Comments on: Assessing revolutionary social democracy: A response to Duncan Hart https://johnriddell.com/2017/07/13/assessing-revolutionary-social-democracy-a-response-to-duncan-hart/ MARXIST ESSAYS AND COMMENTARY Fri, 14 Jul 2017 23:04:09 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.10 By: Felipe Stuart C. https://johnriddell.com/2017/07/13/assessing-revolutionary-social-democracy-a-response-to-duncan-hart/#comment-7929 Fri, 14 Jul 2017 23:04:09 +0000 https://johnriddell.com/?p=4231#comment-7929 One question that occurs to me, especially when reading such articles about 1917-1918 Finland, is why the Marxist left in North America and Western Europe, and in Latin America, has paid so little attention to Finland’s role in the great wave unleashed by the Greater Russian revolutions. Many are schooled in the German and Hungarian events, and of course the Soviet Union itself, but little at all about Finland. Could it be that both the Stalinists and the Social Democrats found it convenient to sweep that history under the rug? Even were that the case, what explains the Trotskyist or Bukharinist disinterest in that history?

All I recall in the F.I. tradition (that I participated in during the 60s and 70s) are the intense debates in the F.I. and the USSWP over the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact and Stalin’s annexation of Finnish territory, and, of course, the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. The spineless response of leftists who refused to defend the Soviet Union when attacked by fascist Germany and the discussion of theories used to cover-up that capitulation, might also have served to turn attention away from Finland’s earlier revolutionary history, and that of other so-called ‘marginal’ or ‘borderland’ regions of the former Tsarist Empire.

Perhaps Eric, Duncan, and John would care to comment on my question.

Felipe Stuart C.

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