Who really won the post-Soviet era?
Let me describe the state of humiliation felt by Russia, which was at its height under Boris Yeltsin, in which it had to force a smile to the world while in inner turmoil: Affecting brash and brazen, it wrapped itself up in sugar-coated Christmas paper, disintegrating values with florescent bad taste both acrid and corrosive. Secretly it was angry and fuming whilst keeping up a fair ground of colour and being bombarded with aggressive heavy repetition of a beat dancing around a pole for custom with strobe lights flickering. Whilst It prowls in this darkness, it prepares to meet out revenge.
Where is the Left in Britain today?
Perhaps the state of the unions requires a multiple of possibilities. Are they a curate's egg,spin and rancour? A cul de sac, an anachronism or still a threat? Could it be a sleeping truculent giant with a vendetta against the West?
Here is a worse case hypothetical scenario:
Has the demise of the USSR been staged and subjected to global down-grading to deflect attention from a dirty and ambitious anti-western, anti-capitalist scheme? This could be the most successful of a long play that the Kremlin has ever tried. It could be a 50 year plan, and we've been too naive to assess such a coup, whilst we worry about the black ops by the CIA or cyber attacks on our banking system by some crack pot dictator. We could have missed the obvious re-birth of the Left secreted in the ashes of its doom.
But surely people aren't stupid to fall for it again?
Yet what if it reemerged transformed, backed up by a number of factors:
1. Trade unions annexing political mandate from the Left wing official political parties, because of their shrinking influence on the voters.
2. What if Russia could dominate not by the threat of the Red Army, but by pipelines of gas and oil.
3.Terrorism factor. Russia could covertly use its enemies to disrupt the pipelines etc and it would be able to dictate terms.
4. A recallibration of Marxist ideological explanations of history to account for the USSR breaking up. It was not the right conditions in Russia, and Capitalism in 1917 in the USA wasn't anticipated, nor globalization, nor climate change etc.But what if Marxists could claim the USSR deliberately infected itself with the 'contagion of Capitalism' to play a long play of eventual reemergence, stronger, better,with experience of the free market, and equipped to provide a war on a second front ( the first being IS) that would truly stretch the free West.
5.Reverse evolution. Namely the street cred for Solidarnosc ( the polish trade union that began public open criticism in Communist Pland ) could be misappropriated to undermine the status quo of the West. Any Western political party would have to tread carefully not to trash the first people power organisation that questioned Communist dictatorship in thr ex-Eastern bloc.
6.Radicalization is the most advanced and popular forms of conviction; it's just extreme run by zealots who hate for a living. An an unholy alliance between IS and Communists, not just as a two front attack on the West, but the quality of 'conspiracy' is shared between the two. Sometimes in order to separate from a wealthy background and join extreme groups, converts are traumatized by the initiation process and indoctrination. They are emotionally compromised and radically asked to indoctrinate others-the cycle is unforgiving and cynical.
7.The power of denial('surely never again in Britain') and the consequences of political amnesia are dangerously familiar.
Conclusion
Never underestimate the dehumanizing and indoctrinating affect of radicalization. Question all that seems quite plausible, and then get help.