Communist International, the Soviet Union, and their impact on the Latin America Workers' Movement

Dan La Botz

doi:10.33956/tensoesmundiais.v13i24.360

Abstract

The Soviet Union and the Communist International had an adverse influence on the Latin American workers’ movement, continually diverting it fighting for a emocratic socialist society. They subordinated the workers’ movements to the interests of the Soviet Union’s ruling class, the Communist bureaucracy. At one oment, they led the workers’ movement in disastrous uprisings, while in a subsequent era they encouraged it to build alliances with capitalist and imperialist power.

Highlights

The Soviet Union and the Communist International worked to influence Latin America from 1918 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in 1991
How do we evaluate the impact of the Soviet Union and the Communist International on the workers’ movement in Latin America? One can judge the Communist parties by the size of their organizations, or by their influence in the labor unions, or by the numbers of people they elected to parliaments, or the number who received ministerial portfolios in government
The better measure of the Communists would be, what they generally claimed was their own criterion: that is, their success or failure in furthering the goal of building a movement from below to bring working people to power and to create socialist society. This is the criterion used in this article to look at the role of the Communist International and the Soviet Union in Latin America from 1918 until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in 1991

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The Soviet Union and the Communist International worked to influence Latin America from 1918 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in 1991. 1960s he had given up his revolutionary socialist views to become a social democrat writing for publications such as Dissent He dedicated one scathing chapter of his 1968 book Politics and the Labor Movement in Latin America to the “The Communist Movement” in which he excoriated the Communists for their anti-democratic, often conservative, sometimes disastrous, and always self-serving policies in every period.. While there was a tremendous initial enthusiasm around the world including in Latin America for the Bolshevik or Soviet revolution, already by the mid-1920s the Soviet Union — through the Communist International — was imposing its national agenda on the international workers’ movement by fiat This meant a series of left and right gyrations that disoriented the various Communist parties and made them worthless as vehicles for an internationalist and democratic revolutionary workers’ movements

Periodization of the Communist International and Soviet Influence

Findings

The Washington Consensus and the Fall of Communism