Bhaskar Sunkara

These movements took root across the capitalist world, but including in Russia and in conditions of illegality.

So it was assumed for many, many years in the workers' movement across Europe and among socialists of Europe, they called themselves social democrats then,

that the revolution would first probably happen in Germany, in this developed, growing hub of industrial capitalism, and not in semi-feudal Russia.

But then World War I came, the workers' movement was split between parties that decided to either keep their head down or to implicitly support the war.

And then, you know, support the war for an hour, keep your heads down, don't get banned, don't get arrested, and then we'll just take power after the war is over.

And those like Russia, and also in the United States for that matter, that chose the path of resistance to the war.

And it was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian movement, Lenin's Bolshevik party, that took power in Russia after a period of turmoil where it didn't seem, well, was it going to go to the fascist right or was it going to go to the far left?

There was a period of flux and turmoil in Russia, but definitely the old regime was not able to stand.

And these Russian social democrats, these Bolsheviks,

said, social democracy has so betrayed the idea of internationalism and brotherhood and progress it was supposed to stand for that we can't call ourselves social democrats anymore.

We're going to go back to this old term that Marx used.

We're going to call ourselves communists.

And that's where official kind of communism out of Russia emerged.

In other parts of Europe, parties were actually able to take power, some in the interwar period, but most in the postwar period.

And they also came out of this old social democratic movement.

And these parties mostly just called themselves socialists.

And a lot of them still on paper wanted to go beyond capitalism.

But in practice, they just managed capitalism better in the interest of workers.

But they all had the same common ancestor.

And in practice, to me, social democracy means trying to insert doses of socialism within capitalism, of maintaining capitalism.