>>777831>These concessions were only allowed to happen due to the USSR and other popular republicsA risible notion if you're vaguely familiar with the chronology of the welfare state.
Did Lloyd George create unemployment and old age pensions
before ww1 in response to the USSR? Did the British Empire really fear a social revolution in New Zealand more acutely than in Britain itself? If not, why did New Zealand - the most middle class little country in existence - go for a welfare state before Britain did? Why did retrenchment of the welfare state begin in the 1970s and 1980s when the USSR still existed, often
slowing down in the 1990s after the USSR collapsed. Why, indeed, did the bourgeoisie launch open class warfare in the same decades (restricting trade union activity etc) if the existence of the USSR was such a bulwark against such a move?
One of the worst tendencies of so-called communists is this facile attitude that every improvement that's ever come about must be attributed directly to their favorite dead states and every regression must be attributed to the passing of those states. Nothing in Marxist theory necessitates this childish mindset, it's entirely a vibes-based phenomenon.