Dominic Alexander concludes our series on the great revolutions by looking at the aftermath of the Russian revolution and assesses the prospects for revolutionaries today

Like the French Revolution before it, the Russian Revolution unleashed a wave of sympathetic enthusiasm and hope over what it promised for the future of humanity. It also, of course, inspired a deadly reaction of fear and hatred among the ruling classes of the imperialist nations. Western imperialisms did their best to strangle the Soviet state at its birth.

These efforts met some significant resistance in Western countries. Workers were not prepared any longer to tolerate the hardship and repression brought by the war years, making armed intervention difficult to sustain. Troops sent to Russia, either in the Arctic, Black Sea or Caucuses regions, were restive and uninterested in fighting the Bolsheviks, if not actively more likely to turn their guns on the Whites. There were mutinies there and at home.

In Britain, a Hands Off Russia campaign gained considerable traction, successfully linking the defence of trade-union rights with protest against intervention in Russia. The nationwide campaign reached a peak when dockers in London refused to load munitions on the SS Jolly Rodger that were bound for Poland to supply the White armies operating from there. Similarly, in the United States, there was a vibrant solidarity movement, and dockers in Seattle refused to load weapons destined for the White army of Admiral Kolchak in eastern Siberia.

The wave of worker unrest and radicalism unleashed by the Russian Revolution largely receded after early defeats, with the fascist Mussolini coming to power in Italy and the last gasps of the German revolution being finally quashed by 1923. Socialist revolution had been expected to occur first in the most economically advanced nations, rather than a significantly backward one like Russia. Thus, in the long term, particularly after the Chinese revolution, and the rise of powerful Communist Parties elsewhere in the developing world, establishment opinion turned to the idea that revolution had happened in Russia because it was backward, and that developed capitalist societies were therefore largely immune to the scale of revolutionary pressures that had beset Russia.

This interpretation minimised the potential of revolutionary and working-class politics in Europe and the United States throughout the 1920s and 30s, as was the aim. In fact, the revolutionary movements in Germany and Italy particularly had been on the very edge of success. The problem in each case was not a lack of militancy among workers, but failed strategies for welding together revolutionary coalitions that could lead workers away from the habit of loyalty to the reformist parties.

The post-war defeats in Europe

In Germany, after the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, the newly formed Communist Party of Germany lurched from one disastrous position to another in the course of the years 1919 to 1921. Large groups of workers were breaking from the SPD in the course of these years, but at different moments in different regions. The KPD, however, frequently squandered the support it gained through adventuristic moves which brought disaster, and decimated its membership. The lessons of the Bolsheviks’ July Days were not learnt by the German communists. They needed to avoid direct contests for power until a decisive proportion of organised workers backed a revolutionary move, but rather than patiently building that base, as Lenin and Trotsky did between April and October 1917, the they repeatedly adopted combative and accusatory poses towards social-democratic workers. This  hardened the divisions in the workers camp, rather than winning moderates over to the revolutionary side.

There was admittedly a great deal of bad blood between the SPD leadership and the Communists, not least in the fact that SPD leaders backed the proto-fascist Freikorps gangs against revolutionary workers, and were thus effectively complicit in the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. However, that should not have coloured the interactions of rank-and-file communist and social-democratic workers, if there was to be any hope of bringing significant numbers of the latter over to the revolutionary side.

It is also true that there was  a strong tendency towards ultra-leftism among large numbers of young workers, especially soldiers returning from the war, and that this made the task of the communist leadership very difficult, but the same had been true in Russia, particularly in July 1917. Undoubtedly, there were huge challenges in forming a disciplined revolutionary party in Germany, and yet compared to Russia, the Germans had many advantages, including a much more educated working class, among whom Marxist ideas had been strongly propagated for decades beforehand.

A communist leadership in Germany who fully understood and implemented the united-front strategy wielded by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia would have been in a very strong position to mount a successful revolution in Germany. The position was not dissimilar in Italy, where the new Communist Party also indulged in ultra-left posturing, under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, which failed to capitalise on the magnificent militancy of Italian workers. Antonio Gramsci absorbed the lessons of defeat, and explained them in his writings from prison under fascism, a resource still rightly seen as essential to radical-left politics. In Hungary, a soviet republic in 1919 squandered its opportunity under the leadership of the ultra-leftist adventurer Béla Kun. From that experience, György Lukács, like Gramsci, produced a body of writing of great worth to the revolutionary tradition, but again from the perspective of defeat.

If either the German or Italian revolutions had succeeded, the history of communism in Western Europe would have been significantly different, and the course of the Russian soviet state might also have been  very different. As it was, the isolated and devastated Soviet Republic in Russia drifted towards a de facto counter-revolutionary dictatorship under Stalin. Communist Parties were put under the tutelage of Russian Stalinists who pushed them to adopt stances that suited Moscow’s nationalist calculations, rather than the interests of the workers’ movements in their own countries. Stalinism lurched between opposite poles of ultra-left sectarianism and the subordination of Communist Parties to bourgeois and reformist agendas, missing entirely the united-front strategy at every point. The possibilities for a revolutionary rupture in France in the 1930s, for example, around the time of the Popular Front government of 1936, were thus squandered.

The failure of Communism

In two countries in the course of the 1920s and 30s Communist strategy proved disastrous on a world-historic level. First in China, the new Communist Party, against the better judgement of some of its own leadership, was forced into a junior partnership with the nationalist Kuomintang, on the basis that only a bourgeois revolution was possible in China, and that had to be led by the nationalists. Once they were in a position of power in cities with a militant, communist-led working class, like Shanghai, the Kuomintang turned about and brutally massacred many thousands of workers in 1927. The Chinese Communist Party never recovered its working-class base, and the result in 1949 was a brutal, bureaucratic state socialism that in recent decades has overseen China’s rise into a capitalist imperial power in its own right.

The other major disaster was the failure of the workers’ movement in Germany to unite against the Nazis in the early 1930s. As late as 1933, a united working-class response to the instalment of Hitler as Chancellor by the reactionary German ruling class still then in power, could have halted the Nazi takeover of the state. However, the Stalinised leadership of the KPD was stuck on labelling the SPD as ‘social fascists’ and imagining, childishly, that ‘after Hitler, us’. The result was of course, the annihilation of both the SPD and the KPD, and the most devastating war in human history.

Unfortunately, unlike Lukács and Gramsci, Communist Parties did not learn from the mistakes of the inter-war period. The united-front strategy was rarely applied except in bastardised forms. In Western countries, Communist Parties tended to devolve into no more than slightly more radical versions of the reformist social-democratic parties they had been formed to challenge in the wake of World War I. If revolution had stalled in the West, national-liberation movements across the rest of the world provided plenty of revolutionary energy, and these were often socialist, at least in principle.

However, the case of communism in Egypt under Gamel Abdel Nasser is instructive. He challenged British and French imperialism, attempting to set Egypt on a course of nationalist development, with the nationalisation of much of industry and extensive land reform for the peasantry. He flirted with alignment with the Eastern bloc, enough to gain Moscow’s approval, but not so far as to provoke the United States. He was denounced in Britain as a ‘new Hitler’, as anyone inconveniencing imperial interests would be in the future, but the US was canny enough to pull the British and French up short when they tried military action to reverse the nationalisation of the Suez canal. It was soon clear that Nasser’s reforms were not stepping stones to socialism, but attempts to consolidate an authoritarian regime whose goal was development, rather than transformation of social structures.

Communists were imprisoned and tortured, and striking workers were shot. Nevertheless, even while Communists were imprisoned, between 1959 and 1964, they continued to support Nasser, reasoning that imperialism was the main enemy. This was true from one perspective, but the stance meant that the Communist Party had no chance to develop an independent radical pole, and languished in the shadow of authoritarian rule. Similarly, Nkrumah in Ghana, for all his avowal of socialism, repressed the trade unions there. In one way or another, the socialisms of this period turned out to be authoritarian vehicles for development only, rather than programmes for equality and liberation.

Results and prospects

The dynamic of socialism and national liberation played itself out in a many variations across the world, but nowhere did a working class establish a workers’ state. The anti-imperialist wave of national liberation subsided largely into dictatorships that failed ultimately to escape the webs of economic imperialism led by the United States as the leading capitalist power. The developmental aims of the leaders of national-liberation movements largely failed, with the spectacular exception of China. Another survivor of that era, Cuba, remains under dreadful siege by the US.

The national-liberation movements failed to destroy imperialism, but demonstrated nonetheless the development of an important aspect of the Great Revolutions in their world-spanning reach. The Great Revolutions had reverberations beyond their host nations, with the French Revolution spawning an era of revolution in Europe, culminating in the continent-wide revolutions of 1848. The reverberations of the Russian revolution were wider still, flowing into national-liberation struggles across the whole world. The ripples were not enough to save that revolution from its involution into dictatorship and eventual collapse, but it did demonstrate that revolutions were now an international phenomenon, rather than one bounded by a single nation.

Nor were the soviets of Russia unique as a type of revolutionary organisation. Similar forms have reappeared a number of times, most notably during the Iranian revolution (the Shuras) in 1979, and more recently in Argentina in the crisis across 2001-2, where people’s assemblies sprang up. The Russian Revolution was not a singular, unrepeatable event, bound by an exceptional historical situation, but its lessons still need to be fully learnt. The soviets were organisations which harnessed the power of the working class on an unprecedented scale, and were effectively class-based united fronts. The revolutionary organisation, the Bolsheviks, worked within the soviets in order to prove themselves and their revolutionary strategy to the wider class, even when the soviets were dominated by the compromising, reformist parties.

The Bolsheviks did not stand aside and lecture the workers involved in the soviets about their insufficiently revolutionary character, but joined in struggle within the movement. This was quite unlike the habits of revolutionary groups in Western Europe at the time, which tended to remain abstract propaganda societies, even disdaining workers’ trade-union struggles as merely reformist. The Bolsheviks made sure to be in and of the working-class movement, but crucially retained their own party organisations, and ability to act apart from the compromising parties.

The necessity for revolutionaries to act in blocs of this kind was shown as early as the English Revolution, where the Levellers allied with the Independents in order to push that revolution to its conclusion. Although they pioneered forms of mass organisation and revolutionary action, what the Levellers lacked was a cohesive class force that could confront the property owners of the Independent leaders of the New Model Army. Such a force emerged into clearer view during the French Revolution, where radical forces, driven by the workers and artisans of Paris, were able to install a democratic republican regime which opened the question of social revolution.

The modern working-class movement grew from there, developing a range of anti-capitalist and revolutionary responses, out of which came Marxism. Unlike the bourgeoisie in their revolutions, the working class has no power bases developing naturally out of its social position and economic power. Instead, conscious organisation is a necessity for the most basic defence of its day-to-day interests, even before longer-term strategic and political goals are considered. Thus trade unions are essential starting points for working-class action, but on their own they are never enough. Political and ideological organisation are essential too. The bourgeois revolutions happened without any deliberate forethought, however long and deeply their causes had been brewing within societies, but the socialist revolution can only happen through the self-organisation of the working class.

This is not to say that the socialist revolution can be predicted or sought in any kind of programmatic way, in the sense that paranoid cold warriors once thought communists were deliberately plotting. A revolution will be as likely unforeseen to revolutionaries as the 1905 Revolution in Russia was to Russian socialists. Yet the nature of capitalism means that crises will occur as they always have before, and we now are living through a time of repeating and multiple forms of crisis. Capitalism has woven together the whole world, such that outbreaks of crisis will rush throughout the globe at enormous speed. Thus the revolutionary wave can do so also, as it has shown repeatedly since World War II, first in the national-liberation struggles, then in the wave of unrest and revolution of 1968 and into the early 1970s, and most recently again regionally in the Arab Spring of 2011-12.

The last quarter of a century has been an age of mass street protests from the left, which gives revolutionaries reasons to hope, however grim the situation might otherwise seem. Revolutionaries need to be organised and prepared to work in and through mass movements, which can offer a way forward when the next crisis arrives. The conditions are not what we would have chosen, but we can and must make our own history.