Revolutions
are historical facts of life. Almost all major states in today's world are born
from revolutions. Whether one likes it or not, our century has seen something
like three dozen revolutions—some victorious, others defeated—and there is
no sign that we have come to the end of the revolutionary experience.
Revolutions
have been, and will remain, facts of life because of the structural nature of
prevailing relations of production and relations of political power. Precisely
because such relations are structural, because they do not just “fade
away”—as well as because ruling classes resist the gradual elimination of
these relations to the very end—revolutions emerge as the means whereby the
overthrow of these relations is realized.
From
the nature of revolutions as a sudden, radical overthrow of prevailing social
and (or) political structures—leaps in the historical process—one should not
draw the conclusion that an impenetrable Chinese wall separates evolution (or
reforms) from revolution. Quantitative gradual social changes of course do occur
in history, as do qualitative revolutionary ones. Very often the former prepare
the latter especially in epochs of decay of a given mode of production.
Prevailing economic and political power relations can be eroded, undermined,
increasingly challenged or can even be slowly disintegrated, by new relations of
production and the political strength of revolutionary classes (or major class
fractions) rising in their midst. This is what generally characterizes periods
of pre-revolutionary crises. But erosion and decay of a given social and/or
political order remains basically different from its overthrow. Evolution is not
identical with revolution. One transforms dialectics into sophism when, from the
fact that there is no rigid absolute distinction between evolution and
revolution, one draws the conclusion that there is no basic difference between
them at all.
The
sudden overthrow of ruling structures is, however, only one key characteristic
of that social phenomenon. The other one is their overthrow through huge popular
mobilization, through the sudden massive active intervention of large masses of
ordinary people in political life and political struggle. (1)
One
of the great mysteries of class society, based upon exploitation and oppression
of the mass of direct producers by relatively small minorities, is why that mass
in “normal” times by and large tolerates these conditions, be it with all
kinds of periodic but limited reactions. Historical materialism tries, not
without success, to explain that mystery. The explanation is many-dimensional,
drawing upon a combination of economic compulsion, ideological manipulation,
cultural socialization, political-juridical repression (including occasionally
violence), psychological processes (interiorization, identification), etc.
Generally,
as one revolutionary newspaper wrote at the beginning of the French revolution
of 1789, oppressed people feel weak before their oppressors in spite of their
numerical superiority, because they are on their knees. (2) A revolution can
occur precisely when that feeling of weakness and helplessness is overcome, when
the mass of the people suddenly thinks “We don't take it any longer,” and
acts accordingly. In his interesting book, The Social Bases of Obedience and
Revolt, Barrington Moore has tried to prove that suffering and
consciousness of injustice are not sufficient to induce large-scale revolts
(revolutions) in broader masses. In his opinion, a decisive role is played by
the conviction that suffered injustice is neither inevitable nor a “lesser
evil,” i.e. that a better social set-up could be realized. (3) A concomitant
brake upon direct challenges to a given social and/or political order, however,
is the locally or regionally fragmented nature of revolts pure and simple.
Revolts generally become revolutions when they are unified nation-wide.
Such
challenges can be explained, among other things, by that basic truth about class
societies formulated by Abraham Lincoln, empirically confirmed throughout
history, and which is at least one reason for historical optimism (belief in the
possibility of human progress) when all is said and done: “You can fool all of
the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. But you
can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
When
the majority of the people refuse to be fooled and intimidated any longer; when
they refuse to stay on their knees; when they recognize the fundamental weakness
of their oppressors, they can become transformed overnight from seemingly meek,
subdued and helpless sheep into mighty lions. They strike, congregate, organize
and especially demonstrate in the streets in increasing numbers, even in the
face of massive, gruesome, bloody repression by the rulers, who still have a
powerful armed apparatus at their disposal. They often show unheard of forms of
heroism, self-sacrifice, obstinate endurance. (4) This may end in their getting
the better of the repressive apparatus which starts to disintegrate. The first
victory of every revolution is precisely such a disintegration. Its final
victory calls for the substitution of the armed power of the revolutionary class
(or of a major class fraction) to that of the former rulers. (5)
Such
a descriptive definition of revolutions has to be integrated into an
analytical-casual one. Social revolutions occur when prevailing
relations of production cannot contain any more the development of the
productive forces, when they increasingly act as fetters upon them, when they
cause a cancerous growth of destructiveness accompanying that development. Political
revolutions occur when prevailing relations of political power (forms
of state power) have likewise become fetters upon a further development of the
productive forces within the framework of the prevailing relations of
production, a development which is however still historically possible. That is
why they generally consolidate a given social order, instead of undermining it.
This
materialist explanation of revolutions offered by Marxism seems indispensable
for answering the question: “why, and why just at the moment?” Revolutions
have occurred in all types of class societies but not in a uniform way. It
appears clearly illogical to attribute them either to permanently operating
psychological factors (humanity’s allegedly inborn aggression,
“destructiveness,” “envy,” “greed” or “stupidity”) or to
accidental quirks of the political power structure: particularly inept, stupid,
blind rulers, meeting increasingly self-confident and active opponents.
According to the particular school of history concerned, one can see that blind
ineptitude either in the excessive recourse to repression, or in the excessive
amplitude of suddenly introduced reforms, or in a peculiar explosive combination
of both. 6
There
are of course kernels of partial truth in such psychological and political
analyses. But they cannot explain in a satisfying way the regular and
discontinuous occurrence of revolutions, their cyclical nature so to speak. Why
do “inept” rulers at regular intervals succeed “adequate” ones, so many
times in so many countries? This can surely not be caused by some mysterious
genetical mutation cycle. The big advantage of the materialist interpretation of
history is to explain that occurrence by deeper socio-economic causes. It is not
the ineptness of the rulers which produces the pre-revolutionary crisis. It is
the paralysis engendered by an underlying social-structural crisis which makes
rulers increasingly inept. In that sense Trotsky was absolutely right when he
stressed that “revolutions are nothing but the final blow and coup de grâce
given to a paralytic.”
Lenin
summarized the underlying analysis in a classical way by stating that
revolutions occur when those below do not accept any longer as before. The
inability of a ruling class or major fractions to continue to rule has basically
objective causes. These reflect themselves in increasingly paralyzing internal
divisions among the rulers, especially around the question about how to get out
of the mess visible to the naked eye. It intertwines with growing self-doubt, a
loss of faith in its own future, an irrational search for peculiar culprits
(“conspiracy theories”) substituting for a realistic objective analysis of
social contradictions. It is this combination which precisely produces political
ineptitude and counterproductive actions and reactions, if not sheer passivity.
The basic cause always remains the rotting away of the system, not the peculiar
psychology of a group of rulers.
One
has obviously to distinguish the basic historical causes of revolutions from the
factors (events) triggering them off. The first ones are structural, the second
ones conjunctural. 7
But it is important to emphasize that even as regards the structural causes, the
Marxist explication of revolutions is by no means monocausally “economistic.”
The conflict between the productive forces and the prevailing relations of
production and/or political power relations isn’t all purely economic. It is
basically socio-economic. It involves all main spheres of social relations. It
even eventually finds its concentrated expression in the political and not in
the economic sphere. The refusal of soldiers to shoot at demonstrators is a
political-moral and not an economic act. It is only by digging farther below the
surface of that refusal that one discovers its material roots. These roots
don’t transform the political-moral decision into a pure “appearance,” or
a manifestation of mere shadow boxing. It has a clear reality of its own. But
that substantial reality in its turn doesn’t make the digging for the deeper
material roots irrelevant, an exercise in “dogmatism” or an “abstract”
analysis of only secondary interest. 8
In
any case, the inability of the rulers to continue to rule is not only a
socio-political fact, with its inevitable concomitant of an ideological
moral-crisis (a crisis of the prevailing “social values system”). It has
also a precise technical-material aspect. To rule also means to control a
material network of communications and a centralized repressive apparatus. When
that network breaks down, the rule collapses in the immediate sense of the word.
9
We must never, therefore, underestimate the technical aspect of successful
revolutions. But the Marxist theory of revolution also supersedes a peculiar
variant of the conspiracy theory of history, which tends to substitute for an
explanation of victorious revolutions an exclusive reference to the technical
mechanism of successful insurrections or coups d’état. 10
Instead, it is the material interests of key social forces and their
self-perception which provide the basic explanation of turning points of
history.
While
revolutions are historical facts of life, counter-revolutions are likewise
undeniable realities. Indeed, counter-revolutions seem regularly to follow
revolutions as night follows day. Etymology confirms this paradox. The very
concept of “revolution” originates from the sciences of astronomy. The
movements of planets evolve in an orbital manner, returning to the point of
departure. Hence the suggested analogical conclusion: the role of revolutions as
great accelerators, as locomotives of history, is just an optical illusion of
short-sighted and superficial observers, not to say utopian day-dreamers. It is
precisely such an interpretation (denigration) of revolutions which is
compatible with the great Italian historian Vico’s cyclical conception of
world history.
Under
the influence of the victorious counter-revolution in England in 1660, the great
political philosophers of the 17th century, above all Hobbes and Spinoza,
developed a basically pessimistic view of human destiny. Revolutions are doomed
to fail: “Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.” Two thousand
years earlier, Greek and Chinese political philosophers had arrived at similar
conclusions. There is supposedly no way out for human destiny but the search for
individual happiness under inevitably bad social conditions, be it happiness
through self-discipline (Stoics, Confucians, Spinoza) or through hedonism (the
Epicureans). 11
In
the 18th century, the Enlightenment questioned both the empirical and the
theoretical roots of dogmatic skeptical pessimism. 12
The belief in the perfectibility of humankind (only sophists or dishonest
critics identify perfectibility with actually attaining a final state of
perfection, be it said in passing), in historical progress, and thus likewise in
the progressive turns of revolutions, re-emerged. Revolution indeed looked
beautiful in times of reaction. But already before the outbreak of the
revolution of 1789, the camp of the Englightenment had split between the
basically skeptical and socially cautious, if not outright conservative,
bourgeois like Voltaire (“cultivez votre jardin”) 13
and the more radical petty-bourgeois ideologues like J.J. Rousseau, who would
inspire the Jacobin revolutionists. This split deepened in the course of the
revolution itself. After the successive stages of counter-revolution (Thermidor,
the Bonapartist Consulate, the Empire, the Bourbon restoration) the reversal to
17th century skepticism became general including erstwhile enthusiasts for
revolution, exemplified by the English poet Wordsworth (but not Shelley). Only a
tiny minority continued to pin their hopes on future revolutions and to work for
them. 14
The near-consensus was: the overhead of revolution is too large, especially
given the fact that they achieve very little. 15
The
Russian revolution’s Thermidor and its tragic aftermath, the horrors of
Stalinism, reproduced the same revulsion towards revolutions, first in the late
nineteen-thirties and the forties, then, after a temporary reprieve in the
sixties and the early seventies, on a generalized scale from the middle
seventies on. The Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia and especially
Cambodia adn Afghanistan, but more generally the reflux of the revolutionary
wave 1968-1975 in Europe, from France through Czechoslovakia, Italy, Portugal,
strengthened this political retreat. The near-consensus can again be summarized
in the formula: revolutions are both useless and harmful from every point of
view, including that of progress towards a more humane society. Indeed, this is
one of the key platitudes of today’s prevailing neo-conservative, neo-liberal
and neo-reformist ideologies.
It
is, however, based upon obvious half-truths, if not outright mystifications. The
idea that revolutions revert to these historical points of departure, if not to
situations worse than the pre-revolutionary ones, is generally based upon a
confusion between social and political counter-revolutions. While a few social
counter-revolutions have indeed occurred, they are the exception, not the rule.
Neither Napoleon nor Louis XVIII restored semi-feudal socio-economic conditions
in the French countryside, nor the political rule of the semi-feudal nobility.
Stalin did not restore capitalism in Russia, nor did Deng Xiaoping in China. 16
The restoration in England was quickly followed by the Glorious Revolution. The
compromise of the American constitution did not lead eventually to the
generalization of slave labor but to its suppression, after the civil war. The
list can be extended ad libitum.
To
this objective balance-sheet, the problems of subjective choice are closely
related. They confront the skeptics and the pessimists with a real dilemma.
Counter-revolutions are not simply “natural” reactions to revolutions, the
product of an inevitable mechanical yo-yo movement so to speak. They originate
from the same exacerbation of a system’s inner contradictions which give rise
to the revolution, but with a specific shift in socio-political relations of
forces. They reflect the relative decline of political mass activity and
efficiency. There is indeed a “natural law” operating here. As genuine
popular revolutions generally imply a qualitatively increased level of political
mass activity, this cannot be sustained indefinitely, for obvious material and
psychological reasons. You have to produce in order to eat, and when you
demonstrate and participate in mass meetings, you don’t produce. Also, great
masses of people cannot live permanently at a high level of excitement and
expenditure of nervous energy. 17
To
this relative decline in mass activity corresponds a relative rise of activity
and efficiency of the old ruling classes or strata and their various supporters
and hangers-on. The initiative shifts from the “left” to the “right,” at
least momentarily (and not necessarily with total success: there have been
defeated counter-revolutions as there have been defeated revolutions.) 18
There are likewise preventive counter-revolutions: Indonesia 1965 and Chile 1973
may be taken as examples. But precisely these preventive counter-revolutions
clearly reveal the pessimistic skeptic’s dilemma. They are generally very
costly in terms of human lives and human happiness—much more costly than
revolutions. It stands to reason that much more repression, much more
bloodletting, much more cruelty, including torture, is needed to suppress a
highly active, broad mass of ordinary people than to neutralize a small group of
rulers. So by abstaining from active intervention against a rising
counter-revolution—on the pretext that revolution itself is useless and
bad—one actually becomes a passive if not active accomplice of bloody
counter-revolution and large-scale mass suffering.
This
is morally revolting, as it means tolerating, aiding and abetting the violence
and exploitation of the oppressors, while finding all kinds of rationalizations
for refusing to assist the oppressed in their self-defence and attempted
emancipation. And it is political counter-productive as well as obnoxious. In
the end, it often proves to be suicidal from the point of view of the
skeptics’ alleged devotion to the defence of democratic institutions and
reforms.
The
most tragic example in that respect was that of German social-democracy at the
end of World War One. Under the alleged motive of “saving democracy”, Ebert
and Noske kept the Imperial army’s hierarchy and the Prussian officers’
corps intact. They conspired with it against the workers—first in Berlin
itself, then in the whole country. They made the generals of the Reichswehr
into the political arbiters of the Weimar Republic. They permitted them to
create and consolidate the Freikorps from which a good part of the
later SA and SS cadres were recruited. They thereby paved the way of
the rise and eventual conquest of power by the Nazis, which in turn led to the
social-democrats’ destruction. They thought they could contain regression and
reaction in the framework of a democratic counter-revolution. 19
History taught the bitter lesson that democratic counter-revolutions in the end
often lead to much more authoritarian and violent ones, when the sharpening of
the socio-economic contradictions makes a total instead of a partial suppression
of the mass movement into an immediate goal of the ruling class.
This
again is not accidental but corresponds to a deeper historical logic. The
essence of revolution is often identified with a widespread explosion of
violence and mass killings. This is of course not true. The essence of
revolution is not the use of violence in politics but a radical, qualitative
challenge—and eventually the overthrow—of prevailing economic or political
power structures. The larger the number of people involved in mass actions
targeting these structures, the more favorable the relationship of forces
between revolutions and reaction, the greater the self-confidence of the first
and the moral-ideological paralysis of the second, and the less the masses are
inclined to use violence. Indeed, widespread use of violence is
counter-productive for the revolution at that precise phase of the historical
process.
But
what does occur most often, if not always, at some point of the revolutionary
process, is the desperate recourse to violence by the most radical and the most
resolute sectors of the rulers’ camp, intent on risking everything before it
is too late, because they still have human and material resources left to act in
that way. At some culminating point, the confrontation between revolution and
counter-revolution thus generally does assume a violent character,
although the degree of violence largely depends upon the overall relationship of
forces. In answer to reaction’s violence, the masses will tend towards armed
self-defence. Disintegration, paralysis and disarming of the counter-revolution
paves the way towards revolutionary victory. Victory of counter-revolution
depends upon disarming the mass. 20
When
the chips are down, when power relations are stripped of all mediations and are
nakedly reduced to bare essentials, Friedrich Engels’ formula is then borne
out by empirical evidence: in the final analysis, the state is indeed a
gang of armed people. The class or layer which has the monopoly of armed force
possesses (either keeps or conquers) state power. And that again is what
revolution, and counter-revolution, are all about. Sitting on the sidelines
cannot prevent this confrontation. Nor can it contribute to delaying for ever
the day of reckoning. In the last analysis the skeptics’ and reformists’
revulsion from revolution covers an implicit choice: the conservation of the status
quo is at best a lesser evil compared to the costs and consequences of its
revolutionary overthrow. This choice reflects social conservatism, not a
rational judgment of empirically verifiable balance-sheets of “costs” of
historical, i.e. real, revolutions and counter-revolutions.
No
normal human being prefers to achieve social goals through the use of violence.
To reduce violence to the utmost in political life should be a common endeavor
for all progressive and socialist currents. Only profoundly sick
persons—totally unable to contribute to the building of a real classless
society—can actually enjoy advocating and practicing violence on a significant
scale. Indeed, the increasing rejection of violence in a growing number of
countries is a clear indicator that at least some moral-ideological progress has
occurred in the last 70-75 years. One has just to compare the wild and brazen
justification of war by nearly all the leading Western intellectuals and
politicians in the 1914-1918 period to the near universal revulsion towards war
today in the same milieu to note that progress.
Double
moral standards still reign supreme in inter-class and inter-state relations,
but the legitimacy of widespread use of violence by the rulers is at least
increasingly questioned in a systematic and consistent way by a much greater
number of people than in 1914-1918 or 1939-1945. The future, indeed the very
physical survival of humankind, depends upon the outcome of this race between
increasing consciousness about the necessary rejection of armed confrontation on
the one hand, and increasing de facto destructiveness of existing and
future weapons on the other. If the first does not eliminate the second through
successful political action, the second will eventually destroy not only the
first but all human life on earth.
But
such a political action can only be revolutionary and thus implies the use of at
least limited armed force. To believe otherwise is to believe that the rulers
will let themselves be disarmed utterly peacefully, without using the arms they
still control. This is to deny the threat of any violent counter-revolution,
which is utterly utopian in the light of actual historical experience. It is to
assume that ruling classes and strata are exclusively and always represented by
mild well-meaning liberals. Go tell that to the prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto
and of Auschwitz, to the million victims of Djakarta, to the oppressed non-white
population of South Africa, to the Indochinese peoples, to the Chilean and
Salvadoran workers adn peasants, to the murdered participants of the Intifada,
to the millions and millions of victims of reaction and counter-revolution
throughout the world since the colonial wars of the 19th century and the Paris
Commune. The elementary human moral duty in the face of that terrifying record
is to refuse any retreat into (re)privatization and to assist by any means
necessary the oppressed, the exploited, the humiliated, the downtrodden, to
struggle for their emancipation. In the long run, this makes also the individual
participant a more human, i.e. happier person, provided he does not make any
pseudo-Real political concessions and observes unrestrictedly the rule:
fight everywhere and always against any and every social and political condition
which exploits and oppresses human beings.
Revolutions
and counter-revolutions, being real historical processes, always occur in really
existing social-economic formations which are always specific. No two countries
in the world are exactly alike, if only because their basic social classes and
the major fractions of these classes are products of the specific history of
each of these countries. Hence the character of each revolution reflects a
unique combination of the general and the specific. The first derives from the
logic of revolutions as sketched before. The second derives from the specificity
of each particular set of prevailing relations of production and relations of
political power in a given country, at a given moment, with its specific inner
contradictions and a specific dynamic of their exacerbation.
A
revolutionary strategy 21
represents the conscious attempt by revolutionists to influence by their
political actions the outcome of objectively revolutionary processes in favor of
a victory of the exploited and the oppressed, in today’s world essentially the
wage-earning proletariat, its allies and the poor peasantry. It has therefore in
turn to be specific to have a minimum chance of success. This means that it has
to be attuned to the differentiated social reality which prevails in today’s
world. We can use the formula of the “three sectors of world revolution” to
designate significantly different strategic tasks, that is, roughly: the
proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries; the combined
national-democratic, anti-imperialist and socialist revolution in the so-called
“third world countries”; the political revolution in the post-capitalist
social formations. 22
We shall consider each of these in turn.
Regarding
the industrialized metropolises of capitalism, a formidable objection is raised
with regard to the possible effectiveness of revolutionary strategy. Many
skeptics and reformists do not limit themselves to allege that revolutions are
useless and harmful. They add that revolutions are impossible in these
countries, that they won’t occur anyway, that to hope for them or expect them
is utterly utopian; that to try to prepare for them or to further them is a
total waste of time and energy.
This
line of reasoning is based on two different—and basically
contradictory—assumptions. The first one (which is still true) states that no victorious
revolution has ever occurred in a purely imperialist country up till now. The
case of 1917 Russia is seen as an exceptional case, a unique combination of
under-development and imperialism. But it is irrational, even childish, to
recognize as revolutions only those that have been successful. Once one accepts
that revolutionary processes did occur in 20th century imperialist countries,
surely the logical conclusion for a revolutionist is to study them carefully so
as to be able to map out a course which will make defeat unlikely when they
occur again in the future.
The
second assumption is that whatever in the past triggered revolutions 23
(revolutionary crises and processes) will never happen again. Bourgeois
society—the capitalist economy and parliamentary democracy—are supposed to
have achieved such a degree of stability and “integrated” the mass of wage
earners to such an extent that they won’t be seriously challenged in any
foreseeable future. 24
This assumption, which already prevailed during the postwar boom (in obvious
function of the undeniable increase in standard of living and social security
which was its by-product for the Western proletariat) was seriously challenged
in May 1968 and its immediate aftermath, at least in Southern Europe (and
partially in Britain in the early seventies). It regained a powerful credibility
in the wake of the retreat of the proletariat in the metropolitan countries
towards essentially defensive struggles after 1974-1975.
We
should understand the nub of the question. The seemingly a-prioristic assumption
is in reality a prediction which will be historically either verified or
falsified. It is in no way a final truth. It is nothing but a working
hypothesis. It assumes a given variant of the basic trends of development of
capitalism in the latter part of the 20th century: the variant of declining
contradictions, of the ability of the system to avoid explosive crises, not
to say catastrophes.
In
that sense, it is strikingly similar to the working hypothesis of the classical
version of reformism, i.e. of rejection of a revolutionary perspective and
revolutionary strategy: that of Eduard Bernstein. In his book which launched the
famous “revisionism debate,” he clearly posited a growing objective decline
in acuity of inner contradictions of the system as premises for his reformist
conclusions: less and less capitalist crises; less and less tendencies towards
war; less and less authoritarian governments; less and less violent conflicts in
the world. 25
Rosa Luxemburg answered him succinctly that precisely the opposite would be the
case. And when under the influence of the Russian revolution of 1905, Kautsky
came the nearest to revolutionary Marxism and was the undisputed mentor of
Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky, 26
he also explicitly identified the perspective of inevitable catastrophes
to which capitalism was leading as one of the main pillars of Marxism’s
revolutionary perspectives. 27
When he moved away from revolutionary Marxism, he started to consider these
catastrophes as becoming more and more unlikely, i.e. he started to share
Bernstein’s euphoric working hypothesis. 28
What
does the historical record reveal? Two world wars; the economic crisis of 1929
and onwards; fascism; Hiroshima; innumerable colonial wars; hunger and disease
in the third world; the ongoing ecological catastrophe; the new long economic
depression. They leave out that it has been Rosa Luxemburg who has been proven
more right than Bernstein; and that it was the Kautsky of 1907 who has been
proven right by history and not the Kautsky of the 1914 “ultra-imperialism”
theory. Today it seems truer than ever, to paraphrase a famous formula of Jean
Jaurès, that late capitalism carries within itself a succession of grave crises
and catastrophes like clouds carry storms. 29
One
transforms that obvious truth—obvious in the sense that is borne out by solid
historical evidence for three-quarters of a century—into a meaningless
caricature when one insinuates that revolutionary Marxists except or predict permanent
catastrophes, every year in every in imperialist country, so to speak. Leaving
aside the lunatic fringe, serious Marxists have never taken that stand, which
doesn’t mean that they have never been guilty of false analysis and erroneous
evaluations regarding particular countries. If one soberly analyses the ups and
downs of economic, social and political crisis in the West and Japan since 1914,
what emerges is a pattern of periodic upsurges of mass struggles in some
metropolitan countries which have at times put revolutionary processes on the
agenda. In our view, the mechanisms leading in that direction remain operative
today as they were since the period of historical decline of the capitalist mode
of production was first posited by Marxists. The burden of proving that this is
no longer the case is upon those who argue that today’s bourgeois society is
somehow basically different from that of 1936, not to say that of 1968.
We haven’t yet seen any persuasive argumentation of that nature.
The
concept of periodically and not permanently possible revolutionary
explosions in imperialist countries logically leads to a typology of
possible revolutions in the West, which sees these revolutions essentially
as a qualitative “transcroissance” of mass struggles and mass experiences of
non-revolutionary times. We have often sketched this process of
“overgrowing,” based not upon speculation or wishful thinking but on the
experience of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary explosions which have really
occurred in the West. 30
We can therefore limit ourselves to summarizing the process in the following
chain of events: mass strikes; political mass strikes; a general strike; a
general sit-down strike; coordination and centralization of democratically
elected strike committees; transformation of the “passive” into an
“active” general strike, in which strike committees assume a beginning of
state functions, in the first place in the public and the financial sector.
(Public transport regulation, access to telecommunications, access to saving and
bank accounts limited to strikers, free hospital services under that same
authority, “parallel” teaching in schools by teachers under strikers’
authority, are examples of such inroads into the realm of the exercise of
quasi-state functioning growing out of an “active” general strike.) This
leads to the emergence of a de facto generalized dual power situation
with emerging self-defence bodies of the masses.
Such
a chain of events generalizes trends already visible at high points of mass
struggles in the West: Northern Italy, 1920; July 1927 in Austria; June 1936 in
France; July 1948 in Italy; May 1968 in France; the “hot autumn” of 1969 in
Italy; and the high points of the Portuguese revolution 1974-1975. Other general
strike experiences 31
involving a similar chain of events were those of Germany 1920 and Spain
(especially Catalonia) 1936-1937. (Albeit in a very different social context,
the tendency of the industrial proletariat to operate in the same general sense
in revolutionary situations can also be seen in Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia,
1968-1969, and Poland 1980-1981).
Such
a view of proletarian revolutionary behavior in the imperialist countries makes
it easier to solve a problem which has haunted revolutionary Marxists since the
beginning of the 20th century: the relation between the struggle for reforms
(economic as well as political-democratic ones) and the preparation for
revolution. The answer given to that problem by Rosa Luxemburg already in the
beginning of the debate remains as valid today as it was at that time. 32
The difference between the reformists and revolutionists does not at all lie in
the rejection of reforms by the latter and the struggle for reforms by the
former. On the contrary: serious revolutionists will be the most resolute and
efficient fighters for all reforms which correspond to the needs and the
recognizable preoccupations of the masses. The real difference between
reformists and revolutionary Marxists can be thus summarized:
·
1. Without rejecting or marginalizing
legislative initiatives, revolutionary socialists prioritize the struggle for
reforms through broad, direct extra-parliamentary mass actions.
·
2. Without negating the need to take
into consideration real social-political relations of forces, revolutionary
socialists refuse to limited the struggle for reforms to those which are
acceptable to the bourgeoisie or, worse, which don’t upset the basic social
and political relations of power. For that reason, reformists tend to fight less
and less for serious reforms whenever the system is in crisis because, like the
capitalists, they understand the “destabilizing” tendency of these
struggles. For the revolutionists, the priority is the struggle for the
masses’ needs and interests, and not the defence of the system’s needs or
logic, nor the conservation of any consensus with capitalists.
·
3. Reformists see the limitation or
elimination of capitalism’s ills as a process of gradual progress.
Revolutionists, on the contrary, educate the masses in the inevitability of
crises which will interrupt the gradual accumulation of reforms, and which will
periodically lead to a threat of suppression of conquests of the past, or to
their actual suppression.
·
4. Reformists will tend to brake, oppose
or even repress all forms of direct mass actions which transcend or threaten
bourgeois state institutions. Revolutionists, on the contrary, will
systematically favor and try to develop self-activity and self-organization of
the masses, even in daily struggles for immediate reforms, regardless of
“destabilizing” consequences, thereby creating a tradition, an experience of
broader and broader mass struggle, which facilitates the emergence of a dual
power situation when generalized mass struggles—a general strike—actually
occur. Thereby, proletarian revolutions of the type sketched above can be seen
as an organic product—or climax—of broader and broader mass struggles for
reforms in pre-revolutionary or even non-revolutionary times.
·
5. Reformists will generally limit
themselves to propagating reform. Revolutionary Marxists will combine a struggle
for reforms with constant and systematic anti-capitalist propaganda. They will
educate the masses in the system’s ills, and advocate its revolutionary
overthrow. The formulation and struggle for transitional demands which, while
corresponding to the masses’ needs, cannot be realized within the framework of
the system, plays a key role here.
Doesn’t
such a view of “really feasible revolution” in the west seriously
underestimate the obstacle which the Western proletariat’s obvious attachment
to parliamentary democracy constitutes on the road towards the overthrow of
bourgeois institutions, without which no victorious revolution is possible? We
don’t think so.
In
the first place, many aspects of the legitimate attachment of the masses to
democratic rights and freedom is not at all an attachment to bourgeois state
institutions. It expresses, to use a clarifying formula of Trotsky, the presence
of nuclei of proletarian democracy inside of the bourgeois state. 33
The larger the masses’ self-activity, self-mobilization and self-organization,
the more the butterfly of democratic workers’ power tends to appear out of its
“bourgeois” chrysalis. The fundamental issue will be one of growing
confrontation between the “naked core” of bourgeois state power (the central
government, the repressive apparatus, etc.) and the masses’ attachment to
democratic institutions which they themselves control.
In
the second place, there is no reason to counterpose in an absolute and dogmatic
way organs of direct workers and popular power, and organs resulting from
undifferentiated universal franchise. Workers and popular councils and their
centralized coordination (local, regional, national, international council
congresses) can be more efficient and democratic forms of making possible the
direct exercise of political, economic and social power by millions of toilers.
But if it is necessary to reject parliamentary cretinism, it is likewise
necessary to reject anti-parliamentary cretinism. Whenever and wherever the
masses clearly express their wish to have parliamentary-type power organs
elected by universal franchise—the cases of Hungary, Poland and Nicaragua are
clear in that sense—revolutionists should accept that verdict. These organs
need not supercede the power of soviets insofar as the masses have learned
through their own experiences that their councils can give them more democratic
rights and more real power than the broadest parliamentary democracy alone; and
insofar as the precise functional division of labor between soviet-type and
parliamentary-type organs is elaborated into a constitution under conditions of
workers power.
Of
course, soviet institutions can and should also be elected on the basis of
universal franchise. The fundamental difference between parliamentary and soviet
democracy is not the mode of election but the mode of functioning. Parliamentary
democracy is essentially representative, i.e. indirect democracy, and to a large
extent limited to the legislative field. Soviet democracy contains much higher
doses of direct democracy, including the instrument of “binding mandates” of
the electors for their representative and the right to instant recall of these
by their electors. In addition, it implies a large-scale instant recall of these
by their electors. In addition, it implies a large-scale unification of
legislative and executive functions which, combined with the principle of
rotation, actually enables the majority of the citizens to exercise state
functions.
The
multiplication of functional assemblies with a division of competence serves the
same purpose. A key specificity of soviet democracy is also that it is
producers’ democracy, i.e. that it ties economic decision-taking to work
places and federated work places (at local, regional and branch levels etc.),
giving those who work the right to decide on their workload and the allocation
of their products and services. Why should workers make sacrifices in spending
time, nerves and physical strength for increasing output, when they generally
feel that the results of these additional efforts don’t benefit them, and they
have no way of deciding about the distribution of its fruits? Producers’
democracy appears more and more as the only way to overcome the declining
motivation (sense of responsibility) for production, not to say the economy in
its totality, which characterizes both the capitalist market economy and the
bureaucratic command economy.
The
revolutionary processes in the Third World since World War II have confirmed the
validity of the strategy of permanent revolution. Wherever these processes have
climaxed in a full break with the old ruling classes and with international
capital the historical tasks of the national-democratic revolution (national
unification, independence from imperialism) have been realized. This was the
case of Yugoslavia, Indochina, China, Cuba, Nicaragua. Wherever the
revolutionary process did not culminate in such a full break, key tasks of the
national-democratic revolution remain unfulfilled. This was the case of
Indonesia, Bolivia, Egypt, Algeria, Chile, Iran.
The
theory (strategy) of permanent revolution is counterposed to the traditional
Comintern/CP strategy since the middle nineteen twenties, to wit that of the
“revolution by stages,” in which a first phase of “bloc of four classes”
(the so-called “national” bourgeoisie; the peasantry; the urban
petty-bourgeoisie and the proletariat) is supposed to eliminate by a common
political struggle the semi-feudal and oligarchic power structures, including
foreign imperialist ones. Only in a second phase is the proletarian struggle for
power supposed to come to the forefront. This strategy first led to disaster in
China in 1927. It has led to grave defeats ever since. It is increasingly
challenged inside many CPs themselves.
It
is of no avail to avoid making this fundamental choice by the use of abstract
formulas. The formulas, “workers and farmers government” or, worse,
“people’s power” or “broad popular alliance under the hegemony of the
working class,” just evade the issue. What revolutions are all about is state
power. The class nature of state power—and/or of the question which major
fraction of a given class exercises state power—is decisive. Either the
formulas just cited are synonymous with the overthrow of the
bourgeois-oligarchic state, its army and its repressive apparatus, and with the
establishment of a workers state; or the formulas imply that the existing state
apparatus is not to be “immediately” destroyed—in which case the class
nature of the state remains bourgeois-oligarchic and the revolution will be
defeated.
When
it is said that without the conquest of power by the working class, without
overthrow of the state of the former ruling classes, the historical tasks of the
national-democratic revolution will not be fully realized, this does not mean
that none of these tasks can be initiated under bourgeois or
petty-bourgeois governments. After World War II, most of the previously colonial
countries did after all achieve political national independence without
overthrowing the capitalist order. In some cases at least, India being the most
striking one, this was not purely formal but also implied a degree of economic
autonomy from imperialism which made at least initial industrialization under
national bourgeois ownership possible. Starting with the late sixties, a series
of semi-colonial countries succeeded in launching a process of
semi-industrialization which went much farther (South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil,
Mexico, Singapore, Hong Kong are the most important cases), often supported by
substantial land reforms as indispensable launching pads for these take-offs.
The famous controversy of the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties on the
so-called “dependencia” theory—the impossibility of any serious degree of
industrialization without a total break with imperialism—has thus been settled
by history.
It
is likewise incorrect to interpret the theory of the permanent revolution as
implying that the overthrow of the old state order and the radical agrarian
revolution must perforce coincide with the complete destruction of
capitalist private property in industry. It is true that the working class can
hardly be supposed to tolerate its own exploitation at factory level while it is
busy, or has already succeeded in, disarming the capitalists and eliminating
their political power. But from this flows only that the victorious socialist
revolution in underdeveloped countries will start making “despotic inroads”
into the realm of capitalist private property, to quote a famous sentence of the
Communist Manifesto. The rhythm and the extent of these inroads will
depend on the political and social correlation of forces and on the pressure of
economic priorities. No general formula is applicable here for all countries at
all moments.
The
question of the rhythm and the extent of expropriation of the bourgeoisie is in
turn tied to the question of the workers—peasants alliance, a key question of
political strategy in most of the third world countries. Keeping capitalist
property intact to the extent of not fulfilling the poor peasants’ thirst for
land is obviously counter-productive. Hitting private property to the extent of
arousing fear among the middle peasants that they too will lose their property
is counter-productive from an economic point of view (it could become also
counter-productive politically).
On
balance, however, experience confirms what the theory suggests. It is impossible
to achieve genuine independence from imperialism and genuinely to motivate the
working class for the task of socialist reconstruction of the nation without the
expropriation of big capital in industry, banking, agriculture, trade and
transportation, be it international or national capital. The real difficulties
only arise when the borderline between that expropriation and the tolerance of
small and medium-sized capital (with all its implications for economic growth,
social equality and direct producers’ motivation) has to be determined.
The
historical record shows that a peculiar form of dual power of confrontation
between the old and the new state order has appeared during all victorious
socialist revolutions in underdeveloped countries: dual power reflecting a
territorial division of the country into liberated zones in which the new state
is emerging, and the rest of the country where the old state still reigns. This
peculiar form of dual power expresses in turn the peculiar form of the
revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) processes themselves, in which armed
struggle (guerrilla warfare, people’s war) occupied a central place. In the
cases of China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam, this resulted from the fact that the
revolution started as a movement of national liberation against a foreign
imperialist aggressor/invader, while becoming increasingly intertwined with
civil war between the poor and the well-to-do, i.e. with social revolution. In
the cases of Cuba and Nicaragua, the revolution started likewise as armed
struggle against a viciously repressive and universally hated and despised
dictatorship, again growing over into a social revolution.
One
should of course not simplify the pattern emerging from these experiences. At
least in Cuba and in Nicaragua (to some extent also in the beginnings of the
Indochinese revolution and in several stages of the Yugoslav revolution) urban
insurrections played an important role. A successful general strike and a
successful urban insurrection decided the outcome of the Cuban and the
Nicaraguan revolutions. The proponents of the strategy of armed struggle today
generally adopt a more sophisticated and complex strategy then in the sixties,
combining guerrilla warfare, the creation of liberated zones and the
mobilization of mass organizations in urban zones (including forms of armed
self-defence) in order to lead the revolution to victory. This combination seems
reasonable in many semi-colonial countries, where state repression under
pre-revolutionary conditions leaves no other alternative to revolutionary
strategy. We believe, however, that this pattern should not be considered
unavoidable once and for all in all Third World countries, regardless of
specific circumstances and particular social-political relationships of forces
at given moments.
The
concept of political (anti-bureaucratic) revolution in the bureaucratized
societies in transition between capitalism and socialism (bureaucratized workers
states) was first launched by Trotsky in 1933. It resulted from the diagnosis of
the growing contradictions of Soviet society and from the prediction that these
contradictions could no longer be removed through reforms; and it was related,
therefore to the prediction that a self-reform of the bureaucracy was
impossible. 34
Most left tendencies considered this concept, and the premises on which it was
based, as either a fantasy, or objectively a call for counter-revolution. The
overthrow of the bureaucratic dictatorship could only lead to a restoration of
capitalism: that was the assumption.
These
objections were unfounded. Trotsky’s prognosis of political revolution, like
his analysis of the contradictions of Soviet society, appear as one of his most
brilliant contributions to Marxism. Since 1953, we have witnessed a chain of
revolutionary crises in Eastern Europe: GDR June 1953; Hungary 1956;
Czechoslovakia 1968; Poland 1980-1981. One can discuss whether similar crises
didn’t also occur in China, both in the nineteen sixties and the nineteen
seventies. (Mikhail Gorbachev himself calls his perestroika a
revolution and compares it with the political revolutions which occurred in
France in 1830, 1848 and 1870.) 35
In all these concrete revolutionary processes, there was no prevalent tendency
to restore capitalism. This did not only result from the objective fact that the
overwhelming majority of the combatants were workers who have no interest in
restoring capitalism. It was subjectively determined by the very demands of
these combatants, which in Hungary set up workers’ councils with the Central
Workers Council of Budapest leading the struggle. Similar development occurred
in Czechoslovakia and in Poland. The line of march of the political revolution
in the USSR will be quite similar.
On
the other hand, it cannot be denied that attempts at self-reform of the
bureaucracy have been many—the most spectacular of them being the introduction
of workers’ self-management at factory level in Yugoslavia in 1950. While
often instrumental in triggering off a “thaw” of the bureaucracy’s
stranglehold on society and enabling a revival of mass activity and mass
politization at various degrees, these attempts have always failed to solve the
basic ills of these societies. This was especially true for the historically
most important of these attempts, the one initiated by N.S. Khrushchev in the
USSR. Indeed, today most of the “liberal” and “left” Soviet historians
and intellectuals agree that the reason for the failure of Khrushchev was
insufficient activity from below. This, incidentally, is also Gorbachev’s
official version of the Khrushchev experience.
So
the historical balance-sheet is again clear: attempts at self-reform can start a
movement of change in the bureaucratized workers’ state. They can even
facilitate the beginning of a genuine mass movement. But they cannot bring about
a successful culmination of such change and movement. For this, a genuine
popular revolution is indispensable. Self-reform of the enlightened wing of the
bureaucracy cannot be a substitute for such a revolution.
The
bureaucracy is a hardened social layer, enjoying huge material
privileges which depend fundamentally on its monopoly on the exercises of
political power. But that same bureaucracy does not play any indispensable or
useful role in society. Its role is essentially parasitic. Hence its rule is
more and more wasteful. It tends to become the source of a succession of
specific economic, social, political, ideological-more crises. Hence the need to
remove it from its ruling position is an objective necessity for unblocking the
march forward towards socialism. For this, a revival of mass activity, in the
first place political activity of the working class, in needed. While a
revolution will have many implications in the field of the economy, it will
basically consolidate and strengthen the system of collective ownership of the
means of production and of socialized planning, far from overthrowing it. That
is why we speak of a “political revolution” instead of a “social
revolution.” 36
To
a large extent, the bureaucracy rules in function of the political passivity of
the working class; Trotsky even said through passive “tolerance” by the
working class. The historical-social origins of that passivity are well-known:
the defeats of the international revolution; the pressure of scarcity of
consumer goods and of lack of culture born from the relative backwardness of
Russia; the consequences of the Stalinist terror; a disappointment of historical
dimensions, leading to a lack of historical alternatives to the bureaucracy’s
rule. But the very progress of Soviet society during the last half century,
achieved on the basis of the remaining conquests of the October revolution and
in spite of the bureaucracy’s misrule, slowly undermines the basis of that
passivity. The stronger, more skilled and more cultivated becomes the working
class, the greater its resentments and expectations clash with the slow-down of
economic growth and the manifold social crises which the bureaucracy’s misrule
and waste provoke. So conditions emerge which tend to revive the working
classes’ activity.
Timothy
Garton Ash quotes a remarkable memorandum by the new Polish Prime Minister,
Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski, which concludes with the prediction that if the
“socialist formation” does not find the strength to reform itself, “the
further history of our formation will be marked by shocks and revolutionary
explosions, initiated by an increasingly enlightened people.” Indeed. But as
Ash himself clearly indicates, in spite of his favoring reforms moving towards a
restoration of capitalism tempered by a “liberal” democracy, the difficulty
lies precisely in the social correlation of forces: the working class is not
ready to pay the price for a return to capitalism, i.e. massive unemployment and
inequality. So you can’t have generalized market economy plus political
democracy. You can only have partial market economy plus political repression.
So you can’t have radical reforms. So the likelihood that you’ll have a
political revolution is growing. Ash himself rather cynically concludes: “It
seems reasonable to suggest that the reform has a rather higher chance of
minimal success—that is, of averting revolution—if only because of the
further diversification of social interests which it will promote. The freeing
of the private sector, in particular, means that Hungary might yet have an
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie that will go to the barricades—against the
revolting workers. Capitalists and Communists, shoulder to shoulder against the
proletariat: a suitably Central European outcome for socialism. To estimate the
percentage chance of peaceful transformation, by contrast requires only the
fingers of one hand. 37
Yet,
precisely because the bureaucracy is not a new ruling class but a parasitic
cancer on the working class and society as a whole, its removal through a
political revolution by the workers does not require the type of armed conflict
which until now has accompanied revolutions in class societies, including modern
capitalist ones. It is more in the nature of a surgical operation. This was
confirmed in the case of Hungary 1956 which went the farthest towards a
victorious political revolution. A significant part of the CP apparatus and
practically the whole army went over to the camp of the workers (of the people).
Only a tiny handful of secret police agents opposed arms to the victorious
masses in open provocations, thereby provoking an overt conflict (and their own
sad fate) which otherwise could have been avoided. In Czechoslovakia 1968 a
similar trend was set in motion. In fact, in all cases of such political
revolutions witnesses up till now, only foreign military intervention could
prevent it from becoming victorious nearly without bloodshed. One does not see
what force could replace such a foreign intervention in the case of the USSR,
probably not the Soviet army. And the capacity of the KGB to repress 265 million
people seems dubious to say the least.
History
has also confirmed the utopian character of the idea that the construction of
socialism could be fully achieved in a single country or a small number of
countries. It has confirmed that the USSR (and the so-called “socialist
camp”) cannot escape the pressure of the world market (or international
capitalism): the pressure of wars and of the permanent arms race: the pressure
of constant technological innovations; and the pressure of changing consumption
patterns for the mass of the producers. But far from being an unavoidable result
of that pressure, the bureaucratic dictatorship undermines the revolution’s
objective revolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe would strengthen
considerably that resistance. It would make new advances towards socialism
possible. But we should not fall into the illusion that it could even so,
actually achieve a classless society of its own, independently of revolutionary
developments elsewhere.
The
concept of the three sectors of the world revolution refers to the different
strategic-historical tasks with which the revolutionary process is confronted
today. But this only represents the first step towards a concretization of the
concept of world revolution today. The question of these sectors and their
interaction, and hence their growing unity, has also to be raised.
For
decades, the apologists of the Stalinist dictatorship used to say that revealing
the dark side of the Soviet (the Eastern European, the Chinese) reality
discourages the workers in the West from fighting to overthrow capitalism. But
history has fully confirmed that it is impossible to conduct a fight for a good
cause on the basis of lies, half-truths or the hiding of truth. As it was
impossible, in the long run, to hide the revolting aspects of Soviet reality,
the mass of the workers in the West and Japan (including those adhering to or
voting for Communist Parties) ended by assimilating them. What really
discouraged and demoralized them was not the revelation of these facts but the
facts themselves—including their decade-long suppression by the Communist
Parties and their fellow travellers. One of the biggest subjective obstacles to
a new development of revolutionary consciousness among the Western working class
is the repulsive mask which Stalinism has put on socialism (communism). By
contributing to tearing off that mask, a victorious political revolution in the
East greatly advances the cause of socialism the world over. It strengthens the
struggle against capitalism and imperialism instead of weakening it.
The
idea that such a revolution would at least weaken the USSR (or the “socialist
camp”) at state level and thereby change the military relationship of forces
in favor of imperialism is likewise unfounded. It is an undeniable fact that the
existence of the USSR in spite of the bureaucratic dictatorship and theory of
“peaceful coexistence,” objectively contributed to the victory and
eventually the consolidation of the Chinese revolution and the downfall of the
colonial empires in the subsequent decades. But parallel to that objective
reality must be seen the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy tried to obstruct the
progress of the Chinese revolution through the strategy it advocated, and played
a key role in the post World War II consolidation of capitalism in Western
Europe.
Furthermore,
it is wrong to disconnect military strength from its economic and social base
and from the political nature of governments. A Soviet Union, not to say a
“socialist camp,” governed through a pluralistic socialist democracy and a
broad consensus of the majority of the toilers, would be much more efficient
economically, far more influential in the world, and thereby much stronger
militarily than the USSR of today. 38
The
concept of interrelationship between the three sectors of the world revolution
is supported by the fact that while victorious revolutions in the Third World
countries can weaken imperialism, they cannot overthrow it. In the epoch of
nuclear weapons it is obvious that imperialism can only be overthrown inside the
metropolis itself. But the main obstacle to that overthrow is not the objective
strength of imperialism or the bourgeois state, nor the absence of periodically
expressed demonstrations inside the metropolis. The main obstacle is subjective:
the level of Western (and Japanese) working class consciousness and the
political quality of its leadership. Precisely for that reason, new qualitative
advances towards socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and the removal of
the bureaucratic dictatorships, would greatly assist in the solution of the
problem.
On
the other hand, any leap forward towards a victorious proletarian revolution in
the West and the most advanced semi-industrialized Third World countries (like
Brazil), which will occur under immeasurably more favorable objective and
subjective conditions than the Russian October Revolution, will usher in
material advantages which will operate as a powerful stimulant for the toilers
of all countries, beginning with the Soviet toilers if they have not yet
overthrown the bureaucracy’s yoke at that moment. To mention just one key
aspect of an already victorious proletarian revolution in an economically
advanced country: the slogan of the half-work day would play the same role as
the slogan of “Land, Bread, Peace” played in the Russian revolution. And if
that were realized no sector of the working class the world over could stay
impervious to the reality.
The
potential relationship—we say potential because it is obviously not yet a fact
today—between the three sectors of world revolution is premised on
historical/social unity of the world working class and the strength of the
forces operating towards the development of conscious awareness of that unity.
We know perfectly well how strong the obstacles are on the road towards that
political consciousness. They have been enumerated and analyzed a thousand
times. What we want to stress is that they can be overcome by the operation of
still stronger objective trends.
The
unity of the process of world revolution is related to the growing
internationalization of the productive forces and of capital—exemplified in
the emergence of the transnational corporation as the typical late capitalist
firm predominant in the world market—which leads unavoidably to a growing
internationalization of the class struggle. Hard material reality will teach the
international working class that retreating toward purely national defensive
strategies (exemplified by protectionism) leaves all the advantages to capital
and increasingly paralyzes even the defence of a given standard of living and of
political rights. The only efficient answer to an internationalization of
capital’s strength and maneuvers is international coordination, solidarity and
organization of the working class.
During
the last decades, the objective need for world revolution as a unity of the
three world sectors of revolution has received a new and frightening dimension
through the growth of the destructive potential of contemporary technological
and economic trends, resulting from the survival of capitalism beyond the period
of its historical legitimacy. The accumulation of huge arsenals of nuclear and
chemical weapons; the extension of nuclear power; the destruction of tropical
forests; the pollution of air and water the world over; the destruction of the
ozone layer; the desertification of large tracts of Africa; the growing famine
in the Third World: all these trends threaten disasters which put a question
mark on the physical survival of human-kind. None of these disasters can be
stopped or prevented at national or even continental level. They all call for
solutions on a worldwide scale. The consciousness about the global nature of
humanity's crisis and the need for global solutions, largely overlapping
nation-states, has been rapidly growing.
Mikhail
Gorbachev and his main advisers and intellectual supporters tend to draw from a
correct perception of the globalization of problems and of the absolute
necessity to prevent a nuclear war the conclusion that progressively, these
global problems will be solved through an increased collaboration between
imperialist and “socialist” states. They base themselves on two assumptions
in that regard. First they believe that a course towards world revolution
exacerbate inter-state relations to the point where the outbreak of a world war
would become more likely, if not unavoidable. Second, they tactily presume that
the inner contradictions of capitalism will tend to decrease, that the real
class struggle will become less explosive, that trends towards increased class
collaboration will prevail in the 21st century. Both these assumptions are
utterly unrealistic. They are of the same type as the hope to achieve the
building of a really socialist society in a single country, of which they
represent in a certain sense the logical continuation.
The
fact is that while victorious or even unfolding revolutions have undoubtedly led
to counter-revolutionary interventions by imperialist powers, they have on
several occasions prevented larger wars from occurring. Without the German
revolution of 1918-1919, and the revolutionary general strike in that country in
1920, the preparations for a general strike in Britain that same year, a major
war of all imperialist powers against Soviet Russia would probably have
occurred. Without the victory of the October revolution, the first World War
would probably have been prolonged at least for one if not for more years. The
revolutionary upsurge in Spain, France and Czechoslovakia in 1936 significantly
slowed down the march toward World War II. If it would have been victorious even
only in Spain, not to say in France and Czechoslovakia as well, World War II
could have been prevented. So to identify revolutions with unavoidable war is
just a misreading of the historical record. In fact, a victorious revolution in
France and Britain today, not to say in the USA, would be the surest way to make
world war impossible.
The
real reasoning of the neo-reformist Gorbachev version of “globalization” is
based on the classical reformist illusion of a decline in the explosiveness and
intensity of the inner contradictions of capitalism and of bourgeois society. We
have already dealt with the unrealistic character of that assumption. It errs
especially by not taking into account the structural link between the
destructive uses of technology and economic resources on the one hand, and
competitive attitudes, competitive strife, private property and market economy
on the other hand. Bourgeois society can never lead and will never lead towards
a world without weapons and without technological innovations applied regardless
of their costs to the natural and human ecology. You need socialism to achieve
these goals. And you have to achieve these goals if humanity is to survive. The
strongest justification for world revolution today is that humankind is
literally faced with the long-term dilemma: either a World Socialist Federation
or Death.
1.
Precisely because the Marxist conception of revolution encompasses the necessary
dimension of mass action, the concept of “revolution from above” is not
strictly accurate, although it was used by Engels and has, of course, a well
circumscribed significance. Joseph II’s reforms in Austria; Tsar Alexander
II’s abolition of serfdom; Bismarck’s unification of Germany; the Meiji
“revolution” in Japan, were historical attempts to pre-empt revolutions from
below through radical reforms from above. To what extent they were successful or
failed in that historical purpose must be analyzed in each specific case. The
same applied mutatis mutandis to Gorbachev’s reform course in the
Soviet Union today. Return
to text.
2.
This was the epigram of the weekly Révolutions de Paris, which started
to appear from the end of August 1789 in Paris. Return
to text.
3.
See Barrington Moore Jr., The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, M.E.
Sharpe, White Plains, N.Y. 1978. Return
to text.
4.
This was the case during the days preceding the downfall of the Shah in the
streets of Teheran, a spectacle largely forgotten because of the subsequent
developments in that country. Return
to text.
5.
This does not automatically flow from the disintegration and disarmament of the
former army. The ruling class can make an attempt to substitute a new bourgeois
army to the old one, as ti did in Cuba after the downfall of Batista and in
Nicaragua after the fall of Somoza, but without success. Return
to text.
6.
This is the currently prevailing explanation of the reasons for the Shah’s
downfall: the combination of the “white revolution” destabilizing
traditional Iranian society and the savagery of SAVAK. Return
to text.
7.
In Russia, the cause of the February-March 1917 revolution was the rottenness of
tsarism and the tremendous parasitical weight of the peasants’ exploitation
upon the overall economic development of the country. The triggering factors of
that revolution were hunger riots of the Petrograd women workers which the cossacks
refused to repress. This expressed the emergence of a de facto alliance
between the working class and the peasantry, contrary to what had occurred in
the repression of the 1905 revolution. There is, however, also a deeper
dialectical mediation between structure and conjuncture. The specific
social-political order in Tsarist Russia determined both its participation in
the first world war, and its increasing incapacity to cope with the material and
political prerequisites of successful warfare. This incapacity in turn deepened
the social crisis in a dramatic way—leading to chronic food shortages, to
hunger riots and hence to the decisive days of outbreak of the February-March
1917 revolution. A similarly multi-layered analysis is needed to understand
contemporary revolutionary moments—including unsuccessful ones, such as May
1968 in France. What went on in France during the climax of the mass upsurge and
the general strike deserves to be seen as a revolution, although it was
defeated. And the triggering factor of the student revolt in Paris must itself
be seen in the context of a deeper structural crisis of social and political
relations. Useful here is the remarkable study by the Soviet sociologist, Alex
D. Khlopin, New Social Movements in the West: Their causes and prospects of
developments, which complements Western Marxist analyses. Return
to Text.
8.
In Russia, the material interests of the cossacks as sons of peasants,
the connections of these interest to political awareness on the one hand, and to
the explosive crisis of the relations of production in the countryside on the
other hand, all converge to explain the cossacks ’ peculiar shift in
behavior, at a given moment, in a given place. Return
to text.
9.
It is, of course, possible that this breakdown is only temporary and only lasts
some weeks or months. But this doesn’t make the collapse less real. In
Germany—not only, but of course especially in Berlin—this is what occurred
in November-December 1918. In France, this is what occurred at the climax of May
1968. Indeed, it was recently confirmed that, at that moment, General de Gaulle
couldn’t phone General Massu, the commander of the French army in Germany: he
had lost control of the whole telecommunication system in Paris as a result of
an effective general strike. An anonymous woman telephone operator whom he
finally succeeded in speaking to personally, refused to obey his order. The
decision of the strike committee prevailed. These are the unknown heroines and
heroes of revolution. This is the stuff proletarian revolutions are made of. Return
to text.
10.
See Edward Luttwack, Technique of the Coup D’État (1968); cf.
interview with Stampa-Sera, August 8, 1988. Return
to text.
11.
Nevertheless Spinoza, who was himself skeptical about the outcome of
revolutions, explicitly proclaimed the people’s right to revolution, more than
a century before that same right was ensconced in the Preamble of the American
Declaration of Independence first, in the French Declaration the Rights of Men
and Citizens afterwards. To our knowledge, the Yugoslav Constitution is today
the only one which not only contains explicitly that right, but even adds to it the
duty to make a revolution under specific conditions. Return
to text.
12.
The dogma of the basic “evil” of humankind is based in the West on the
superstition of Original Sin. Of late, it has received a pseudo-scientific
veneer witht he Konrad Lorenz school of the alleged universal agressivity of
human beings, which some psychologists then tend to generalize into a human
trend towards self-destruction. Better psychologists, in the first place Sigmund
Freud, pointed out that the human psyche combines both a trend towards
cooperation and a trend towards self-destruction, Eros and Thanatos, to love and
to kill. If only the second one would have prevailed, humankind would have
disappeared a long time ago instead of showing an impressive
demographic-biological expansion. Return
to text.
13.
Two thousand years ago, the Jewish philosopher Hillel expressed the
contradictions of individual skepticism in a succinct way: “If I am not for
myself, who is for me? And if I am for myself alone, what then am I? and if not
now, then when?” Kant tried to escape that dilemma through his categorical
imperative, but failed to apply it convincingly to social conflicts (see his
attitude towards the French revolution). Marx found the solution in his
categorical imperative to struggle against all social conditions in which human
beings are debased, oppressed, and alienated. Return
to text.
14.
Revolutionary continuity was maintained by a handful of followers of Babeuf who,
through the person of Buonarotti, helped to inspire Auguste Blanqui’s Société
des Saisons, which gave rise to anew revolutionary organization in the
1830s. But for nearly forty years, there were very few organized revolutionaries
in the country which witnessed five revolutions in the course of a century. Return
to text.
15.
The debate goes on, of course. René Sedillot (Le coût de la révolution
française, Paris, Perrin, 1987) is the most brazen of the latter-day
dragon-killers, who continue the good fight against the French revolution after
two centuries. The sophisms on which he bases his argumentations are revealed by
the fact that he adds the victims of counter-revolution, in the first place of
Napoleon’s wars, to the cost of the revolution. But he does not compare these
“costs” to those of the Ancien Régime’s dynastic wars: the devastation of
a quarter of Germany, the big famine in France at the beginning of the 18th
century, etc. Return
to text.
16.
The inclusion of Deng Xiaoping in this list is of course open to serious
challenge. Mao was not Lenin; he was rather a unique combination of given traits
of both Lenin and Stalin. Hence, Deng Xiaoping, in spite of many right-wing
tendencies in his politics, cannot be considered the Thermidorian equivalent of
Stalin of the Chinese revolution. Return
to text.
17.
Incidentally, this is one of the objective bases for the second “law of
permanent revolution” formulated by Trotsky. For the revolutionary process to
continue after it starts to recede in a given country, its center of gravity
must shift to another one. Return
to text.
18.
Classical examples of defeated counter-revolutionary coups are the
Kornilov one in Russia, August 1917, the Kapp-von Luttwitz putsch in
Germany, 1920 and the Spanish military-fascist uprising in July 1936 in
Catalonia, Madrid, Valencia, Málaga, the Basque country, etc. Return
to text.
19.
A democratic counter-revolution is a counter-revolution which seeks to maintain
essential features of bourgeois democracy, including the legal mass labor
movement, universal franchise and a broadly free press, after having beaten back
the workers’ attempts to conquer power and to arm themselves. Of course, while
engaged in suppressing the German revolution, Ebert, Noske an Co. systematically
curtailed democratic freedoms, forbade political parties, suspended newspapers,
requisitioned strikers and even outlawed strikes, to preserve the bourgeois
state. Moreover, Ebert cynically lied before the All-German Congress of
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (December 1918) when he denied having
brought soldiers to Berlin for repressive purposes. He had actually done so, in
direct connection with the Imperial Army’s High Command, behind the back of
his fellow “people’s commissars” (ministers) of the Independent Socialist
Party. The repression started a few days later. Return
to text.
20.
This occurred in Germany throughout the country starting with January 1919 in
Berlin. It occurred in Barcelona after the May days in 1937, in Greece starting
with December 1944, in Indonesia in 1965, just to quote some examples.
Courageous left socialists like the prewar Austrian social-democrats and
Salvador Allende in Chile did not refuse to fight counter-revolution arms in
hand, but they refused to organize and prepare the masses systematically for
this unavoidable showdown and deliberately left the initiative to the enemy,
which meant courting disaster. Return
to text.
21.
Revolutionists cannot “cause revolutions,” nor can they “provoke” them
artificially (this is the basic difference between a revolution and a putsch
). Engels even went further and stated: “Die Leute die sich ruhmen, eine
Revolution gemacht zu haben, haben immer noch am Tage darauf gesehen,
dass sie nicht wessten was sie taten, das die ‘gemachte’ Revolution, jener
die sie hatten machen wollen, durchaus nicht ähnlich sah” (letter to Vera
Sassulitch of April 23, 1885, MEW, Band 36, p. 307). Return
to text.
22.
The concept of “combined revolution” is also applicable to some imperialist
countries, but with a different ponderation of the combined elements from that
of third world countries. E.g. the combination of proletarian revolution and
self-determination of oppressed national minorities in Spain; the combination of
proletarian revolution and black and hispanic liberation in the USA. Return
to text.
23.
E.g. in Finland 1917-1918; in Austria 1918-1919, 1927, 1934; in Germany
1918-1923; in Italy 1919-1920, 1944-1945, 1969; in Spain 1931-1937; in France
1936, 1968; in Portugal 1974-1975. Return
to text.
24.
Some argue that the impossibility of escaping “technology compulsion” (technologischer
Sachzwang ) constitutes today an unsurpassable obstacle on the road to
proletarian revolution and “Marxian socialism.” This is an unproven
assumption, based upon the petitio principii that technology somehow
develops and is applied independently from the social interests of those who
have the means (under large scale commodity production: the capital) to apply
it. Return
to text.
25.
See Eduard Bernstein: Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben
der Sozialdemokratie (1899). Return
to text.
26.
On Kautsky’s evolutions away from revolutionary Marxism in 1909-1910, its
turning point (his capitulation to the Parteivorstand on the censorship
that body applied to his booklet The Road to Power ) and its political
outcome in his opposition to Rosa Luxemburg’s campaign in favor of political
mass strikes, see Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist
Revolution, NBL, London, 1979, pp. 123 ff. Return
to text.
27.
Karl Kautsky, Les Trois Sources du Marxisme (1907), ed. française,
Spartacus, Paris 1969, pp. 12-13. Return
to text.
28.
Kautsky’s articles on ultra-imperialism in which he considered
inter-imperialist wars more and more unlikely, started to appear from 1912 on.
The final one had the unfortunate fate of appearing in Die Neue Zeit on
the aftermath of the actual outbreak of World War I. Return
to text.
29.
We have developed this idea further in our article “The reasons for founding
the Fourth International and why they remain valid today.” International
Marxist Review, Summer-Autumn, 1988. Return
to text.
30.
Ernest Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism To-day, New Left Books, London,
1979. Return
to text.
31.
The case of the German workers’ answer to the Kapp-Luttwitz coup of
1920 and of the Spanish workers’ answer to the fascist-military uprising of
July 1936—in a more limited way also the Italian workers’ uprising of
1948—helps to integrate into this typology the question of the proletariat’s
capacity to answer massively counter-revolutionary initiatives of the
bourgeoisie. This will remain on the agenda in the West in the future as it was
in the past. But this does not justify any refusal to recognize that the process
of proletarian revolutions likely to occur in the West and in Japan will most
probably be quite different from these particular examples, as well as from the
revolutionary processes which we witnessed in Yugoslavia, China, Indochina,
Cuba, Nicaragua during and after World War II. Return
to text.
32.
See Norma Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, (New Left Books, London,
1976) on this, and on Rosa being one of the founders, together with Trotsky, of
a theory of dual power emerging from workers’ mass strikes. Return
to text.
33.
Trotsky, Was Nun? Schicksallfragen des deutschen Proletariat, January
1932. Return
to text.
34.
Leon Trotsky first formulated that conclusion in 1933 in his article “The
Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1, 1933) Writings of Leon
Trotsky 1933-1934, p. 101 f. Return
to text.
35.
On the question of how far that characterization is legitimate, see Ernest
Mandel, Beyond Perestroika, Verso, London 1988. Return
to text.
36.
On the theoretical foundations of the definition of “political revolution”
and the analysis which leads to it, see Ernest Mandel, “Bureaucratie et
production marchande,” Quatrième Internationale, No. 24, April 1987.
Return
to text.
37.
The New York Review of Books, October 27, 1988. Return
to text.
38.
The Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzales Casanova has tried to refute the
legitimacy of the political revolution in the bureaucratized workers states on
the basis of a hierarchy of revolutionary tasks on a world scale. As long as
imperialism survives, revolutionists (socialists, anti-imperialists) everywhere
in the world should give priority to the fight against that monster over and
above all other struggles. (See his “La Penetración metafísica en el
Marxismo europeo,” in isabado, supplemento de Unomasuno, 8/1/1983).
Underlying that reasoning is the hypothesis that an ongoing, not to say a
victorious, political revolution in a bureaucratized workers’ state somehow
weakens the fight against imperialism. But that supposition is completely
unfounded, for the reason we have advanced. Return
to text.