Why do revolutions always seem to end in bloodshed and tyranny?
War and genocide, catastrophic climate change, poverty and hunger, oppression and preventable diseases: the case for a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalist barbarity has never been stronger. Yet most revolutions seem to end badly: bloodshed, civil war, dislocation and the replacement of one form of tyranny with another. Why?
The historical record shows that most of the bloodshed results from the violent suppression and defeat of revolutions, rather than the revolutions themselves. Time and again, largely peaceful revolutions have been drowned in blood as the ruling class take a terrible revenge on those who challenge their power. Just one example: from 2011, Bashar al-Assad slaughtered an estimated 650,000 Syrians who dared to revolt, even using chemical weapons against them.
When socialists talk about revolution, we mean the wholesale reordering of society: billionaires and capitalists having their wealth taken from them, and the state, which exists to enforce their rule, being replaced by democratic structures that genuinely reflect the interests and collective will of the majority. A socialist revolution would equitably redistribute the world’s wealth and use it to solve the problems that plague humanity.
The people who currently rule the world fear this kind of revolution and will do whatever it takes to prevent it.
The only successful socialist revolution to date occurred in Russia in October 1917. Yet it ended in Joseph Stalin presiding over a hideous dictatorship, a police state that mercilessly repressed any breath of opposition.
But this outcome was not inevitable. For a few brief years, and under the most adverse conditions, the workers’ state carried out reforms that were light years ahead of what the most liberal democracy at the time could offer: universal suffrage, equal pay, independence for oppressed nationalities, religious and sexual freedom, to name just a few.
The Russian Revolution took everyone by surprise, including socialists. As the First World War raged in 1915, Russian Marxist leader Vladimir Lenin—who would soon lead the victorious uprising—wrote despondently that he did not expect to see a revolution in his lifetime. Most expected that it would be a country like Germany—with its large, well-organised working class and a mass socialist party—that would have the first socialist revolution.
So there was a problem from the outset. Russia had a much smaller working class and was far less developed than the other imperialist powers, and years of war had shattered its economy. Lenin repeatedly warned that the workers’ state could not hold on for long without economic assistance from a victorious revolution in one or more developed countries.
The world’s ruling classes were equally aware of this, and organised to strangle the revolution at its source. Armies from fourteen countries (including Australia) were dispatched to Russia to assist the counter-revolutionary White Russian forces to “restore order”. Against enormous odds, and with incredible courage and sacrifice, Russia’s workers and peasants defended their revolution and won the civil war. But the country was left in an even more dire and impoverished state, and the working class that had led the revolution was decimated and exhausted. It was even more imperative that the revolution spread.
And indeed, the October Revolution galvanised workers around the world. In late 1918, German sailors mutinied and German workers toppled the government, ending the carnage of World War One and saving who knows how many lives. A period of intense class conflict followed, with revolutionary uprisings in Finland, Hungary, Italy and Spain, nearly revolutionary situations in Britain, France and elsewhere; even a short-lived Socialist Soviet Republic in Persia.
But in no other country did the working class succeed in taking power. Russia was left isolated, and this was to have terrible consequences—not just Stalin’s rise to power, but also the triumph of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany.
There are two main reasons why revolutions fail. The first is that they don’t go far enough. This is above all a failure to come to grips with the nature of capitalist rule, in particular the role of the state. The state is not neutral; it exists to protect the property and rule of the capitalists. They will not hesitate to use their armies, police, courts and prisons to crush opposition. The state cannot be reformed; it has to be smashed.
Within the workers’ movement, some always deny this reality and try to mislead workers into some form of accommodation with the system short of completely overthrowing it. In Chile in 1973 and Egypt in 2011, for example, workers were encouraged to believe that the army would respect democracy. In both instances, the armed forces led the counter-revolution and established dictatorships. As the French revolutionary Louis de Saint Just put it: “Those who make half a revolution dig their own grave”.
The second reason is related to the first. Success in Russia was predicated on the existence and leadership of a mass revolutionary party, the means by which workers can most effectively organise their power , take on the state and be prepared to withstand counter-revolution.
The party’s role is to lead the revolutionary movement and win the battle of ideas against political currents that try to hold back the fight for a new society. The party embodies and transmits the lessons learnt in previous revolutions so that workers can avoid the pitfalls that have derailed them in the past.
Revolutionary parties grow rapidly during a revolution, but that’s way too late. Millions of people need to be won to a clear revolutionary perspective. To do this, we need organisations that argue for revolution, train their members in revolutionary politics, history and strategy, and build experience and credibility over time. The party needs, in Lenin’s words, to “patiently explain” why and how the working class can and must defeat the power of the capitalists and their state. This is a lengthy process that cannot occur in the heat of battle. So to have any chance of success, parties need to be built well before revolution breaks out.
By 1917, the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s group) were a mass party, with thousands of worker members in key sectors of the economy. The party had proved its ability to lead the struggle against the Russian monarchy as well as the capitalists. It had earned the trust and confidence of the most politically advanced sections of the working class, who were in turn able to influence and lead those around them. Bolsheviks led strikes, but also seized every opportunity to argue for socialism, whether in the tsar’s fake parliament, the Duma, or through publications such as their newspaper Pravda (Truth), which workers widely read.
During the earlier 1905 revolution, a new kind of organisation had sprung up: the soviets, democratic councils of workplace delegates. Similarly, in 1917, a network of soviets emerged, comprising worker representatives, soldiers and peasants. These delegates had no special privileges and were recallable at any time. As the American journalist John Reed noted: “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented”. As such, the soviets would form the basis of a workers’ state.
Between February and October, a period of “dual power” existed between the soviets and the provisional government, which wanted to keep Russia in the war and establish a limited form of capitalist democracy. But such an unstable situation could not last: either workers would go forward and take power, or capitalist counter-revolution would triumph.
The Bolsheviks had to wage a political struggle, not just against the provisional government, but also against reformists such as the Mensheviks, who argued that Russia was not ready for socialism, so workers should moderate their demands. The Bolsheviks counterposed the demand of “All power to the soviets”, and their slogan “Peace, bread and land” encapsulated the hopes of millions of workers and peasants.
The Bolsheviks’ leading role in defeating a right-wing coup in August was crucial in helping them defeat the reformists and win a majority in the Petrograd soviet. The depth and breadth of working-class support meant that the insurrection in Petrograd was almost bloodless. As the leading Menshevik, Julius Martov, admitted: “Almost the entire working class supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising”.
The Russian workers’ victory inspired a wave of revolutions. But nowhere was there a party like the Bolsheviks. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had long since abandoned the goal of revolution, and in 1914 had betrayed the working class and supported the war. A clearly revolutionary Communist party wasn’t established until December 1918, with only a few thousand members. Lacking both experience and roots in the working class, it launched a premature insurrection, and the SPD, now in government, demonstrated its loyalty to capitalism by ordering the murder of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and unleashed the reactionary Freikorps to terrorise the working class.
In Italy, a powerful workers’ movement waged heroic struggles during the Biennio Rosso of 1919–20—striking, occupying their factories and defending them with arms, setting up councils like the soviets. But again, there was no clearly revolutionary party that could unite all the struggles into a movement to challenge the state. The reformists and trade union leaders maintained control, which ultimately allowed the fascist Benito Mussolini to take power in 1922.
With Stalin’s rise to power, another deadly factor came into play. The Communist International (Comintern) was set up in 1918 to help spread the revolution by providing advice and assistance to the new Communist parties that were springing up everywhere. But by the late 1920s, Stalin’s new regime abandoned the international working-class revolution, and the Communist parties became agents of Russian foreign policy instead.
This too was a product of the failure to build revolutionary parties: Russia’s prestige and authority as the first workers’ state meant that the young and inexperienced parties were incapable of standing up to all the bad advice they received. Stalinism strangled revolutionary possibilities in China, Spain, France and Germany. And Stalinist politics have continued to play a counter-revolutionary role. They are responsible for derailing anti-colonial movements and for the failure of the momentous working-class revolts in France and Italy in the late 1960s and ’70s, among other tragedies.
Revolutions have failed or been defeated, often at a terrible cost. But that has never stopped people fighting for a better world. In fact, revolutions are inevitable. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and this is particularly true of capitalism. Rarely has a decade gone by without revolution breaking out somewhere, and at times spreading across entire continents, most recently in the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring of 2011. Whether our rulers like it or not, revolutions will continue to occur. The real question is, how can we win?
The capitalists and their supporters are a minority, but they are well organised and command a powerful state. Our side is far more numerous, but to win, we must be as well organised as our enemies. That means building revolutionary parties today, wherever we are.
