Strike at the Gdansk shipyard in Poland, 1980 (Pic: Wikimedia commons)
This new book, Revolutions Thwarted, fascinatingly brings to life the dilemmas faced by leading trade union and socialist organisers around the world.
It shows how mass strikes and rebellions by the poor and oppressed open up immense possibilities of revolutionary change.
Only one of the case studies John Rose examines, Iran in 1979, was undeniably a “revolution” in the classic sense.
Yet the Iranian experience of a revolution thwarted was a common thread linking the outcomes of struggles in Poland, South Africa and Brazil.
The outcomes of all these crises were strikingly different. For instance, military repression snuffed out the revolutionary potential of the independent trade union Solidarity, in Poland in 1981.
And the leaders of the mass movements against apartheid in South Africa and dictatorship in Brazil negotiated an exit from authoritarianism to parliamentary democracy.
In both cases, as John notes, this was a compromise that benefited those at the top of society. This left a legacy of deep inequality that would fatally undermine the benefits of the democratic transition for those at the bottom.
This is a kind of “democracy” that keeps the real reins of power in the hands of a corporate and political elite, even if the faces in parliament change.
As this book vividly shows, it is different to the kind of democracy created by and for working class people at the height of their struggles to change the world.
At the heart of the book’s argument is a set of common threads that links the revolutionary experiences of the four case studies with Russia in 1917. The October Revolution led to the creation of the world’s first—and so far only—workers’ state.
The goal of Revolutions Thwarted is to ask searching questions about the conditions that made 1917 possible.
It refuses to accept easy answers. It doesn’t uncritically celebrate experiments in revolutionary democracy or fall into pessimism, like many former revolutionaries.
The long-standing political tradition of the Socialist Workers Party refuses to accept the idea that the conditions of 1917 are relegated to history.
This critique has armed us in arguments over the decades against two main political positions. The first of these was the Stalinist argument that there was no need to repeat the October Revolution because it had done its work.
According to this worldview, the “socialism” of Russia could be transmitted to other societies by a wide variety of means.
These included military invasion, armed insurrections, coups and electoral victories
These methods all substituted taking over the state from the top for destroying it from the bottom.
As John argues, they had nothing in common with the tradition of revolutionary socialism from below.
He writes, “A ‘Communism’ that claims to speak and act on behalf of the working class, without their active participation, cannot be the same communism that Marx, Engels and Lenin originally intended.”
The second perspective that our politics rejects has been endlessly repeated by conservatives, liberals and reformist socialists alike in various guises.
It states that the “rupture” of 1917 was a mirage—it was simply a cover for Vladimir Lenin’s plan for one-man rule.
According to this viewpoint there is no alternative to the system that exists already.
John’s careful investigation of both the experience of 1917 and the “thwarted” revolutions of his case studies challenges both of these perspectives.
He takes the rich experiences of “Red Petrograd” with its dense networks of factory committees and sets them alongside later examples to pick out the common threads.
For instance, take the Baltic works committee of 1917. Its members were deeply involved in the whole production process, intervening in relations between manual and clerical workers, tackling issues about the role of experts.
But it also sponsored theatre, arranged teaching for women workers, gave financial help to an apprentices’ club and set up schools for soldiers and sailors.
There are clear echoes of this in John’s interviews with Polish workers who led the mass strikes during the developing revolutionary crisis of 1980-1.
This collision between networks of independent trade union activists began to spring up in the 1970s, fusing dissident socialist ideas with Christianity.
The explosion of mass strikes starting in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk on 14 August 1980 transformed the situation. John argues this created conditions that were reminiscent of 1917 in more ways than one.
“A humiliated government forced to recognise, for the first time in a ‘Communist’ country, a mass-based independent free trade union. In any case, the government understood, in no uncertain terms, that the dynamic of democratisation, sometimes referred to as self‑determination and workers’ self-management, was now unstoppable,” John writes.
Yet the truly revolutionary force of workers’ demand for self-management was eventually broken by military repression. The leaders of Solidarity, the mass independent trade union created out of the strike wave, sought to negotiate a compromise with the state.
The Iranian Revolution that had exploded the year before, in February 1979, saw a strong movement for workers’ democratic control emerge in a few key industries. This included oil production, with the creation of workers’ shoras—democratically-elected factory committees.
The shoras’ battle for control of production also unfolded in parallel with the battle for democracy in wider society.
In contrast to Poland, there was a revolutionary leadership in Iran willing to confront and overcome the old order.
The problem was that this current was led by Islamists who seized control of the state and made themselves into a new ruling class. This class was just as undemocratic as the monarchy overthrown by the mass movement in 1979.
The restriction of the shoras’ vision of democratic control to the workplaces was a huge limitation, John argues, contrasting with the experience of 1917.
“The soviets were seen as the ‘tribunes of the people’, the political and democratic expression not just for organised workers but for all the exploited and oppressed peoples,” he writes.
“The constituency of the soviet was rooted in the locality—the neighbourhood, even if the strategic leadership was at the point of production in the workplace in the towns and cities.”
Similar questions also emerged in South Africa as the battle against apartheid reached its climax during the 1980s.
John interviewed the metal workers’ leader Moses Mayekiso about the revolutionary potential of the mass strikes and the councils of shop stewards organising the trade union movement.
A call for a strike in November 1984 saw nearly a million workers refusing to go to work. This triggered a crackdown that led to Mayekiso facing a treason trial. He explained how his horizons widened with the growth of the movement from below.
“With those shop stewards councils, we began looking beyond the realm of those workers’ areas. We asked where are the workers staying? They are staying in squalid conditions in the townships. Let’s bring our structures.
“Organise the communities, the poor in the townships to really topple apartheid and capitalism later,” he said.
Yet once again, problems of leadership emerged to derail the revolutionary potential.
In South Africa, a compromise between Nelson Mandela’s ANC party and the old white ruling class meant the economic structures of power were left largely intact in the new era.
The Brazilian experience also involved a “negotiated exit” from dictatorship, although of the more conventional military kind, rather than South Africa’s racist apartheid system.
This transition was on the surface an electoral one, marked by the emergence of the Workers’ Party (PT) as a major force in national politics. Its leader, former metal worker Lula, was elected to the presidency in 2002.
Lula and the PT leadership would also compromise and betray this movement, surrendering to neoliberalism and preparing the ground for the resurgence of the far right.
This book doesn’t provide easy answers to the critical questions it raises about the relationship between workers’ power, democracy and revolutionary leadership.
It brings to life how complex, mass struggles to change the world continue to throw up possibilities of creating democratic, bottom-up forms of workers’ control of production.
These are also the means by which the working class establishes and maintains its political control over that state and the people running it.
Understanding and acting on the lessons of those experiences remains critical for revolutionaries as we enter a new era of political and social crisis.
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