Marxists have no sense of realism. Though Marx called his opponents ‘utopian socialists’, he himself was a tremendous utopian. Where he differed was his belief that moral persuasion would not be enough to bring about socialism – it required large-scale socio-economic and political transformation. It is unclear whether such a notion is much more realistic than the Saint-Simonian ideal of phalansteries. The amount of destruction it necessitates should make reasonable men pause at the thought of a revolution.
War and Revolution
Let us take the question of war and revolution, for example. Everyone knows that the two of these things are inseparable. Not only have revolutions been accompanied by civil wars, but foreign powers have sought to intervene to curtail said revolution. This was true for the English Revolution of the 1640s, the Glorious Revolution of 1689, the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. (The German Revolution of 1918-19 saw low-level civil war in parts of the country, which continued even after 1919.) All these wars have been utterly destructive and traumatising, but Marxists are convinced that all this violence is either (a) necessary or (b) will not happen. In the IMT, we would disingenuously speak of the possibility of a peaceful revolution, provided the workers had the ‘correct’ leadership and were united behind our sect. After all, had not the Bolsheviks peacefully seized power in November 1917? Of course, as we all know, this ‘peaceful’ seizure of power was short-lived, for before long the Bolsheviks found themselves having to use frightful violence against the workers and peasants to hold onto power, and reactionary armies spawned across Russia determined to overthrow the precarious Bolshevik regime. After all, as we ourselves conceded, no ruling class has given up its power without a fight.
The preposterous Trotskyist idea that if the revolution had spread to the ‘advanced’ countries, Russia could have avoided civil war and isolation is nonsense. Already, the First World War had militarised large numbers of the populations of Europe. Any revolution would have divided the army, even if most of them had opted for the revolutionary side like in Russia (of which there was no guarantee). The bulk of the officer corps would have gone over to the side of reaction, especially in the case of Britain and Germany. The idea of a quick, painless revolution with minimal violence is a fantasy. This has rarely occurred. Lenin was proudly proclaiming in the spring of 1918 that the civil war was over! Little did he know that the civil war was about to begin in earnest that very summer. Clearly he did not have the ‘dialectical foresight’ to know that at least a few more years of bloody fighting lay ahead. What an astonishing gamble to seize power in the delusion that there will be minimal violence, only to unleash a bloody civil war that kills millions and leaves the country utterly ruined.
One should also debate the notion that wars only ever cause ‘degeneration’. Whilst the brutal civil war undoubtedly made Stalinism more likely in Russia, and whilst civil war in revolutionary France helped pave the way for the Jacobins, one could also argue that war is useful from the point of view of consolidating and preserving the revolution. After all, one reason why the Girondins pursued war in the summer of 1792 is that they thought that war would make it easier to unite the nation around the new revolutionary order and undermine the power of the monarchy. When France looked like it would collapse due to internal strife and foreign invasion, Danton, Robespierre and the Montagnard Jacobins stepped forward to save the revolution by applying the militarisation and regimentation of the population that was necessary to defeat the enemy. It also paved the way for the Terror and the seizure of power by Napoleon, but would the French have won the revolutionary wars without this massive increase in state power and the consequent diminution of political and economic freedom? Probably not. One can say the same of the Russian Revolution. Without Trotsky’s authoritarian methods in forging the Red Army and mobilising the population to resist the forces of reaction, would the enemies of the Russian Revolution have been thrown back? Even though these policies paved the way for Stalin? Again, probably not.
Of course, to say that Trotsky was simply doing what was ‘objectively necessary’ is disingenuous, since he and other Bolshevik leaders justified their policies by quoting Marx and Engels at every opportunity. They did not believe that they were doing anything contrary to Bolshevik ideology, for Marxist theory told them that they should expect civil war, and that ruthless, authoritarian means were justified in crushing counter-revolution. Moreover, many of the Bolsheviks’ policies were arguably unnecessary, a step too far and justified purely in ideological terms. In fact, in Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky does not justify his policy of ‘militarisation of labour’ by appealing to objective conditions. On the contrary, he argues that the war, far from causing the revolution to ‘degenerate’, has helped the Bolsheviks by creating a militarised, regimented population of slave labourers that can be used for the rebuilding of society on a socialist basis during peacetime. Trotsky argued that soldiers and officers, on the basis of their war experience, were best suited to administration in the new socialist society he envisaged. Later this same Trotsky would denounce Stalin for the ‘bureaucratic degeneration’ of the revolution. In addition, the much misnamed ‘War Communism’ was not simply a response to ‘objective conditions’, but an ideologically-motivated war on the peasantry, which arguably hampered the war effort by pushing many of the peasantry towards the Whites, forcing the Bolsheviks to spend time and resources on policing the countryside instead of fighting the enemy and reducing Russia to beggary and starvation. Bukharin admitted this in as many words when he later said, ‘We did not see War Communism as related to the war.’ When War Communism was abandoned in 1921, Lenin described it as a retreat forced upon the Communist Party by the revolt of the peasantry. It was not ditched with the war’s end on the basis that it had served its purposes in the extraordinary conditions of civil war, but continued even after it could be justified on the basis of ‘objective necessity’.
Another benefit of the war is that even those who detested the Bolsheviks rallied behind it on the basis that the Whites were worse. Anarchists, syndicalists, libertarian socialists and Mensheviks supported the Red Army in its battle with White reaction, hoping that the regime would liberalise once the war was over. This did not happen.
The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, though often seen as a war of aggression by Iraq, was arguably provoked by the new revolutionary Islamist theocracy that had seized power in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged the Iraqi Shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein’s godless regime and sought to export the revolution beyond Iran’s borders. The result was almost eight years of brutal conflict and hundreds of thousands of dead, but it arguably helped the Iranian regime even as it bankrupted Saddam’s regime. Khomeini succeeded in mobilising millions of ordinary Iranians, including many who hated the mullahs, behind the government in a war of patriotic defence against Iraqi imperialism. This also helped justified a massive expansion in state power and the complete restructuring of the military in line with revolutionary Islamist principles. Again, we see that war helps revolution as much as it hinders it.
What should we conclude from all this? We should conclude that all present-day attempts at a socialist revolution will likely lead to war – civil war and war between the revolutionary countries and the reactionary countries trying to contain the spread of the revolution. Moreover, once in power, revolutionaries will need war to distract the masses from their failures, as an excuse to regiment the entire population behind the socialist agenda and to spread the revolution to foreign countries. The cause of international socialism demands nothing less. We should ask ourselves whether, in the nuclear age, this is a risk we want to run.
Economic Disruption
Economic disruption is another central feature of revolutions. Revolutions are often provoked by economic dysfunction, but rarely improve it. Revolutionary France dealt with runaway inflation, shortages of basic goods and blockade from the rest of the Continent. The same was true of Russia after 1917. When a revolutionary regime seizes power, the result is often a prolonged period of isolation from foreign powers who are afraid of the revolution spreading. One can hardly blame Western capitalist powers for blockading Communist Russia when its leadership was hell-bent on subverting the very basis of the international order – the bourgeois nation-state – in favour of world socialism. To blame the USSR’s economic woes on imperialism and ignore the role of ideology in making the USSR isolated in the first place is highly disingenuous. Nor can we take seriously the idea that if only the revolution had spread, it would all have been different. All of Europe was in economic turmoil after WWI, with Germany hit harder than any other country. The idea that if the Communists had seized power in Germany, they could have set up a functional planned economy and sent aid to the beleaguered Russians, is beyond nonsensical. It ignores the prospect of Allied intervention in Germany to prevent any such seizure of power, plus a civil war within Germany itself which would have brought about even more economic destruction. The level of astonishing ignorance required to hold to the Trotskyist narrative on this is truly incredible.
Bertrand Russell, in his 1920 study of Bolshevism, suggested that any country that launches a revolution will face the immense economic disruption and international isolation that the Bolsheviks did. He suggested that only a revolution in a country like America would avoid all the pitfalls of Bolshevism. Of course, the idea of a revolution in America has always been nothing more than an idle dream among Marxist revolutionaries. There will never be an American revolution – not in a country full of millions of armed, right-wing paramilitaries, with a powerful, professional army that is loyal to liberal democracy, with federal states with strong local identities that will doggedly resist the creation of a powerful, centralised socialist regime, with a national ideology that enshrines capitalism as king and celebrates rugged individualism. Nevertheless, America is arguably the best hope of any socialist revolution succeeding. It is, after all, the world’s only superpower. But even America would face terrible economic disruption and brutal and bloody civil war, which would destabilise the rest of the West and would see Western countries choosing sides between the revolutionary and reactionary factions. America would end up exporting its civil strife to the entire Western world, allowing China and Russia to benefit from the fall of Western civilisation. It is hard to see how this would be good for anyone.
Realism
Any revolution that takes place today would face even bigger obstacles than in 1917. In the IMT, we loved to claim the opposite – that the industrialisation that has taken place worldwide since the Russian Revolution means that the ‘objective conditions’ are even stronger in favour of socialism, because, after all, there were more workers in the world, plus better technology with which to supersede capitalism. Where does one begin with such idiocy? For every set of ‘objective conditions’ one could cite as having strengthened the forces of socialism, one can cite a dozen more that have weakened it. The collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the partial abandonment of Communism by China and Vietnam, the isolation of Cuba and North Korea and Cuba’s transition to state capitalism – that is to say, the world-historical failure and eclipse of Communism as an alternative system of modern civilisation – has severely weakened the forces of revolutionary socialism worldwide. A tangled web of entrenched, neoliberal institutions has cropped up across the planet, uniting the ruling class like never before in its determination to preserve capitalist hegemony. If any country, major or minor, had a socialist revolution and broke off from the international capitalist system, it would be embargoed by the rest of the planet and collapse into beggary, penury and starvation, like Venezuela or North Korea have. There would also be intensive regime change efforts by the USA and its allies that would seek to force such governments out of power. The militancy of working-class people has been dampened through attacks on the self-organisation of the working-class and has been channelled through parliamentary institutions. Capitalist regimes have built up powerful, professional armies, insulated from politics and separated from involvement in political administration, except in a few banana republics, making the mass defection of the soldiery to the side of revolutionary socialism implausible. This was not the case in the large conscript armies of early 20th-century Europe, hence why the Bolsheviks were able to politicise the ‘peasants in uniform’ and convert them to their cause. In the most powerful capitalist countries, like the USA, France, Britain, Germany etc, liberal democratic institutions are so entrenched that the thought of a revolution from below toppling it in favour of socialist revolution is simply laughable. Intelligence agencies are far more sophisticated now than in the past, and no revolutionary organisation can escape penetration by the authorities. (Even the Bolsheviks, with all the precautions they took, couldn’t stop Tsarist secret police penetration.) The superior technology produced by capitalism in the 21st century, whilst it can be utilised by rogue regimes like Iran or Venezuela for their nefarious purposes, largely lies with the liberal democracies of the world, who can use it to enhance their methods of state control. Governments have a greater knowledge of human psychology than any ‘revolutionary organisation’ could ever claim to possess, making it much easier for them to manipulate the masses and see off any insurrection. The revolutionary left is smaller, weaker and more divided than ever before, existing in thousands of sects numbering anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand members, talking in an echo chamber online and offline, and nowhere close to seizing power. Mountains of history books have been written about the horrors of the Marxist experiments of the past, dissuading people from repeating any such sinister experiments.
Also, from the founding of the Trotskyist movement in 1938, we have been waiting 80 years. In 80 years, all of the ‘objective conditions’ Trotskyists say should bring about the revolution have come and gone. There have been wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions, economic crises, heated elections, large movements of the working-class worldwide, and still, none of this has brought about the socialist utopia. Instead, in all this time, the capitalist class has grown stronger and stronger, and the working-class has grown weaker and weaker. We see that under capitalism, working-class influence hit a peak during the 1950s and 1960s, and has diminished ever since. The trend is that the working-class is becoming less and less powerful. Marxists explain this away by appealing to dialectics. The rest of us are not convinced. Dialectics is nothing more than a cop-out that allows Marxists to ignore objective reality. It amounts to nothing more than having faith, blind faith, that the working-class will rise up sooner or later. Marx, Engels and their followers have made false prediction after false prediction about the impending collapse of capitalism, and it has never come true.
Moreover, Trotskyists have the bizarre, paradoxical belief that everything that happened in the Russian Revolution was ‘objectively necessary’ even though it paved the way for Stalinism, and that there is nothing Lenin or Trotsky could have done to stop it, whilst simultaneously the ‘subjective factor’ is key to understanding the failure of every revolution outside Russia. Why is the subjective factor irrelevant for the Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1924, but very important when looking at the German Communists of the interwar period, who had even worse ‘objective conditions’ to deal with than the Bolsheviks? According to our counterfactual history, every revolution could have gone further if only there had been the ‘correct leadership’. We applied this to Germany 1918, 1970s Chile, Iran 1979 – with no hint of irony whatsoever. We simply assumed that if only the leaders of these revolutions had been Trotskyists, everything would have worked out differently. What happened to all that talk about ‘objective conditions’?
Trots only stress ‘objective conditions’ when it suits them. On other occasions, they will stress the ‘subjective factor’. Lenin and Trotsky cannot be held responsible for Stalinism, so the ‘objective conditions’ must be blamed for Stalinism. Conversely, in all those countries where the Communists failed to seize power, it must be blamed on the corrupt, Stalinist leadership and the lack of ‘real’ Marxist (i.e. Trotskyist) leadership – the ‘subjective factor’. See the hypocrisy?
Of course, both positions are extreme and unrealistic. The first ignores the role that Soviet politicians played in affecting the outcome of the revolution in favour of a reductionist, deterministic materialism that blames everything on the unfortunate circumstances of the time. Why bother studying an event which was supposedly the ‘greatest event in human history’ if we cannot learn any lessons from it so as to avoid the mistakes that were made in the past? Effectively, Trots are saying that the Russian Revolution was a fluke which can never be replicated. So why make it the cornerstone of your ideology? The second ignores the situation faced by revolutionaries in countries which failed to launch the revolution and, in an application of hindsight bias, says that if only these people had followed true Leninism, it would all have been different – an extreme form of idealism. For people who bang on about dialectics, Trots are very good at replicating the undialectical extremes of crude materialism and crude idealism in their ideology.
There is no sense of realism when Marxists talk about revolution. They are prisoners of their own delusion,. They never stop to think about the possible consequences of their actions. It is all hot air. Bearing the fate of past revolutions in mind, we should counsel extreme caution when embarking on any attempt at large-scale social reconstruction. We cannot talk about ‘objective conditions’ only when explaining the failures of the Russian Revolution, but them talk up the ‘subjective factor’ where Communists have failed to seize power. We must always bear in mind the fact that the ‘objective conditions’ are invariably against socialism, and consider whether socialist ideals should be tweaked to make them more realistic, or abandoned altogether. But of course, this is regarded as blasphemous, reactionary pessimism and conservatism by Marxists.