ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Revolution from Cromwell to Castro

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

In anticipation of the next Trip, the ACFM trio deliver a condensed but essential history of revolution from Oliver Cromwell to Fidel Castro, with stop-offs in France, America, Haiti, China, Spain and Russia. What does it take to cook up a revolution? Is the French Revolution still relevant to our idea of radical social upheaval? […]

Hello and welcome back to ACFM. This is producer Matt with a few words about what you're about to hear. This will be our 20th trip with ACFM and to celebrate we wanted to pick a topic that would do justice to such a momentous milestone. So naturally, revolution was the order of the day. However, when we started putting the show together, myself and my co-producer Chow realized

we were going to need quite a lot of space to do justice to such a big topic. So, what follows? is a kind of group microdose in which Nadia, Jeremy and Keir collectively tell the history of 400 years of revolutionary struggle beginning with the English Civil War

and bringing us up to around the mid-20th century. We think it works really well as a microdose on its own, but it's also intended to serve as a bit of a supporting text for the full trip. We hope you'll listen to both, as well as the microdose with Rodrigo Nunes that's coming, and we hope this does justice both to such a big topic and also to our 20th trip with ACFET.

Let's do the history, boys. All right, the words revolution. I mean, it comes from like the same route as revolve. And there is this real change in its meaning. So people think of history as moving through revolutions, meaning not like an upturning of everything that currently exists, but just a kind of literally a cycle. I mean, think about the word cycle. Both cycle and revolution, they mean something going around. And then sometime around the sort of 18th century, the term revolution takes on a completely different meaning really in sort of political discourse that it means like a complete overturning of the current order. I want to stick with that image for a second because there's revolutions which are a clean revolution. So as in we've got a wheel and it's going round. But then there's something in between before what you just said.

Jeremy, which is a weighted revolution. So if you think about a sphere or something spinning round, but it's got a weight in it, then every time it turns round, it's going to turn around and it's going to escalate and it's going to escalate and it's going to slow down. It's going to escalate and it's going to slow down. If you see what I mean. So it's like, you know, a hamster wheel or something or a hamster ball with a hamster in it. It doesn't quite behave as a as a clean turn. Erratic. Erratic revolution. Erratic or all that there is, There might be a certain point or a certain weight or a sort of accumulation of force, which means that that revolution is not, does not have, that each turn doesn't take the same amount of time and have the same amount of weight because there's, you know, something in the middle of it, like a centrifuge or something.

And then beyond that is the turning over. So something, you know, that is kind of completely different almost to what an original literal revolution is. so you can take it from there. Most historians today would accept the first of the kind of the modern cycle of revolutions whereby essentially an emerging political, new social class takes political power and kind of abolishes the old institutional order is actually the English Revolution, the English of the War of the 1640s, which results in for 10 years, a republic being declared.

And there's a big debate, I mean, there's a tussle between kind of leftist historians, kind of here and in France and in America, for example, in the post-war period. The French obviously think the French Revolution is like year zero. You know, nothing important happens before it. And then you've got various English radical historians arguing that actually, you know, the English Revolution was really important. But sort of the sort of compromise position is to point out that, well, it is true that the English revolution in the 1640s has a particular historical status.

but it's also true that for example the rhetoric of like let turn the world upside down isn't even completely new then you can go back to the peasants revolt to the Middle Ages and like it's not like I mean there's probably no time in history when people haven't been able to imagine the outside possibility of the social order being overturned and it's still the case

even when they're you know declaring a republic in the 1640s in England it's still the case that they're kind of thought way they think of their place in history, the people doing that, is they think of themselves as restoring some lost social order. And depending how radical they are, like, you know, it will vary how far back they think it goes. So the sort of emerging middle class and the kind of middle-sized landowners, the gentry, who are the driving force of the revolution, they have this whole mythology, or maybe it's not entirely mythology, it's sort of mythology, which is that there's this

pre-norman, like basically pre-medieval version of England that was much more egalitarian, like old Saxon England, and they're throwing off what they called the Norman yoke. And then you get the really radical groups, like the diggers, the sort of proto-communists, and they say, no, actually, we're going right back pretty much to the Garden of Eden. But everybody is going back to something. But the thing that really is novel in the late 18th century, and this is true to some extent in the United States, is during the France and the French Revolution, is that radical thinkers like Thomas Payne,

they start to say, actually, it doesn't matter what happened before. We're going to use our reason. We're going to use our capacity for logical thought to build a society which is actually better than anything that's gone before. And then it's really the historical event of the French Revolution, which does end up forming the model for what we think of as a kind of political and maybe a social revolution in the 19th century. that's what Marx and Engels are thinking about, when they're thinking about their idea of

revolution. But of course, the French Revolution, yeah, there is still like zero consensus among historians as to like, when does the French Revolution happen? At what point does it go from being like just a kind of radical set, you know, an accumulating set of demands for social institutional reform? And at what point does it become a revolution? what makes it a revolution. Like, no, I mean, still nobody really agrees about that. Well, it's too soon to tell, isn't it? Too soon to tell.

Who said that? It was a, was it, Vietnamese general, wasn't it? Yeah, it was the guy, it gets credited to various people. Somebody said to some great communist leader who, what do you think of the French Revolution? And they said it's too soon to tell. Such a class answer.

It's so smooth. It's so good. I think, yeah, it was whoever was like Ho Chi Min's mentor, I think is the person who is credited with it. I don't really, because I've seen it credited to Mao. I've seen it credited to other people. And I mean, with all of these examples, as you're going through that history, Jeremy, obviously like, that depends on which angle you're looking at it from in terms of what for the groups who are saying or the population saying, well, things were better before and we're trying to restore. It's like they were probably of a certain class and they were probably men.

So history is written by the history that we read doesn't really tell us the full view of the factors. Like, you know, medieval Britain was not very good for women. Actually, though, thinking about it, perhaps we should take seriously, whoever it was that we can't remember who said it's too soon to tell. Because one of the things about revolutions is that they work backwards in time and construct their own history. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, English Civil War got to be seen as a revolution only after the French Revolution when revolutions became more thinkable. Do you know what I mean? This is interesting. So it is too soon to tell. It depends. What was the French Revolution leading to? We'll find

out. You do have to, as far as I understand the history, you do have to get to the point where people are no longer referring back to some imagined past before you can really put issues like women's equality on the table. That is a qualitative thing because that definitely is in that is an issue in the French Revolution. It's not an issue in the English Revolution. Right. No one in the English Revolution, not even the diggers and the levellers, no one is saying, I mean, the most radical groups in the English Revolution are arguing for a democratic republic,

a land reform and full universal male suffrage, but nobody is arguing for women's suffrage. By the French Revolution, the most radical groups are arguing for, you know, are arguing for women's suffrage. They're arguing for, you know, rights for gay people are. are one during the most radical phase of the French Revolution. I mean, perhaps the Haitian revolution is a good way to deal with that. Such a good revolution. Such a good revolution. Definitely in my top 10 of a revolution.

He's in my top five here. So basically, the Haitian Revolution happens just after the French Revolution, and Haiti is a U.S. French colony and it's a slave, it's a slave island. and there's a success I think it's the only the world's only successful slave revolt basically

they sort of overthrow their masters kill them all and then they have to fight off a French invasion this is the story about when the French soldiers are coming into battle against the Haitian rebels

the Haitian rebels sing the French national anthem back at them and so it's like and then the French soldiers are really ashamed and the point of doing that is look in the French revolution you said all men are equal sorry Nadia it probably was all men are equal actually

I apologize to me apologise to 51% of the world's population I will I'll do it I'm going to go around and apologize each person yeah yeah yeah but that was the point was that like you know look we are taking your revolution seriously you didn't take it seriously you go on about how you know how men are enslaved and we need to fight against tyranny enslaved slavery, but as soon as you actually see actual physical slavery, you don't mean it.

And so it was that the Haitian revolution was seen as, you know, well, we're going to complete the French Revolution. We're going to complete it because, you know, the French Revolution fell short. And you could sort of see, you know, the feminist movement as in some ways, you know, well, yeah, but well, what about everybody else? Is everybody else included in this equality, etc.? Sure. And in the English-speaking world, you know, Mary Wollstonecraft rights of indication of the rights woman in the 1790s. It's absolutely in that, as part of that

milieu, because the French Revolution, you know, is this sort of political crisis in France as the kind of aristocratic and monarchical order has become completely bankrupt and completely inefficient. And it starts off with a set of fairly sort of liberal political demands for, you know, representation, effective government,

responsible government budgeting and this sort of thing. But then it occasionally, accumulates and accumulates, and it goes through these various stages, particularly as the people of Paris, become more and more central to the revolutionary process as political actors. And in the early 1790s, it goes through this very radical phase when it looks like, you know, the issue of like class inequality might start to come on the political agenda. And at that point, you know, much has happened in the English Revolution, actually, once the issue of class inequality starts to come on, starts to start to come on the agenda. There's a kind of reconfiguration of forces. The liberal middle

classes mostly ally themselves with the more forward-thinking residual elements of the aristocracy, and they line up behind Napoleon in France, and Napoleon is committed to, among other things, suppressing the revolution in Haiti in order to protect French colonial interest. Although reputedly Napoleon regretted that when he was in his later life, in his exile, repeatedly, not necessarily for ethical reasons, but for strategic political reasons. I've heard it claims that the Napoleon decided that it had been a strategic error not to support the Haitian revolution and then have a revolutionary allies in the Americas, in the Caribbean.

Because the French Revolution is like a massive, it is perceived all across Europe and the world as like a massive sort of crisis, because it has really put on the table, the idea that the masses might organise themselves, presumably under the leadership of like the middle classes, and overthrow established institutions of monarchy, of aristocracy, etc. And of course the French army, I mean, one of the things that happens is the French

revolutionary government, because it's got all this kind of democratic further, it's able to raise a kind of mass conscript army. And that's really the first time anybody's done that. And what's the relationship, sorry, to the state in terms of where the state's army was at that moment? Well, there isn't really a state. Well, this is a thing. Right, okay. There wasn't really a state. There was a very complex set of feudal institutions like landowners with their rights and obligations, the church. There was the crown. And there was the way the crown had kind of contractual relationships all over the place. We basically were sort of individual. So the infrastructure was quite fucked by the time we got there. It was fucked like for the for the business, for the emerging sort of business classes. You know, there was, I mean, this is the classic market. Marxist analysis is that for the kind of emerging middle class, the merchant classes, there are all these stupid rules like which stopped them doing business because basically the right to tax them had been sold to like just countless like, you know, just some local.

It sounds like UK 2021 man. I mean, there was just there was no stable way for the state to like raise money and then be accountable for how that money was spent. And that's how, that was also the same in England in the 1640s. I mean, that's how, It's also the same with the American Revolution. I mean, all these revolutions, really, as political events, they all get going at a point where the kind of emerging middle class feels like it's got the political confidence and the economic way to be able to say to the king, look, we're not going to keep paying for your wars and shit unless we have a say over how the money gets spent. And then one way or another, you know, some kind of deal has to be worked out as to what is the means by which. those taxpayers are then going to be consulted on how the money gets spent and how broader franchise is going to be extended,

like how big a group of people are you going to be consulting and how big a group of people are still just going to be locked out of the democratic process altogether and to do what they're told. And that is a thing that doesn't really get resolved until mass suffrage in the early 20th century. But the rhetoric of the French Revolution is, it doesn't matter what happened in the past, we're ditching everything from the past

and also it had a universalistic ideology like the mass conscript of army of France kind of runs riot basically like winning all these battles against the other European powers in the name of spreading the revolution so it's the idea that the revolution is not just a local matter

but it's a kind of ideological project for universal human emancipation which is going to be the country which has had a successful revolution is going to try to spread. That really begins with the French Revolution. And that is what really terrifies the other kind of European states. And so you get a real sort of backlash. And really the beginning of modern conservatism is the kind of is the backlash.

It's the reaction against the French Revolution. Yeah, what's happening at France's. So France's border, I haven't got in my head what France's borders looked like. But yeah, what's happening at the borders when this shit is kicking off in Paris? Well, France is generally, I mean, you know, France is that not an issue because of where people, where, where. No, it's massively an issue. Yeah, no, it's totally an issue. I mean, France, France has historically been the biggest territorial power in Western Europe, biggest military power, but it's been, but it's being being encroached upon by the rise of Prussia and the Austro- And the, you know, the Austro-Hungarian, the Habsburg. Well, I don't think they're called Austro-Hung. Not yet, yeah, yeah. Can't remember now. All those people. And since the Treaty of Westphalia, there's been a sort of international, in 1648, there's been a set of rules, supposedly a set of rules in place, sort of governing relationships between states and what have you. But the Russian Revolution just tears this all up. I mean, one of the debates within the French Revolution is, all right, do we just do the revolution in France? And do we just consolidate the revolution here? Or do we go out to seek military glory? Do we show the world and our own people that revolution?

Revolutionary France is going to be better at fighting wars than non-revolutionary France. Because non-revolutionary France, one of the problems is over the past hundred years, it's gone from being the dominant power to be increasingly, like losing its dominance and seeing its military power threatened. And, you know, a lot of historians would say it's from a leftist or radical perspective. It's kind of a disasterous decision. The decision which I think, you know, people like, some of the main revolutionary leaders didn't want to happen was that they decide, yeah, we're going to go to war. So they engage in this mass project of mass conscription, what's called the Grand Leve, the great mass conscription project. And they just sort of run riot. They go, they, I mean,

the territorial borders of France massively expand because they go out and win all these battles on their borders, like taking over disputed territories and like really, I mean, just defeating everybody. This is after the, this is after the local win or whatever you call it, once the Well, no, it's part of the process. Right. So if it's during the 1790s, it's during the period of the revolution and it's part of the process of the revolution. And then one of the things that kind of, that means that the kind of halts the revolutionary process, indeed, is that the other powers of Europe can have really led by Britain and Prussia get together and say, look, we're not having this shit. And they start to, you know, they start to, and then you've gone too far, lads.

Yeah. And they start to win battles, you know, like the Battle of Waterloo. I mean, eventually against Napoleon. They start to win battles against them. And they sort of contain revolutionary France. And in France, the most revolutionary factions of the revolutionary movement are defeated by an alliance of kind of more moderate liberal factions and just conservative royalists and what have you. And you end up with the sort of Napoleonic compromise where instead of having a kind of democratic process that has no end in sight. You have a process of building kind of liberal institutions which will allow the middle class, middle class men to vote sort of, but you will have a very clearly defined kind of top down government, which will be led by Napoleon and eventually we'll see the restoration of some kind of monarchy. So the kind of ideological reaction against that sees the birth of modern conservatism in Britain, Edmund Burke, famously writes his reflections on the revolution in France and Burke basically says this is he's saying this in 1789 at what's usually considered the date of the the proper revolution the

revolution proper happening. He says this is all going to end in tears that this if you try to completely overturn a social order in one go the only possible result can be sort of totalitarian government and terror and then you know that seems he that seems to be sort of borne out because of its most radical phase in the early 1790s, the French government famously does sort of, you know, execute hundreds, many thousands of people who are regarded as enemies of the revolution and try to impose a highly sort of dogmatic kind of revolutionary ideology.

They try to, they try to create a whole new religion. It's a consolidation phase, isn't it? Where you just have to kill off loads of people. That seems to be the way it goes, right? But I think like sort of moving through, I think sort of moving through the history, for the 19th century,

And for the radical tradition, the issue which the French Revolution really puts on the table is the question of whether a revolution is going to be merely political in nature. In other words, it's going to create a set of institutions which are completely different from the ones that have gone before, but it's largely going to create a set of institutions which fit the current social order, which don't actually change the balance of social and economic power. They merely reflect it. Or whether you're revolution is actually going to be a social revolution, which actually tries to create actual social equality, actually tries to challenge the social and economic order, the class order of society. And of course, liberals and the middle classes and the people who are really the rising power of the time generally just want a political revolution and obviously have no interest in social revolution. The problem is there's usually not enough of them to make a revolution work without promising some kind of social change to the broader masses. So you've always got a situation. I mean, France is completely typical, but this is also happening 100 years earlier in

England, and then it's replicated in various kind of national contexts over the 19th century. You've got a situation where the middle classes basically have to say to the emerging working class, some elements of the peasantry, even poorer members of what you might call the middle class, say to them, come on, lads, let's have a revolution and we'll create democracy and freedom and justice for all. And then as soon as you've used them to kind of defeat the monarchy, you know, its military forces, the aristocracy, then you have to start saying, no, no, actually, well, that's it now. That's as far as we're going. We're just going to create a set of liberal institutions and we're definitely not going to let poor people vote.

What happens to the What happens in the 19th century is, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, there are all these sort of left-wing groups around here. who have been inspired by the more radical ends of the French Revolution and want this social revolution to happen, to bring about a society without domination or some sort of society of equals. But there isn't necessarily, it's not clear who the agent for that is,

who the revolutionary agent for that is. So that's one of the things that gets clarified in the 19th century. In fact, we should probably talk about the Industrial Revolution. I suppose that takes that part of the thing that happens with the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the factory system, etc. is that you know

you have the development of an agent for revolution so that's one of the things that Marxism does it sort of says well look now we've got this agent who's revolution which is the developing working class but I suppose the industrial revolution is a revolution of a very different sort isn't it, the Industrial Revolution I suppose that brings us to this question

of you know what has to change in wider society for this conception of ruptural revolution to make sense. I want to just talk briefly about this German historian, conceptual historian, Reinhard Koseleck, he's trying to explain why revolution isn't thinkable in the sort of middle ages, and then it becomes thinkable towards the end of the 18th century. And he has this distinction between the people's experiences and their expectations. where he talks about the horizon of expectation and the space of experience, basically.

And he says, in the Middle Ages, change happens so slowly that your experiences, there wouldn't be a reason why you'd think your experiences would be different to your expectations. Basically, experiences will mean that your expectations are that nothing will change or that it will continue as your experience has shown you. And then the pace of change developed and speeds up in terms of conceptual change, but also technological change and the social change it goes along with that,

to introduce this idea that there's this gap between your space of experience and your horizons of expectations and that's where, you know, the expectations that things could be different come in, basically.

And that is a lead through to, there's this sort of theory of revolution called the J-C-Curve Theory of Revolution by James C. Davis. So this J-Curve theory of revolution is that like it's not, when people are, When societies are really ground down and impoverished,

that's not when revolutions happen because people are taken up by trying to physically survive. What tends to happen is you have revolutionary situations emerge when you've had a period of rising living standards and therefore rising expectations which suffer a reverse, right? Which get thwarted. And so people's expectations are high and they're worried that their gains will be taken away from them.

and that's the place where you should look for evolutionary moments, not the most ground-down bit, but those are times when expectations arise and they become thwarted. I'm trying to map that onto Britain, and I can't, because I'm just trying to think, well, in terms of inequality, like, you know, after the crash in 2008. Well, one way to do it is to think about generation left, basically, who emerge after 2008,

because, you know, they've had a period where they think, where they've been told if they sort of, you know, if they play the game, then they're going to have rising living standards, et cetera. And those expectations are thwarted by 2008. And so that doesn't mean there's a revolution. But, you know, people become open to different ways in which the expectations can be changed or could be different to their present experiences, if you know. Okay, go back to the J curve again.

So, okay, so is it just called the J curve because his name is J or is it actually shaped? It looks like a J. Yeah, so it's like a graph. It looks like a Jane. Things have been going down, and they go up and then they stop. Right, gotcha. The Industrial Revolution, I think, I mean, it's always important to remember. Nobody called it that at the time, and that's a term that wouldn't have been used

to the late 19th century at the earliest, to the idea, when the idea of revolution, as a kind of the general way we conceptualise, massive social change, had really become sort of somewhat institutionalised. But even if we don't call it the Industrial Revolution, by the early 19th century, people can see that things are really, really changing, especially in Britain, that a whole new way of life is emerging. And that relates to the points you were just making kit, that really, this is the first time in a really long time

that people have experienced very rapid change within the space of a generation. Yeah. Rather than be very incremental change. But there's definitely been other times in history when that happened, like, you know, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, things like that. But there's really, first time in a really long time in somewhere like in Western Europe, the people have had that experience.

And the point is, I mean, I think, I mean, the background of the industrial evolution is crucial because I think like sort of Keir was saying, that's one of the things that creates in people's minds by the end of the 18th century, the idea that, well, everything can change. The whole way of life can change. It can change. And therefore, you know, maybe it should change. And also, also amongst conservatives and reactionaries, you know, the feel. that it might, the fear that there is a real threat of total change is there and becomes

a kind of dominant theme. And so by the mid-19th century, there have been events sort of comparable to the French Revolution in various countries, I mean, sort of all over Latin America, for one thing, but also in various parts of Europe. On the other hand, you know, by the time Marx is first writing the Communist Manifesto, there's quite a strong sense that like in Habsburg, Europe, for example, that those things haven't quite happened, that even the sort of the establishment of a modern, liberal democracy and a kind of government committed to industrialization and capital accumulation, you know, people like Marx and Engels think, well, that's only really happened in the United States, Britain and France, still hasn't really happened anywhere else. And Marx and Engels start to

are also looking at the ways in which the French revolution seem to have been unfinished and the possibility that the working class elements of the Parisian radical forces might become more and more important to French politics and working class people might become more important to politics elsewhere. And they basically develop a whole theory of history, which is partly a radicalisation of Hegel, the German philosopher Hegel's theory of history, in which they see it as moving. through these necessary historical stages, but the transition point between historical stages is always a revolution. So that's the point at which you start to look back at what had been

always called the English Civil War. And so, well, actually, that was a revolution. It was a revolution to overthrow the established order of aristocracy and monarchy and make the world safe for capital accumulation. And then the French Revolution was also that. And the American revolution to a certain extent was also that. And so Markton Engels developed this conception of history, which also they think has a sort of predictive capacity, which says that, well, the next thing that's going to happen in history, and we've already, we saw it start to happen a little bit in the most radical phase of the French revolution, is that the working class, particularly the new urban industrial working class,

which the industrial revolution is producing is going to eventually is going to make its own revolution and is going to establish socialism and that is what and that is their sort of their understanding what's going to happen and the Paris Commune

which we've talked about on the show before in the 1870s for example because it has a very strong working class element and has a strong dimension of wanting to sort of create collective property and things like this seems to be sort of fulfilling those predictions and also spatially

I think the Paris commune is specifically interesting because of how the inside of the city was taken over and the barricades were built I mean they had hot air balloons coming in and out man it is just like you know serious shit so there's a revolutionary wave in 1848 which fails and then there's a wave of reaction after that

and so yeah so Marx has got you know, a particular conception of how revolution should go and what the role of the state would be in that. And in 1872, it seems as though people have almost done away with the state. There's a huge, it's like a huge wave of sort of self-organisation and real democratic, you know, explosion of democratic control in some sorts of ways in the Paris commune. And following that, he sort of, you know,

he starts to change his idea of what revolution might look like. so there is this sort of like there's this predictive almost teleological as though history is moving in a certain direction sort of element to Marx but there's also this element which is you know actually it's in fact it's that quote the whole communism

is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things it's also it's something that happens and people try out and work out what the possibilities are and that's one of the those sort of dynamics are more determinist sort of conception of Marxism and a more contingent conception of Marxism and revolution, are two waves that go through

the subsequent history of how people think about what revolution is and, you know, how history works, etc. I mean, that's how to be, I mean, that's happening, and that's happened with the Paris Commune, but other things also happening in the 1870s, for example, Britain, they start to be developments that are quite different from what Marx was expecting, say, in the 1840s. So when they write the communist manifesto, they have a pretty clear vision of

what they think is going to happen, which is the working class is going to organise itself politically. The bourgeoisie will attempt to suppress it, but ultimately they won't be able to suppress it because it's too big. And then something that will basically look like the French revolution will happen in each respective country, which is that a well-organized revolutionary force, presumably based in the capital city, will take over, take power and will take control of the state, and it will then use the state to impose the program laid out in the communist manifesto. What's happening in Britain by the 1870s is yes, the industrial working class has got itself organized politically. No, there has been some attempt at suppression,

but then, you know, sort of faction, inter-class rivalries to some extent within the ruling class mean that the Conservative Party in the 1870s, you know, which is kind of allied to landowners and see as their main rivals, the kind of in the rising industrial capitalist class, the conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli, like decriminalises trade unionism, and enfranchises some of the workers, because, you know, essentially they're, you know, quite brilliant strategic conception of what's going on is if if they offer a kind of a layer of the industrial working class like the most the already most affluent layer if they say to them yeah yeah you can have unions and you can have the vote you can have things like building societies you know

you can become homeowners and you can become respectable you know you can be the respectable working class you don't need to make a revolution then they can successfully neutralize any sort of threat of revolution and indeed that is what happened there has to be a payoff right the whether it's the housing or or whatever any of the examples that you just gave like there has to be a payoff for that too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, concessions have to be made but those concessions are made and they're successful.

And then towards in the last decades of the 19th century, you get situations like we're in Germany, which by the end of the 19th century, has the largest, best organised, most militant socialist trade union movement. You also get like the highly authoritative, government, imperialist government of Bismarck, you know, making like massive concessions, like starting to build the beginnings of a modern welfare state, because they have a very

clear sense that say, ah, if you make significant concessions, then a whole chunk of the working class will abandon any, any aspirations to revolution. So then by the end of the 20th century, the international sort of socialist movement is really faced with some real kind of dilemmas. Well, so given that basically a set of reforms are being made, but if you'd have asked anyone in the 1840s, how would you get those reforms? They'd have said, well, violent revolution is the only way they would ever happen. And like a load of them are being made anyway,

and they're being made partly, indeed, because of the fear of revolution, and because of the force and the political power of the working class. But they're not, you know, it's not sort of, it's not inevitable. that the working class, like once they've won those reforms, is going to actually remain committed or ever be committed to a sort of revolutionary project. So then you get the kind of classic debate within the international. Do you mean end of 19th century, end of 20th?

Because you said end of 20th? No, I meant end of 19th. 19th, right, okay. The end of 19th, the beginning of 20th. The late 19th, early 20th century. Really from the 1870s up to the First World War. And that's when you start to get the classic strategic debate. within the international workers movement

around whether you want to make a conceptual distinction between reform and revolution and whether an idea of revolution which is still really sort of indebted to the experience of the French Revolution is even still relevant. And so the so-called revisionists within the international socialist movement

led by people like the German Social Democrat leader Bernstein. And you've got to remember that social democrat means Marx's socialist at this time. That's what Marxist's socialists call themselves. So the German leader Bernstein, for example, you know, famously basically says, look, you know, that idea, the idea of revolution that Marx had

was basically a hangover from the experience of the French Revolution. Like, it's completely inappropriate to a situation where you have mass suffrage, where you have a legal trade union movement, you have a workers' press, etc. Clearly, that's not what the transition to socialism is going to, it's not going to look like a version of the French Revolution. It's going to look more like modern social democratic

parties will just keep winning elections and keep implementing reforms until at some point people will look around and say, well, actually, we've pretty much replaced capitalism now with socialism. And then the critics of that perspective always say, well, no, sooner or later, there's going to come a crunch point where if your reforms are going far enough, you know, the bourgeois Z will react. They'll probably react with violent force and you're going to have to be prepared for that. You're going to have to, and you might as well, you know, you better be getting ready for that or you're never actually going to get past a certain limit. Yeah, I mean, it's a good way to put it at that about whether, yeah, whether there's a crunch point. I mean, the crunch point

is given by capitalist profitability, isn't it, basically? To what extent can you have rising living standards for the working class and maintain profitability, enough profitability for capital to keep investing and growing, etc? I think that's still one of the ways in which you frame, you have to frame the debate between reform and revolution because that calculation is different, depending at different times in history and depending on the sort of economic settlement of that time. Yeah, I think you're right.

I think I want to clarify that because I think it's a key. point. I think that's completely right. I would say from a contemporary vantage point, it looks like the situation is this. During periods of expanding capitalist profitability, if you have a well-organized working class, it looks like you can win major reforms without any serious social conflict. And then during those periods, lots of people come to the conclusion, well, why would you bother? Why would you want to do something as violent and as messy as a revolution when look we can just win all these reforms and then what happens several at least two major junctures in that history the 30s and the 70s is you hit a crisis of profitability

and it turns out capital has no intention of conceding any more reforms and he's going to withdraw and he's going to like it's going to dismantle as many of the reforms you made as it can possibly get away with I think the dismantling is a key is a key it's key there because it's like I mean for me that's I mean I we grew up like somebody me and Keir's age so we came of age at a point in like the 80s where you know the previous 40 years had largely seemed to bear out the idea that why would you need revolution you know you can win reforms and massive social progress and then since then we've lived through a period where it's become increasingly clear that liberal democracy plus trade unionism just can't actually defend those reforms during periods of crisis.

It works really even better in the 1930s and the 1970s. But like the pre-First World War debates that went on, that sort of got resolved in a different way by the emergence of the First World War. And that sort of breaks up the Second International, which is where a lot of these debates are taking place between reform and revolution. That breaks it up because basically workers fall in line behind their country. And in fact, social democratic parties, most notably the German Social Democratic Party falls in line with the ruling class of each side of that war and, you know, basically joining on that war.

That's the thing that sort of breaks up the great social, the sort of German Social Democratic Party and movement, basically, where, and that was like a sort of movement which encompassed all of life. It wasn't just that, you know, we could get these reforms. you also, people would live almost their entire lives, that's not true, many parts of their lives within, you know, the organisations of the Social Democratic Party. Can you just do one line on what the second international is for people who have no idea? So Karl Marx and his allies around Europe have a thing called the International Working

Women's Association, which is like a few hundred people, a few hundred radicals in different countries, though, who sort of correspond with each other and have meetings. And that's what we call the first international, the International Working Men's Association, few hundred nutters and fringe figures like Marx and Bakooning. And then by the end of the, but then it's replaced kind of formally by the second international, I don't know what we always just refer to as the second international, but it's the international organisation of socialist and Labour parties, which by the end of the 19th century includes the German Social Democrats

in the early 20th century, it includes the British Labour Party. you know, it's a huge force. All the socialist parties belong to it. So the Russian social democrats, including the Bolsheviks, the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democratic parties in Scandinavia, in Germany, all other parts of Europe, the Socialist Party in France, they all belong to this organisation called the Second International. And that's like the most unified that movement has ever been. And then indeed, as Keir said, during World War I, I mean, there's a real dilemma for all the various national parties. I think the sort of leftist caricature, which I mean, I also like promote, I mean, I will also say this when I'm talking about very quickly as well, they all chose nationalism over international socialism.

I mean, the truth is there was a real debate. Like, if you were a German social democrat, you were faced with a dilemma, like if Germany loses the war against Britain, is that going to be good for socialism? And they thought, and mostly they thought, no, it's going to be a disaster for socialism. We're going to be subject to sort of British imperialism. They'll probably hand us over to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is more reactionary, less developed. I mean, that's how they thought about it, whether they were right or not.

But it was a real sort of dilemma. It was a real strategic dilemma. And so all of the constituent parties of the socialist international ended up, or almost all of them, not all of them, almost all of them ended up voting to support the war effort within their national context. And that's basically the end of the Second International. And then the First World War happened.

First World War is a total shit show. Well, just before we go on to that, Jim, it's actually an interesting point that basically, how do we understand the First World War? Classically, it's understood as inter-imperialist rivalries, basically. And so, you know, that sort of sets us up for some later revolutions, is the picture we sort of set up, which is, you know, about the working class getting improving their living standards

and then that coming into conflict with capitalist profitability. The thing that complicates that is imperial. And so in some ways, the first world, if the 1970s are sort of, you know, they are sort of influenced by anti-colonial, colonial revolutions, you can understand that in ways that you're internal to sort of a country such as the UK, you know, imperialism is this other bit that sometimes gets forgotten about, and which you can understand the First World War in. And then there's the other thing to say on that is the opposite position to voting for war credits or the social democratic parties, you know, falling in line behind their national governments,

the other position would be revolutionary defeatism. And that's the position that the Bolsheviks take. And, you know, and that plays a really big role, actually, in stimulating the Russian revolution. Because one of the, you know, the slogan is peace and land. And like, you know, what the Bolsheviks are proposing is to basically withdraw from the first world. And it is that huge mobilization of soldiers who sort of come away from the front, you know, who form a huge cadre or cohort for the Russian Revolution. But let's do the Russian Revolution in a little bit more ordered style.

The first of war is a crisis for all of the crisis for all of the states of Europe, but more for the losers. Germany, Austro-Hungarian Empire, as it was, and in particular for Russia. For Tsarist Russia, it's a total disaster. I mean, basically, the Tsarist system collapses, like consent, public consent for the centuries-old Tsarist system of government just collapses. And there's no clarity about what's going to replace it. It collapses in 1917. There's no clarity about what's going to replace czarism.

it's clear that something has to, that some kind of a revolution is underway. And over the course of 1917, there's a kind of series of attempts to sort of resolve the question. And, you know, in Russia, the most powerful political factions, the ones with the most support, especially the most support amongst the military, the rank and file, military rank and file, are various factions of the left, the really radical left, really, compared to most other places in the world. But even amongst them, there's a constant debilful. as to whether they should keep fighting the war. And the only group, the only faction, the only organization, which consistently maintains

a position that Russia, that the revolutionary government should not continue to fight the war, should withdraw Russia from the war, is the Bolsheviks, who were, you know, had emerged as a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party a few years earlier. And they are led by Lenin and Trotsky. and it's really only during this period that sort of in response to rapidly changing events that, for example, that Lenin

formulates his theory of revolution that Lenin-on-Trottsky formulate their theories of revolution that will become really the most influential theories of revolution in the 20th century. And really what they're having to adapt to is the circumstance where classical Marxist theory

and the variants of it that had been developed by most of the key thinkers and the second international all maintained that you could only have a socialist revolution in a country that had a well-developed capitalist class and a well-developed, a very large industrial working class. And neither of those things existed in Russia. Instead, what you had was you did have a very militant and well-organized industrial working class in Moscow and St. Petersburg

you had very high levels of support for radical socialism amongst the military. And then you had a peasantry who could kind of go either way. We're just looking for someone who would offer them indeed peace, you know, peace, land and freedom. So Lenin basically, Lenin formulates this idea that you can, you don't have to have an actual proper mass proletariat. You can just have a class coalition, a cross-class coalition, which is led by the proletariat. So the coalition of the workers and the peasants is what is,

represented by the simmer of the hammer and the sickle. But it's clearly really supposed to be led by the workers. And the workers, it is assumed, must be led by the revolutionary party. Because even before this point, Lenin has developed a critique of the way in which socialism has developed in places like Britain. And that critique says that, well, Marx is sort of wrong to think that the proletariat, in other words, the industrial working class will spontaneously generate revolutionary consciousness for themselves, because left of their own devices, they'll only ever get to the level of what he calls trade union consciousness. In other words, they'll want reforms, they'll want high wages and low working hours,

but they won't challenge the basis of capitalist social relations. And so the only way they'll be persuaded to do that is if they are offered leadership by a well-organized, highly disciplined, professional revolutionary party, the so-called vanguard party. And then, well, for various reasons, I mean, we don't have time to get in. I mean, one of the big debates, you know, amongst historians is whether the Bolsheviks really, like, won the Russian revolution, sort of fairly by building mass support, or whether it was just the fact that they had support amongst key sections of the military, enabled them to basically do a coup against the revolutionary government, you know, that was in place in 1917. You know, we're never going to resolve that here. But for whatever we think about that, by the 1920s, what you've got in Russia and in the whole, all of the territory of the former Russian Empire is you've got a revolutionary government, which isn't even using the liberal institutions of parliament.

It's using the new institutions of workers' democracy, the workers' councils or the so-called Soviets. I mean, that's the Russian term for council. And it's committed to not just building kind of capitalism with some social reforms, but, directly building a socialist economy and indeed is committed to spreading workers' revolution all around the world. And that's the situation by the 19-20. And it's a huge rupture within the international left movement. And that's when you get the split between the legacies of the second international and the people who are members of what comes to be known as the third international or the commentant, the communist international. And that is the network.

work of organisations and parties who are directly loyal to the Russian Communist Party and the Russian Revolution and see themselves as directly I lied to it. And that's, interestingly, that is when people start to call themselves communists. So Markton Engels had used the term, had called their document in 1848, the Communist Manifesto. And that because communist was like a kind of scare term used by conservatives who were kind of imagining these people who would want to communise everything. But they used it in 1848. When they wrote the Communist Manifesto, it was a deliberate provocation. Like it was almost a joke. You know, they didn't call their organization, like a communist organization. They called themselves the International Working

Men's Association. The Russian, you know, Marxists and the German Marxists didn't call themselves communist. They called themselves Social Democrats. So the term, the communist, and it's only after the revolution that the Russian Bolsheviks call themselves like the Communist Party. And then within the left parties, kind of all around the world, actually, within almost every country in the world, there's a split within its left party. There's a split in, I mean, that happens in Britain. It happens everywhere, really. And the faction, which sees itself as loyal, both to the project of the Russian Revolution, but also to Lenin's theories about how to organize a revolution, based on the Russian experience, you know, they call themselves

communist parties, and they become the Communist International. And then from that point, on, the idea of revolution is kind of, to some extent, I think is sort of inseparable from the model of the Russian Revolution. And one of the things that most people who call themselves revolutionaries from that point on see themselves as in some sense trying to replicate what the Bolsheviks achieved in 1917 in Russia. And people who don't see themselves in those terms, who are on the left, anyway, are generally making some argument that, well, look, there were very, very specific conditions in Russia. You know, there was no mass suffrage. There was a decrepit kind of absolutist monarchy. Like, they didn't even have

functioning feudalism, like, never mind functioning capitalism. And under those conditions, yeah, you can, you know, you can do what they did. But under all other, but under conditions such as obtaining places like the United States or Britain or indeed Germany, etc. Those methods aren't necessarily going to work. And I think what happens actually is the debate about revolution versus reform. It gets mixed up with a different debate, which is related, but is not conceptually exactly the same. And it's the debate over basically just whether you can replicate the Russian experience or you can't. That sort of model of revolution, there's an image that goes with it and it's called the storming of the winter palace. And people

quite often use that phrase to stand in for that whole model of revolution. That was like the key moment in the October, there was a revolution in February, and then the Bolsheviks initiated a revolution in October. You know, and that is quite literally, you know, the winter palace where the government is held, you know, that gets stormed by revolutionary soldiers, etc. And so the state is sort of seized. But the other point, the other thing to raise about that moment is, you know, it's just after the first world war bringing the first world war to an end and it sparks a revolutionary wave across

europe and which fails basically so there's most famously the the german revolution fails that the leaders such as rosa luxembourg and car libenick they get sort of pushed into into a revolution that they didn't really think was the right time and then they get they get captured and murdered by the Freikorp, which is like a pre-Nazi sort of reactionary workers' organisation who were actually mobilised by the Social Democratic Party, by Ebert, the Social Democratic Party's minister in the government. That sort of like put as an element of spice to this growing divide

that Jeb was just talking about. But it's not just the German revolution, It's also, you know, they have the two red years they call them in Italy where you have this huge upsurge of factory occupations. You know, and out of that, that's the spike that the Italian Communist Party emerges out of. And so, like, the position in Russia is, you know, they thought they were leading a world revolution. That world revolution fails outside Russia.

Therefore, you then have to adjust to that situation, basically, which eventually leads to socialism in one country. of Joseph Starling, etc. But we could, probably could use that just to talk really, really briefly about Rosa Luxembourg's conception of revolution. She has much more of a, like she's associated with this idea that revolution would take the form of a mass strike. And so, you know, in opposed to the idea of a revolution,

which would be done by a vanguard party, she's more linked to a more sort of spontaneous idea of how a revolution happens. And is that, just, Kear, just to clarify on that, so linking that to what you were saying, around the Winter Palace, is it that it's also a different model because the model of a strike is where you're effectively bringing power to its knees through the withdrawal of labour en masse, which is quite different to, like, physically as an army would storming, storming, you know, and they're both extremely important and powerful as models, but obviously one of them is, you know,

you can see the cinematic effects of much easier than, you know, a mass strike. I mean, it's literally cinematic because it's Eisenstein's film about the storming of the Winter Palace, which establishes that as the foundational sort of myth of the Russian Revolution. No, famously, more people died during the filming of Eisenstein's setting than it did in the actual revolution. But also, of course, and that was because the idea of the storming of the Bastille as being the definitive event of the Russian of the French Revolution, the storming of the prison, the central prison in Paris in 1789. It was only really decided in like the late 19th century, oh, well, that, we're going to say that was when the French Revolution happened. So Bastille Day is only established as a French

national holiday in the late 19th century. And the idea of storming the Winter Palace is basically directly modelled off that as well. So this idea, you've got to storm something. So yeah, you're totally right. I think that's exactly right in our idea. But it's not just bringing things to a stop, though, Nadia, because the other idea of that was, you know, the model was workers' councils or factory councils, and it would be the workers would occupy their factories, and then they'd restart them.

They'd restart them without their bosses, basically was the idea of the mass strike. So, you know, that's a different model of sort of revolution or how revolution would happen to, you know, seizing of the, of the high point of the state storming, whatever the Winter Palace is in your country and then using the state to implement a series of policies, etc.

The distinction between those wasn't particularly clear, you know, perhaps you'd have both going on at the same time, but it does give two sort of ideas of revolution, but Gem is completely right, you know, the sort of more councilist conception of revolution, where workers' councils just take over and

sort of run things, that becomes this massively minoritarian element of the left in the 20th century. And the Russian revolution, which is successful, becomes the dominant mode of revolution. It necessitates a different organising model, each one of those. It does, yeah. But, I mean, this might be a way into the next revolution we might want to talk about,

which is the Spanish Civil War and the revolution that takes place there, because that's a very different form of model of revolution, one which actually has some sort of, it becomes quite useful later, and discussions later in the 1970s, etc., which is in the Spanish civil war, you have a left government gets elected into power and then there's a right wing attempted right wing military coup against that and the workers rise up to stop the to stop the military coup and in fact that comes into a military invasion because a lot of the Spanish army is in Morocco and you know that's the bit that that has to invade Spain and what happens is that a social

revolution emerges out of the defense of democracy particularly around Catalonia etc And that's because, you know, in Spain, Spain was one of the only countries in which it's really, really strong anarcho-sindicalist tradition was probably dominant actually in a workers' movement there. And so they seize control of the factories in Barcelona, take them over, start running them without bosses. You know, we've talked about the Spanish Civil War before. But it's a different model.

It's a model in which revolution is spurred, it's not planned in advance, but it's spurred by the need to defend even a left democratic project, etc. But everyone wants to see it on the table external to Spain. So you've got to only got all of these forces playing in, intervening, you know, and funding different bits of it. And then everybody hates each other and dies. Only one side. Yeah, only the fascists funded their side.

That was why they won. Yeah, that's what I meant when I asked. I'm not talking, I'm not talking about the fascists. I'm saying the Spanish Civil War had an important significance in terms of from the world watching it of like what the hell is going to happen here. And so necessarily there are different external forces going, right, how can we get our side to win? And that is a kind of excuse the visual expression, like a Russian doll system because you've got the fascist on one side and then you've got the broadly, the leftist on the other side. But within that leftist cadre, there's different factions. some of which end up totally hating each other.

Okay, so the Spanish Civil War, I mean, Keir's right, it's the Spanish Civil War, it's also going on in France. It's also, to some extent, it's also happening even in America, arguably, in a mild form with the New Deal administration, is you've got the election of governments that are committed to forms of social reform, which they themselves recognize, require some form of confrontation with capitalist forces, some kind of direct confrontation. I mean, in the case of the New Deal, they've got no intention of making revolution.

I mean, they see themselves as confronting some of the more reactionary elements of capitals. It's clearly not revolutionary in nature. In the case of the French Popular Front government, and in the case of the Spanish popular front government, they are at least significant elements of those governments. They do indeed, they do indeed expect a violent showdown with capital to be provoked by their reform program. And in France, that gets the Nazis beat the French bourgeois to it to some extent in terms of being able to. I mean, the Popular Front government kind of falls apart anyway, like before the war. But a lot of the public also thought that when the Popular Front won the election in France in 1936, when the Popular Front won the election in France, that sparked a huge wave of factory occupations.

patience because people are like loads of workers just thought oh great it's on let's have a revolution then The movement for national liberation in India, around the world, is an explicitly non-violent modeler of revolution. And to some extent, although Gandhi is kind of inspired directly by people like Tolstoy, I think you can see a kind of interesting affinity between that and like the theory of the mass strike. I mean, Gandhi is partly influenced by theories of mass strike actually, theories of mass strike and general strike. And like pre-Luxenberg theories of general strike, like is it Sorrel, the Italian?

It's a kind of non-participation model. Yeah, yeah, it's the idea, yeah. It's kind of opting out in a way. Well, I mean, the idea, I mean, the point in India was that there was a very, very little industrial working class, like most people are sort of peasants. And the idea is that peasants could be, would be, could just, indeed, could just stop participating with colonial capitalism. And just, that's why the spinning wheel became, the spinning wheel became the symbol of national liberation, because the idea was people should spin their own cloth in the

villages where they were also growing the cotton that were done. Yeah, but we, but then, yeah, what we want to talk about is not just the, the question of Gandhiism, particularly, and that model, but also national liberation to kind of colonial and imperial powers everywhere you know like the whole of especially Africa I mean Latin America did it all you know the timing of stuff is different but you know the whole of Africa and a lot of Asia people are going

yeah fuck this is that revolutionary yeah well it is well the most important I mean the of the great world revolutions that hardly ever gets mentioned in Western centric or kind of Russian centric actually history of revolution is the Chinese revolution. There's a national revolution against the ancient imperial system, which has become decayed and decrepit. Then there's a war of it, there's a war of national liberation against Japanese colonialism, really in the decades between the two world wars.

And then there's a civil war. I mean, much as happens in Russia, much as in happens in lots of other comparable contexts, there's a civil war between the two main factions who fought the war of national liberation, and that is the liberal sort of pro-capitalist faction, the so-called nationalists, and the communists win. And by 1949, you have a government as well. By the period after World War II, you have a government in China, like one in Russia, and the former Russian Empire, which is committed, nominally at least, committed to a kind of project of global world revolution. And so then in the, really in the post- war period, the decolonizing movement, the anti-colonial movement around the world,

it takes its inspiration sort of variously from India and from China and Russia. And it is really significant that a huge part of the anti-colonial movement in many countries, in many parts of Africa and parts of Asia, sees itself as participating in this international communist movement. And I think it's a key reason why really authoritarian and xenophobic forms of nationalism are so weak within those movements during that period. We should also mention places where revolutions in that period are forestalled involve an imaginable death. You know, millions of people in Indonesia, of leftists in Indonesia just get killed in order to prevent, because the movement is strong there, etc.

you know that um yeah absolutely yeah i mean it's not just oh revolutions happen and then violence happens you know the revolution doesn't have to happen in order for absolute you know huge genocides to to take place to prevent that and then you have i suppose you then you move into things such as the cuban revolution in which you know a very small group actually sparked that revolution a small group of guerrillas go up into the they come in from uh mexico they got them to the Sierra Madra Mountains and they waged a guerrilla war which then turns into a big revolution

and the Cuban revolution is a real model is seen as a real model for how revolution might might take place particularly in Latin America after that. What year are we? It's not complete till sort of 59. Yeah.

So that's right. Yeah. So the guerrilla model yeah and so Cuba does become another model and that ends up having a big influence on the kind of radical imaginary of people around the world. The idea that you have a small, you basically have guerrillas engaging

in what would later have been end up being described, almost a sort of terrorist action. But the idea is if the masses are ready, they will rise up, kind of inspired by these guerrilla actions and make a proper mass revolution. But you've got to say, like in Cuba,

that model totally worked. I mean, Cuba ends up being one of the few countries in the world where you can really say, you know, pretty clearly there's like mass support for the project of radical socialism, you know, real mass support, not just sort of grudging sense that we might as well try this because there's nothing better going on, like you seem to have in places like Russia

for a while, but, you know, real mass, sort of enthusiastic mass support. And I think that's right about the model of the guerrilla kind of, the face of like the guerrilla fighter or the, you know, guerrilla movements being kind of in a way. I mean, I'm sure there are others, but I like that kind of those three that we've got storming the Winter Palace, like the mass strike and, you know, the guerrilla movement as kind of like images that cut, that are conjured by different ways of doing revolution. Yeah. I think that's interesting. Yeah. I think that's really useful. And I think we should add like here said the fourth, which is just a left government wins an election and then becomes, or maybe that's

part of a mass strike strategy or something. But then, of course, at the same time as that that Cuban model of revolution starts to really become part of the imaginary landscape of revolutionaries around the world is you get a real sort of crisis for the idea that storming the Winter Palace is going to

lead to a desirable revolution because the level of disillusion with the authoritarianism and militarism of the Soviet Union really reaches a new level after the 1956 invasion of Hungary and after the invasion of Hungary

in 1956, like a huge cohort of Marxist intellectuals and activists around the world, breaks with the Comintern. Lots of people leave the Communist Party. Entire organisations disaffiliate from the Comintern, from the Third International. And that's really the moment of the birth of what Britain and America is called the New Left. We should just say, actually, that the Soviet invasion of Hungary is sparked by something Well, it's sometimes called the Hungarian Revolution, which looked a little bit more like that whole mass strike version of revolution

in which workers occupied their factories, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, it is. And that had a renewal, that gave a sort of renewal to this sort of like counts for this idea of revolution. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's some sort of influence in the events of the 1960s. I mean, I mean, the invasion, Hungary is invaded to prevent a set of democratic reforms being implemented, that the leadership of the Russia of the, of the Hungarian Communist Party want to implement. I mean, they see themselves as in all good faith, having implemented the

authoritarian model of Stalinist communism of necessity during a period of consolidation, and they think the time is right for democratization of, you know, of indeed democratization of processes production, but also democratization of institutions. And Stalin's, you know, know, the Stalinist regime isn't having it because they think it's the thin end of a wedge which will lead to Hungary becoming bourgeois democratic, becoming liberal,

no longer being a kind of loyal satellite of the Soviet Union. And so the Red Army invades, they invade and they install, I mean, what they do actually is they install a loyal Stalinist faction

in power within the Hungarian Communist Party. And then, of course, they do pretty much exactly the same thing happens in Czechoslovakia in 1968. And both those two moments, 56 and 68, are moments of like mass disillusion with formal communism and with the politics of the common term. And indeed, as Keir said, they're seen as within the international left, they're seen as suppressions of the councilist democratic, you know, wing of socialism by a kind of militarist, you know, state, you know, status, totalitarian version of it,

and a sort of counter-revolutionary version of it. So the upshot of all this is that by the end of the 60s, there's very widespread disillusion with the legacy of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. There's considerable controversy and disquiet over the direction of the Chinese revolution and its legacy. And there's disillusion with the Western European Communist parties in the places where they were the most powerful parties on the left, like France and Italy. And there's a growing sort of revival of interest in anarchist ideas, councilist ideas, radical democratic ideas. And there's a broad sort of turning away from forms of political organisation that rely on highly centralized or top-down.

modes of organisation. I mean, that's not exclusively what's going on. I mean, from the student movement in the late 60s through into the early 2000s, they're still a fairly vigorous, sort of, you know, Trotskyist revolutionary movement. I mean, there still is to this day. You know, and so Trotskyists generally take the view that, you know, basically the Russian model, Leninist model of revolution was correct, but the great mistake made in the Soviet Union was to retreat from the aspiration towards a world revolution that had characterised the early phases of the Russian Revolution. And that's why the idea of being part of an international organisation has remained really important to self-identified Trotskyists to this day,

even though, you know, the sort of scale and size of the Trotskyist internationals since the 90s has really been sort of comparable with the first, you know, international working men's association. I mean, you know, there are various organisations claiming to be a fourth or fifth international in the Trotskyist tradition, and most of them have like a few hundred active members and have had zero impact politically. But there's a significant revival of that kind of activity as well. coming out of the student movement in the late 60s.

And partly, partly from the 60s onwards, there's a fairly common pattern. And it's certainly one I've seen, sort of replicated in the experiences of some of my friends and comrades whereby you sort of start off life as a teenage anarchist, like committed to sort of completely libertarian, decentralized, democratic, participatory, non, sort of non-authoritarian mode of organisation.

And then you become disillusioned with that. that because it turns out that actually you just can't get anything done that way. And then you become convinced of the strong value of actual disciplined organisation. You join like a Trotskyist organisation and something and spend a few years doing that, sort of acting like you were a member of the Bolsheviks in 1915 and having a secret party name and all sorts of things. And then eventually you realise that, well, that isn't getting anywhere

because you were not in Russia in 1915, and you usually end up being a sort of left-wing member of the Labour Party, doing a bit of community organising and a bit of work with something like momentum and what have you. I'm not talking about myself here, to be clear. I mean, actually, I just, you know, my views on all this stuff have barely shifted into the late 80s when I decided that I was, in theory, I was a sort of anarcho-sindicalist, but in practice, given that we're not in a pre-revolutionary historical moment, you know, you just need to use whatever means are available to you to get results. But anyway, in terms of our overall history, that's pretty much where things end up, I would say,

by sort of about 1970. You have very broad disillusion with the Leninist model, which had seemed to be so successful over much of the 20th century. And you have some people trying to sort of maintain a quite orthodox form of Leninist Trotskyism. and thinking that the only problem with that, the implementation of that was, you know, because of Stalin and the ways he's deviated from a certain kind of Totskyist, Leninist view of the world, and probably a larger number of people being attracted towards, you know, more sort of radical democratics, with decentralized, sort of neo-annochist ideas,

but really not having any success at all in terms of implementing those as actual revolutionary projects. And that's about where you get to, around 1970, which is where we pick up the story in the main episode on Revolution. So we can leave it there now. Four out.