Is Social Revolution Still Possible in T PDF

Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe
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Is Social Revolution Still Possible in the Twenty-

First Century?
Neil Davidson
To cite this article: Neil Davidson (2015) Is Social Revolution Still Possible in the Twenty-First
Century?, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 23:2-3, 105-150
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0965156X.2015.1116787
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Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2015
Vol. 23, Nos. 23, 105150, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0965156X.2015.1116787
Is Social Revolution Still

Possible in the Twenty-
First Century?
Neil Davidson
Downloaded by [Cancer Research UK Beatson] at 07:18 22 December 2015
The eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Stalinist regimes
were treated by many analysts and commentators as signalling the end of the
contemporary form of social revolution. The defeat of communism had
apparently removed the possibility of any systemic alternative to capitalism,
which now emerges as the telos of history. Henceforth, the only conceivable
revolutions were regime-changing political revolutions, a claim that appeared
to be supported by the subsequent Colour Revolutions and the Arab Spring.
This interpretation is, however, based on a misunderstanding of the nature of
the Stalinist regimes and the revolutions which created them. Following an
analysis of the categories of political and social revolution, and the different
varieties of the latter, the article will argue that Stalinism has to be seen, on
the one hand, as the counter-revolution (in Russia) and, on the other, as
contemporary bourgeois revolutions (everywhere else), leading to forms of
state capitalism in both cases. From this perspective, the negative effect of
the Stalinist regimes on the formation of revolutionary consciousness was not
their downfall, but their existence and the distorted idea of socialism which
they perpetuated. The article concludes by arguing that, while there are
indeed obstacles to the resumption of socialist revolution as a goal, these are
more to do with the defeats inflicted on the international workers movement
by neoliberalism than by the events of 1989.
Keywords: Arab Spring; Stalinism; revolution; socialism; neoliberalism
Introduction
During the summer of 1989, the neoconservative journal The National Interest
published an article by a former analyst at the RAND Corporation, who was by
2015 Taylor & Francis

106 N. DAVIDSON
then deputy director of policy planning staff at the US State Department. It

quickly achieved fame, or possibly notoriety, for the author, Frances
Fukuyama. The End of History (1989) appeared while the USSR was undergo-
ing the twin processes of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (open-
ness) which the reforming wing of the bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev
had initiated in response to the era of stagnation. By the time Fukuyama
published a book-length version of his argument in 1992, a series of revolutions
had swept away the eastern Europe regimes; but more importantly, the USSR
itself no longer existed. Although the events which led to the latter outcome
were less obviously revolutionary than those in Romania or in a different
way East Germany, they were clearly of the same kind. Fukuyama was later
to note: A sober student of communist affairs back in 1980 would have said
that none of these events was likely or even possible in the coming decade
(Fukuyama 1992, 28). But just as few people anticipated these events at the
time his original article appeared, only months before the revolutions began.
Those taken unawares included not only external observers, but also the popu-
lations of eastern Europe themselves members of the state apparatus as
much their dissident opponents (Kuran 1995, 15281530). They also included
Fukuyama. For he had not predicted the imminent demise of the regimes, but
simply argued that even though states claiming to be based on Marxism might
be able to survive in some form, they could no longer offer a feasible alterna-
tive system to what he called democratic capitalism. Indeed, according to
Fukuyama, the latter, having previously defeated fascism, was now unchal-
lenged by any possible alternative, leading to the situation encapsulated in the
title of his article and subsequent book. Was he right?
After Twenty-Five Years
Twenty-five years on from 1989, some nominally Marxist states still exist five
of them, to be precise: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. But of
these, only the first is a global power and its status as such scarcely depends
on any residual adherence to the tenets of historical materialism. According to
the Hungarian economist, Ja nos Kornai: The socialist system still persists to
a great extent in the worlds most populous country, China (Kornai 2000, 27).
Yet it is difficult to understand in what sense the socialist system can be said
to persist to a great extent in a nation state which is almost universally
regarded, even in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago,
as one of the most dynamic hubs of global capitalism (see, for example, Coase
and Wang 2012). As Nigel Harris once observed, in China the walls sport an
unlikely icon, portraits of a hairy Victorian gentleman, Karl Marx. One should
not be misled by these affectations (Harris 1986, 185). Indeed, one relatively
trivial sign of the reality of contemporary China is that The Origins of Political
Order (2011), a recent work by Fukuyama himself, was a best-seller there,
while its sequel, Political Order and Political Decay (2014), appeared in a
IS SOCIAL REVOLUTION STILL POSSIBLE? 107
privately printed edition to edify the upper ranks of the Communist Party of
China (Yang 2014). More tangibly, a recent analysis of China has described how
processes which are clearly constitutive of the accumulation and in some
cases, the primitive accumulation of capital are still badged with the term
socialism:
In the Reform Era, Chinese society has undergone a sweeping process of com-
modification and commercialization across the board: from economic activ-
ity to social services to cultural life in which financial capital, state or
foreign, has been the guiding force. If villagers are evicted from their homes
by dams on the Yangzi, or herders from their pastures in Inner Mongolia, it is
all in the cause of the greater socialist good. Here lies the positive utility of
the discourse of socialism with Chinese characteristics in masking the
opposite of the principles it supposedly upholds. (Wang 2015, 37)
Similar observations have been made about the other surviving Communist
state to have followed a similar trajectory to that of China: Vietnam. As Nick
Davies writes, the claim by Vietnams leaders to be socialist looks like empty
propaganda. In the words of one former guerrilla who risked his life for this:
They are red capitalists (Davies 2015). We can expect comparable develop-
ments in Cuba and Laos, once the leaderships which maintain continuity with
the original revolutions die or retire; only in North Korea is the total collapse
of the state likely to be a necessary precondition for the return of private cap-
italism, within the context of a reunited peninsula. But any system for which
the regime of Kim Jong-un is the remaining showroom model is unlikely to
attract new converts.
Twenty-five years on from 1989, there are, of course, also still revolutionary
upheavals, and the record of Western state officials and social scientists in
foreseeing them has not improved, as was demonstrated by their surprise at
the Middle East and North African (MENA) revolutions in 2011 (the Arab
Spring) (Gause 2011; see also Kuran 1995 for a prediction of this failure to
predict). These revolutions, particularly the most important, the Egyptian,
were initially greeted with what might be called malign neutrality in the
centres of capitalist power, threatening as they did key Western allies like
Hosni Mubarak (for an analysis of British responses see, Hollis 2012). As Adam
Hanieh points out, once it became apparent that at least some of the MENA
revolutions were likely to succeed, they were ideologically assimilated into the
same narrative as had been constructed for the eastern European revolutions,
so that they became a movement against an intrusive state that had
obstructed the pursuit of individual self-interest through the market: In this
discursive reframing of the uprisings, the massive protests that overthrew
Mubarak and Ben Ali occurred due to the lack of capitalism rather than to its
normal functioning (Hanieh 2013, 165166; my emphasis).
Correctly understanding what would gain Western approval, some of the
revolutionaries, particularly the most visible, middle-class elements, played
108 N. DAVIDSON
their allotted roles to the letter. Patrick Cockburn noted the emphasis by
these participants on new electronic media and information technology:
Protesters, skilled in propaganda if nothing else, could see the advantage of

presenting the uprisings to the West as unthreatening velvet revolutions with
English-speaking, well-educated bloggers and tweeters prominently in the van-
guard. The purpose was to convey to Western publics that the new revolution-
aries were comfortingly similar to themselves, that what was happening in the
Middle East in 2011 was similar to the anti-communist and pro-Western upris-
ings in eastern Europe after 1989. (Cockburn 2015, 140)
As we shall see, it is a myth that the Egyptian revolution was primarily the
work of the middle classes, as media visibility does not necessarily equal social
weight; but even beyond Tahrir Square, there was a more general break with
those revolutionary traditions which had evolved prior to 1989:
The organisers of the uprising [in Egypt] drew inspiration from neither the rev-
olutionaries of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, nor from
their neighbours in Libya or Syria. They did not grasp the necessity of creating
a situation of dual power by occupying government buildings, entrenching
themselves in the crowded neighbourhoods, seizing entire cities, and using all
of these as bases for incrementally supplanting the regime. Instead the organ-
isers drew inspiration from eastern Europe in 1989 (in fact many of them later
admitted to studying this experience thoroughly). (Kandil 2012, 225)
Kandil refers here to the organisers, but there are several respects in which
the MENA revolutions had even less unified opposition leadership than did
those in eastern and central Europe. As one commentator noted,There are no
leaders among the self-appointed NGO leaders, nor among political party
leaders, nor among tribal sheikhs (Hanafi 2012, 208209).
There was a great deal more to the MENA revolutions than an attempt to
rerun the events of 1989; nevertheless, almost all were either defeated (as in
Egypt), or concluded in the disintegration of the state (as in Libya), or both (as
in Syria). The one exception to date is Tunisia; but even in this case, as in
those of the other successful post-1989 revolutions such as in Indonesia (1998),
the outcome was a change of regime, rather than society. And this subsequent
decline in the significance of revolutions, rather than any direct influence over
how they are conducted, may be the greatest impact of 1989.
Timothy Garton Ash, who reported the events of 1989 more comprehen-
sively than perhaps any other Western reporter, described it as the new 1789:
at once a turning point and a reference point. As he notes, however,
compared to 1968, let alone 1789, the revolutions of 1989 have done little to
define the generation which took part in them: 1989 was clearly a much big-
ger historical event than 1968. So where are the 89ers? (Garton Ash 2014, 35)
Leaving aside this highly contestable claim for the lesser importance of 1968,
the absence of the 89ers may not be so surprising if we understand the date,
not as an opening, a beginning, but as a closure, an ending if not of history
itself, then at least of the particular regime of historicity which had prevailed
since 1789 (Hartog 2015, 15, 104107). Peter Pomerantsev recalled how, aged
12, he had watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV: It seemed like the
Russian Revolution and the 1960s rolled into one, the people taking power
from elites while celebrating the subversive effect of U2. We need not accept
the notion that 1989 was comparable to 1917 to understand that, for example,
the revolutions of 2004 and 2014 in Ukraine were still examples of a
different and lesser order of event:
in the 21st century something changed. Suddenly any national fight was
calling itself a revolution. Revolution stopped being a name you gave to a
transformative historical moment and became the name a political technology

gave itself in order to gain importance. (Pomerantsev 2015, 38)
Do events since 1989 therefore confirm Fukuyamas claim? At the time, those
who regarded the Stalinist regimes as the antithesis rather than the embodi-
ment of Communism regarded the world after 1991 with cautious optimism,
the revolutions having potentially established conditions for reconstruction of
a genuine Marxist left. Thinkers from traditions as different as World Systems
Theory and dissident Trotskyism offered conditional, but nevertheless broadly
positive assessments (see, respectively, Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein 1992,
238 and Callinicos 1991, 3). Indeed, as late as the following decade some ner-
vous Western liberals were worried precisely by the possibility that in the face
of neoliberal intransigence, Marxism would re-emerge largely for want of
competition as the common currency of international protest movements
(Judt 2008, 143). In fact, neither re-emergence nor reconstruction of the Left
took place on any scale. Those who assumed, stupidly, that with the fall of
the Soviet Union the road was clear for a real, pure, socialism, gravely under-
estimated the tectonic shift (Ali 2013; viiix). Tariq Alis unnecessarily harsh
verdict conveys the dominant assumption, held by activists and academics
alike, that there is a causal connection between the revolutions of 1989, the
failure and rejection of actually-existing socialism that they involved, and
the subsequent absence of fundamentally transformative revolutions. And this
assumption is shared by thinkers from quite different theoretical traditions and
scholarly disciplines, with opposing attitudes towards the Stalinist regimes (for
a selection, see Halliday 1999, 331332; Mann 2013a, 178; Mann 2013b,
9092; Tama s 2011, 38).
These are not only theoretical positions: a sense of curtailed possibilities
informs the policies of left-wing governing parties, often with previous revolu-
tionary pedigrees, above all in South Africa (Kingsnorth 2003, 118119), Bolivia
(Garca Linera 2005, 2006, 82) and most recently in Greece. One of Syrizas lead-
ing figures, Yanis Varoufakis, has argued that the key goal for socialists, even
Marxists, was to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the
time we need to formulate its alternative precisely the attitude which led his
party into futile attempts to appease the Troika for the first half of 2015:
110 N. DAVIDSON
with Europes elites deep in denial and disarray, the left must admit that we
are just not ready to plug the chasm that a collapse of European capitalism
would open up with a functioning socialist system. Our task should then be
twofold. First, to put forward an analysis of the current state of play that non-
Marxist, well-meaning Europeans who have been lured by the sirens of neolib-
eralism, find insightful. Second, to follow this sound analysis up with proposals
for stabilising Europefor ending the downward spiral that, in the end,
reinforces only the bigots (Varoufakis 2015; see also Varoufakis 2011, 227).
This position is not easily distinguishable from that outlined by the German
trade union leader, Fritz Tarnow, in his classic 1931 description of the double
role of Social Democracy:
Are we sitting at the sickbed of capitalism as doctors who want to cure the
patient, but also as cheerful heirs who cannot wait for the end and would like
to hasten it with poison? Our entire situation is expressed in this image. We
are condemned, I think, to be doctors who seriously desire a cure, and yet we
also maintain the feeling that we are heirs who wish to receive the entire
legacy of the capitalist system today rather than tomorrow. If we know of a
medicine that, if it will not cure the patient, will at least stop his death rattles
so that the masses again have something to eat, than we must give him the
medicine and for the moment ignore the fact that we are also heirs and await
his rapid demise. (Quoted in Hunt 1964, 3839)
Given what was shortly to follow in Germany, this is not a promising historical
parallel.
Even at their most radical then, as in South Africa, Bolivia and Greece,
self-declared socialists no longer talk in terms of socialism as an end goal at
all or, if they do, then only as one achievable at such a distance in time
that it is effectively unattainable. Alternative forms of society are therefore
no longer possible and perhaps they cannot even be envisaged. The socialist-
feminist analyst of technology, Donna Haraway, admitted as much to David
Harvey, shortly after the dissolution of the USSR: I think the most difficult
problem that I face, if I own up to it, is I have almost lost the imagination
of what a world that isnt capitalist could look like (Harvey and Haraway
1995, 519). Indeed, according to an aphorism variously attributed to Fredric
Jameson and Slavoj Z izek, it is now easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism (Jameson 1994; xii; Z izek 1994, 1; Jameson
2003, 76).
But even those who can still imagine a different form of society no longer
seem to have a conception of how to achieve it. Revolutionary change is
more desperately urgent than ever, writes John Holloway, but we do not
know any more what revolution means (Holloway 2010, 215). It may be, as
Holloway claims, that not-knowing is part of the revolutionary process, but
declarations of a theoretical Year Zero with an accompanying embrace of
collective amnesia are rarely helpful in achieving a state of knowing. As
Massimiliano Tomba writes:
Whoever participates in this, writing hymns to the obliteration of memory

while thinking that such a loss of memory can itself have revolutionary poten-
tial, becomes a participant in the construction of the dominant imaginary that,
through the erasure of that tradition, pushes the working class offstage.
(Tomba 2013, 43)
In what follows I will argue that interpretations of the revolutions of 1989

which hold them responsible for the declining significance of subsequent revo-
lutions are flawed, misleading and consequently generative of quite unneces-
sary political pessimism. I will make the case in six stages. The first will define
the kinds of revolution that are possible, either political or varieties of
social revolution (bourgeois or proletarian). The second, drawing on these

definitions, will argue that the eastern European revolutions must be seen as
social, so long as we assume that the societies in which they took place
were indeed socialist/communist or at least post-capitalist. (For the pur-
poses of this discussion I will treat the terms socialist and communist
interchangeably, although I am obviously aware that in Marxist thought they
represent lower and higher stages in post-revolutionary society.) The third will
question this classification, arguing that Russia experienced a counter-revolu-
tion as early as 1928, transforming a society which had been transitional to
socialism into one based on an extreme form of state capitalism. The fourth
will show that it was this Stalinist model which was imposed by the USSR in
most of eastern Europe and imitated by local communist parties in the former
colonial and semi-colonial world, where it constituted neither counter-revolu-
tion nor the socialist revolution, but rather the modern form of the bourgeois
revolution. The fifth stage then returns to the nature of the eastern European
revolutions, concluding that if the societies in which they took place were not
in fact socialist, but actually a form of capitalism, then they have to be
regarded as political revolutions, which left the underlying mode of production
unchanged. Finally, the sixth stage will attempt to provide an alternative
explanation for the absence of social revolution since 1991.
Political Revolution, Social Revolution, Counter-Revolution
My starting point is that revolutions can be ultimately either political or social

in nature. These categories have by no means received universal acceptance.
For some thinkers this is mainly a question of terminology: Zygmunt Bauman,
for example, uses the term systemic revolutions in virtually the same way as
most people use social to distinguish them from what he calls merely politi-
cal (Bauman 1994, 1517); Robert Snyder accepts the category of social revo-
lution, but contrasts it with what he calls liberal revolutions, which remain
at the level of the political (Snyder 1999, 78). For other writers there are,
however, more substantive issues. Steven Pinkus, for example, argues that it is
not useful to distinguish between political and social revolutions, and that
112 N. DAVIDSON
the former must be understood simply as civil wars, rebellions, or coups

de
tat. In effect, Pinkus seems to believe that all genuine revolutions are
social in nature:
Revolutions must involve both a transformation of the socioeconomic orienta-

tion and of the political structures. That transformation must take place
through a popular movement, and the transformation must involve a self-con-
sciousness that a new era has begun. (Pinkus 2008, 32)
These assertions about the character of social revolutions involve elements

that are entirely arbitrary. I accept that they must involve transformation
of the socio-economic orientation and of the political structures, but why

must these transformations also be achieved by a self-conscious popular
movement? The establishment of capitalism in Scotland followed the suppres-
sion of the last Jacobite Rebellion in 1746; the establishment of capitalism in
Japan followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868: both were fundamental transfor-
mations, neither involved popular movements but rather state-led revolutions
from above.
The identification of social revolutions only with those events that initiate a
process of both socio-economic and political transformation has also been
made by Theda Skocpol:
Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a societys state and class
structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-
based revolts from below. Social revolutions are set apart from other sorts of
conflicts and transformative processes above all by the combination of two
coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval
and the coincidence of political with social transformation. ... Political revolu-
tions transform state structures but not social structures, and they are not
necessarily accomplished through class conflict ....What is unique to social rev-
olution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur
together in a mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through
intense sociopolitical conflicts in which class struggles play a key role. (Skocpol
1979, 45)
Skocpol rightly argues that the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions were
all social revolutions, but her definition also leads to other key modern revolu-
tions being excluded from the category. She notes that the English Revolution
involved episodes very similar indeed to the developments that would mark
the trajectory of the French Revolution 150 years later, but nevertheless
rejects the comparison:
Though the English Revolution was certainly a successful revolution, it was not
a social revolution like the French. It was accomplished not through class
struggle but through a civil war between segments of the dominant landed
class (with each side drawing support from all of the other classes and strata).
And whereas the French Revolution markedly transformed class and social
structures, the English revolution did not. Instead it revolutionized the political
structure of England. (Skocpol 1979, 141)
The assumption here is that, in a social revolution, the relationship between

state and socio-economic transformation must be unidirectional from the
latter to the former, but this leads to the extraordinary conclusion that two
societies that are essentially of the same type, and have undergone very simi-
lar revolutionary experiences, which in both cases led to the transformation of
the state all of which Skocpol accepts with respect to England and France
must nevertheless be deemed to have undergone different types of revolution,
simply because the extent of prior socio-economic transformation was differ-
ent in degree.
If the categories of political and social revolution are to be helpful in terms
of historical understanding, then we have to begin from the understanding that
all revolutions, of whatever kind, fall on the terrain of what Andrew Abbott
calls turning point analysis, in which neither the beginning nor the end of
the turning point can be defined until the whole turning point has passed, since
it is the arrival and establishment of a new trajectory ... that defines the turn-
ing point itself. Consequently, turning point analysis makes sense only after
the fact (Abbott 2001, 250). It is only after a revolutionary process has con-
cluded that it is possible to say whether it has involved political or social revo-
lution. As Tomba notes of the two categories in Marxs own work, they need
to be conceptualised as synchronic and from within a given situation (Tomba
2013, 29). As this suggests, all revolutions pose a set of alternative outcomes.
Jeffrey Webber argues that we need a further category to accommodate these
uncertainties:
One way out of the quandaries of process and consequence that arise in
defining revolution is to separate the notion of revolutionary epoch from social
revolution. The concept of revolutionary epoch provides us with a way of
understanding that revolutionary transformative change is possible but not
predetermined in a certain period, stressing the uncertainty and yet not
wide openness of alternative outcomes. (Webber 2008, 58; Webber 2011, 46)
What then are the outcomes which would allow us to distinguish between
political and social revolutions? Hal Draper has perhaps made the clearest
distinction between the two:
Political revolution puts the emphasis on the changes in governmental lead-

ership and forms, transformations in the superstructure . If social bound-
aries are burst by the change, then we have a different sort of revolution,
which is of special importance to Marxs theory. The outcome is a revolution
involving the transference of political power to a new class; and this change in
ruling class tends to entail a basic change in the social system (mode of
production). It is this kind of revolution which is most properly called a social
revolution. (Draper 1978, 1920)
114 N. DAVIDSON
Political revolutions are therefore struggles within society for control of the
state, involving factions of the existing ruling class, which leave fundamental
social and economic structures intact. These revolutions have been relatively
frequent in history and include the Roman Civil Wars, which led to the aban-
donment of Republican rule for the Principate in 27 BCE; the victory of the
Abbasid over the Umayyad dynasty in 750, which led to the opening up to all
Muslims, of the elite offices of the Caliphate formerly held exclusively by
Arabs; and the French Revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871, which successively
widened the franchise and consolidated the presence of bourgeois personnel
within the state apparatus. Political revolutions may involve more or less popu-
lar participation, may result in more or less improvement in the condition of
the majority, can introduce democracy where it has previously been absent;
but ultimately the ruling class that was in control of the means of production
at the beginning will remain so at the end (although individuals and political
organizations may have been replaced on the way) and the classes that were
exploited within the productive process at the beginning will also remain so at
the end (although concessions may have been made by the winning faction to
secure their acquiescence or participation). The absence of fundamental social
change associated with political revolutions means that there is far less
distinction between them and processes of accelerated reform.
Social revolutions, however, are not merely struggles for control of the
state, but struggles to transform it, either in response to changes that have
already taken place in the mode of production, or in order to bring such
changes about. Perry Anderson notes, modes of production change when the
forces and relations of production enter into decisive contradiction with one
another:
The maturing of such a contradiction need involve no conscious class agency

on either side, by exploiters and exploited no set battle for the future of
economy and society; although its subsequent unfolding, on the other hand, is
likely to unleash relentless social struggles between opposing forces. (Anderson
1992, 17; see also Anderson 1980, 5556)
Only three epochal processes fall into the category of social revolution. At one
extreme is the transition from slavery to feudalism. At the other extreme is
the socialist revolution, which will begin the transition from capitalism to
socialism and of course one of the main issues at stake in the debate over
1989 is whether this transition has ever been underway or whether it merely
remains a historical possibility. Between these two extremes lie the bourgeois
revolutions, and not simply in chronological terms. As Alex Callinicos writes:
The balance between the role played by structural contradictions and con-
scious human agency in resolving organic crisis has shifted from the former to
the latter in the course of the past 1500 years. The transition from feudalism
to capitalism occupies an intermediate position in this respect between the fall
of the Roman Empire and the Russian Revolution. (Callinicos 1987, 229)
Because social revolutions are so rare, it is difficult to make generalizations

about their nature. It is not even possible to say that in every case social revo-
lution involves the replacement of one ruling class with another, since in some
cases the personnel of a former ruling class remained in place while their role
in the social relations of production changed where, for example, slave
owners became feudal lords or feudal lords became capitalist landowners.
The relationship between political and social revolutions is complex. Some
revolutions, which taken by themselves appear to be merely political revolu-
tions, are in fact the opening or concluding episode of a more extended social
revolution. In relation to the bourgeois revolution, the English Revolution of
1688 has this relationship to the revolution of 1640. Reversing the chronologi-
cal order of importance, the American Revolution of 1776 has the same rela-
tionship to the Civil War of 18611865. Some revolutions conclude as political
revolutions because they fail as social revolutions. In relation to the socialist
revolution, this is clearly the case with the German Revolution of 1918. A simi-
lar case could also be made for the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, the
Portuguese Revolution of 19741975 and indeed most of the so-called demo-
cratic revolutions to have taken place since. Some revolutions that conclude as
being merely political actually involve far greater social upheavals, far
more mass involvement than successful social revolutions. The Iranian
Revolution a political revolution in my terms confused many analysts for
precisely this reason (see, for example, Skocpol 1994, 240243). Egypt is a
more immediately relevant case in point. Nassers coup of July 1952 was a
decisive instance of (bourgeois) social revolution in Egypt, while the process
which began with Mubaraks resignation on 11 February 2011, while involving
mass mobilizations on a colossal scale, did not even achieve the outcome of a
political revolution, since the coup of 3 July 2013 restored the military to
power and effectively constituted a successful counter-revolution (Roberts
2013, 6).
Defining the Eastern European Revolutions (1)
On the basis of the preceding discussion, what kind of revolutions were those
which overthrew the eastern European regimes? It is first important to estab-
lish that they were revolutions rather than counter-revolutions. The latter are
attempts to either overthrow a recently established revolutionary regime, to
halt a revolution in progress, or to pre-emptively destroy the possibility of a
revolutionary movement achieving power in the first place, although these sit-
uations can obviously overlap. The Nazis and their supporters, for example,
certainly feared a socialist revolution, which had threatened at various points
between 1918 and 1923, but their political goal was pre-emptive, not reactive:
they wanted to end the possibility of socialist revolution ever happening. As
this example suggests, counter-revolution is intended to defend the existing
socio-economic order against the majority of the population.
116 N. DAVIDSON
There are therefore two reasons why the movements which overthrew the
eastern European and Russian regimes between 1989 and 1991 cannot be
assimilated to the category of counter-revolution. One is their popular basis.
As Gareth Dale writes of the Eastern German experience:
a period of 40 years in which collective action was systematically suppressed

was thunderously brought to an end, as the country was rocked by some 2,600
public demonstrations, over 300 rallies, over 200 strikes, a dozen factory occu-
pations and army mutinies. From a total population of 17 million at least sev-
eral million (and perhaps as many as five million) people took part, giving a
glimpse of the potential that arises when established order breaks down in the
face of collective protest. (Dale 2009, 67; see also Dale 2006)
The other is simply that the revolutions occurred far too long after the regimes
were established: In reality, the old regime preceding the revolutions of 1989
to 1991 was no longer an experiment, but a post-revolutionary, imperialist dic-
tatorship dressed up in the language of Marxist ideology (Daniels 2000, 202).
If we reject the category of counter-revolution then, but accept for the
moment that the revolutions took place in communist societies against com-
munist states, the answer to the question concerning their nature is clear:
they were social revolutions involving a systemic shift between two different
kinds of economy and society. In Marxist terms, there was a transition from
one mode of production to another: but from which to which?
There are those in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the post-communist
world who speak today of a return to capitalism. They are wrong in more
ways than one, but above all in clinging to Marxs mistaken assumption that
socialism succeeds capitalism. In fact, the opposite is the case. capitalism
succeeds socialismin those countries where the socialist option was the
chosen method of entering the modern world. (Dahrendorf 1990, 46)
Dahrendorf means that the majority of eastern European states were not capi-
talist before the Stalinist takeovers, and so had effectively gone from feudal-
ism directly to socialism, and then to capitalism. Here, we can detect the
ghostly presence of modernization theory: socialism is simply an undesirable
if widespread entry point to industrialization, or modernity more generally.
However, even if we accept the assessment of eastern Europe prior to 1945 as
pre-capitalist, in the important cases of Czechoslovakia and East Germany,
1989 did involve a reversion to capitalism, opening the possibility that that
may be a fourth epochal kind of social revolution, an additional one to those
envisaged by Marxists: from communism back to capitalism. In socio-economic
terms, this would also be true for Russia itself. The Russian social formation
[before 1917] was a complex ensemble dominated by the capitalist mode of
production, writes Perry Anderson, channelling Lenins extensive writings on
the subject (Anderson 1974, 355).
Counter-intuitive though it may seem, however, the potential for treating
the eastern European events as examples of social revolution constituted a
problem for Western ruling classes and their ideologues. The nature of that
problem was revealed by the coincidence of the bicentennial commemorations
for the Great French Revolution occurring only months before the revolutions
of 1989 began. Margaret Thatcher commented on both events in her memoirs:
The French Revolution was a Utopian attempt to overcome a traditional order

one with many imperfections, certainly in the name of abstract ideas, for-
mulated by vain intellectuals, which lapsed, not through chance but through
weakness and wickedness, into purges, mass murder and war. In so many ways
it anticipated the still more terrible Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The English
tradition of liberty, however, grew over the centuries: its most marked fea-
tures are continuity, respect for law and a sense of balance, as demonstrated
by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. (Thatcher 1993, 753)
Thatcher actually spends more time criticizing the French Revolution, in her
reflections on the bicentennial, than she does celebrating the Easter European
revolutions, which are mentioned in passages notable for their sobriety: But
no matter how much I rejoiced at the overthrow of communism in eastern and
central Europe I was not going to allow euphoria to extinguish either reason or
prudence (Thatcher 1993, 790). In part this was simply a calculation of the
likely detrimental geopolitical consequences of the reunification of Germany
on the UK, but there was also something deeper involved.
Bourgeois ideology, incarnate in the utterances of the late Prime Minister,
has to reject the very idea of social revolution: capitalism is natural and con-
sequently, eternal. The only social revolutions are wicked and terrible
attempts to re-establish society on a non-capitalist basis. But it is not only the
outcome of these attempts which must be resisted, it is the very idea of the
mass collective endeavour required to achieve them. One can therefore appre-
ciate the nature of the difficulty presented by the revolutions of 1989.
Although the occasion for unbridled bourgeois triumphalism at the fall of com-
munism, the resulting change of system meant that these revolutions had to
be regarded as social in nature; but they could not be presented as such with-
out the risk of legitimating social revolution in general, not just in response to
regimes to which the West was opposed.
A solution of sorts was offered to eastern Europeans in the editorial columns
of The Economist immediately prior to the outbreak of the 1989 revolutions.
The leading journal of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism warned potential revolution-
aries that they should take their inspiration from Thatchers revolution of
choice, 1688, or rather its North American extension in 1776 two revolutions
which, considered in isolation from the civil wars which respectively preceded
and succeeded them, were classic examples of political revolution. The argu-
ment that the American Revolution was the only one worth emulating precisely
because it was purely political had originally been made by Hannah Arendt in
the early 1960s and was deployed by neoconservatives during the bicentennial
of 1776 (Arendt 1973, 5556, 142, 144, 156; Kristol 1973, 812). Now, The
Economist went so far as to propose 1776 as the missing pivot of global
118 N. DAVIDSON
history, for it is tempting to believe that the world would have been a
happier place had the seminal revolution of the eighteenth century had been
not the French but the American one. Is it possible that the eastern Euro-
peans, whose societies were clearly on the eve of major reforms at least,
might now learn the lessons ignored over the previous two hundred years? If
they are ever to abandon the philosophical underpinnings of the Bolshevik rev-
olution and its Chinese equivalent (most of the communist revolutions were
imposed from above), they would be wise not to be seduced by 1789 and all
that but to go back to 1776. It is a pity they did not do so in 1917 (The Econo-
mist 1989, 14). Similar views were expressed, after the 1989 revolutions but
before the collapse of the USSR, in Russia itself. By 1990 one former Soviet
Historian, E. B. Chernyak, was arguing,Revolutions (like the French and Rus-

sian) that attempt to abolish the existing order entirely should be deemed less
radical than organic revolutions (like the American), which build on existing
institutions rather than destroying them. And the reason they were able to do
so? By reducing future social conflict, revolutions of the second sort create
more favourable conditions for economic growth (quoted in Foner 2002, 79).
The entire revolutionary process from 1989 to 1992 was deemed by Western
politicians and their media echo chambers to have been appropriately political
and suitably devoid of the utopian social impulses which Thatcher saw as
the root of all evil; but at least some social and political scientists realized
that this outcome had implications for our understanding of revolutions. Writ-
ing in 1990, when the situation was still in flux, Robert Dix identified three
dilemmas which it posed for theory. First is the question of whether change
in eastern Europe has been genuinely fundamental, especially, but not only, in
the areas of economic and social policy, and in social structure. If the extent
of the transition from state to private property was soon obvious, Dixs other
two dilemmas concerned agency and process and therefore had longer term
implications. One was that the revolutions were not the massive class uphea-
vals that are among the principal marks distinguishing great or social revolu-
tions from coups, rebellions, and political revolutions:
Only if one thinks of the apparatchiks of the old regimes in terms of Milovan
Djilass new class can the revolutions of eastern Europe be thought of as
massive class upheavals; moreover, it even appears that many bureaucrats may
preserve their old positions in the new order, especially at the lower and
intermediate levels.
The other was the absence of revolutionary violence, for if revolutions are by
definition violent, most of eastern Europes recent upheavals surely do not
qualify as suchthe principal instruments of change have been nonviolent
general strikes and mass demonstrationsand even in Romania the violence
was short-lived and by comparative revolutionary standards not very extensive
(Dix 1990, 230231).
These observations were made in the course of the revolutions themselves,

when they might be expected to have a provisional character; but writing
shortly before the twenty-fifth anniversary, Mann essentially confirmed Dixs
assessment. The Fall differed from the Bolshevik Revolution (Mann 2013a,
179). On this point virtually everyone including the present author is
agreed (for virtually the sole exception, see Bauman 1994, 16). Mann, how-
ever, goes much further in questioning the status of the eastern European
revolutions. The usual term for this [type of revolution] is a revolution from
above, but was it a revolution at all? (Mann 2013a, 264; see also 198199).
So, we have a process which at best is classifiable as political revolution and is
perhaps not even that, which nevertheless leads to an outcome which appar-
ently involves a fundamental socio-economic transformation. How can this

contradiction be resolved?
Two Aspects of Stalinism (1): Counter-revolution
The claim that the eastern European revolutions were political in nature is only
dissonant with their outcomes if we accept that the states which they over-
threw were indeed socialist or communist; if, in other words, we accept the
self-description of their ruling classes, which was of course agreed by their
Western opponents. At this point in the discussion it may be useful to recall a
cautionary note issued by Marx in relation to the problem of ideology:
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so
one cannot judge a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on
the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of
material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production
and the relations of production. (Marx 1975, 426)
In other words, in the context of this discussion, even if the Stalinists them-
selves believed the societies they ruled were socialist, we are not obliged to
accept the validity of their assertions, and this also applies to the beliefs of
their Western opposite numbers. Why not?
izek recounts the following story about J. K. Galbraith:
Z
Before a trip to USSR in the late 1950s, he wrote to his anti-Communist friend
Sidney Hook: Dont worry, I will not be seduced by the Soviets and return
home claiming they have socialism! Hook answered him promptly: But thats
what worries me that you will return claiming USSR is NOT socialist! What
worried Hook was the nave defence of the purity of the concept: if things go
wrong with building a socialist society, this does not invalidate the idea itself,
it just means we didnt implement it properly. (Ziz
ek 2014, 20)
izek spectacularly misunderstands the nature of Hooks concerns and, by

Z
extension, those of the US ruling classes for which by this stage in his career
the latter was acting as an apologist. Far from being worried about the
120 N. DAVIDSON
purity of the concept, for them the USSR had to be socialist, had to act as an
Awful Warning of the dangers of attempting to overthrow capitalism. Any sug-
gestion that the USSR was something other than socialism, let alone that it
was a form of capitalism, and that socialist revolution was therefore possible
with a different and genuinely liberatory outcome was, to put it mildly, highly
inconvenient. This ideological position had two components.
The first related to the USSR in particular. For the equation of socialism
with totalitarianism to be effective, it had to be valid for the entire period
since 1917, a position that Stephen Cohen calls the continuity thesis. There
could be no differences, except in degree, between Russia under Lenin and
Russia under Stalin; the period from 1917 to 1991 must constitute an indivisible
whole (Cohen 1985, 4043). In a way this merely supports the Stalinist
perspective on developments in Russia, but with a negative rather than posi-
tive gloss one also shared, in many respects, by anarchists and libertarian
socialists, although they are usually prepared to acknowledge the independent
role of the working class in the revolution itself in a way that Cold War
Liberals and Stalinists are not (Acton 1990, 2848).
The second component was that not just the USSR but all the Stalinist
regimes had to be collectively treated as the inevitable outcome of attempting
to carry out the Marxist programme: they represented the realization of Marx-
ism, not a deviation from it. We might call this the legitimacy thesis. Its
claims were often found convincing even by otherwise radical figures. The US
rock critic Richard Goldstein, for example, reports in his autobiography the
impact of a visit to Czechoslovakia organized by the CIA-sponsored National
Student Association in 1967: The trip to Prague was the most important politi-
cal experience of my life. It demolished my faith in Marxism as a system, and
made freedom seem much more concrete. Goldstein is self-aware enough to
comment: I suppose this was the impression that the CIA and its student
fronts hoped Id come away with (Goldstein 2015, 53). He does not however
allow this correct supposition to impinge on his conclusions.
Both the continuity and legitimacy theses treat the Stalinist outcome of the
Russian Revolution as all but inevitable. The Bolshevik faction of the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party had apparently always intended to establish a
one-party dictatorship, its formula for dominance allegedly having been set
out in Lenins 1902 pamphlet, What is to be done? Anyone taking the trouble
to actually read this fabled text, rather than relying on the Black Legend, will
however not encounter a programme for totalitarian domination, but a contri-
bution to an internal debate about how a revolutionary socialist party should
organize in a vast country with a minority working class and no democratic
institutions, which is ruled by a feudal absolutist autocracy. Much of it is
devoted to a discussion increasingly incomprehensible to activists born in an
age of electronic news media about the need for an all-Russian newspaper
to give organizational and ideological coherence to the party (Draper 1999; Lih
2005, 1333).
A more plausible explanation for the emergence of Stalinism might be found

by concentrating on actual conditions in Russia during and after its subjection
to World War, blockade, civil war and counter-revolutionary foreign invasion.
By 1920 Petrograd had lost 57.5% of its population and Moscow 44.5%; industry
had all but collapsed and in the two most extreme cases, iron ore and cast
iron, production fell to 1.6 and 2.4% of pre-war levels (Carr 1966, 197198).
Economic disintegration on this scale was historically unprecedented. Michael
Haynes notes that, when the civil war ended, on average some 17 cartloads
of filth were taken from every house in Moscow and concludes: Piles of
excrement, cholera and typhoid were no basis for a leap into the realm of
freedom (Haynes 1985, 63). Materialist considerations of this sort, tediously
mundane though they undoubtedly are in comparison with idealist fantasies

about Lenins Will to Power, are of more relevance to the eventual outcome
than a document from twenty years earlier which Lenin himself regarded as
being of purely historical interest. Nevertheless, as Keven Murphy reminds us,
it is not the case that all was lost even after the tribulations of 19171921:
Despite the utter devastation of seven years of war and civil war, Soviet citi-
zens could openly criticise the re
gime; they had the right to practice their reli-
gion; workers continued to have considerable control in the factories; seven
hundred thousand women participated in the proletarian womens movement;
the re
gime enacted favourable policies for national minorities, and the peas-
antry for the most part, was left alone. All of this of changed, of course, dur-
ing the First Five-Year Plan, when coercion and repression supplanted
tolerance and persuasion in every aspect of Soviet society. (Murphy 2007, 17)
Murphys final sentence points to the central problem with the continuity the-
sis: there is actually a profound discontinuity in the history of the USSR. It is
not that Cold War academics are unaware of the significance of this moment.
Take this passage, chosen virtually at random, from an early 1960s collection
on the strategic use of political violence by Communists:
The pattern of policies now generally accepted as Communist was not evolved
in the Soviet Union until a decade after the Revolution of 1917 and it is signifi-
cant that Marxism did not provide any more than very general indications as to
the policies of the new state. These had to be worked out by trial and error,
and did not take their present form until the inauguration of the First Five-
Year Plan in 1928. (Black 1964, 15)
But as Cohen has pointed out, recognition of the turning point represented by
1928 can be made compatible with the continuity thesis: While most Western
theorists of Soviet totalitarianism saw Stalins upheaval of 19291933 as a
turning point, they interpreted it not as discontinuity but as a continuation,
culmination, or breakthrough in an already ongoing process of creeping
totalitarianism (Cohen 1985, 43). It is not entirely clear to me how something
being transformed into its opposite can be described as a culmination.
122 N. DAVIDSON
More appropriate terms to describe the break of 1928 might be found in

the categories of revolution I discussed in the previous section. The cadres of
the Stalinist bureaucracy certainly regarded what they had achieved as a revo-
lution. The distinguishing feature of this revolution is that it was accom-
plished from above, in the initiative of the state, wrote propagandists of the
regime in 1938, under the guidance of Stalin himself (Commission of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)
1943, 305). As Haynes has pointed out, however, there is a word missing from
the description offered above: what began in 1928 was not a revolution, of
either the political or social kinds, but a counter-revolution from above not
in 19891991, but sixty years earlier (Haynes 2002, 8895). C.L.R. James
explains what drove the bureaucracy onto this path:
In Russia by 1928, from a revolution, exhausted and desperate, and seeing in

the world around it no gleam of hope, arose the same social type as the Nazis
administrators, executives, organizers, labour leaders, intellectuals. Their
primary aim is not world revolution. They wish to build factories and power
stations larger than all others which have been built. (James 1978, 12)
The notion of a counter-revolutionary break in the history of the USSR clearly

has implications for what we think about its nature and that of its subsequent
satellites and imitators. In fact, the case for their not being regarded as social-
ist is extremely strong. As we saw in the case of Dix, some commentators on
the revolutions of 1989 felt able to refer to eastern Europe as socialist while
simultaneously describing these societies, in terms derived from the Yugosla-
vian dissident communist Milovan Djilas, as being ruled by a New Class,
either not noticing or not understanding the contradiction (Dahrendorf 1990,
46; Dix 1990, 231, 234; Djilas 1957, 3769). Why was this not socialism? As
Moshe Lewin writes:
Socialism involves ownership of the means of production by society, not a

bureaucracy. It has always been conceived of as a deepening not a rejection
of political democracy. To persist in speaking of Soviet socialism is to
engage in a veritable comedy of errors. Assuming socialism is feasible, it would
involve socialization of the economy and democratization of the polity alike.
If, confronted with a hippopotamus, someone insisted it was a giraffe, would
he or she be given a chair in zoology? Are the social sciences really that much
less exact than zoology? (Lewin 2005, 379)
As Lewin suggests, this position does not commit one to the position that
socialism is feasible: it may be, as Leszek Kolakowski once claimed, that the
Marxist vision could not be realized in any way other than that of a totalitar-
ian state; but that is a different matter (Kolakowski 1978, 171). Nor does it
commit one to any positive conception of what the USSR was Lewin himself
believed it be bureaucratic absolutism (Lewin 2005, 280). I will return to this
issue ; for the moment the point is simply that the USSR was not socialist. The
outcome of the revolutions of 1989 made it possible for hitherto loyal
communists to admit this. Eric Hobsbawm said in an interview shortly after

the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the USSR obviously wasnt a workers state
nobody in the Soviet Union ever believed that it was a workers state, and the
workers knew it wasnt a workers state (Hobsbawm 1990).
The problem this apparently poses for socialists has been well-expressed by
Gregory Elliot:
For, if the USSR and the Second World were not in any sense socialist, then
there never has been socialism; and hence its feasibility as a systemic alterna-
tive to capitalism remains undemonstrated an inviolate ideal, rather than a
proven potential. (Elliot 1998, 236)
I think there are two fundamental problems with this argument, one of which I
will address later. For our present purposes, the relevant difficulty is that it
essentially accepts the continuity thesis. But this is quite unnecessary: to claim
that the USSR was not in any sense socialist at the point of collapse does not
commit one to claiming that it was never in any sense socialist at any point in
its history. We do, however, need to make our terminology more precise.
Rather than socialism, the expression used by Hobsbawm, workers state,
is the appropriate one here.
None of the Bolshevik leaders, least of all Lenin, imagined that Russia had
achieved socialism simply by virtue of overthrowing the Tsarist regime in Octo-
ber 1917. I have no illusions about our having only just entered the period of
transition to socialism, he said in January 1918, about not yet having
reached socialism (Lenin 1964b, 464). Four months later, he noted that the
Russian economy still contained five intermingled socio-economic structures:
patriarchal or natural peasant farming, small commodity production, private
capitalism, state capitalism and socialism. His point was that Russia was not a
socialist state, it was a workers state, defined not by state ownership of the
economy but by whether the working class exercised political rule, by whether
the Soviet state is a state in which the power of the workers and the poor is
assured (Lenin 1965a, 335336, 339). In May 1918, this was still true, if only
just; but by the Eighth Congress of the Soviets in 1920 Lenin had to point out
to Trotsky that not only the economy involved non-socialist characteristics:
the workers state itself was becoming increasingly subject to non-proletarian
class influences from the majority peasant population. Shortly after this discus-
sion, Lenin returned to the subject, adding that it also had bureaucratic
distortions (Lenin 1965b, 24; Lenin 1965c, 48).
However imperfect working-class democracy became relatively soon after
October, it was real and in this respect the Russian Revolution was unlike any
subsequent communist revolution (the actual class components of which I
discuss below), for it did involve the actual industrial working class, not only
as strikers, demonstrators and insurgents, but even more importantly as the
original basis for rule by the workers councils (soviets). We know this partly
because, unlike most revisionist accounts of particular revolutions, which
124 N. DAVIDSON
seek to minimize their radicalism or represented it as irrational acts of

violence (above all in relation to the English and French), those concerned
with the Russian Revolution have emphasized popular involvement, drawing on
the social history of the working-class movement (Acton 1990, 5582, 97106,
117128, 133134, 136137, 140, 143145, 146147, 151152, 156166,
177181, 182209).
What then was the USSR after the counter-revolution of 1928? In effect, it
had regressed to a capitalist stage that it had already transcended, albeit in a
new form. During the 1970s, one Russian dissident, Boris Weil, told a leftist
gathering in Italy: After countless heated discussion, I and my co-thinkers in
the USSR have for a long time been in no doubt about the correctness of the
term state capitalism (Weil 1979, 94). Around the same time, a Ukrainian
worker called Mykola Pohyba, then serving his second term of imprisonment in
a penal colony for the crime of campaigning for workers rights (slanderous
activities), arrived at similar conclusions. In a letter smuggled out from his
prison in Bucha and published in the West, he wrote:
I came to the conclusion that ultimately it is the state which is the exploiter
along with the State-party bourgeoisie which is in its service and which is the
one wielding the real power in the country. In short our country is actually
a State capitalist society with a totalitarian form of government. (Pohyba
1981)
The idea of state capitalism first emerged a hundred years before these citi-
zens of the USSR decided it was the most appropriate term for their country.
Appropriately enough, it did so from within the Classical Marxist tradition. The
hring,
first use of the concept, if not the actual term, was by Engels in Anti-Du
where he noted the way in which capitalist states were increasingly encroach-
ing onto the preserves of private capital through control or even outright own-
ership (Engels 1987, 266). Engels point, subsequently elaborated by German
Social Democrats opposed to Revisionism in the 1890s, was that the expansion
of the state into economic life had nothing to do with socialism, but merely
centralized existing capitalist relations of production (see, for example, Lux-
emburg 1973, 2829). This was generally accepted among the left and centre
of the Second International before the First World War: Nan Milton, the daugh-
ter and biographer of Scottish socialist John Maclean noted that revolutionaries
objected to the reformist panacea, nationalisation, which all Marxists consid-
ered would lead to a kind of state capitalism, rather than to state socialism
(Milton 1973, 53). Perhaps the most theoretically developed version of the
argument was that of the Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, in a book written
immediately prior to the Russian Revolution:
We have here the process of accelerated centralisation within the framework

of the state capitalist trust, which has developed to the highest form, not of
State Socialism, but of State Capitalism. By no means do we see here a new
structure of production, i.e. a change in the interrelation of classes; on the
contrary, we have here an increase in the potency of the power of a class that
owns the means of production in quantities hitherto unheard of. It follows
that (as far as capitalism will retain its foothold) the future belongs to eco-
nomic forms that are close to state capitalism. (Bukharin 1972. 157, 158)
This was an accurate prediction, at least for the period down to the advent of
the neoliberal era in the 1970s. What neither Bukharin nor anyone else could
have foreseen, however, was that forms close to state capitalism would
emerge from the internal decay of a temporarily successful workers revolu-
tion. Anarchist, ultra-left and social democratic critics of the Russian Revolu-
tion declared that the Bolshevik regime presided over a form of state
capitalism almost from the moment that the Provisional Government fell in
October 1917, largely on the mechanistic grounds that the bourgeois revolution
and, consequently, capitalist development was all that Russia was capable of
achieving. Since the Bolsheviks and their allies were evidently not presiding
over a state in which private capital was dominant, it must therefore be
state capitalism. A more serious position was taken by left critics from within
the Bolshevik Party, who argued, from 1918 through to the final crushing of all
dissent in 1928, that state capitalism was indeed a danger, but not an achieved
fact (Daniels 1964, 8187, 154156, 255, 261, 296). It was only after 1928, by
which time it had become an achieved fact, that these arguments were taken
up outside the USSR (van der Linden 2007, 4963, 107126, 160161,
180193, 258280).
The most intellectually credible versions were made by dissident Trotskyists
in the late 1940s, but in doing so they had to break with the positions of Trot-
sky himself. By far the weakest sections of his otherwise path-breaking 1937
analysis of the USSR, The Revolution Betrayed, are those in which he attempts
to justify his definition of it as a degenerated workers state, or even as
in this quotation a proletarian state:
The nationalization of land, the means of industrial production, transport and

exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitute the basis of
the Soviet social structure. Through these relations, established by the prole-
tarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us
basically defined. (Trotsky 1972, 248)
As Tony Cliff points out, in what was the first thoroughly scientific version of
the theory of state capitalism, this contradicts Trotskys own earlier definition
of a workers state which he shared with Lenin as one in which the work-
ing class holds actual political power (Cliff 2003a, 35). To define a workers
state as in terms of a state-run economy is to engage in metaphysics where
juridical relations are treated as if they represent the collective will of social
classes. But who controls the state? Who is planning and what is being planned?
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Trotskys argument, at least for anyone
opposed to the myth that Stalinism equals socialism, is that none of the
features which he treats as definitional were established by the proletarian
126 N. DAVIDSON
revolution; on the contrary, complete nationalization, the Five-Year Plans,

collectivization and the rest were established at the moment of Stalinist
ascendancy in 1928. They constitute the final break with 1917, not the
culmination of its goals.
Why was the First Five-Year Plan such a turning point? For the first time the
bureaucracy now sought the rapid creation of the proletariat and accumulation
of capital, in other words, as quickly as possible to realize the historical mis-
sion of the bourgeoisie. (Cliff 2003, 56 and 3156 more generally)
In another area of agreement between World Systems Theory and dissident

Trotskyism, Immanuel Wallerstein, came to similar conclusions about the role

of the Stalinist bureaucracy in realizing the historical mission of the
bourgeoisie:
The very objective of socialism in one country what I have designated as the
mercantilist strategy of catching up involved the assumption by socialist
parties of what was once upon a time thought to be the historic task of the
bourgeoisie the the primitive accumulation of capital, the destruction of the
feudal fetters, the total commodification of all the factors of production. It
is an historic fact of the twentieth century that communist parties in power
have done at least as much as transnational corporations to extend the domain
of the law of value. (Wallerstein 1984, 94)
Is the theory of state capitalism simply another variant of the once-popular

notion of convergence between the First and Second Worlds? One classic
statement of the position claimed that: Each industrialised society is more
like every other industrialised society however great the differences among
them might be than any industrialised society is like any pre-industrialised
society (Kerr et al. 1973, 56). If we were to substitute the phrases societies
based on the capitalist mode of production for industrial societies and
pre-capitalist for pre-industrial this sentence would be nearer the truth,
but still inaccurate. Rather than converging, capitalist states West, East and
South existed on a continuum of state intervention, with two extremes, the
USA and the USSR, at opposite ends of the scale. As Paul Mattick writes: Aris-
ing at the same time as the mixed economy, the state-capitalist system may
be regarded as Keynesianism in its most developed and consistent form
(Mattick 1971, 279280). It is perhaps easier to see this in retrospect. Kate
Brown asks:
What would happen, then, if we discarded all that we know about the polari-
ties of communism and capitalism and, just for the sake of argument, explored
the spatial affinities? With this approach, it may turn out that historians and
politicians in both countries have focused to the point of obfuscation on the
differences between Soviet communism and American capitalism and ignored
the parallels produced by the industrial-capital expansions of the twentieth
century. After all, a mirror image, the Soviet Union and United States, is just
the same form reflected backward. We may even recognize how the two
countries followed similar paths of development and destruction that differ

more in scale than form. (Brown 2001, 2122)
At the conclusion of her illuminating comparison of industrial cities in the USA

and USSR, Brown points out that both states were centrally concerned to sup-
press the resistance of workers to the dictates of capitalist industrialization,
to fix social relations in place:
Thus, despite the fact that both the United States and Soviet Union were
founded on revolution and grew through rapid urbanization, leaders in both
countries distrusted the revolutionary and spontaneous quality of urban space
and worked to destroy it. With straight lines and the force of the grid, Soviet
and American leaders planned new garden cities cut through with wide,
rebellion-proof avenues, which negated the unpredictability and anarchy of
nineteenth-century cities. As a result, both expanding American corporate
power and expanding Soviet party-state power etched an anti-revolutionary
conservatism onto twentieth-century urban scapes. (Brown 2001, 4647)
Why then were the two camps in such potentially lethal opposition if both
were fundamentally capitalist? It is this apparently systemic conflict that
allows Halliday to describe the effect of the revolutions of 1989 as nothing
less than the defeat of the communist project as it has been known in the
twentieth century and the triumph of the capitalist:
This is so evidently the case that it provides retrospective validation of the

inter-systemic interpretation of cold war. The linkage of international change
and relaxation of tension with the internal collapse of communism and the
spread of capitalist relations into the former bloc states illustrates just how
the course of inter-state rivalry correlated with internal, systemic difference.
The course of recent events should, moreover, underline to those who ever
doubted it, the degree to which there did exist in the communist states a
system based on different social and economic criteria. If all had been capital-
ist, or subject to the workings of the international capitalist market, there
would have been no need for EastWest conflict and no need now for radical
reorganization of post-communist societies. (Halliday 1990, 12)
But capitalist nation-states had, after all, been known to maintain long-term
hostility to each other before the onset of the Cold War think of France and
Germany between 1870 and 1945 and to go to war with catastrophic effect,
notably in 1914 and 1939. In the case of the Cold War, however, there were
two additional reasons.
First, prolonged state rivalries need to be ideologically justified, not least if
there are enemies within who sympathize or support a rival. Brown notes of
the Cold war variant:
the decades of focusing on political systems and ideology appear in retro-

spect as a prolonged exercise in self-definition. Neither country could have
existed without the other, because each country used its communist/capitalist
nemesis as the self-justifying point of departure; each country projected a
128 N. DAVIDSON
mirror image of the other in order to define and produce itself so as to rule.
Without the spectre of the counter-revolutionary capitalist or the subversive
communist, each country would have had a much harder time defining the
abnormal and the dangerous; it would have been more difficult to appropriate
the power to condemn and exclude, to coax and coerce into conformity. In
short, by straining away the mountains of verbiage encircling the Cold War, we
may find the Soviet Union and the United States share a great deal in common.
(Brown 2001, 22)
By the late 1990s Russia had begun to recover from the initial post-Soviet
neoliberal demolition of its economy. The USA immediately resumed a strategy
of destabilizing Russia and weakening its political position, above all trying to
prevent reconciliation with the Western European states (Kagarlitsky 2004,

262265; Todd 2003, 146147). Russia is no longer communist, but this has
not stopped politicians and commentators referring to a new Cold War
between states which everyone regards as capitalist although Russia of
course now has the wrong kind of capitalism: gangster, oligarchic and
so on (Lucas 2008). At the very least this suggests that Russias geopolitical
position as a rival imperialism would have led to rivalry with the USA even if
the Russian Revolution had never taken place.
Second, different forms of capitalist organization can involve class fractions
with distinct interests. Mattick noted that the displacement of the market
system by the planned system or the complete supersession of private capital
by state capital, would be experienced by individual capitalists as their death
warrant, and would not be accepted by them without opposition or even, as
Mattick suggested, civil war (Mattick 1971, 204). The same is also true on
the other side, as any attempt to reintroduce private capital into wholly state
capitalist economies would mean that some sections of the bureaucratic ruling
class would lose their privileged positions in a situation of market competition
as many did after 1991, particularly in former East Germany, although in
Russia perhaps as much as 80% still managed to transform themselves into
private capitalists or managers (Haynes 2002, 210214).
Two Aspects of Stalinism (2): Bourgeois Revolution
While the Stalinist second revolution of 1928 represented the counter-revo-

lution in Russia, it did however play a different role in the rest of the world,
particularly in those areas which constituted the colonial and semi-colonial
world, as it was still known at the time. As Perry Anderson writes of the
Communist parties which led revolutions there:
The states they created were to be manifestly cognate (not identical: affinal)
with the USSR, in their basic political system. Stalinism, in other words, proved
to be not just an apparatus, but a movement one capable not only of keep-
ing power in a backward environment dominated by scarcity (USSR); but of
actually winning power in environments that were yet more backward and
destitute (China, Vietnam) of expropriating the bourgeoisie and starting the

slow work of socialist construction, even against the will of Stalin himself.
(Anderson 1983, 57)
As we have seen, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is not decisive if a

bureaucracy simply steps into its role as the personification of capital and if
capitalist relations of production are otherwise maintained in the socialist
fields and factories. Anderson is correct, however, to identify Stalinism as an
international movement, mobilizing similar social forces although not
working class forces. According to James the cause of the revolts in (what was
about to be christened) the Third World was not the existence of the USSR,
but
the fact that in every type of country, the most highly developed and the most
backward, have arisen tens of thousands of educated men who are ready to
do in their own country exactly what the Communists are doing in Russia and
look to Russia as their fatherland. (James 1978, 13)
But although such people might have existed in every country, they did not
equal possibilities of coming to power; in arguing the opposite James came
dangerously close to giving a left colouration to the Western Cold War paranoia
about the Global Communist Threat. In fact, as Michal Reiman writes:
The real key to the problem of the recurrence of Stalinism in other countries
lies in the circumstances and tasks faced by some countries developing their
economies at an accelerated pace, a situation similar to that faced by the
USSR. (Reiman 1988, 129)
Stalinist parties did therefore play a revolutionary role, in many cases as the
bearer of genuine social revolution; but it is important to be clear which kind
of social revolution. In fact, the revolutions which began in Vietnam in 1945
and ended there thirty years later are best understood as the form taken by
the bourgeois revolutions in the era of state capitalism. When the Russian
Revolution took place in October 1917 the majority of the world still lay under
the domination of similarly pre-capitalist states, often overlaid with colonial
rule. The Russian Revolution now offered a new way of achieving their libera-
tion. Bourgeois revolutions were still possible, but they were no longer neces-
sary, because of what Trotsky called permanent revolution: a process that
could enable the less developed countries to decisively break with feudal,
tributary, or colonial rule under working-class leadership and move directly to
socialism as components of an international revolutionary movement, as Russia
had begun to do in 1917:
Russia was so late in accomplishing her bourgeois revolution that she found
herself compelled to turn it into a proletarian revolution. Or in other words:
Russia was so far behind the other countries that she was compelled, at least
130 N. DAVIDSON
in certain spheres, to outstrip them. That seems inconsistent, but history is full
of such paradoxes. (Trotsky 1977, 507)
The process of permanent revolution, at least in the form identified by

Trotsky, opened up the possibility of an alternative path out of imperial
domination, leading not towards occupying a subordinate position of formal
independence within the capitalist system of nation-states, but towards a
socialist world in which both capitalism and nation-states would be historical
relics.
In 1963, Cliff introduced the concept of deflected permanent revolution:
the process that ensues when the working class does not carry through the
strategy identified by Trotsky and another social force takes on the role of
leadership, enabling the break with pre-capitalist modes of production or for-
eign domination to take place, but only in order for the countries in question
to become parts of the capitalist world system (Cliff 2003b). The revolutions
which followed the defeat of the Chinese working-class movement in the 1920s
took their inspiration not from the society promised by the Bolshevik revolu-
tion of 1917, but the one delivered by the Stalinist counterrevolution of 1928;
not the moment of working class self-emancipation, but that of the develop-
mental dictatorship hell-bent on industrialization at any human cost. On this
basis, the bourgeois revolutions now entered the period of their greatest pro-
liferation, adding many more to the roster in the two and a half decades
between the proclamation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 and the
fall of Haille Selassie in 1974 than had been achieved in the three and a half
centuries between the Dutch Revolt of 1567 and the Russian Revolutions of
1917. Whatever else they may have been writes Eugene Kamenka, these
revolutions represented the belated French Revolution of their societies
(Kamenka 1988, 90).
Concomitant with these developments, an extraordinary form of collective
false consciousness arose, first in Russia itself. For, as Cliff noted, the bureau-
crats did not cease to regard the societies they had created as socialism:
The reality of industrialization and collectivization turned out to be in absolute

contradiction to the hopes the masses had in them, and even to the illusions
which the bureaucracy themselves held. They thought the Five-Year Plans
would take Russia many strides forward to the building of socialism. This is not
the first time in history that the results of human actions are in outright con-
tradiction to the wishes and hopes of the actors themselves. (Cliff 2003a, 55)
Similar delusions then spread to the colonial and semicolonial world. Here
again, Marxs warning against simply accepting the self-description of social
actors retains its relevance. False consciousness had been a characteristic of
almost all previous bourgeois revolutions, but the level of cognitive dissonance
here was of quite a different order, because it did not involve an ideology that
was merely tangential to capitalism but one that was supposed to represent
the society that would succeed capitalism. Puritanism in revolutionary England
sought to establish the rule of the Saints and ended up facilitating the rule of
a very unsaintly landed, mercantile and banking elite; outside of Russia, Stalin-
ism sought to establish state capitalist societies and succeeded in doing so,
but mistook in most cases it appears quite sincerely what they had
achieved for socialism. This kind of self-misidentification tended to be present
at the early, most idealistic stages in the establishment of the state capitalist
regimes, when the processes of primitive accumulation and industrialization
required mass mobilizations. Once some kind of stability was achieved, cyni-
cism tended to set in and bureaucrats used the language and symbols in the
terms used by Milton in Paradise Lost, the outward rites and specious forms
of the socialist tradition in conventional ways (Milton 1961, 340). More pro-
saically, Paul Collier notes that in most nominally socialist states, the Marxist
ideology was a decorative veneer, a language of politeness appropriate for the
circles in which political leaders mixed, much as Christian sentiments must
have been de rigueur in the nineteenth-century drawing room (Collier 2009,
16). Reporting from Romania after the regimes had fallen, John Simpson
commented:
even though Ceausescu had died singing the hymn of international socialism
[i.e. The Internationale], the regime he led was MarxistLeninist only in name.
With his death the socialist fac ade in Romania crumbled immediately and
left scarcely a trace behind. It had been an affectation, a matter of a few
words (comrade, revolution, class enemy) and a few props (red flags,
stars, a nomenklatura). (Simpson 1992, 292)
Sometimes these affectations and props concealed very different views indeed.

Milan Simec ka, himself a member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party,
recalls that as early as 1969 it included people of every political hue includ-
ing dyed-in-the-wool anti-communists as well as sincere admirers of
Western consumer society, partisans of free-enterprise capitalism and
Rosenberg-style anti-Semites (Simec ka 1984, 36).
These modern bourgeois revolutionaries were not necessarily organized in
national communist parties formally affiliated to the Soviet Union in Africa
in particular they tended not to be nor did they necessarily look to full
state-capitalism on the Russian model as a goal; hybrids involving both state
and private capital, often combined with long-standing forms of petty-com-
modity production, were common as decolonization was achieved. In many
ways, these revolutionaries were not particularly different in class terms from
their predecessors between 1789 and 1848. In the colonial and semicolonial
world after 1945, the local capitalists tended to be very weak and, even when
not closely linked to the colonists, inherited the long-standing class fear of
mass involvement in any revolution. Members of the revolutionary intelli-
gentsia and the non-capitalist bourgeoisie more generally tended to treat the
capitalist bourgeoisie with contempt, which is one reason the former looked to
the state as an alternative (Fanon 1967, 143144). The hostility between the
capitalist and non-capitalist bourgeoisie in the colonial world during the
132 N. DAVIDSON
twentieth century was far greater than in Europe and the Americas during the
nineteenth. What remained similar was the sense of humiliation, and conse-
quently hatred, felt by members of the revolutionary non-capitalist bourgeoisie
for their oppressors in the old or colonial regime so obviously inferior to
them in every respect (Cabral 1969, 52).
This final phase in the history of the bourgeois revolutions involved two
main variants: one involved the overthrow of pre-capitalist states, preserved
beyond their natural life by one or other of the imperialist states for reasons
of geopolitical strategy or access to raw materials, usually oil; the other
involved the dismantling of actual colonial regimes that had constrained local
capitalist development in order to meet the economic requirements of the
metropolitan power. In the former, the process of transformation was initiated

by an army coup, as in Egypt in 1952, Libya in 1969, or Ethiopia in 1974
although the first example actually occurred before the advent of Stalinism
with the opening of the second phase of the Turkish Revolution after the First
World War (Davidson 2015, 361364). In the latter variant, the option of a
coup did not exist and the revolutions therefore tended to combine elements
of earlier bourgeois revolutions from below and above: from below in rela-
tion to the existing state, since it required an external military force usually
waging guerrilla warfare in the initial phases to overcome it; but from
above in relation to the popular masses, whose self-activity was either sup-
pressed, minimized or channelled into individual membership in an instrumen-
tally organized party-army apparatus. This was the pattern in China between
1928 and 1949, North Vietnam between 1945 and 1954 and Algeria between
1956 and 1962.
Yet it would be wrong to identify every episode of national liberation that
followed the Second World War as a bourgeois revolution. In other cases, such
as Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1948 and Cuba after 1959, external or internal
forces replaced one model of capitalism with another. In others cases, such as
that of India, liberation movements contributed towards making the position
of colonialists untenable, but the successor regimes simply inherited the state
apparatus bequeathed by the colonial power; native elites occupied the offices
vacated by the departing Westerners, while peasants and workers returned to
fields and factories as before. All these cases and many others were examples
of political revolutions, in which the class basis of the state remained essen-
tially unchanged. In still other cases, such as Malaya from 1947 to 1957 and
Kenya from 1952 to 1963, liberation movements were actually defeated prior
to British withdrawal, with independence then being granted on imperialist
terms; but the states and societies that emerged were no more or less capital-
ist than those in which the movements had succeeded. Between the two
extremes lay many states which combined elements of both, most in the post-
colonial world, particularly in those which were to be classified as the Newly
Industrializing Countries. What was the difference? One criteria of definition
was simply about the degree of state control, as Georgi Derluguian notes:
Whenever states moved to control everything down to peasant households, the

state was declared socialist. In states that seized only the properties of
foreigners and some particularly obscurantist or unpatriotic owners, like the
landlords and large comprador traders, the process and its result was called
nationalism. (Derluguian 2013, 125126)
More often, however, classification was a function of whether the states con-
cerned were politically aligned with the USSR or not. South Korea was part of
the Free World, but as Harris points out, its development was as state capi-
talist as any East European economy and as Keynesian as any West European
social democracy and, although a major contributor to the growth of world
trade, as regards the role of the state, it was as socialist as most of the
countries that applied that term to themselves (Harris 1986, 42).
Defining the Eastern European Revolutions (2)
We can now return to the nature of the eastern European revolutions for a sec-
ond attempt at definition. If, as I have argued, the revolutions which bought
them and the other Stalinist states into existence could be described as a par-
ticular form of social revolution, namely bourgeois revolution, could this term
also be applied to the revolutions which brought them to an end? During the
1970s one Russian Marxist dissident, Leonid Plyushch, like many of his com-
rades, regarded the regime that had imprisoned him in a psychiatric hospital
as presiding over a form of state capitalism in which even the limited forms of
representative democracy were denied. As a result, he argued, the political
tasks facing the Russian opposition were paradoxical: We still have to make
our bourgeois-political revolution even though we have already destroyed pri-
vate property: it is history back to front (Plyushch 1979, 42, 44). After the
fall of the Stalinist regimes, Colin Barker and Colin Mooers claimed that this
was effectively what had taken place: The East European revolutions make
sense as a species of bourgeois revolution. Barker and Mooers were rightly
insistent that capitalism was already the dominant mode of production in
eastern Europe, with the states themselves acting as collective capitalists.
Why then were bourgeois revolutions required?
Bourgeois revolutions may also occur within already constituted capitalist rela-
tions. Because capitalist development is both uneven and combined nations
not only leap over stages of development, they also fall backward. Capitalism
not only revolutionizes the means of production, it revolutionizes the political
conditions of its own existence. Specific state and regime forms become
impediments to further capitalist advance. (Barker and Mooers 1997, 35, 36)
Similar, if less theoretically informed claims were also made for the subse-
quent colour revolutions. One Ukrainian writer and intellectual, Olexander
Invanets, was reported on the BBC as describing the demonstrations in Kiev
134 N. DAVIDSON
during December 2004, which forced a rerun of the presidential elections, as

a Ukrainian bourgeois revolution (Denyenko 2004).
Rather than describe them as bourgeois revolutions, however, they seem to
me to be far better understood as examples of the broader category of politi-
cal revolution. In the capitalist epoch, as Barker and Mooers correctly point
out, revolutions are sometimes required to move from one form of capital
accumulation to another: Such were the nineteenth-century revolutions in
France, the German political transformations of 19181919, 1933, and 1945,
the Iberian revolutions of the 1970s and the Latin-American democratic transi-
tions of the 1980s (Barker and Mooers 1997, 36). But precisely because these
all remained within the confines of the capitalist mode of production, they can
only be defined as political, no matter how extreme the consequences in this

respect might be. As I have argued above, social revolutions are epochal
events involving change from one type of society to another and certainly not
only changes of government, however violently achieved. As Alex Callinicos
writes:
The social meaning of the East European revolutions was obscured by their
most visible aspect, the collapse of the Stalinist one-party state. But an eco-
nomically dominant class must be distinguished from the specific political form
through which it both secures its own cohesion and establishes its rule over
society. (Callinicos 1991, 57)
The fall of the Stalinist regimes was therefore less significant than either their
delighted Western opponents or depressed Western admirers believed. As
Harman wrote while the revolutions were still underway, the transition from
state capitalism to multinational capitalism is neither a step forward nor a
step backward, but a step sideways (Harman 1990, 82; see also 6467). The
problem, of course, was that those leftists who were critical of actually-exist-
ing socialism but still regarded it as a different and superior form of society
than capitalism, did perceive this as a step back. Again, it is Halliday who
best captures the feeling of desolation experienced by people with this
perspective:
Nothing could more vividly illustrate the import of the collapse of communism
in the period 19891991 than the experience of cities where the old order had
crumbled. To walk through the streets in Budapest or Moscow that had been
only months before ruled by communism, to see the collection of deposed stat-
ues Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Kalinin in the garden of the House of Artists in
Moscow, to cross at the former Checkpoint Charlie, where the Berlin wall once
stood and which I had often seen, or visit the gardens of the Lubkovic Palace,
the German embassy, in Prague where thousands of East Germans had sought
refuge in 1989, was to feel the passage of history before ones eyes. It seemed
as if all that the Bolshevik revolution had meant for world history, and that
indeed all that Revolution had meant, was now reduced to nothing. (Halliday
1999, xvi)
The elegiac tone reveals exactly how much a certain kind of Western-based
Marxist actually had invested in the existence of the Stalinist regimes, an
investiture which only became fully apparent once they ceased to exist. What
feeds this nostalgia for Stalinism and gives it a superficial validity, is less the
nature of the fallen regimes themselves, as the effects of what followed on
the populations. The majority of the eastern European regimes, in addition to
routinized repression, also provided some level of social welfare, leading to
low infant mortality and high life expectancy at birth as is still the case in
Cuba (Tama s 2011, 3435; Morris 2014, 89). None of this remains. Seamus
Milne, after noting how the revolutions of 1989 led to rejoicing across the
political spectrum, from free-market conservatives to the far left, points out
what happened next in Russia itself:
Far from opening the way to emancipation, these changes led to beggary for
most citizens, ushering in the most cataclysmic peacetime economic collapse
of an industrial country in history. Under the banner of reform and the guid-
ance of American-prescribed shock therapy, perestroika became catastroika.
Capitalist restoration brought in its wake mass pauperisation and unemploy-
ment; wild extremes of inequality; rampant crime; virulent anti-semitism and
ethnic violence; combined with legalised gangsterism on a heroic scale and
precipitous looting of public assets (Milne 2012, 17; for the figures, with special
reference to Russia, see Haynes and Hassan 2003, chapter 6).
Similar, if less extreme consequences followed elsewhere in Europe. There the

pattern of impoverishment for the masses was accompanied by, on the one
hand, the zealous embrace by former party bureaucrats of neoliberalism in an
even more extreme form than practiced in its Anglo-Saxon heartlands and, on
the other, by the emergence of the far-right in populist response to the social
traumas consequent first on the imposition of marketization, then the effects
of the 2008 crash: Hungary is perhaps the clearest example of the link between
the two processes (Fabry 2011; Kova cs 2013).
Yet the very nature of the catastrophe in eastern Europe suggests that the
absence of successful social revolutions since 1991 is not a consequence of the
downfall of actually existing socialism. There were no popular movements to
defend the regimes and have been none to restore them. Furthermore, it
strains credulity to imagine that the MENA revolutions failed because masses
involved no longer had the inspiring vision of the Peoples Republic of Hungary
before them as a model. It is true that there are no existing models for social-
ism, but that was true even when the regimes existed. Other factors were
involved, to which I now turn.
The Sources of Revolutionary Retreat
The Scottish sci-fi author Ken McLeod has argued that

136 N. DAVIDSON
the decline in the sense of human agency started, or at least became

inescapable, not in 1989 but 10 years earlier, in 1979: the moment when the
Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia revealed the full extent of the Khmer Rouge
barbarity and when the Iranian Revolution offered an alternative ideological
content for revolutions. (McLeod 2014, 22)
I think that McLeod is right to identify 1979 or at least the late 1970s as a
turning point, but not for exactly the reasons he gives. Take his point about
the Iranian revolution first.
The modern era of bourgeois revolution finally came to an end in 1973
1975, when the feudal-absolutist regime of Ethiopia was overthrown, the
Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique were liberated,

and the United States was defeated in Indochina with the fall of its client
states in Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam. To this list we might also add the
Communist coup of 1978 in Afghanistan. In relation to these specific kinds of
bourgeois revolution Snyder is right to say,
Revolutions should be regarded, therefore, as historically time-bound events.

They were a product of state-led industrialism and national integration and a
product of international war and imperialism. (Snyder 1999, 2324)
With no longer any non-socialist, social revolutions to accomplish, all success-

ful revolutions in the absence of any that were genuinely socialist were
inevitably now political. This seems to be the real significance of the Iranian
Revolution. It was not, as Marc Mulholland claims a failed bourgeois
revolution (2012, 283). Here Mann is correct:
It was a political revolution, replacing an authoritarian monarchy with a

republican constitution supervised by a theocracy. It was also an ideological
revolution, from Western secularism to Islamism. (Mann 2013a, 259)
But the contemporary Western fixation with Islamism can blind us to the fact
that other political revolutions similar to the Iranian were occurring or climax-
ing at the same time, which had quite different ideological dimensions. The
Nicaraguan revolution which achieved victory in 1979 began as an attempt to
replace a state run as a murderous, corrupt personal dictatorship with a con-
stitutional bourgeois-democratic regime committed to a degree of social
reform and ended by achieving this goal. The bourgeoisie did not seek a state
capitalist outcome and the working class although it participated heroically
in the insurrection that overthrew Somoza did not attempt to seize power
on its own behalf. The liberation of Zimbabwe in 1980 similarly did not result
in establishment of the totally state-controlled economy that might have been
expected. The shift was not entirely clear in the cases of Nicaragua and
Zimbabwe; but it was unmistakeable in the case of the Philippines (1986),
the first people power revolution and one devoid of even the limited
socio-economic reforms associated with its two predecessors.
The climax of the bourgeois revolutionary era did not merely mean that
there were no more revolutions of this sort to accomplish, it coincided with
the neoliberal supersession of the state capitalist model that had been the
characteristic outcome of its last phase. It was in China, home of the greatest
of these revolutions, that one important entry point to the neoliberal era was
first opened, when Deng announced the Four Modernizations to the Third
Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee Congress of the Chinese Communist
Party in December 1978 (Davidson 2006, 216222; Harvey 2005, 120135).
When Deng looked back from 1992 on the transformation he had initiated in
China he used the slogan to get rich is glorious; the echo of Guizot advising
disenfranchised French citizens to enrich themselves if they wanted to be
able to vote was unlikely to be accidental. And perhaps this is appropriate.

Regardless of the vast differences between them in most respects, what the
Frenchman and his Chinese successor had in common was that they repre-
sented the consolidation of the bourgeois revolution that had brought them to
power and which was now over.
In other words the seeming exhaustion of social revolution and embrace of
neoliberalism had begun at least a decade before 1989 and could not therefore
be causally connected to the events of that year. Furthermore, as McLeods
references to the Khmer Rouge imply, the most detrimental impact of the Stal-
inist regimes on the idea of socialist revolution was not their demise, but their
existence. In that sense those who celebrated their fall as an opportunity to
restart the socialist project on an unsullied Marxist basis were right in princi-
ple. The problem, as I noted earlier, is that many socialists essentially accept
what I call the legitimacy thesis. For entirely understandable reasons this was
particularly prevalent among anti-regime radicals in eastern Europe, long
before 1989. The following exchange is reported by John Berger from a confer-
ence on socialism and revolution held in Prague during April 1969, while the
city was under Russian military occupation.
A political activist from London described the daily struggle in British factories
to resist anti-trade-unionist legislation and his groups long-term aim of creat-
ing workers councils to act as soviets. Could some of the lessons they had
learned apply to the Czech situation? His was the longest and most passionate
speech, which remained uninterrupted. After it a Czech student remarked, Do
you know what most of us would reply to all that you have just said? Wed ask
you whether you had read Dostoyevskys The Possessed. The activist, who had
held the floor with such force, shook his head not to answer No: he had
surely read it but as though to free his face from a mesh of cobwebs into
which he had mysteriously and inadvertently walked. (Berger 1972, 243)
The British political activist was Chris Harman, a leading figure in the Inter-
national Socialists who, as we have seen, rejected claims that eastern Europe
was either socialist or transitional to socialism (Birchall 2010, 5960). The sig-
nificance of this exchange is that, for the Czech student, any attempt to
achieve revolutionary transformation would lead to the type of society against
138 N. DAVIDSON
which they were struggling, even if the revolutionaries intended a quite differ-
ent outcome. If this attitude was more likely to be encountered among the left
in Prague or Budapest than London or New York in the 1960s, it is far more
common in the West today, lying behind the Great Fear of party organization,
the reluctance to even contemplate taking power characteristic of the Alter-
Globalization movement and Occupy, and most clearly expressed by Holloway:
For over a hundred years, the revolutionary enthusiasm of young people has
been channelled into building the party or into learning to shoot guns; for over
a hundred years, the dreams of those who wanted a world fit for humanity
have been bureaucratised and militarised, all for the winning of state power by
a government that could then be accused of betraying the movement that

put it there. Rather than look to so many betrayals for an explanation, per-
haps we need to look at the very notion that society can be changed through
the winning of state power. (Holloway 2010, 1213)
John Foran too identifies the organizational forms taken by Third-World bour-
geois revolutions with the revolutionary tradition as such:
The confluence of the demise of twentieth-century social revolutions and the

emergence of radical new struggles in the twenty-first suggests that the pre-
sent moment is one of transition in the revolutionary tradition, in which armed
struggle led by a vanguard in the name of socialism is yielding to more inclu-
sive, democratic struggles in the name of something else. (Foran 2008, 237)
But who ever imagined that armed struggle led by a vanguard was appropri-
ate in Glasgow or New York or for that matter in Petrograd?
Why did the notion that revolution will inevitably lead to something more or
less like the Stalinist regimes become so widespread outside of the regimes
themselves? The answer must at least in part be because of the absence of any
example of a genuine, permanently successful socialist revolution to point to
as an alternative. That has of course been true since 1917, but the possibilities
for such an outcome were present, on an international scale, in the period
that is now referred to as the long 1968, in other words the entire period
between the Vietnamese Tet offensive in January 1968 and the end of the
Portuguese Revolution in November 1975. One recent account of the period
refers to the paradox of stability in the late 1960s amidst so much internal
unrest with the result that not a single major government was overthrown
by protesters in 1968 (Suri 2013, 99). If we move beyond the year 1968 then
we offer the overthrow of the Greek and Portuguese governments in 1974 as
examples, but the central point is right: there were very few successful politi-
cal revolutions and no successful social revolutions during the period, at least
in the West, and the most decisive overthrow of a government was not from
the left but the right, in the form of the Chilean military coup of 1973. This
period was the third and last great moment of international revolutionary
potential in the twentieth-century, after 19161923 and 19431949. We have
seen regional explosions since, most obviously those of 1989 in eastern Europe
and 2011 in North Africa and the Middle East, and in a more diffuse way those
in Latin America between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s, but nothing on a
comparably international scale. The failure of the long 1968 has dominated the
forty years afterwards in the same way that the Stalinist counter-revolution of
1928 dominated the forty years beforehand. As one US participant puts it, our
revolution hadnt even happened, and yet we had to suffer the feeling of
impotence in its aftermath (Goldstein 2015, 187).
A shift to the right followed, as tends to happen after failed revolutions,
but in most cases this had nothing do with a sudden realization about the reali-
ties of actually existing socialism. This is why I think McLeod is wrong to
place so much emphasis on the impact of Democratic Kampuchea: this may
have been a particularly monstrous example, but only the wilfully blind could
have remained unaware of the previous crimes of Stalinism, certainly after
1956. And it is simply ludicrous to claim, as, for example, Paul Berman has
done, that it required the publication of Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago
to make the non-Stalinist left aware of this history; doubly so to claim that
this was what then led them to abandon revolutionary politics (Berman 1997,
274). According to Berman, the biggest impact the book was not on orthodox
Communists, but on the generation of 68. Apparently, to learn at last that
MarxistLeninist societies could survive only through a consistent threat of
terror, to understand finally that Communism and totalitarianism were insepa-
rable that was a new experience (Berman 1997, 278). What led to the drift
from revolutionary politics was not a final capitulation to the cliches of Cold
War propaganda about the inseparability of Communism and totalitarianism,
but the experience of failure. One suspects that for characters like Bernard-
Henri Levy praised by Berman, but described by Anderson correctly, if with
quite unnecessary restraint, as a crass booby unable to get a fact or idea
straight (Anderson 2009, 147) revelations about the Gulag were the
occasion rather than the reason for abandoning socialist commitments; but he
was not alone.
I have referred up till now to the failure of the long 1968, rather than to
its defeat. The reason is that, with the exception of Chile, in most countries
there was no decisive reversal: indeed, in the UK the period came to an end
with the removal of a Tory government from office after an election forced by
a national miners strike. The real defeats came in the following decade, most
catastrophically in the defeat of a further miners strike in 19841985, but
similar confrontations, with similar outcomes occurred across the industrial-
ized world, including Poland in 1981. We can now see these defeats as the
vanguard phase of the reconfiguration of capital that we know as neoliberal-
ism (Davidson 2010, 3154). The crisis of the 1970s, to which neoliberalism
was the capitalist response, destroyed the illusions of Social and Liberal
Democracy that the system had already been self-transformed by Keynesianism
and the Welfare State into something that no longer deserved the name of
capitalism. In ideological terms, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes did not
so much prove as confirm the already widely held belief that any alternative
140 N. DAVIDSON
form of economy to neoliberal capitalism was impossible. By 1989, virtually no

one, especially not on the post-1968 revolutionary left, regarded the Stalinist
regimes as a model for socialism. The real ideological shock, although one
which was more slow-acting, had been the earlier revelation that Keynesianism
and the Welfare State in its post-1945 form was no longer compatible with
capitalism, at least as anything other than a short-term expedient (Sinfield
2004, xxxxxxiv).
Against Pessimism
So, should we be pessimistic about the prospects for socialist revolution in the
twenty-first century? A longer-term perspective might be helpful at this point.
As Anthony Arblaster noted during the eastern European revolutions, the
history of socialism is relatively both longer and shorter than the death of
socialism hypothesis requires:
It is far longer in so far as the socialist aspiration or dream, of a world of

equality, without exploitation or injustice whether it is realistic or not
antedates the post-1917 or post-1945 experience of actually existing social-
ism by many centuries, as any anthology of egalitarian writings easily demon-
strates, and can confidently be expected to outlive the debacle of official
communism by many further centuries, if human history lasts as long. It is
shorter in that, looked at in historical perspective, the period in which
attempts have been made to put socialism into practice have been extremely
short. Barely a hundred years have elapsed since the first social democratic
and communist organisations and parties came into being. (Arblaster 1991, 48)
Indeed, we might usefully compare the length of time during which socialism
has been materially possible with that which was necessary for capitalism to
become the dominant economic system. It took capitalism nearly 400 years,
from the arrival of the Black Death in Europe to the establishment of British
supremacy over France in the Seven Years War, to be irreversibly secure
(Davidson 2012, 580586). Any beneficiary of the feudal mode of production,
magically granted a Marxist understanding of the consequences of capitalist
development for them, could have looked back with satisfaction from the year
1660 at a succession of aborted transitions, failed revolutions and external
conquests which had suppressed capitalism where it had existed, in the Italian
city-republics, Bohemia and Catalonia. And they would have noted too, that
even those states where capitalism remained the dominant mode of production
were either in decline, like the United Netherlands, or had experienced the
restoration of absolutist monarchy, like England. They would surely have com-
placently concluded that capitalism had been defeated as a viable alternative
system; yet within less than a hundred years the question was not whether
capitalism would survive, but how feudal societies would make the now
inevitable transition towards it.
The analogy is obviously not exact. Socialism will not develop within feudal-
ism in the same way that capitalism developed within feudalism, nor do we
have an infinite amount of time before human-made climate change threatens
environmental collapse and, in any case, there is no reason why anyone should
continue to suffer from capitalist exploitation for a minute longer when it
could be ended. Nevertheless, in a longer-term historical perspective there is
no reason to assume the defeat of socialism to date is necessarily permanent,
any more than that of capitalism was, over a much longer period. Defeat is
not the same as disappearance.
I wrote earlier that I had two objections to Elliots claim that if we regard
Stalinism as state capitalism then socialism is merely an inviolate ideal,
rather than a proven potential. One was the experience of the Russian Revo-
lution before Stalinism, but the other is that we should not look for models of
socialism in the grotesque caricatures established after 1945, but rather in the
practice of the working class institutions thrown up in the course of the strug-
gle to achieve it. The early years of the Russian Revolution are certainly the
most sustained example of this, but in shorter but similarly illuminating
moments both before (the Paris Commune) and after (Germany 19181923,
Spain 1936, Bolivia 1952, Hungary 1956, Portugal 19741975, Poland 1980
1981), we can see how it is possible to see how the working class has estab-
lished new democratic institutions which have taken over the running of the
economy, society and the state. These have not ceased to emerge, The most
important recent developments in this respect have indeed occurred in Latin
America, not the activities of Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa or any
other elected leader, but rather in the new forms of collective organization
which emerged first in Argentina between 20002001 in the form of the
piqueteros (picketers) and asambleas (assemblies), and then in Bolivia
between 20032005 in the form of the neighbourhood assemblies and workers
regional committees, which organized from the vast slum city of El Alto to
blockade La Paz. The emergence of new organizational forms from below in
Argentina and Bolivia is of crucial importance for revolutionaries, since they
present, if only in embryo, the possibility of an alternative to the bourgeois
state. It is in the replacement of that state that we can see the early indica-
tions of what socialism might look like in practice.
The Egyptian revolution was the most dramatic of these recent examples,
showing both the potential for socialist revolutions to take place and the real
obstacles in their way. In aspiration at least, it was strikingly similar to earlier
attempts at revolution. As one participant, Ali Abunimah, reported from Cairo
during its early, triumphant phase:
Yesterday evening, after it was announced that Hosni Mubarak had met the first
demand of the revolution and left office, I headed toward the Egyptian embassy
in Amman. The joy on the streets was something I had never experienced before.
The revolutions have restored a sense of limitless possibility and a desire that
change should spread from country to country. (Abunimah 2012)
142 N. DAVIDSON
Analysis of the class forces involved in the Egyptian revolution by no means

supports the view that it was driven by the middle classes. Workers deserve
more credit for Mubaraks ouster than they are typically given, write Joel
Beinin and Marie Duboc:
Facilitated by the Governments closure of all public sector workplaces in early

February, many workers participated in the popular uprising as individuals. Just
two days after work was resumed on February 6, tens of thousands of workers
went on strike, demanding both resolution of local grievances and the ouster
of Mubarak. There were some sixty strikes and protests in the final days before
Mubaraks fall on February 11.
Even after February 11, workers continued to protest. At least 150,000 partic-
ipated in 489 strikes and other collective actions during February 2011. Per-
haps more importantly, the same period saw the formation of the Egyptian
Federation of Independent Trade Unions (Beinin and Duboc 2014, 143144).
Yet clearly there was a problem in terms of what might be called the self-
limiting nature of the revolution. Hugh Roberts has argued that the Egyptian
events were something less than a revolution, if more than a mere coup: It
was a popular rising that lost the initiative because it had no positive agenda
or demand. Bread, freedom, social justice arent political demands, just
aspirations and slogans (Roberts 2013, 6). Well, bread is a fairly concrete
demand, but Roberts is clearly right to point to the vagueness of freedom
and social justice compared to land and peace, two other objectives to
which bread has been conjoined in the past. The aspiration, under what was
effectively a military dictatorship (and now is again) is for democracy.
Some Marxists have seen this as a revolutionary demand in itself, uniting the
oppressed and exploited in a goal which has the possibility of going beyond bour-
geois forms of democracy a political revolution, in other words to socialist
ones: in effect a contemporary form of Trotskys strategy of permanent revolu-
tion (Callinicos 2013, 144). This is certainly a possibility, but any assessment has
to take account of the fact that in every occasion where revolutions have begun
as struggles for bourgeois democracy and been successful in this respect from
Portugal in 1974 to Tunisia in 2011 they have also ended there. Leaving aside
occasions such as Egypt in 2012 where there was mass pressure to set aside the
result of democratic elections, we have to consider the possibility that the
achievement of democracy itself acts as an obstacle to revolution.
Jeff Goodwin has argued that revolutionary movements are rather less
likely to arise and social revolutions less likely to occur during the contempo-
rary period than during the Cold War era especially, but not exclusively,
movements and revolutions that would seriously challenge the capitalist world
system. Goodwin rejects both the argument that globalization has reduced
the power of individual states thus rendering them less meaningful as the
site of revolutionary overthrow and the removal of the Soviet Union as a
support for revolutionary movement as explanations. He claims instead that
the real reason is the spread of representative democracy, which he regards as
inimical to social revolution, although not to political radicalism and mili-

tancy, which seeks to influence the state, but not to seize it, still less to
transform it (Goodwin 2001, 298, 302 and see 293306 more generally).
Snyder emphasizes a larger number of factors than Goodwin (the expansion
of markets, the growth of the middle classes and the spread of transnational-
ism), but also focusses on the role of democracy in preventing successful
revolutionary movements, for three reasons:
First, democracy resolves who has political power through the ballot box. Revo-
lutions attempted to decide power by force. If the people choose their leaders
through elections, there is little or no reason to use violence to remove unpopu-
lar leaders. Democracy also undermines the legitimacy of revolution, for democ-
racy prevents revolutionary leaders from claiming that they speak for the
people. Second, democracy limits the radicalization of the polity. When revolu-
tionaries believe that only force can remove leaders, they must promote a radi-
cal alternative in order to justify the use of force. Third, democracy is usually
based on a pluralist conception of the polity. Pluralism entails a polity of differ-
ent interests and the respect of those interests. On the contrary, revolutions
attempted to force all interests into a collective one manipulated by one fac-
tion. A distinguishing characteristic of revolution was intolerance for those who
rejected its chiliastic and communitarian values. (Snyder 1999, 1415)
The problem with this analysis, which may have been more plausible in the
early years of the third millennium, is that representative democracy is now in
retreat. A key characteristic of the Global South is relative and in some cases
absolute poverty and it is this that leads to the absence or precariousness of
democracy; under conditions of economic crisis this is unlikely to change.
Moreover, the tendency has been for the crisis to lead to technocratic restric-
tions on democracy within the weaker areas of Europe, above all in Greece.
There is, however, a more fundamental objection to these claims for the
anti-revolutionary consequences of democracy. Dominico Losurdo concludes
his book War and Revolution with this gloomy reflection: While faith in a
great social revolution, definitively resolving things, has vanished, the trage-
dies to which it sought to put an end are still the order of the day (Losurdo
2015, 326). In order for revolutionary pessimism of this sort to be valid, it is
not enough to demonstrate that a majority of working class people currently
have doubts about the feasibility of a systemic alternative to capitalism. When
has this not been the case? Revolutions always appear impossible to the major-
ity of people until they actually begin. It would have to demonstrate that capi-
talism had structurally changed to such a degree that it was capable of either
atomizing the working class to the point where mass collective action was no
longer possible or creating mass prosperity to the point where mass collective
action was no longer necessary. Neither of these is plausible. The first might
be sustained if we were to base our analysis solely on current situation in the
UK, but it is scarcely credible in, for example, India, where over 100 million
workers struck for, among other things, a living wage and universal food security
as recently as February 2013 (Van der Linden 2015). It is the impossibility of the
144 N. DAVIDSON
second which casts the biggest doubt on the ability of democracy to contain rev-
olution. In an era of growing inequality and falling working-class incomes the
first is, to say the least, somewhat implausible: no one expects a return to the
Golden Age of the postwar boom, least of all in those areas of the Global South
which have recently experienced political revolutions. After the terrorist attack
on tourists in Bardo Museum in March 2015, the Tunisian journalist Safa Ben Ali
said: We have freedom, but people havent felt any change in their daily life.
What democracy brought us is a bad economy and now terrorism (Stephen
2015). Z izek is therefore correct to say that, in the last decades we witnessed
a whole series of emancipatory popular explosions which were re-appropriated
by the global capitalist order, either in its liberal form (from South Africa to
Philippines) or in its fundamentalist form (Iran). The problem for the popular
movement is always this: What happens is that we get democracy, but poverty
remains what to do then? (Z izek 2014, 102103). The issue of democracy is
therefore an extraordinarily complex one, which requires detailed study and dis-
cussion, but the fate of future potential social revolutions is more likely to
depend on how revolutionaries negotiate its complexities than on imaginary dis-
couragements arising from events in eastern Europe 25 years ago.
Conclusion
Michael Billig has recently pointed out that, as far as the theoretical stock
values of intellectual figures are concerned, Lenin is currently untradeable
(Billig 2015, 174). Perhaps we should take the Bolshevik leader more seriously.
As he wrote in 1915, it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a
revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which objective
changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the
revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break
(or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis,
falls, if it is not toppled over (Lenin 1964a, 215). Because neoliberalism has
moved official politics so far to the right, many issues which in the era of
the long boom would have been considered reformist demands, or even ele-
mentary issues of human decency, are now resisted by the dominant institu-
tions of capitalist society, of which the attitude of the Troika to the Greek
arguments for the end of austerity has provided a striking demonstration. It is
not merely that reforms increasingly require to be fought for in a revolutionary
way it is that the reforms themselves have the potential to constitute revo-
lutionary demands in a context where the system is unable to allow them, for
fear of interrupting the restoration of profitability.
The experiences of the twentieth century have surely put paid to any notion
of the inevitability of socialism. Consequently, we do not and cannot know that
working class will ultimately be triumphant that is the wager on revolution
which many Marxist thinkers have invoked (Davidson 2012, 280284); but we still
have good reasons to believe that it is possible. The bet is still on.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Is Social Revolution Still

Keywords: Arab Spring; Stalinism; revolution; socialism; neoliberalism

2015 Taylor & Francis

then deputy director of policy planning staff at the US State Department. It

After Twenty-Five Years

Protesters, skilled in propaganda if nothing else, could see the advantage of

transformative historical moment and became the name a political technology

Whoever participates in this, writing hymns to the obliteration of memory

In what follows I will argue that interpretations of the revolutions of 1989

social revolution (bourgeois or proletarian). The second, drawing on these

Political Revolution, Social Revolution, Counter-Revolution

My starting point is that revolutions can be ultimately either political or social

the former must be understood simply as civil wars, rebellions, or coups

Revolutions must involve both a transformation of the socioeconomic orienta-

These assertions about the character of social revolutions involve elements

of the socio-economic orientation and of the political structures, but why

The assumption here is that, in a social revolution, the relationship between

Political revolution puts the emphasis on the changes in governmental lead-

The maturing of such a contradiction need involve no conscious class agency

Because social revolutions are so rare, it is difficult to make generalizations

Defining the Eastern European Revolutions (1)

a period of 40 years in which collective action was systematically suppressed

The French Revolution was a Utopian attempt to overcome a traditional order

by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. (Thatcher 1993, 753)

Historian, E. B. Chernyak, was arguing,Revolutions (like the French and Rus-

These observations were made in the course of the revolutions themselves,

ently involves a fundamental socio-economic transformation. How can this

Two Aspects of Stalinism (1): Counter-revolution

izek spectacularly misunderstands the nature of Hooks concerns and, by

A more plausible explanation for the emergence of Stalinism might be found

mundane though they undoubtedly are in comparison with idealist fantasies

More appropriate terms to describe the break of 1928 might be found in

explains what drove the bureaucracy onto this path:

In Russia by 1928, from a revolution, exhausted and desperate, and seeing in

The notion of a counter-revolutionary break in the history of the USSR clearly

Socialism involves ownership of the means of production by society, not a

communists to admit this. Eric Hobsbawm said in an interview shortly after

seek to minimize their radicalism or represented it as irrational acts of

We have here the process of accelerated centralisation within the framework

The nationalization of land, the means of industrial production, transport and

revolution; on the contrary, complete nationalization, the Five-Year Plans,

In another area of agreement between World Systems Theory and dissident

Trotskyism, Immanuel Wallerstein, came to similar conclusions about the role

Is the theory of state capitalism simply another variant of the once-popular

countries followed similar paths of development and destruction that differ

At the conclusion of her illuminating comparison of industrial cities in the USA

This is so evidently the case that it provides retrospective validation of the

the decades of focusing on political systems and ideology appear in retro-

prevent reconciliation with the Western European states (Kagarlitsky 2004,

Two Aspects of Stalinism (2): Bourgeois Revolution

While the Stalinist second revolution of 1928 represented the counter-revo-

destitute (China, Vietnam) of expropriating the bourgeoisie and starting the

As we have seen, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is not decisive if a

The process of permanent revolution, at least in the form identified by