From the moment Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels urged workers of the world to unite, in the final line of their 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto, the goal of international revolution has been at the core of Marxist politics. An international workers’ revolution is the only way to replace capitalism with socialism—because, unlike previous societies, capitalism is a globally integrated economic and political system.
A world system
“For the first time in history”, the late British Marxist Colin Barker wrote, “capitalism has created a genuinely world society, where all our lives are entwined together in a common history and a common fate”. Every state has now been linked into chains of production stretching across continents. Take your mobile phone, for example. It was likely assembled in China using computer chips manufactured in Taiwan, powered by coal exported from Australia, produced with minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to specifications developed in Europe or the United States. No single country can produce everything necessary to satisfy its population’s needs, unlike the various pre-capitalist societies, which were mostly self-sufficient and organised around small local economies.
Socialism has to be an international project not only because we live in an interconnected global economy, though. The capitalist classes that rule each country use immense violence to defend their interests internationally—militaries, police forces, intelligence services, mass surveillance and so on. They are perennially concerned with defending their place at the top of the social hierarchy and maintaining their access to resources. Reforming governments have been demolished with the aid of the world’s capitalist powers countless times in the past century, from the 1973 overthrow of President Salvador Allende’s government in Chile to the 2019 attempt to topple a centre-left government in Bolivia (“We will coup whoever we want”, Elon Musk boasted at the time). The international capitalist class won’t tolerate revolution in any single country.
Toppling this transnational coterie of capitalists is clearly a huge task. But the good news is that capitalism’s international interconnectedness makes it possible, not just necessary. The global integration of production itself transmits resistance from one country to another. In 1974, for instance, opposition to Chile’s newly installed military dictatorship spread to East Kilbride, Scotland, of all places. Workers at the Rolls-Royce factory there learned that the engines they were repairing were being used by the Chilean air force to drop bombs on workers resisting the coup. They refused to work on the engines, keeping them out of the hands of the military junta for four years.
Capitalism’s global nature also means that workers today share increasingly similar experiences: conditions of work, forms of consumption, lifestyles and political cultures. Increasingly, it has become clear that the world’s main divide is between the minority capitalist class and the majority working class; between the rich and the poor. So when revolts break out in one part of the world, people in other parts of the world instinctively identify with the causes and motivations of the struggle, and draw comparisons with their own situation. “Languages remain different”, Marxist writer Chris Harman observed in 1992, “but what they say is increasingly the same”. Harman’s words ring true across the decades. Since the “European Spring” of 1848, every great social upheaval has spread beyond national borders.
Global revolts
1968 is remembered as a year of global revolt, when millions of workers, students and oppressed people drew inspiration from each other’s movements. Activists in the US were radicalised by the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people to American imperialism. Irish civil rights activists emulated the militant politics of the Black Panthers. When students and workers united to launch a massive general strike in France in May, it taught student radicals in Australia that they, too, needed to link their campaigns to workers and to the power of the organised working class.
The movements of 1968 united people across superficially very different societies. For two decades after the Second World War, common sense said that the most significant divide on the planet was between Western capitalism and Stalinist “Communism”. But in 1968, both sides of the Iron Curtain exploded in revolt. The triggers may have been different, but they were all responses to similar issues: inequality, exploitation and war, imposed by monstrous bureaucratic states.
In 2011, an impoverished Tunisian street vendor burned himself alive to protest against police harassment. This individual act tapped into widespread resentment at inequality, unemployment and state violence. Within days, anti-government protests had erupted across the country. Within weeks, the protests had escalated into a regional revolt that toppled or challenged regimes across the Arab world. The radical wave spread even further: at a massive demonstration against an anti-union bill in the US city of Madison, Wisconsin, a man held up a poster with a picture of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak beside Republican Governor Scott Walker. The caption read: “One dictator down. One to go”. The Arab revolutions went on to inspire the Occupy movement, which spread to more than 80 countries.
The global Palestine solidarity movement over the past two years is a further illustration. People have protested, occupied and taken strike action from Australia to Spain, to defend a group of people most have never met. They’ve rallied around the banner of Palestine, not only in solidarity with a brutalised and defenceless civilian population, but also as a symbol. The Palestinian flag has united millions fed up with a system of liars, hypocrites and murderers who preside over an economic system of exploitation, authoritarianism and war. As one striking Italian worker noted: “The hand that bombs the Palestinians is the hand that exploits us in our workplaces”.
The Russian Revolution
Capitalist rule is a global process, as is working class resistance. No event in history has underlined this as sharply as the Russian Revolution. In 1917, workers, radicalised by years of war and economic crisis, overthrew the country’s monarchy and eventually established a workers’ government to implement socialism and eliminate capitalism once and for all. In response, the capitalist powers of the world, in alliance with local reactionaries who wanted to restore the monarchy, united to crush the new workers’ state. Unless revolutions spread internationally and challenge the imperialist powers that have an interest in destroying them, they will be crushed.
A heroic effort by Russian workers and peasants repelled sixteen invading armies, but at a great cost. The working class was decimated, the factories were depopulated, and the radical working-class democracy withered. The isolation and poverty imposed on Russia made socialism impossible, and a new dictatorial regime led by Joseph Stalin emerged, reversing most of the revolution’s gains.
Russia’s revolutionary socialists pinned their hopes on spreading the revolution across Europe, but they were ultimately defeated. Ever since, the Russian example has been used by defenders of capitalism as a cautionary tale: revolution leads only to disaster and dictatorship. Yet while the Russian Revolution is cynically deployed as the ultimate argument against international revolution, it actually shows that the goal is not only necessary but also possible.
News of workers seizing power in Russia, overthrowing their government and withdrawing from the First World War, created shock waves across the planet. Workers in Germany rose in revolt a year later, finally ending the most destructive war the world had ever seen, and establishing soviets—a form of radical working-class democracy inspired by the Russian example. Uprisings followed in France, Italy and Hungary. The revolutionary wave spread further. A classified British government report from 1919 noted a “very widespread feeling among workers that thrones have become anachronisms, and that the Soviet may be the best form of Government for a democracy”.
The rising tide of radicalism also reached Australia. Meatworkers in Townsville, Queensland, donned red jumpers, stormed the local police station to free jailed unionists, and placed the city under workers’ control. The editor of the conservative Townsville Daily Bulletin lamented: “Townsville for the last year or so has been developing Bolshevism ... [T]he mob management of affairs in this city differs very little from the Petrograd and Moscow brand”.
Politics for world revolution
The Russian Bolsheviks, the revolutionary party that led workers to victory in 1917, viewed their revolution as one part of a global upheaval. Workers across the world faced the same problems: the horrors of imperialist war, attacks on their living standards and right to organise, economic breakdown that proved the capitalist class was unfit to rule.
The Bolsheviks understood that these objective prerequisites, while important, were not enough. The international dynamics of capitalism wouldn’t inevitably produce successful revolutions worldwide. Political organisation in every country was necessary.
In 1919, they established the Communist International, to facilitate the creation of mass revolutionary workers’ parties. Revolutionaries from Russia met with those in Italy, France, Germany, the US, Australia and elsewhere to discuss how to turn capitalist crisis into socialist revolution in their own countries.
For several years, workers came close to overthrowing capitalism in many places. But in none of these countries was there a party like the Bolsheviks, which had been hardened through years of organising working-class struggle to overthrow the state for decades beforehand. The tragic defeat of the international revolutionary wave wasn’t due to a lack of working-class resistance, but a lack of political organisation.
In periods of stability, when social conservatism dominates, international revolution might seem like a pipe dream. Defenders of the status quo work to reinforce this illusion. But history shows that capitalism’s crises are international and inevitably provoke international resistance. Capitalism is a global system. It requires a global movement to tear it up, root and branch. The most important thing that socialists can do, whether in Tunisia or France, Italy or Australia, is to start organising for it today.
