Review of A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution by Anna Reid, John Murray Press, 2023.
Within hours of taking power in October 1917, the new revolutionary government in Russia had declared its withdrawal from World War One. “The government considers it the greatest of crimes against humanity to continue this war”, its ‘<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26b.htm">Decree on Peace</a>’
stated, calling on “all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace”.
The declaration scandalised and frightened the rulers of the Allied countries Russia had been fighting alongside. What they did in response is recounted in A Nasty Little War, Anna Reid’s very useful new book. In this narrative history, she documents the attempts made, first to corral the Soviet government back into the fighting and, later, when that had failed, to overthrow it. 
To say the Bolshevik-led Soviet regime flouted international conventions is an understatement. The previous tsarist government had incurred many debts. The Bolsheviks refused to pay them. Secret treaties were found and published, including the infamous <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement">Sykes-Picot Agreement</a>,
which, unbeknownst to its inhabitants, carved up the Middle East between Britain, France and Russia. When a Soviet delegation was dispatched to negotiate with Germany for peace, it included a revolutionary by the name of Anastasia Bitsenko, who had assassinated a former Russian minister of war. On arrival, the delegation didn’t bother with the usual diplomatic niceties, but instead took the opportunity to distribute revolutionary literature among German soldiers. 
“You might as well legalise sodomy”, British member of parliament Winston Churchill declared, “as recognise the Bolsheviks”. The fact that war-weary populations around the world were becoming increasingly mutinous only intensified the ruling-class panic and hatred of the Soviet regime. They feared events in Russia would spur on rebellion elsewhere. This fear was well grounded; fully four empires would collapse as the revolutionary wave that began in Russia swept the world in the following years. 
Initially, the likes of Churchill hoped the Soviet regime would die a natural death. In their eyes, the Bolshevik-led government in Russia was so unstable as to represent more of a power vacuum that would inevitably be filled, sooner or later, by a more “responsible”, capitalist government. In the meantime, though, the Allied powers were desperate to keep the Russians in the war. The role of the mass of Russian workers and peasants in the army was, as they saw it, to tie up large sections of the German army in the east, easing the pressure on their own forces to its west. In other words, to be cannon fodder.
They took matters into their own hands. They sent soldiers and diplomats to Russia to take over port towns, control supply lines and scheme against the new regime. 
Gathering soldiers for the intervention wasn’t simple. There wasn’t much public appetite for a new war. But intervention forces, including Australians, were gathered nonetheless. Reid writes of a group of Québécois soldiers who resisted mobilisation—their ship was forced to set sail with thirteen of them handcuffed in the ship’s hold. 
The extent to which the question of Russia’s continued involvement in the war dominated over other considerations in the early stages of the intervention is demonstrated by Britain’s first military engagement on Russian soil—which took place in Murmansk in March 1918. There the British forces fought, not against, but alongside the Soviet Red Army—repelling an attack by a group of Finnish reactionaries who had crossed the border and captured a Russian town. A revolution had broken out in Finland, and the counter-revolutionaries were supported by Germany. If victorious, they would align Finland with Germany in the war, something the British were very keen to avoid.
Despite this peculiar alignment of forces, however, the Finnish revolution went down to defeat. The reactionaries cemented their victory with a reign of terror, slaughtering thousands of the rebels. 
This experience provided a lesson for the Russian revolutionaries, showing the kind of treatment they could expect were they to lose power themselves. At the time, the so-called White armies were grouping together across Russia, preparing to unleash counter-revolutionary massacres of their own. Meanwhile, the lesson drawn from events in Finland by those leading the Western powers’ intervention in Russia was definitely not that the forces under their control should continue their momentary alignment with the Reds. Quite the contrary—the stronger the White armies became, the more support they gave them. 
The attitude of the foreign delegations to the locals was, in the main, appalling. One story recounted by Reid involved an American military engineer running a trench through a cemetery. In the process, many bones were left scattered on the ground, and a group of American soldiers amused themselves by kicking an exposed skull some blocks down the road. Russian women were described as “handy for doing our washing”.
Other examples are more sinister. British Major General Lionel Dunsterville wrote in his diary that on 5 August 1918 he returned to a town where earlier in the year he had negotiated with the local revolutionary committee “all very pleasant and ‘comrade-y’”. This time, though, things were very different. The committee, Reid writes, were “arrested and sent to Baghdad”—an early example of what, in the context of this century’s “war on terror”, became known as <a href="https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/torture/extraordinary-rendition">extraordinary rendition</a>. 
The intervention forces built prison camps with despicable conditions, while they preferred to sleep in luxury hotels. They introduced the Spanish flu to towns with no local resistance, and, according to Reid, deployed the “world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons”.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that the Bolshevik government began increasingly to circumscribe their freedoms. The measures were initially not very harsh. Reid describes the aftermath of an attempt to overthrow the soviet in the town of Archangel. When Bolshevik reinforcements arrived and restored (revolutionary) order, you might expect drastic reprisals to have been inflicted on the coup plotters. Yet, as Reid has it, they were left alone—hanging around the American consulate, playing football and cooking up new schemes. But the Bolshevik situation was becoming untenable as the White armies made gains, and the measures the former enacted became harsher and harsher. 
In November 1918 an armistice was signed, and World War One officially ended. This removed continuing Russia’s participation in the war effort from the objectives of the foreign intervention and left only the overthrowing of the Bolshevik regime. Through 1919, the fighting intensified. Tens of thousands of people were killed in battles between the Red and White armies across Russia. 
For the White armies with which the intervention forces aligned themselves, toppling the Bolshevik regime was only part of the mission. They intended to brutalise the population to such an extent that even the thought of resistance would become inconceivable. 
One of its largest forces was known as the <a href="https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/volunteer_army">Volunteer Army</a>. It was profoundly antisemitic. “As soon as the Volunteer Army entered a city”, Reid quotes historian Elias Heifetz as saying, “one could find everywhere on the walls ... proclamations against the Jews”. Antisemitism provided a convenient explanation for everything the Whites despised in Russian society, which they combined into the figure of the contemptible and traitorous, but somehow also all-powerful, “Bolshevik Jew”.
The pogrom was one of the Whites’ preferred methods of struggle. Scores of them would take place in areas under White control in these years, with something in the region of 150,000 killed. “The first major pogroms of the period took place in December 1918”, Reid writes, “in and around Lviv, near Ukraine’s present-day border with Poland ... The recorded death toll, probably an undercount, was 132, and doctors reported that sixty twelve-year-old girls were recovering in hospital from soldiers’ ‘hooliganism’”. 
Some historians have seen these pogroms as rehearsals for the Holocaust. Certainly some of the members of the German Freikorps who volunteered after World War One to fight against the Bolsheviks later joined the Nazi militias. The future Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss was, in Reid’s account, one of them. 
How did the leaders of the interventionist forces respond to the pogroms and other unconscionable acts of the Whites? “The British military representative”, Reid writes, “dismissed pogrom ‘rumours’ as ‘grossly exaggerated’”. Many Western newspapers in fact politically supported them, providing story after scandalising story about the supposed crimes of the “Jewish Bolsheviks”. In a sign of ruling-class attitudes in this period, the major British horse race, the Coronation Stakes (not the Cup, as Reid has it in the book), was won in 1922 by a horse called “Pogrom” owned by former member of parliament Lord Astor. 
The Russian revolutionary and leader of the Red Army Leon Trotsky later commented that, if the Whites had won in Russia, “fascism” would be a Russian word. Fortunately however, after years of desperate fighting the revolutionary side came out on top.
In some—for a reader with revolutionary socialist politics—particularly enjoyable pages, Reid describes the end of the interventionists’ time in Russia. By early 1920, their forces were in a terrible state. Soldiers had relied primarily on White army-issued currency for money and were now penniless. “They sold spare clothing and blankets at a street market, and found odd jobs”, Reid writes. “Several gave English lessons.” 
One British soldier found himself with a compatriot begging for help from a Bolshevik who, as Reid describes it, “delivered an impassioned lecture on how revolution was about to sweep England too”. “Captain Horrocks and I”, the soldier recounts, “looked at each other with amazement, for we realised that we were dealing with a state of things of which we had no previous conception”. 
In short order they fled. “As the Red Army advanced and the White ones collapsed”, Reid writes, “Allied troops destroyed equipment, filed back onto their ships and sailed away. Typically, the last they saw of Russia was smoke rising from burning warehouses”.
The forces of international reaction had thrown 180,000 foreign soldiers at the revolution. They were armed to their teeth with all that capitalist governments could provide, and financed with limitless cash. But the revolution showed its strength, and fended off the challenge. 
It’s sometimes said that “socialism was tried and failed in Russia”, as though it were a laboratory experiment carried out in pristine conditions and not a society subject to massive internal and external pressures from capitalist forces bent on its destruction. Reid’s book demonstrates the falsity of that claim and exposes the true sordid history of the Western ruling classes that—not content with the rivers of blood that flowed in the slaughter of World War One—attempted with the most barbaric means to quash the rising that finally put an end to it.

Jess Lenehan

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, is one of history’s most well-known figures, and one of its most maligned. Mainstream culture vilifies him as a despot. 
But how many of the people who castigate him and deride his legacy have read his works? Five texts help cut through the myths and highlight what he really stood for: a society freed, as he wrote in The State and Revolution, “from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation”.
What is to be done? (1901)
In the last years of the nineteenth century, as Lenin approached his 30th birthday, all hell broke loose in Russia. Thousands of students participating in a national student strike in 1899 were treated appallingly by the police and government, but brutal repression could not prevent the movement from flaring up again and again. In 1901 tens of thousands of workers across Russia joined in protests and riots, and several times drove the police out of the demonstrations. Lenin was in awe. 
The inadequacies of the revolutionary movement stood out starkly against this backdrop. Meetings were regularly smashed up by police and networks destroyed by arrests. Multiple political currents strove for supremacy with no real way of discussing their ideas. In his own words, Lenin “suffered painfully and acutely from the realisation that we were acting as amateurs”. So he got to work. 
His key work of this time, the hastily written What is to be done?, was a call for revolutionaries to rise to the moment. They needed robust methods of underground communication, and networks that could withstand arrests. They needed a mass, working-class party that could guide the revolutionary movement.
Lenin argued against those who attempted to limit the workers’ movement to immediate concerns—factory conditions, state repression and police brutality—and fought for a Marxist party that acted as “the tribune of the people ... able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears”. 
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916-17)
To the question of what the working class should offer an imperialist war, the international socialist movement gave the answer: “not one man, not one penny”. But when Germany declared war on Russia in August 1914, the German Social Democratic Party, the leading party of European socialism, announced that its parliamentarians would vote to finance the war. 
The about-face was so jarring that Lenin initially believed it to be a hoax. When it was clear that the socialist movement had betrayed its principles—and the continent’s labouring classes—he responded energetically, co-organising anti-war conferences, assisting in attempts to encourage fraternisation between German and Russian soldiers, and developing a theoretical analysis of the war. 
In this pamphlet he draws heavily on the work of other theorists to demonstrate that World War One was “imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world”.
Lenin explained imperialism as not simply a policy that governments adopt. Instead, it is a stage of capitalism, in which the world has been fully carved up and occupied by the colonial powers. So their rapacious desires to acquire new territories can be met only at the expense of other powers. Profit-hungry ruling classes need resources and new markets, which makes some kind of conflict inevitable and creates a situation that sooner or later spills over into open warfare. 
Twenty million people were killed in World War One. The disaster and bloodshed it unleashed pushed millions to oppose it. When workers took power in the 1917 Russian Revolution, one of their first acts was to pull that country out of that war. Lenin’s Bolshevik party was one of only a handful of socialist parties that opposed the whole rotten endeavour from day one.
The State and Revolution (1917)
The 1871 Paris Commune had convinced Karl Marx that the “ready-made state machinery” could not be “wielded” by the working class but had to be replaced. Yet Marx’s evaluation had been buried by moderate socialists who called themselves Marxists but were moving toward greater and greater accommodation with capitalism. 
Lenin quoted Marx at length to re-establish these precepts of his thought, reviving the idea that the working class must be “armed and organised as the ruling class”. That is, workers need to centralise their power in an alternative national institution to defend themselves against reaction and to distribute resources. 
This could not be another institution to ensure minority rule, but to guarantee the rule of the majority. He explained that this would be a temporary arrangement, necessary only in the period during which all counter-revolution could be permanently defeated. 
The pamphlet took on anarchists who rejected the need for this interim body. On the other hand, Lenin rejected the moderate socialists who viewed the capitalist state as an institution sitting “above” society, which can be bent to the will of whoever has the most social leverage at the time. 
The structures of the state, its “special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.” cannot be taken over by the workers’ movement, because they are integral to maintaining capitalism. 
These insights make it one of the most important works of Marxist thought. But its power lies not just in that, but in the way it outlines a program soon to be implemented with the victory of the Russian Revolution: the dismantling of Russia’s ruling-class institutions and their replacement with institutions of workers’ power.
Left-wing communism (1920)
The barbarity of World War One opened the eyes of the world to capitalism’s darkest tendencies, filling millions with horror and rage. Mutinies, revolts and general strikes spread around the world in response, and when the 1917 Russian Revolution declared its victory, millions of people were determined to follow the Russians’ lead. 
Left-wing communism was an intervention into the international debates that were raging at this time. Lenin began by establishing the position of the Russian Revolution in relation to the world socialist movement, acknowledging that when socialism was won elsewhere, “Russia will cease to be the model and will once again become a backward country”. (Most socialists had thought that socialism would come first in the more economically advanced regions—Germany, Britain, France—and then spread to the “backward” economies. Russia had caught everyone off guard by having the first socialist revolution.)
The next chapters elaborated its most important and relevant lessons.
First was the centrality of the revolutionary party to socialism’s success. The Bolshevik party, without which success in Russia was impossible, was not born but created, Lenin noted. The labour of thousands of workers and activists had gradually built this institution through its many challenges and opportunities. The resilience of the party meant that hundreds of thousands of people could flood into the revolutionary movement and have their energies combined into the most powerful movement possible. 
In later chapters, he argued against the idea that the primary role of revolutionaries was to launch insurrections. The “left-wing communists”, as they were known, opposed participation in mass working-class organisations. They eschewed parliamentary elections, abandoned trade unions and resisted all compromises. 
This approach threatened to isolate the most radical militants from the very groups of workers that they had to influence and win to revolutionary politics if Bolshevik-type parties were to be built in other countries. 
“It would be hard to imagine any greater ineptitude or greater harm to the revolution than that”, Lenin wrote.
Lenin’s last testament (1923)
In May 1922, Lenin suffered a debilitating stroke. He recovered and began writing and speaking in public again, but more health battles were coming. Lenin was dying. 
In his final years, he was focused on the difficulties the young soviet state was facing. He worked through the night, exhausting himself further, determined to keep Russian socialism alive as the country was blockaded and gripped by civil war, while the working class exhausted itself and a new layer of bureaucrats emerged within the state.
He wrote a series of letters intended for wide circulation in the press and to be reported at various upcoming congresses—but they were withheld from all. What we now know as the Lenin’s last testament was not published until 1956. 
In this and in other works he railed against the “deplorable” and “wretched” state of the Soviet apparatus. He devised various measures to combat the bureaucratisation of the institutions. 
He began to understand the specific danger posed by a badly weakened working class, a bureaucratised society and a party general secretary with “unlimited authority concentrated in his hands”. In a postscript to the note “Letter to the Congress”, Lenin made his position clearer, demanding the removal of Joseph Stalin from that post. 
His words were prescient. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Soviet society continued to disintegrate and Stalin led a vile counter-revolution that stripped the revolution of its gains. All of the leaders of the 1917 revolution were executed or imprisoned or fell into line. 
Yet Lenin’s proposals could not solve the fundamental problem—Russia’s international isolation was almost total. 
Ultimately, Lenin’s fate was tied to the revolution he led. Its triumphs were his triumphs, its catastrophes were his defeats. It is only just that this be the case—he was its leading figure and devoted his life to its cause. 
But it is grotesque that the crimes of the counter-revolution that stripped the Soviet state of everything Lenin and the workers’ movement had fought for—and led by the man he had fought to remove from power to his dying breath—are now associated with his name.

Lenin in his own words: five key texts

“Fighting the System, Rebuilding the Left” was the theme of Socialist Alternative’s 2022 Marxism Festival. The event is usually held in Melbourne, but this year was spread across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide because of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. Around 1,000 people attended across the five cities.
A number of sessions were devoted to understanding the most pressing issues of our time. These included discussions about the state of the world economy, increasing military tensions, the Ukraine war, the politics of the pandemic and the threat of climate catastrophe. The conference highlighted both the destructive chaos of modern capitalism and the glimmers of resistance that arise in response.
Special guests included Tristan Dutchin, an Amazon worker who in April this year helped establish the first independent union in an Amazon warehouse in the US, Bashana Abeywardane, a Sri Lankan journalist forced into exile, and a panel of refugees—including Lavanya Thavaraja, Betelhem Tibebu Zeleke, Abdul Nouri and Thanush Selverasa, who was recently released from Melbourne’s Park Hotel detention prison—talking about their struggle for safety.
In Sydney, a panel including nurses, teachers and university staff shared stories of recent union organising and strike action, while in Brisbane, Priya De and Sam Watson Junior from the recently-formed Campaign Against Racism and Fascism discussed strategies to take on the far right.
Radical history was another major theme. The legendary Aboriginal activist Dr Gary Foley spoke in Melbourne about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and its founding 50 years ago, which remains one of the most significant events in the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia. Socialist historian and writer Janey Stone spoke on radical Jewish history, and Gregor Benton, a professor at Cardiff University, spoke on the subject of a book he edited, Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo.
For those new to Marxist theory, there were sessions about the modern working class, reform vs. revolution and the need for socialism to end oppression. Sessions devoted to classic texts of Marxism, such as Clara Zetkin’s Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win and Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike, also featured.
The Victorian Socialists’ electoral campaign was a particular focus in Melbourne, with Cooper candidate Kath Larkin, and Victorian Senate candidate Aran Mylvaganam speaking at the opening night rally. In a federal election that offers so little, the Victorian Socialists represents a chance to campaign for a radical left alternative to the status quo, and many Marxism participants from around the country will be travelling to Melbourne in the coming weeks to be part of the campaign.
Marxism is organised by revolutionaries. It brings together radicals, activists, theorists and socialists of all stripes to learn from each other and strengthen our commitment to the fight for a better world. “We’re surrounded by examples of the horrors of capitalism”, Marxism organiser Sarah Garnham said, “but we hope that Marxism showcases the resistance that is always out there, the struggles and victories”.

Marxism 2022: Fighting the system, rebuilding the left

Marx’s view of how society’s ills could be resolved underwent a major change between 1843 and 1845. At the start of this period, he was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung—attempting to apply insights from the philosopher Georg Hegel to the struggle for a more liberal and democratic Prussian state. At the end of it, he was a communist, convinced of the potential of the working class to overturn capitalism and build a new, more equal and free society in its place.
The banning of the newspaper by the Prussian authorities in March 1843 was a turning point. Seeing little prospect for further political activity in such a climate of repression, in October that year Marx moved to Paris. There he became involved with socialists and circles of radical workers—his first direct experience of a workers’ movement that was then still in its infancy. It was in Paris too, in 1844, that Marx began his life-long friendship with Friedrich Engels, who travelled there from Manchester, where he had been collecting material for his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was published in 1845, and building links with the Chartists.
A selection of Marx’s notes from this period—based on his intensive study of the mechanics of contemporary society, and in particular the position of labour within the emerging system of industrial capitalism—was later published as the 1844 Manuscripts. The first note in the published collection indicates how much his focus had already shifted. “Wages are determined”, he wrote, “through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker”.
In 1845 and 1846 Marx collaborated with Engels on the texts that were later published as The German Ideology. In chapter I, they explain their new perspective of “historical materialism”. In seeking to understand human society and history, they wrote, “the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones ... They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live”.
This approach was in stark contrast to the kind of idealist philosophy that dominated in the radical liberal circles that Marx had previously been part of. “Men must be in a position to live”, they went on, “in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself”.
The key to understanding society and social change, then, wasn’t to be found in abstract theorising of the philosophers, but in the realm of the material conditions of life and the daily production and reproduction of those conditions. According to the historical materialist standpoint, the manner in which people produce their means of subsistence (the food, shelter and so on they need to survive) is the foundation on which the entirety of what we call “society” rests. Understanding any aspect of society, then, had to start with an understanding of the particular “mode of production” it was based on.
This is where class became central. People, of course, can be grouped by workplace, locality, speciality or any number of things. As Marx and Engels saw it, however, the most important way they are grouped is by the way they access their means of subsistence, or the money to do so. Does it come primarily from working for someone else, or from having others work for you? The answer to this question—about which class you belong to—is the most important aspect of the many elements that condition an individual’s consciousness and view of the world. And the existence of such fundamentally differing standpoints within a single society points to something that Marx and Engels came to see as the basic driver of social change throughout history: class conflict.
The basic opposition at the heart of production between the worker and the boss had been present in various forms, they contended, from the first emergence of class societies to their own time. “The history of all hitherto existing society”, as Marx famously put it in the opening passage of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, “is the history of class struggles.
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
At whatever point you consider in history following the emergence of class societies, you find, on one side, a ruling class that enjoy their role in society and the rewards of their social position. On the other side you find the workers (or peasants, slaves and so on), for whom the situation is completely different. The “good life” enjoyed by those at the top is won off the misery and impoverishment of those at the bottom.
This is not, and can never be, a stable state of affairs. It’s not just that those at the top will always look for ways to turn the screws and squeeze yet more riches from those whom they see it as their “right” to rule. Nor that the miserable existence forced on those at the bottom guarantees rebellion. It’s also that, over time, what Marx and Engels called the “forces of production”—which includes workers themselves, their knowledge and skills, the tools and machinery they use, and so on—gradually develop in such a way as, ultimately, to begin to be stifled by the existing “relations of production” that the rulers want to maintain.
However stable and permanent a particular class society might look, then, the basic conflict at its heart ensures change will ultimately come, whether the ruling class wants it or not.
Under the emerging system of capitalism, Marx realised, this fundamental class conflict was growing in both scale and intensity. The whole world was being drawn into one system—building, on one side, a capitalist ruling class destined to overtake all of its predecessors in wealth and power, and on the other side a working class of enormous proportions and capacities.
The emergence and growth of the system in Europe from the fourteenth century onward destroyed old ways of life and eroded the ideological and material basis of reactionary monarchies. These developments paved the way for an explosion of economic productivity and raised, in the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, the (illusory, but nevertheless significant) banner of “liberty, equality and fraternity” as the new ideal towards which society should strive.
Understanding these developments didn’t make Marx anything like a cheerleader for the system. There was never, as he saw it, a “heroic” phase of capitalist development. Capitalism’s immense productivity created the possibility of the creation of a society of genuine freedom and abundance. But this possibility was threatened from the start by the ever increasing scale of barbarism and destruction that was the flip side of the system’s ceaseless drive to conquer and accumulate.
The technological advance was immense, but it was used destructively. Marx wouldn’t live to see atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, millions slaughtered in industrial wars and holocausts or today’s unfolding climate catastrophe. But he saw enough to know that, while capitalism could conjure up gigantic forces of production and incredible technological feats, it couldn’t control them or put them at the service of humanity as a whole, rather than just the profits of the rich. The periodic economic crises, wars, genocides and other “un-natural” disasters the system brought with it provided a periodic reminder of its fundamentally destructive core.
The hope for an escape from all this lay, as Marx saw it, with the working class. This class, with all its latent power and knowledge, the class that contained within itself every grievance in society, and which had no stake in capitalism’s continuance, could become, as Marx put in the Communist Manifesto, the system’s “gravedigger”.
It could do so not only because of its potential to resist its exploitation and oppression—a potential it shared with previous labouring classes like the peasantry under feudalism. It could do so because its role as producer of all the profits and wealth that are capitalism’s lifeblood gave it the power both to bring the entire system to its knees, and to build an alternative, socialist, system in its place. The bigger capitalism grew—Marx realised—and the more gigantic the productive forces it created, the more numerous, and potentially powerful, the working class would become. The single remaining missing ingredient for the “revolutionary reconstitution of society” along communist lines was the kind of class consciousness required for workers to wield their power collectively.
This, for Marx, was where revolution came in. “Revolution is necessary”, he wrote in The German Ideology, “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew”.
No ruling class in history has ever gracefully accepted that its time in power was complete. The capitalist class itself had to contend with the structures that arose from and defended feudal society and the power of the aristocracy. The working class, in turn, has to contend with the capitalists and the governmental powers, police, military, right-wing media and all the other structures that have grown out of, and defend, capitalist society. Only a mass, working-class revolution holds out the hope of successfully overturning this imposing edifice of reaction.
At the same time, it’s only through the direct participation of the mass of workers in the process of struggle and revolution that they can gain the consciousness and confidence in their power needed to begin running society for themselves. The reality of daily life under capitalism is (quite consciously, when you consider the role of the education system, the mass media and so on) unlikely to produce this kind of consciousness on a wide scale. The rupture to the fabric of this reality that occurs when workers fight back collectively against the system is like a window through which the “new world” of communism breaks through.
By the mid-1840s the main elements of Marx’s theory of society, social change and revolution were in place. In contrast to his idealist and “utopian socialist” predecessors, Marx’s socialism was grounded in an understanding of the fundamental material basis of class society, and of the contradictions of capitalism that point to its own demise. To be a communist didn’t just mean plucking out a vision of a better society and upholding it against contemporary reality. To do that meant only to write, in Marx’s famous quip “recipes for the cook-shops of the future”. Instead, it meant ascertaining which processes in contemporary society pointed towards a better future, and devoting your life to their success.
Historical materialism became, as the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács later put it, “the theory of the proletarian revolution”. The rest of Marx’s life would be devoted to putting this theory into practice.

Marx’s theory of society, social change and revolution

At the start of 1917, it was clear that Russia was, in the words of the revolutionary and novelist Victor Serge, “sliding into the abyss”. The country was being stretched to breaking point by the demands of World War I. Millions were dying in the trenches, and behind the lines, the economy was unravelling. In the first weeks of 1917, Serge writes, “most Russian politicians and generals, not to mention several Grand Dukes, were thinking of how they might avert a revolution in the streets by conducting one in the palace”. But, Serge goes on, “nobody dared to do anything” and “the revolution did come into the streets”.
On 23 February 1917 (8 March in the Western calendar—International Working Women’s Day) women textile workers in Petrograd led 100,000 workers out on strike. The next day the numbers doubled, and from there it spiralled out of the authorities’ control. The February Revolution had begun, and the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty, headed by Tsar Nicholas II, was enjoying its last days of power. Barely a week after the first strikes of the revolution broke out, the tsar—who was stranded in a railway car that workers refused to allow to move—was forced by his own generals to abdicate.
News of the end of tsarism spread fast. Eduard Dune, a factory worker and enthusiastic participant in the revolution, recalled in his memoir Notes of a Red Guard the moment a demonstration in Moscow got word of it. “The news swept through them like a breeze”, he wrote, “and created an extraordinary atmosphere. People began to embrace and kiss ... the mood of the crowd was transmitted to one another like conduction”. Across Russia, similar scenes played out.
Meetings of the newly elected soviets—which brought together thousands of delegates from factories, barracks and peasant villages—ran day and night. Debates raged everywhere. Limitless new ideas were raised about what needed to be done to improve society. Smaller groups and committees responsible for all manner of tasks the revolution had set itself sprung up like mushrooms—including armed detachments. In these early days of the revolution, the armed workers’ militias were most commonly formed simply by someone putting out a call and getting a few volunteers.
Clashes with police or right-wing soldiers were rare. Rex Wade, in his definitive history Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution, writes that “workers, students, citizens, and soldiers, intoxicated by liberty, had [during the February Revolution] careered around the city in trucks brandishing arms they did not really expect to use”. People were improvising—pulling groups together and sending them, in another memoirist’s words, “God knows from where, to where, and for what reason”.
Like much of what occurred in February, it’s easy to overstate just how spontaneous the workers’ militia movement was. Lessons had been learnt by many workers who recalled the violent repression they faced after the abortive revolution of 1905. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had noted then that “what is lacking [on the revolutionary side] ... is a military force”. The Bolsheviks were acutely aware that gains won easily in February could also be lost. They warned persistently (and presciently) that the capitalists, together with the remnants of the old tsarist order, would counterattack, and they foresaw the crucial role the workers’ militias would play in the defence against this.
As the revolution went on from February into March, the militias grew at pace. By this point, as Wade recounts, “a bewildering array of militias ... and other armed groups existed, and more were being created daily. An estimated 20,000 men were under arms in these organizations by mid-March”. Not everyone, of course, was pleased with this development. The militias, Wade writes, “thrilled the hearts of revolutionaries and tormented the leaders trying to harness the revolutionary tide”.
Following the abdication of the tsar, power passed into the hands of a Provisional Government made up of the remnants of the tsarist State Duma. The first order of business for this body—dominated, as it was, by representatives of the Russian capitalist class—was to bring the disorders on the streets under control and get Russia back to work and back behind the war effort. For this they needed a reliable police force, one they could use to combat strikes and protests by workers. They set about organising, for this purpose, a number of detachments under the banner of the City Militia, and they demanded that the workers’ militias be subsumed under its leadership.
The revolutionary workers, however, jealously guarded their independence. The tension between the City Militia and the workers’ militias wasn’t just a matter of turf, but of class power. This conflict between armed bands, one at the disposal of the Provisional Government, and one under the sway of the most radical section of the soviets, reflected the dual power contest the whole of Russia was engulfed in between March and October.
The workers’ militias were selective about who was allowed to join. “The candidacy of each prospective member”, Dune writes, “was discussed at a session of the factory committee, and applicants were often turned down on the grounds that they were regularly drunk, or engaged in hooliganism, or had behaved coarsely with women”. The family circumstances of the potential recruits were also taken into account, disallowing sole providers, for instance.
The workers’ service in the militias didn’t separate them from the rest of their class. They didn’t have their own special barracks or stations like the police, but lived their lives immersed in the working-class communities they served. It was common in 1917 for each individual factory contingent in the mass protests of workers that regularly occurred to be headed by the factory committee and delegates to the soviet, followed by the armed factory guard and then the rest of the workers. The role of militias was to be a kind of advance guard of the broader working-class movement.
As the militias grew to be a recognised part of the revolution, they required a more “official” name. A Bolshevik by the name of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich suggested one in an article in Pravda on 18 March: the “Red Guard”. By this time they had procured a large quantity of arms. The Red Guards were quite coy about the number of weapons they had stockpiled, preferring to plead poor. But a hint as to their surprisingly large cache comes from the counter-revolutionary General Lavr Kornilov, who on 31 March was forced—rather humiliatingly—to plead for the return of 40,000 missing rifles and 30,000 revolvers to the military’s stores.
How did the workers get their guns? The bulk of them were handed over by military units that had been won to the revolution. Others, however, were procured by more ad hoc means. In the early days of the revolution, some enterprising workers found that it was a reasonably simple matter to get their hands on weapons, by searching in the streets until they stumbled on a policeman who was unfortunate enough to be standing or walking alone.
The February Revolution had raised expectations enormously among Russia’s mass of workers, soldiers and peasants. But delivering on these hopes was another matter altogether. The war dragged on, bosses steadily eroded the gains won in the workplace, and the feeling of collective euphoria of the first days and weeks of the revolution faded, leaving an enormous and rapidly growing reservoir of discontent and frustration.
Increasing numbers of workers came to see the Provisional Government as a barrier to the further advance of the revolution. The answer, many thought, was workers’ power. “If we could organize a revolutionary government in one factory”, Dune reflected, “then why could we not create a similar order across the whole of Russia?” But, when it came to how this power was to be organised, he continued, “No one had a clear idea”. In April, Bolshevik leader Lenin returned to Russia, declaring, “We must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”. To revolutionary workers like Dune, that sounded grand. The question was: how? And, in particular, when?
Anger at the lack of change built to a crescendo in the first days of July. In the July Days, as they’ve come to be known, tens of thousands of soldiers and workers came out onto the streets of Petrograd to demand that all power be transferred into the hands of the soviets—not next month, not next week, but now. The Bolshevik leadership, aware that the uprising was premature but unable to stop the demonstrations, put the party at the head of the movement in an attempt to prevent it collapsing into carnage.
The movement was isolated and repressed. The provinces weren’t ready to follow Petrograd down the path of insurrection. The bulk of the army remained loyal to the Provisional Government, ensuring that any genuine attempt at insurrection would be drowned in blood (and also, in the minds of many revolutionary workers, further emphasising the importance of the Red Guards). Heavy days followed. Slanders against Lenin and the Bolsheviks spread like wildfire. Enormous numbers of people were imprisoned or forced into hiding, and a certain number of guns were seized.
“This was the time”, Dune wrote, “when the Bolsheviks were being persecuted ... The newspapers spoke of the Bolsheviks losing their influence on the masses, but in fact we noticed that it was growing, at least to judge by the number of those wishing to join the Red Guard detachment. Attached to it was now a nursing corps, formed by young women at the factory. For more than a month we were dubbed ‘German spies’, but in August came the counterrevolutionary rebellion of Kornilov”.
The Kornilov coup was a pivotal moment on the road to the October insurrection. After months of wrangling with the heads of the Provisional Government for a decisive end to the instability in Russia, General Kornilov had grown weary of their vacillations and decided to take matters into his own hands. In August he launched a military invasion of Petrograd. The working-class and left response was enormous. Factory after factory held meetings denouncing the coup and mobilising workers for the armed defence of the revolution. The workers demanded, and received, a new supply of weapons from the government’s stores. The Putilov factory alone sent a detachment of 800 armed metalworkers to the outskirts of the city to meet Kornilov and his army.
Kornilov, however, never made it that far. “The railroad workers”, Trotsky writes, “tore up and barricaded the tracks in order to hold back Kornilov’s army”. Bolshevik agitators surrounded them at the stations where they were stuck and convinced many of the soldiers to abandon Kornilov on the spot. The coup rapidly dissipated into nothing, but not before it had both further discredited the Provisional Government (the head of which, Alexander Kerensky, was revealed to have been conspiring with Kornilov in the lead-up to the coup), and convinced much wider layers of people of the need for soviet power as the only reliable defence against counter-revolution.
By October the Bolsheviks’ demand for “all power to the soviets” had become almost universal among workers, soldiers and peasants. In addition to the ongoing carnage of the war, the economy had catastrophically collapsed, and hunger raged. Everyone felt a final showdown coming. The Red Guards were sleeping in their factories with their rifles. Ugarov, a factory worker, wrote of receiving an order “to prepare the Red Guard for action. The bolts of rifles clicked”.
The October insurrection wasn’t marked by large marches of workers in the streets—a fact which many have taken as a sign that it lacked the element of mass participation seen in February. But the “orderliness” of the October Revolution reflected, not the lack of mass participation, but its much more organised and directed character. “The Red Guard detachments”, Trotsky wrote, “felt at their back the support of the factories. The soldier squad returning to the barracks found the new shifts ready. Only with heavy reserves behind them could revolutionary detachments go about their work with such confidence”. This is demonstrated by the account of one Bolshevik leader and worker, A. Vasil’ev, who when he arrived at his factory to round up a portion of the Red Guard there, found every single one of the workers already lined up outside, ready to take part.
The Red Guards were the core of the armed insurrection. There were no wavering units among them. They seized bridges and railway stations, stiffened the resolve of the revolutionary soldiers, kept public order and stormed the last bastion of resistance of the counter-revolution: the Winter Palace. These were mainly bloodless events, with many reports of Red Guards stepping in to prevent unnecessary violence. They could act so decisively and effectively only because they were supported by the immense majority of Russia’s population at the time. This mass of people formed the body of the revolution, while the Red Guards were, in the decisive moment, its iron fist.
Following the revolution, the Red Guards continued to play a role as armed protectors of the newly won and fragile power of the workers’ state. Subsequently, the Guards were incorporated into the Red Army, which had to be established and trained in a matter of months in order to fight the assembled forces of reaction that sought to strangle the new Soviet regime. Many former members of the Red Guards went on to play a central, and heroic, role in the civil war that raged from 1918 to 1921.

The Red Guards in the Russian Revolution

When a serious call to recreate the racist Cronulla riots goes out, and 200 people answer it, something serious is in the air. When a short-notice call for opposition is answered by three hundred anti-racists, you know there are plenty of people in Melbourne ready to stop these bastards in their tracks. This is what happened in St Kilda on Saturday. 
“Personally”, ABC editorial director Alan Sunderland said on Sunday, “I wouldn’t call them Nazis. I’d call them people making Nazi salutes. Accuracy matters”.
It certainly does. It is accurate, for instance, to note that these “Nazi salute making people” chose 5 January to gather at St Kilda’s foreshore – 100 years exactly since the founding of the German Workers’ Party, the precursor to the Nazi party. And it is a damning omission that outlets such as the ABC failed to reiterate that one of the key organisers of the event has called for a picture of Adolf Hitler to be displayed in every school in the country. 
At the event, some waved helmets branded with Nazi insignia. Others held two fingers above their upper lip in imitation Hitler moustaches. They draped themselves in Australian flags to invoke the Cronulla race riot of 2005. Senator Fraser Anning, who used his first speech in parliament to call for a “final solution” to stop Muslim immigration, brought parliamentary prestige to the affair. 
They gathered to “take St Kilda back”. Take it back from migrants; take it back from “gangs”. 
The announcement of their event left anti-racists with two options. The first was easy: stay home. The second was to stare down the “Nazi saluting people” and do everything we could to disrupt them. The enormous resources mobilised by Victoria Police only aided them. At one point the cops surrounded anti-racists to allow the neo-Nazis and fascist sympathisers to roam freely. 
Politicians are now tut-tutting about the Nazi demonstration. As they should. But they cannot erase decades of bipartisan dehumanisation of refugees and demonisation of Muslims, or rewind the disgraceful Victorian Liberal Party and Herald Sun campaign against Victoria’s “African gang problem”. These campaigns, full of confected fear and insecurity, have given succour to the far right.
“Daniel Andrews’ Labor government is soft on crime”, they say. “He’s letting gangs run wild”. “Someone needs to do something”. Far right organisers take that as an open invitation to “do something”. They take matters into their own hands. 
Yet 5 January changed the narrative about the people regularly described in the media as right wing activists or concerned citizens. It has become possible to name them for what they are: Nazis. This naming, with all the seriousness and urgency it implies, could be an important moment for galvanising the activist opposition to these groups and broadening the support for anti-fascist activity. We outnumbered them on Saturday, but not by enough. We need to build the opposition so that we outnumber and demoralise them.

When Nazis walk among us

Abortion may be legal in Australia, but accessing it is another matter. The last specialist clinic in Tasmania has shut down, leaving women in Tasmania with curtailed choices.
There is now only one place in the state which will perform second trimester abortions – for $2,500, and with only part time availability. This appalling state of affairs is the responsibility of health minister Michael Ferguson – a man who described the safe, cheap abortion pill RU486 as “a drug which will allow the death penalty to be imposed on unborn babies”.
The Tasmanian Health Department has allowed women who now have to travel interstate for an abortion to access funding to offset the cost of travel. This is a second-rate option.
It is not only more logistically difficult and stressful; the scheme also has strict regulations about who can access it and for what. Patients still have to contribute to the flights and accommodation, and the Health Department requires the patient to attend the nearest centre that provides the service. Only people under 18 are guaranteed support for someone to travel with them.
The clinic shut down because it wasn’t profitable enough to stay open. The Liberal state government has let three clinics shut despite the decriminalisation of abortion in Tasmania in 2013. Decriminalisation was a genuine victory, but legal wins are hollow without real access.

Last abortion clinic in Tasmania closes

Thousands of early childhood educators walked off the job on 7 September as part of their campaign for equal pay. “Equally qualified industries in a male-dominated field get paid 30 percent more than we do”, one of the striking workers explained to Red Flag. “So we need to be paid more. We lose educators daily to other fields because we're underpaid.”
Women in Australia earn, on average, about 15 per cent less than men. Industries that are dominated by women tend to be paid less for comparable work with the same qualifications. The long day care workforce is 97 percent female, and their pay reflects that.
The workers do not want families to have to pay more so they can get a living wage. “We can’t expect families to fund this; we just need the government to step up and fund this pay rise”, one worker said. Families with children in day care already spend a huge amount. Fees of more than $100 per day are normal around the country.
But it’s not just about the money, Miranda, an early childhood educator, said. “It’s about equal rights. I mean, no equal rights is like a day without sunshine, and we’ve basically brought some sunshine into this day by gathering. It’s just beautiful. All power. It’s good we’re making noise.”

Jasmine Duff

Early educators strike for equal pay

EMpath, a self-described “high-performing and innovative organisation” based in the US, offers a “metric-based, mentor-led, incentivised program” that “takes a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach to fostering economic mobility”. Poverty, they reckon, is all in your head. 
In the poor, they say, “the prefrontal brain can get swamped and the wave of emotion can drown out clear focus and judgment”. This is a normal, temporary state for anyone under significant stress. But living in poverty means this strain is constant. Over time, they say, the constant stress and pressure of poverty form an impression so deep it rewires the brain. 
This is not surprising. Not just because any poor person will tell you that having no money is stressful, but because everything we experience leaves an imprint on our world view. This is the nature of being human. 
So, they say, to overcome poverty, the brain must be retrained to think differently. How can people plan for success when they have no “bandwidth” left for positivity? Children need “tools” like EMpath’s patented (and not at all cult sounding) “Child Bridge to a Brighter Future™”. And the company’s report “Using brain science to design new pathways out of poverty” outlines the “Bridge to Self-Sufficiency” for adults to sort their lives out. 
That’s cute. And the program claims some success helping poor people sort out their checklists and that. But this is no challenge to poverty. 
Unequal distribution of material resources is built into our society. It manifests in shocking inequality and consigns huge numbers to poverty. Eight men now own as much as the bottom half of the population. Does anyone really believe that you can think away cuts to penalty rates? Think away unemployment? Think away causualised, low wage jobs?
In reality, governments rule for the rich and demonise the poor. The Turnbull government is handing $65 billion to the wealthiest businesses in a corporate tax cut. On the other hand, students are facing university fee increases and below poverty level income support, because, says the education minister: “We’re trying to maintain fairness”. 
These policies will drive more people below a poverty line that is already above more than one in 10 people in Australia. That figure is growing, according to the Australian Council of Social Services. 
There’s no thinking around reality. It is not enough to take individuals and train them to work smarter, not harder. We live in a society that has always and will always cut down the hopes and aspirations of poor and working class people. Not because it makes us poor thinkers, but because it relentlessly exploits us.

Think your way out of poverty? Yeah, right

A fear of rent rises, evictions and blacklisting is stopping tenants asking for repairs or raising complaints, according to a new survey by CHOICE, the National Association of Tenants’ Organisations and National Shelter.
The survey revealed that there is a “climate of fear” among renters. Tenants are right to be nervous. According to the survey, one in ten copped a rent increase immediately after asking for a repair. Some are evicted for making reasonable complaints. “I was once told when I signed a lease that the landlord would be leaving the house as it is otherwise the rent would be put up”, one survey respondent said.
The report, Unsettled: Life in Australia’s private rental market, also detailed the insecurity of renting in Australia. Only 6 percent of renters are on a lease of six years or more, and more than 60 percent have a fixed term lease for one year or less.

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

Lenin in his own words: five key texts

Marxism 2022: Fighting the system, rebuilding the left

Marx’s theory of society, social change and revolution

The Red Guards in the Russian Revolution

When Nazis walk among us

Last abortion clinic in Tasmania closes

Early educators strike for equal pay

Think your way out of poverty? Yeah, right

‘Climate of fear’ for renters

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