Timeline¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter presents a stark chronological record of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggles that defined the interwar period, from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the consolidation of Stalinism and the onset of the Second World War. The timeline’s core narrative thrust is the catastrophic defeat of the European working class, not by the bourgeoisie alone, but through the treachery of its own reformist and Stalinist leaderships. The sequence of events is arranged to demonstrate a clear causal chain: the German Revolution of 1918 was betrayed by the SPD, whose leaders ordered the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht; the Italian factory occupations of 1920 were sold out by reformist union officials; and the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 was drowned in blood under Stalin’s disastrous policy of subordination to the Kuomintang. The timeline draws heavily on the theoretical framework of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which is shown emerging in 1923 precisely to challenge this pattern of bureaucratic betrayal. The key polemical target is the Comintern leadership under Stalin, whose declaration of the ‘third period’ in 1928 is exposed as a catastrophic ultra-left turn that, combined with the earlier policy of the ‘united front from above’, left the German working class divided and disarmed before the Nazi seizure of power. The evidence is presented through the relentless electoral statistics of the early 1930s: in November 1932, the SPD and KPD together commanded 221 seats in the Reichstag, a majority that was never used to block Hitler’s appointment. The timeline’s later entries, including Ted Grant’s 1946 analysis of ‘counter-revolution in a democratic form’, extend this argument into the post-war period, framing the British intervention in Greece and the Popular Front governments in France and Spain as further instances of the same pattern: the suppression of working-class power by ostensibly left-wing forces. The murder of Trotsky in 1940 and the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 serve as the grim bookends of this degeneration, while the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 is presented as the only principled response to a world sliding into war and fascism.