Classic conditions for the proletarian revolution

Wellred

Core Argument

This chapter argues that the Second World War and its immediate aftermath produced the classic objective conditions for proletarian revolution across Europe, yet the absence of a mass revolutionary leadership—specifically, parties of the Fourth International—constituted a fatal subjective weakness. The core narrative thrust contrasts the utter demoralisation and treachery of the European bourgeoisie with the radicalised and transformed consciousness of the working class.

The bourgeoisie of the conquered nations, already shaken by pre-war mass movements, proved incapable of national leadership. Demoralised by military defeat and filled with hatred for their own workers, they fraternised with the enemy, becoming quislings who organised joint exploitation with the foreign oppressor. This earned them the hatred of workers and petty bourgeoisie alike. Even in victory, the Allied bourgeoisie is depicted as panic-stricken, lacking stable organs of state oppression, and wholly dependent on foreign bayonets to maintain rule.

At the opposite pole, the working class has undergone a profound transformation. The chapter identifies several factors driving this shift: a generation of capitalist rule since the previous world war, the ruling class’s collaboration under Nazi occupation, unemployment, starvation, fascism, national humiliation, and the powerful association of the Red Army’s victories with the October Revolution. Workers are breaking with bourgeois parliamentary politics and social democratic reformism, turning instead to revolutionary communism—though, critically, to its “caricatured and distorted” Stalinist form. Total war has accelerated capital concentration, ruined the urban petty bourgeoisie, and forced them into factories and slave labour camps, proletarianising them. Women and youth, bearing the greatest burdens, have also been drawn towards radical communist solutions.

The chapter’s central polemic is directed against both Stalinism and social democracy as betrayals and obstacles. It argues that while all objective conditions for overthrowing capitalism exist, the subjective factor—mass revolutionary parties of the Fourth International—has not been established. Without Trotskyist leadership, the masses will batter themselves in vain against capitalism, blindfolded by Stalinism and social democracy. The ruling class’s breathing space is afforded only by the numerical weakness and isolation of Trotskyist cadres. The chapter thus functions as a strategic intervention, insisting that the immediate task is to transform small Trotskyist groups into the fighting leadership of the working class.