The counter-revolution in a “democratic” form¶
Core Argument¶
The Counter-Revolution in a “Democratic” Form
This chapter argues that the post-war European bourgeoisie, having lost the stable basis of fascist rule with the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, cannot simply bludgeon the radicalised masses back into submission. Instead, it must adopt a “democratic” form of counter-revolution, combining illusory reforms and representative government with repression and the disarming of the workers. The central thesis is that the bourgeoisie has found a willing tool for this task in the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties, which act as “hirelings of capital” to dam the revolutionary upsurge into safe channels of class collaboration.
The text draws on the immediate post-war context, noting that the fall of fascism revealed the revolutionary forces developing beneath the surface across Western and Eastern Europe. In Italy, the instant appearance of soviet forms of organisation after Mussolini’s fall demonstrated “dual power in its elementary stages,” but the old workers’ parties acted as a brake. The heroic but misled Warsaw insurrection and its calculated betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy are cited as evidence of the Kremlin’s counter-revolutionary role. The chapter argues that the Soviet bureaucracy, while afraid of proletarian revolution, is compelled to preserve the workers’ movement as a safeguard against imperialist intervention, leading to a compromise with Anglo-American imperialism on the basis of preserving capitalism.
The theoretical context is explicitly Leninist and Trotskyist. The chapter invokes Lenin’s observation that there is no hopeless position for the bourgeoisie given a weak revolutionary vanguard. It predicts a period of “Kerenskyism” in the first stages of the European revolution, where the masses, clear on what they oppose but not on the means to achieve their ends, will briefly follow the old organisations before learning through experience. The Spanish revolution of 1931 is presented as a pattern: the fall of the monarchy, a coalition government of bourgeois republicans and socialists that combined radical programmes with repression, leading to a period of crisis and civil war. This pattern, the chapter claims, will be “manifested on an all European scale,” though without even the relative stability of the Spanish republic.
The polemic is directed against both Stalinism and Social Democracy, which together form two “traitor internationals” at the service of capital. The chapter also attacks the “perfidious ‘leaders’ of the working class” who fail to learn from history, contrasting them with the “serious representatives of finance-capital” who have learned how to manage transitions to safeguard their interests. The central argument is that the approaching revolution in Europe can only be proletarian, but the masses lack a mass Trotskyist party, leaving the bourgeoisie with a temporary but dangerous opportunity to impose a “democratic” counter-revolution.