These studies, on Poland in the early 1980s, Iran in 1979, Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s and South Africa at the end of Apartheid, were all examples of mass workers action that had the potential to spill over into working class revolution. With the possible exception of Iran, which saw workers' councils in a small number of highly organised areas of workers' strength, none of them did. Comparing these events, with the high points of revolutionary activity in the early 20th century, form the main purpose of the book. Despite the book originating in a Phd study Rose writes not out of pure academic interest, but with the ambition of revolutionary emancipation. It is a remarkable work.
The book opens, however, not with 20th century revolution, but with 1848 and The Communist Manifesto, "one of modernity's greatest historical documents". The Manifesto, writes Rose, "provides strategic and tactical guidelines for accomplishing the ultimate goal of a classless society". Rose traces the development after 1848, not just of revolutionary ideas, but also of organisation. Crucially, he notes that while Marx and Engels did not fully develop their thoughts on revolutionary organisation, others did. Gramsci, for instance, noted how his revolutionary newspaper in 1918-1920 "worked to develop certain forms of new intellectualism"... individuals whose strength was not simply "eloquence" but "in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser". Such individuals were, Gramsci writes, "elites of intellectuals of a new type who arise directly from the masses through remaining in contact with them".
While Rose fully explores other aspects of revolutionary thought, particularly Marx and Engels' key concept that the emancipation of the working class will "be the act of the working class" themselves. The importance of revolutionary worker "intellectuals" remains central to his argument. It was individuals like these, Rose concludes, who made the Russian Revolution: "Lenin's purposive workers: worker leaders, 'genuine heroes... with a passionate drive toward knowledge and toward socialism' [Lars Lih]" Why is this important? That, in essence, is the argument of the second part of the book.
In examining the four "thwarted" revolutions of Iran, Poland, South Africa and Brazil, Rose explores two things. Firstly the ongoing relevance of the Marxist approach to social change. The moments when mass action by workers begins to spill over into the demand for "self management" a slogan that Rose describes as one of 1968's greatest slogans. This self-management is evident in a number of examples. Rose quotes from his interview with one of the Solidarity activists from Poland who describes a key moment in the strike wave:
There was a nuclear bomb shelter in the basement. I used this shelter because I was formally leader of a trade union... I organised a strike committee for this March mobilisation for all offices, all workshops around the old market. I even prepared food for three months. So I had everything prepared for these strikes... It was a classical dual power situation. There was still a state with military apparatus and police... But the real power, day by day, went to workers' factory councils.... we organised a plebiscite in the biggest factories in Wroclaw about who has the power to choose the director, manger, the Party or workers' councils? And in every factory we won this plebiscite.
If that was the situation in Poland, in some parts of the Iranian Revolution power went even further. One account, quoted by Rose says:
The oil industry is virtually controlled by dozens of independent workers' komitehs, committees, which, though loyal to the central government, are nevertheless participating in all the decisions related to production and marketing... the komitehs have unquestionably demonstrated that they can run the oilfields and the refineries without the top rank Iranian managers and without the expertise of some 800 foreign technicians.
But as Rose shows at crucial points in all four of these risings the left failed the test. This was, it must be stressed, not just about whether or not the left supported workers' action or retreated at the wrong point (a particular issue in Poland), but also whether or not key questions such as oppression were taken seriously. In Iran, for instance, the left failed to support women's fight for their rights, seeing it as a distraction. Comparing the German Revolution of 1919 with Iran in 1979 Rose writes:
The German communists in 1919 had one tremendous advantage over their Iranian counterparts... Both shared the experience of taking part in revolutionary upheavals, toppling tyrannies, as a result of decisive collective workers' action. Both shared the experience of witnessing and participating in very advanced experimental forms, though at different stages of development, of organised workers attempting to establish democratic forms of workers' control of production... But the German left had at least secured elementary democratic and constitutional rights, which allowed the German Communist and the independent workers' movement time to recover from the defeat.
He continues, that the
tragedy of the Iranian left is that not only was this decisive advantage denied to them; the Iranian left itself has to share some of the responsibility for this failure. The struggle for popular democracy, including the defence of women's rights and the independent press in 1979 was just as important as defending the workers' shoras and the new regime's anti-imperialist stance.
But the left was unable to engage in the sort of tactical twists and turns that Lenin's Bolsheviks used throughout 1917 to consolidate their position in the minds of the masses. The problem was politics, or the lack of political clarity. In Iran, Rose argues that "the Stalinist mind-set not only ruled out such essential tactical and strategic flexibility, it altogether downplayed the importance of the struggle for popular democracy". Those leading the movements, in all four case studies, too often shared a political allegiance or set of ideas that saw mass struggle as secondary. It was always their downfall.
But it wasn't simply the lack of a clear political line, or a distortion of strategy. It was also the failure of the sort of revolutionary organisation with large numbers of Gramsci's intellectual activists within the working class. Activists who could think about strategy and fight for mass action, at the same time as building an independent movement. That's not to say that individuals like this did not exist. Rose interviews several of them, and he notes that the best of these "the regimes most feared because of their widespread influence" and they tried to silence them. But he concludes, for Iran:
The problem of how to revitalise that vision [of socialism] in the shadow of Soviet Communism and its Iranian apologists was never resolved. The same applied in Poland, South Africa and Brazil. It also meant that the nascent worker intellectuals were unable fully to develop their political abilities.
It is a problem that contemporary socialist organisation must grapple with. Indeed Joseph Choonara has recently written a piece on how revolutionary parties can develop cadre. While the International Socialist Tradition, of whom John Rose was part, have rightly always understood the problem of the Stalinist politics of the State Capitalist regimes and the Communist Parties who acted in their name, Revolutions Thwarted demonstrates how lasting and extensive that influence was. Rose concludes:
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This... underestimates the impact of the collapse of Soviet Communism and the growing doubts about its viability that preceded it. Criticisms of the Soviet Union... easily flowed over into a demoralising sense that the original socialist revolution in Russia 1917 was itself flawed... the independent workers' movements in the four countries... were... dogged by the experience of Soviet Communism and lacked confidence to develop sustainable ideological responses which would revitalise a communist project centred on their own self-activity.The conclusion can only be to build the sort of intellectually dynamics, revolutionary socialist organisation that was lacking in these movements in Polish, Brazilian, Iranian and South African history. The sort of organisation that John Rose dedicated his life to building. Revolutions Thwarted is, in many ways, one of the most important books to come out of the International Socialist tradition in the last ten years. Its a book that reasserts the core politics of classical Marxism, puts workers' self emancipation at its heart, and is not afraid to be self-critical and honest. Its one that a generation of socialists ought to read to arm us for the struggles to come.
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