Revolution Against Fascism

The previous article began with the late Franz Neumann on the failure of voting for the lesser evil against Hitler. This was the path chosen by social democrats in Germany like him, those who prioritized saving their own middle-class privilege over stopping fascism. The present article explores the path that the social democrats didn’t choose, the path of what he called “political revolution.”  

This isn’t what today’s democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the “Squad” mean by the phrase. What they mean is a more conservative version of what Neumann was arguing against. They’re advocating a more conservative version of the social democracy that failed against the Nazis.

Ultimately, the German social democrats, like today’s liberals, progressives, and many democratic socialists, wanted to save the capitalist society that allowed them to achieve their version of the American Dream. They ended up sacrificing everyone else in the process.  Eventually, the social democrats even sacrificed themselves.

What is a Revolution?

It can be difficult to understand what does and does not constitute a revolution.  The left today remains dominated by those from the middle classes, including the “professional-managerial class.”  Similar to the social democrats against the Nazis, too many middle-class leftists utilize a form of gaslighting to attain and retain their privilege.  

The most popular misrepresentation of revolution on the left today came from a now deceased academic named Erik Olin Wright. He used the phrase “ruptural transformation” instead of revolution and summarized it with this short sentence: “Smash first, build second.”[1]  This is a very misleading characterization though.

The Russian communist Vladmir Lenin tends to be most often labeled as supposedly advocating this view. Folks then say that revolution will always lead to the disaster of totalitarianism, like what happened in Russia under Stalin—which is untrue. Lenin absolutely advocated for “smashing the state,” as he called it, which meant overthrowing capitalism and its governance.  

He also believed it was necessary to build an organized fighting force as an alternative before a revolution—to carry out the revolution itself. Without that alternative he believed the working class who carried out the revolution would be forced to rely on the existing government’s bureaucracy to manage the economy, which he thought would end in disaster. This is why, on the eve of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin famously called for “All power to the soviets!” We’ll return to the soviets in a moment.

The revolution was catalyzed in defense, which is important when considering the threat of fascism today. Acting on behalf of the Tsar (the Russian king), the commander-in-chief of the Russian army attacked what was then a newly formed republic. The army wanted to return the Tsar to power. 

People in neighborhoods and workplaces across the country formed soviets, also known as democratic worker assemblies or councils, to defend themselves and fight back. They then launched nationwide general strikes, took over workplaces, communized them, and governed them via the soviets. That was the revolution. Franz Neumann eventually came to agree that this was the necessary path to take against fascism, as opposed to the path of semi-dictatorship.

Lenin advocated “smashing the state” and believed in the need to immediately replace capitalism and its government with something like the Paris Commune of 1871, which was also catalyzed under similar defensive circumstances.[2] He wanted the government and economy to be a nationwide democratic commune of communes. He also believed that all the armed self-defense forces needed to be organized into what he called a “workers’ state,” that must “wither away” after the threat of counter-revolution was defeated.[3]  

Unfortunately, even though the workers' revolution spread to other countries, the soviets were only able to take power in Russia. This left the country isolated and open to the counter revolution that led to Stalin's dictatorship. Despite what middle class propagandists might say, that doesn’t mean every revolution is destined to end in totalitarianism. That’s just what people say who are afraid to risk the power of their professional-managerial class and who can afford to wait and see how things play out before making any sort of real commitment. It’s also a genocidal politics rooted in sacrificing the more vulnerable. 

The 2024 Elections and the Revolutionary Alternative

In contrast, we need to be building our own equivalent of soviets everywhere, organized into a coordinated force that can bring the economy to a halt, take over workplaces, and communize them so that we can make a revolution to bring an end to capitalism.  This requires those whose labor makes our economy function and generates all the profit, the working class, to bring workplaces and communities together and build up the collective capacity to strike. That’s what we should be organizing and planning for, instead of remaining dependent on the foolish idea that the government and a reformed capitalist system will save us from fascism.  

This requires getting all our forces ready—those who believe that a revolution is necessary and possible. This is not to say that a revolution will come about from a single strike around the 2024 election. But the only way revolution becomes possible is if we build a coordinated fighting force, what Lenin called a “revolutionary party.” We desperately need to put a workers’ revolution back on the table. We desperately need to build an organized fighting force, including now amid the urgent necessity to stop the US government’s enabling of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.  

Between now and the November 2024 elections, we need to be building a party that brings together those from all terrains of struggle, those who are ready to fight. From Palestinian liberation to Drag Story Hour defense and beyond, we need to be building a revolutionary united front to be ready for what the end of the year has in store for us…because it might be quite horrific.  However, in building a revolutionary party and a united front against fascism now, we can turn the tables on fascists and any Democrat semi-dictatorship—even from what may otherwise seem like the darkest of moments.

NOTES

[1] Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, (New York: Verso Press, 2010). P. 303.

[2] V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 2020). P. 37-57.

[3] Ibid., 83-100.

Atlee McFellin lives in East Cleveland, Ohio and is originally from Battle Creek, Michigan. He was raised in no small part by his late maternal grandmother who was born into a middle-class Catholic family and grew up in Hitler’s Germany.