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Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) is often described as the “founder of German social democracy”. But his influence on the German workers’ movement was mostly disastrous.

Lassalle participated in the 1848 revolution, for which he spent a year in prison. But he was not at all the workers’ champion. Frederick Engels said, in an 1891 letter to Karl Kautsky, that until 1862 Lassalle was “a specifically Prussian vulgar democrat with strong Bonapartist leanings” before “he suddenly switched round for purely personal reasons”. Lassalle tried unsuccessfully to assume leadership of the main bourgeois party, the Progressives. His hatred of the liberal bourgeoisie and subsequent turn to the working class were largely due to his resentment at the liberals’ rejection of him.

In the 1860s, there was a revival of struggle in Europe, as the working class recovered from the defeats of 1848. This made it possible to establish an international workers’ organisation, the First International, in which Karl Marx and Engels were key players.

In the early 1860s, the German workers’ movement was starting to organise, notably in Leipzig. But lacking in experience and self-confidence, these workers felt the need for a spokesperson and turned to Lassalle. Still smarting from his rejection by the liberals, Lassalle saw an opportunity to put himself at the head of this burgeoning workers’ movement and use it as a vehicle to advance his own ideas. He founded the General German Workers’ Association (GGWA) in 1863 and ran it as a dictatorship.

Lassalle was killed in a duel in 1864, but his ideas had quickly become hegemonic in a section of the German movement. Marxist writer Hal Draper commented that, by the time the First International was established in 1864, “the German field had already been pre-empted by Lassalleanism”. Under Lassalle, the new movement “was cradled in the swaddling clothes of a bureaucratic dictatorship, nurtured on state-cultist politics, and educated in the spirit of the Cult of the Individual Leader”.

The centrepiece of Lassalle’s ideology was “state socialism”. Like the philosopher Georg Hegel (whom he studied at university), he believed that the state’s mission was to accomplish the development of human freedom. The role of workers’ or popular movements was essentially to pressure the state into fulfilling its historic role. Marx, having long since rejected the idea that the state could be any kind of progressive force, argued that “state socialism” was a form of reformism.

For reformists, social change comes about through tinkering with the existing state. But for Marx, the question is who controls society—that is, which class rules the state. Therefore, the aim must be a change in class power. Uncompromising hostility to the state, the instrument of the class that rules society, was central to Marx and Engels’ thinking—even before the 1971 Paris Commune demonstrated in practice that workers couldn’t simply take over the existing state but had to smash it and replace it with a new kind of state.

For Lassalle, however, the state was “the immemorial vestal fire of all civilisation”. And he drew no distinction between his idealist conception of the state and the oppressive nature of the state as it actually existed.

In practice, this meant siding with reaction. As Draper pointed out in the fourth volume of his monumental Karl Marx’s theory of revolution, “in 1862 reformists still had a choice between contending ruling classes, the old one still in control of the state [the feudal aristocrats] and the new one dominating the economy [the capitalists]. Lassalle chose the power that still visibly monopolised the state machine”. That is, he looked to a state that rested on the old reactionary class; concretely, he tried to form a secret alliance with Prussian Chancellor Bismarck against the liberal bourgeoisie.

In May 1863, Lassalle wrote to Bismarck. He boasted of his dictatorial powers within what he openly called his own “empire” (the GGWA), and asserted that “the working class feels an instinctive inclination towards dictatorship if it can … be persuaded that the dictatorship will be exercised in its interests”. He proposed an anti-bourgeois coalition: an alliance between king, aristocracy, army and his workers’ movement.

Lassalle described his personal dictatorship of the workers’ movement as “on a small scale the prototype of our next form of society on a large scale”, without the nasty “malcontent spirit” and “individual opinion” that characterised liberalism.

Nothing came of Lassalle’s secret dealings with Bismarck, which were exposed after his death. Engels commented to Kautsky that they “would certainly have led him to the actual betrayal of the movement, if fortunately … he had not been shot”.

Lassalle propounded what he called the “iron law of wages”, based on Malthusian population theory. “Under the rule of the supply and demand of labour”, he wrote, “the average wage always remains reduced to the necessary subsistence level … needed for eking out a living and for propagation”. Wages could not rise above the average for any length of time, as the working population would increase, bringing wages down again. On the other hand, wages could not remain for long below subsistence level, as poverty would lead to a reduction in the number of workers, and thus the supply of factory hands.

But if this were a natural law, Marx argued in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, it couldn’t be abolished, because it would govern “not only the system of wage labour but every social system”. The so-called law simply allows bourgeois economists to argue that “socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature, but can only make it general”. As Engels noted in a letter August Bebel in 1875, “Marx proved … in Capital that the laws regulating wages are very complicated … they are in no sense iron but on the contrary very elastic”.

The political conclusion arising from Lassalle’s “iron law” is that workers cannot improve their conditions of life through their own efforts, so there is no point engaging in collective economic struggle or forming trade unions. Lassallean logic suggests that the only way workers can be freed from the “iron law of wages” is to become their own employers.

And how do they do that? Lassalle’s solution was massive state loans to found large-scale cooperatives that would eventually take over all industry and all branches of the economy. This process would, at some point in the distant future, lead to socialism. So the state, rather than the working class, was to be the agent of social transformation, and no revolution was required. The central demand of the movement therefore had to be for universal (male) suffrage. Indeed Lassalle argued that it should be the only demand of the workers’ movement. He exhorted his followers to “be deaf to all that is not called universal and direct suffrage”:

“When [universal suffrage] comes … there will be at your side men who understand your position and are devoted to your cause—men armed with the shining sword of science, who know how to defend your interests. And then you, the unpropertied classes, will only have yourselves and your bad voting to blame if the representatives of your cause remain in a minority.”

These “men armed with the shining sword of science”—men like him!—would then legislate to ensure that the state provided the loans to set up producers’ cooperatives.

Lassalle believed that while state aid did not in itself amount to socialism, it nonetheless contained the “germ” of it. The state and its rulers were presumably not expected to understand this; otherwise they would hardly finance their own demise. But workers weren’t expected to understand it either!

Lassalle’s approach—not just socialism from above, but socialism by stealth—is the polar opposite of the conscious self-emancipation of the working class.

Marx condemned the Realpolitik of Lassalle, whose idea of practicality was to conform to existing conditions. But he understood its appeal to a working class that was still demoralised by a long period of reaction, and so was ready to “hail such a quack saviour, who promised to get them at one bound into the promised land”.

After Lassalle’s death, Marx and Engels set out to fight his ideas within the workers’ movement. They opposed the Lassallean project of getting state capital for producers’ cooperatives, on the grounds that this would only help the government extend its tentacles into the workers’ movement.

As Marx wrote in letters to Engels: “The Prussian state can not tolerate workers’ coalitions and trade unions … In contrast, government support to a few lousy cooperative societies is just the kind of crap that suits it. It means extending the noses of officialdom … corrupting the most active of the workers, emasculating the whole movement”. Lassalle’s “hapless illusion” that “a Prussian government would carry out a socialist intervention” was doomed to disappointment; and “the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing”.

In January 1965, Marx had written to J.B. Schweitzer, now leader of the GGWA, “telling him that he must array himself against Bismarck, that even the appearance of a flirtation with Bismarck on the part of the workers’ party must be dropped”. But in the 1866 election, the GGWA supported Bismarck’s candidacy. By this time, Marx and Engels had resigned as contributors to the GGWA’s publication.

Lassalleanism declined as the political power of the bourgeoisie grew and its weight within the state increased. By 1875, there were discussions about the possibility of unity between Lassalle’s followers and the Eisenachers—the group led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who saw themselves as Marxists and had founded the Social Democratic Labour Party in 1869.

Marx believed that the Lassallean forces were being forced towards a merger because of their weakness on the one hand, and the growing independence of trade unions and influence of the Social Democrats on the other. Nonetheless, his preference was not for a united organisation, but for a period of common activity, a kind of united front. The vital step, in his view, was not agreement on a common programme but rather the advancement of the workers’ movement: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”, he wrote in a letter to Wilhelm Bracke.

But Bebel and Liebknecht succumbed to impatience and opportunism, viewing organisational unity as a shortcut. At a conference in Gotha in 1875 the two organisations merged to form the Socialist Labour Party of Germany under a draft program that made huge concessions to the Lassalleans. The programme pledged that the party would work “by every lawful means to bring about a free state”. It contained none of Marx’s analysis of economic development, no word of revolution, no discussion of the class character of the state. Unity was achieved at expense of political principle.

Marx wrote a savage critique of the Gotha programme, which he described as “for all its democratic clang … tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state”. To summarise his main objections:

First, the programme dealt with the state “as an independent entity”, whereas the German state in question rested on a reactionary class. The programme “attacked only the capitalist class and not the landowners” and described all classes other than the working class as “one reactionary mass”. This Lassallean distortion was used to “put a good colour on his alliance with absolutist and feudal” forces.

Moreover, the workers’ movement was viewed, again following Lassalle, “from the narrowest national standpoint”. Marx argued that working-class struggle is national only in form, not substance. The national state exists within the framework of the world market and the system of states. The programme thus reduced internationalism to “the international brotherhood of all peoples”, with no class content.

Second, the programme enshrined the slogan of “cooperative societies with state aid … on such a scale that the socialist organisation of the total labour will arise from them”. Marx’s response was scathing: “It is worthy of Lassalle’s imagination that a new society can be built with state loans just as well as a new railway!” Marx didn’t oppose cooperatives per se, or oppose making demands on the state. But he objected to such reforms being held up as the goal, a substitute for a rounded socialist programme.

For Marx, reformism does not simply mean the advocacy of reforms, but rather “assigning a certain all-encompassing meaning to the fight for reforms, its elevation to the be-all and end-all of politics”. Marxists fight for reforms partly to improve the conditions of workers, but more importantly as a way of developing the consciousness and confidence of the workers’ movement to go beyond reforms and challenge the capitalist system itself.

As for cooperative societies, “they are of value only in so far as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés of either governments or of bourgeois”. The key word there is “independent”.

Similarly, Marx drew out the political meaning of the demand for “state aid”: “Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the ‘socialist organisation of total labour’ ‘arises’ from the state aid that the state gives to the producers’ cooperative societies and which the state, not the worker, calls into being”.

Thus the Gotha programme, following Lassalle, dispensed with the need for revolution and assigned the basic creative role to the state.

Engels, in his letter Bebel, also dismissed the idea of the “free state”: “As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people’s state … as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist”.

Ominously for the future of German socialist organisation, Marx’s critique was suppressed for years, as were the passages in his writings that were most critical of Lassalle. The Gotha programme was, as Hal Draper described, a “bridge between the state-socialist reformism of Lassalle, which by itself had no future, and the bourgeois reformism of the type that did represent the future of German social democracy”.

Despite the Social Democratic Party’s formal rejection of Lassalleanism and the adoption of the seemingly more radical Erfurt program in 1891, a degree of confusion about the state—and therefore the seeds of reformism—remained within the German party.

The Italian general election was a historic win for the far right. A coalition of the three major parties won 44 percent of the vote, enough in Italy’s byzantine electoral system to form a clear majority in both houses of parliament. Most importantly, it was driven by the meteoric rise of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party rooted in the post-Mussolini fascist tradition, which secured 26 percent of the vote, making it the single largest party in parliament.

For many, the ascension to power of a fascist party in the centre of Europe seemed unthinkable. But decades of grinding economic crisis, state-sponsored racism and the discrediting of parties of the neoliberal centre have created a dangerous situation of far-right advance. With Europe on the brink of yet another recession, the prospect of further descent into authoritarianism and barbarism is alarming.

If you listen to the capitalist press and politicians, however, you would think that there’s nothing to worry about. A headline in the Australian exhorts: “Relax, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers aren’t fascist”. The Australian Financial Review carried the line, “Victory to Italian right is no lurch into extremism”. This is despite Meloni’s pledge to institute a naval blockade to stop refugee ships, roll back abortion and LGBTI rights and dismantle social welfare.

Speaking to an Italian journalist at the Venice Film Festival, US former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even praised Meloni: “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing”. It’s remarkable to speak of “breaking with the past” as Mussolini-nostalgists return to power in the birthplace of fascism.

A statement from Lorenzo Codogno, a former director-general of the Italian Treasury, reveals the real reason for establishment nonchalance in the face of fascism. “They want to be perceived as a party that you can do business with and can govern the country.” Business has taken a look at this coalition of far-right racists and fascists, and decided it’s a government they can deal with, potentially making a great deal of money.

Aided by a wave of apologetics from the media, Meloni has attempted to sanitise her image to present a respectable face. During the election campaign, she reassured voters that her party had “handed fascism over to history for decades now”. But Meloni has maintained a commitment to fascist politics throughout her life. At the age of 15, she joined MSI (Italian Social Movement), the party founded by leading fascists who survived the fall of Mussolini’s regime in 1943 and wanted to work for its return. Along with a series of other former MSI leaders, Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia in 2012 as the latest iteration of this project.

In her autobiography, I am Giorgia, she espouses the “great replacement theory”, claiming that the left is attempting to destroy Western civilisation by flooding the continent with African and Middle Eastern migrants and undermining traditional family structures. In local government, Brothers politicians have passed legislation making it harder for migrants to access social housing, and proposed laws that would make it compulsory to bury aborted fetuses in cemeteries.

Meloni will rule in coalition with the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, who as interior minister in a previous government blocked the entry of NGO ships carrying rescued refugees to Italian shores, and Silvio Berlusconi, the infamously corrupt and venal media magnate whose Forza Italia was once the leading light of the populist right.

While the far right has been advancing in Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, Meloni’s victory is a significant milestone. It’s the first time a party with neo-fascist roots has led a government in a major European economy. This gives a boost to the rising tide of far-right politics internationally.

Meloni’s victory comes in the immediate aftermath of the major win for the far-right Sweden Democrats. She has been a vocal supporter of the Spanish Vox Party and Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government in Hungary. Both Meloni and Orbán were guests of honour at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important gathering of the American right.

Meloni’s victory was assured by the craven support that every party of the political mainstream gives to unpopular and brutal neoliberal policies, which have created massive poverty and youth unemployment and savaged living standards. The 25 September election was triggered by the collapse of the Draghi government, an unelected technocratic cabinet headed by a former European Central Bank president to oversee further cuts to social spending.

Every major party from the centrist Democratic Party to the Lega participated in this “national unity” government. Meloni’s group was the only significant force that remained outside of the coalition. As the government slowly but inevitably collapsed, the Brothers gained credibility.

The high level of abstention in the election was another important factor in Meloni’s success. The rise of the right can be put down to widespread revulsion at the political mainstream, rather than a popular endorsement of Meloni’s program. Fewer than 64 percent of the eligible population voted, the lowest turnout in history and down from an average of 90 percent in the post-WWII period. Meloni increased her vote largely by winning voters from the other right-wing parties.

Despite a history of shallow anti-establishment rhetoric, a hallmark of the far right, Meloni will likely continue Draghi’s economic agenda. Meloni has also reassured the capitalist class that her government will support NATO. Internal divisions could emerge within the coalition over the war in Ukraine—Salvini’s Lega has ties to Italian capitalists with heavy investments in Russia, and he has questioned the continuation of sanctions. Meloni will have to balance the fragile and conflicting interests of her coalition partners with her desire to remain a reliable ally of European capital at large.

What is certain is that the new right-wing coalition will intensify attacks on workers and oppressed people. It can’t be ruled out that they will attempt to curb civil and democratic rights. The Brothers have already signalled their desire for legislation to ban what they term “totalitarian” or “extremist” ideologies, by which they mean communism and Islam.

The far right’s victory is a harbinger of things to come. A recent opinion piece by Edward Luce in the Financial Times noted: “Western liberalism is still skating on thin ice”, with war and looming recession in Europe, a protracted energy crisis and far-right electoral advances making for destabilising factors in world politics.

The capitalists realise that in a crisis-ridden and polarised world, far-right governments may increasingly be an option for defending their power and privilege. They think that they are playing a clever game by normalising the new government in Italy. They believe that they can keep the fascists under their thumb, use them to absorb discontent at unpopular austerity measures and advance their economic agenda.

History tells us that fascists like Meloni, who are inspired by the monstrous dictatorships of the 1920s and ’30s, may harbour even darker aspirations for the future.

“Should Fascism achieve power it will ride over your skulls and spines like a frightful tank”, wrote Leon Trotksy in a letter to a German communist in December 1931. “Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only unity in struggle with the social democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-communists, you have very little time left.”

To a modern audience aware of the Nazis’ horrific crimes, Trotsky’s words are painfully prescient. But he was something of a lone voice in his own time. Many among the rich and powerful openly collaborated with Hitler. Winston Churchill sang Mussolini’s praises. Liberal capitalist parties across Europe formed coalition governments with fascists, while social democrats reassured themselves that constitutions would protect democracy against a fascist seizure of power. The Stalinist Communist parties argued that the fascists were no worse than the usual rulers of capitalism, and barely lifted a finger to stop their rise to power.

A theory of fascism emerges from Trotsky’s scattered writings on Italy, Germany, France and Spain, published together as the pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it.

Fascism represents the counter-revolutionary revenge of the ruling class against workers. It arose as a political phenomenon during the 1920s and 1930s, immediately following the workers’ revolutions that engulfed Europe after the First World War. The ruling classes, terrified of revolution, sought comfort in a reactionary movement that would violently repress the working class. “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”, Trotsky wrote in a 1934 piece, “Whither France?”

But fascism is not just a concoction of the bosses. “The fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie [middle classes]”, Trotsky wrote. Subsequent analyses of fascist voting patterns, including Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted for Hitler, confirm Trotsky’s statement. In terms of membership and voting base, the fascist parties drew most of their support from the middle classes, including small shopkeepers, artisans, managers, lawyers, bureaucrats and peasants. Workers, who made up 50 percent of the German population, were only about 25 percent of the Nazis’ membership, and fewer than 5 percent of Nazi members were in trade unions.

Why were the middle classes the social base of fascism? In the 1920s and 1930s, they were “entirely ruined by big capital”, according to Trotsky. They were ruined by the war, which had sent millions to fight and die, and by the Great Depression, which began in 1928. The fascists seemed to offer solutions to these problems, and they diverted the “dissatisfaction, indignation and despair” of the middle classes “away from big capital and against the workers”.

The fascists directly appealed to the middle classes. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler highlighted the social position and grievances of these “self-made men” in Mein Kampf, declaring that “for people of modest situation who have once risen above that social level, it is unendurable to fall back into it, even momentarily”. It was this fear of social regression that drove the middle classes into the arms of the fascists, who promised political stability, social cohesion and economic salvation for small proprietors. In the years before they came to power, the Nazis campaigned against the large businesses that put economic pressure on small shopkeepers, often using anti-Semitic tropes.

Fascists also recruited from the completely destitute: the long-term unemployed, ex-soldiers and those driven to petty crime. Fascism gave these men hot soup, a place to sleep and a gun with which to menace the left and Jews, whom they could blame for all their problems.

It was not inevitable, however, that the middle classes would be drawn into the fascist camp. Much of the petty bourgeoisie had been drawn along by the worker-led revolutions and uprisings at the end of the war; this fusion was the most successful during the 1917 Russian Revolution, which was supported by millions of peasants.

But without sufficient leadership, the revolutions in the rest of Europe didn’t fare as well, and by the early 1920s, the revolutionary wave had ebbed. The various left-wing parties seemed incapable of solving the ongoing capitalist crisis, and so the petty-bourgeois masses turned towards the fascists. Workers largely remained loyal to the socialist parties, but some were dragged towards fascism. As Trotsky put it, “Fascism is a form of despair in the petty-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the working class as well”.

While fascism gained its foot soldiers and numerical strength from the middle classes, it could come to power only at the behest of the real kingmakers of politics: the big capitalists, the military generals and the state bureaucrats.

The ruling class will bring to power a fascist party with a rabid, plebeian base only when three conditions are met. First, when capitalism cannot continue as before—with unstable political regimes and a large and menacing workers’ movement. Second, the usual methods for keeping the workers’ organisations in check (legal repression or cooption) are inadequate to the task. Third, when bringing the fascists to power will not provoke a revolution in response.

After taking power, the fascists acted as the strong arm of the capitalists, including against their own middle-class supporters. “After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vice of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty”, Trotsky wrote. It was the big capitalists, not the petty bourgeoisie, who enriched themselves under the Nazi regime: between 1933 and 1936, corporate profits rose by 433 percent while workers’ wages fell, and half of small businesses went bankrupt.

The fascists’ rise to power wasn’t inevitable. The political errors of the two main forces on the European left—the reformist Social Democrats and the Communist parties loyal to the USSR—made it possible.

The stance of the reformists amounted to a servile trust in the institutions of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. They thought that the police could be used to disarm the fascist gangs, despite all evidence that the police were extremely sympathetic to the fascists and that, as Trotsky wrote, the “comedy of disarmament by the police” would “only have caused the authority of the fascists to increase as fighters against the capitalist state”.

They also believed that the capitalists’ commitment to democracy would halt the fascist march to power. In Germany, the Social Democrats (SPD) formed an “Iron Front” with the capitalist parties, supposedly to counter the rise of the Nazis. Later, the Socialists in France and Spain insisted on the participation of bourgeois parties in their “Popular Front” coalitions against fascism. In this way, they openly cooperated with the class of exploiters. The strategy failed precisely because the bourgeoisie holds no such commitment to democracy.

There was another fatal flaw in the reformists’ attitude to fascism—they were terrified of unleashing the revolutionary potential of workers’ struggle lest things “go too far”. Trotsky ruthlessly mimicked the SPD leaders begging the government: “Please don’t force us to defend ourselves with the might of workers’ organisations, for this will only arouse the entire working class; and then the movement will rise above the bald pates of our party leadership: beginning as anti-fascist, it will end communist”.

For Trotsky, the reformist leaders were politically irredeemable in their unswerving loyalty to capitalism, but the millions of workers who supported them were key to blocking the fascists’ road to power. Along with Communist workers, they could drive back the armed fascist gangs that were now rampaging through working-class districts. Together, they had the power to overthrow capitalism, thereby resolving the economic and social problems that allowed fascism to fester and grow.

Trotsky held particular contempt for Joseph Stalin’s theory of fascism. “Fascism is the military organisation of the bourgeoisie which leans upon the Social Democracy for active support”, Stalin claimed. “The Social Democracy, objectively speaking, is the moderate wing of fascism.” While it’s true that the capitalist class, in a crisis, leans on both fascism for its violent attacks on the working class, and on Social Democracy for its ability to restrain working-class militancy, it does not follow that Social Democracy is just the “moderate wing of fascism”.

This stupidity formed the basis of the Stalinist theory that fascism is just another face of capitalism, no better or worse than a democratic parliament led by Social Democrats. Therefore, the Communists should not lift a finger to stop the fascists, and would never work with the Social Democrats, whom they branded “social fascists”. Trotsky replied in 1932, just months before Hitler took power in Germany: “The know-alls who boast that they do not recognise any difference between [German Chancellor] Brüning and Hitler are saying in reality: it makes no difference whether our organisations exist, or whether they are already destroyed”.

The actions of the German Communist Party (KPD) during the rise of the Nazis provide an example of Stalin’s theory in practice. It made a series of terrible tactical decisions that did nothing to stop the Nazis’ rise. But its worst crime was passivity. As the Nazis prepared to destroy every vestige of working-class power and democracy, the KPD leaders smugly sat by, claiming that Hitler’s victory would only hasten the crisis that would bring the Communists to power. They had an idiotic slogan for this attitude too: “First Hitler, then our turn”.

Trotsky could only watch in horror from afar as his predictions came true; fascism ran roughshod over the most powerful workers’ movements in Europe, from Italy to Germany and Spain. But he preserved in his writing the lessons of those terrible failures for future generations.

It is worth returning to Trotsky’s arguments as far-right and even fascist organisations continue to gain influence. Contemporary politics is not a mirror image of the 1930s, so Trotsky’s arguments are not a simple blueprint for analysing fascism today. The workers’ movement is comparatively weak, there are no mass socialist organisations, and the crisis of capitalism is not yet on the same scale. Because of this, the capitalists feel less need to totally dispense with democracy.

But Trotsky’s writings on the class base of fascism and the economic and social conditions that allow it to take power should serve as a warning for what the future may hold. His arguments about the need for mass working-class resistance to stop fascism in its tracks are based on an analysis of the same class forces that rule the world today.

And Trotsky’s anger at the criminal negligence of the two dominant wings of the workers’ movement, reformism and Stalinism, should serve as fuel in the fight for revolutionary Marxist politics today.

“A tremendous wave of strikes swept the country from end to end, convulsing the entire body of the nation … The working-class masses were stirred to the very core of their being.”

So Leon Trotsky described the impact of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Saint Petersburg on 9 January 1905, when the Russian king’s troops fired into a crowd of protesting workers. The Saint Petersburg soviet, or the council of workers’ deputies, emerged out of the revolutionary struggle ten months later, and Trotsky was elected its chair at just 26 years of age.

The soviet was an innovation of momentous significance. It remains of fundamental importance in the struggle for socialism as the key site where workers organise in times of revolutionary upheaval. The most democratic institutions ever seen, soviets comprise delegates elected from workplaces, in which they continue working, rather than becoming detached representatives like the politicians in Western democracies. The composition of soviets is responsive to changes in political consciousness because delegates can easily be replaced if opinions change.

In the 1917 revolution, Trotsky and Lenin drew on the experience of 1905, winning majority support for their slogan “All power to the soviets!” and for the overthrow of the capitalist provisional government. Workers’ councils have been the hallmark of workers’ revolutionary struggles ever since. Here we look at how Trotsky recorded their role in his book 1905.

The turmoil ebbed and flowed all year. In September, print workers’ strikes over wages sparked a surge of mass strikes. By 10 October, trains were stationary, the telegraph was silent, industry was grinding to a halt and banks were closing. All this needed coordination.

In a first step towards “creating a revolutionary workers’ council of self-management”, about 40 workers, at the suggestion of socialists, called on the working class of Saint Petersburg to launch a general strike and to elect delegates. The proclamation they drafted stated:

“Decisive events are going to occur in Russia within the next few days. They will determine the destiny of the working class for many years ahead; we must meet these events in full readiness, united by our common soviet.”

Trotsky wrote:

“It was … authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organisational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the working class; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control—and most important of all, which could be brought out from underground within 24 hours.”

From then on, the soviet was “the cornerstone” of events, “the freely elected parliament of the working class”.

The Petersburg soviet was a model for Moscow, Odessa and several other cities. Above all, “this purely class-founded, proletarian organisation was the organisation of the revolution as such. The soviet was the axis of all events, every thread ran towards it, every call to action emanated from it”.

The soviet employed a range of tactics, from verbal appeals to forcible coercion, to deepen the strike. A delegate reported that he addressed the manager of a textile factory still working: “In the name of the soviet I call for the immediate closing down of your factory”. The manager replied, “Very well, we shall stop work at 3pm”.

By 16 October, all workplaces were on strike in the working-class areas. Trotsky described the dynamic:

“By spreading the strike, the soviet expanded and consolidated itself. Every striking factory elected a representative … The second meeting was attended by delegates from 40 large plants, two factories and three trade unions.”

Its meetings “resembled a council of war more than a parliament … The questions under discussion—the spreading of the strike and the demands to be addressed to the duma—were of a purely practical nature and were debated briefly, energetically and in a business-like manner. One felt that every atom of time was accounted for”.

A deputation was to submit their demands to the state duma—a new parliament founded as a concession to the revolution but elected by a very limited franchise.

Before they would address this citadel of the property-owning classes, they demanded it declare that if any workers’ deputies were arrested it would inform higher authorities that it considered this an insult to itself.

After demanding that food supplies be distributed to workers, their spokesperson concluded:

“The soviet of workers’ deputies demands—and it has a right to demand, not to ask, since it represents several hundred thousand workers, inhabitants of this city, whereas you represent only a handful of electors … that the property of the city be placed at the disposal of all the city’s inhabitants for the satisfaction of their needs … We need places where we can meet, open to us our municipal buildings!

“We need funds for continuing the strike: allocate municipal funds for this purpose, not for supporting the police and the gendarmerie!

“We need arms to gain our freedom and preserve it. Allocate funds for the organisation of a working-class militia!”

It was an agitational display, not a plea they expected to win any concessions. By this kind of action, Trotsky explained, “the soviet naturally came more and more to the political forefront”.

Strike committees accepted the soviet’s authority. “By placing many disconnected organisations under its control, the soviet united the revolution around itself.”

A manifesto issued by the king granting concessions did not guarantee freedom of the press, provoking the soviet to proclaim:

“The soviet of deputies resolves that only those newspapers may be published whose editors … refuse to submit their issues for censorship … Typesetters and other workers of the press will work only after editors have declared their readiness to put the freedom of the press into practice … The soviet of deputies will take all necessary measures to pay the comrades on strike all wages due to them. Newspapers which fail to accept the present resolution will be confiscated.”

This became the new press law. The monarchy’s manifesto had to be printed by soldiers and appeared only in the Government Gazette. When the reactionary Svet (Light) was published without the knowledge of its own typesetters, its print shop was duly wrecked.

In response to government threats, the soviet executive committee announced that Izvestia, the soviet’s paper, would be printed in print shops seized from their owners. Four issues were published in this way. Trotsky explained the soviet’s stance:

“Would it not have been possible for the soviet to exempt the legal social-democratic papers from the strike, thus relieving itself of the necessity to raid the print-works of the bourgeois press? If the question is put in isolation, it cannot be answered. But everything becomes clear if we see the soviet as a whole, in its origins and in all its tactics, as the organised embodiment of the supreme rights of the revolution at its moment of extreme tension, when it cannot and does not wish to adapt itself to the enemy …

“During general strikes, when all life came to a standstill, the old regime considered it a point of honour to continue printing its Government Gazette without interruption, and it did so under the protection of its troops. To this the soviet opposed its armed workers’ detachments, which ensured the publication of the revolution’s own newspaper.”

Trotsky argued that, due to their small numbers, Marxist revolutionaries in Saint Petersburg were “not able to create a living organisational link with these masses”. This meant:

“The creation of a non-party organisation [was] absolutely essential. In order to have authority in the eyes of the masses on the very day it came into being, [it] had to be based on the broadest representation … Since the production process was the sole link between [workers] who, in the organisational sense, were still quite inexperienced, representation had to be adapted to the factories and plants.”

This is not just specific to Russia, or the consequence of small revolutionary forces. Soviets are necessary to mould the working class into a united, powerful force. The workers’ council creates a forum in which all shades of opinion can be debated. The less class conscious can be drawn into the struggle and can learn for themselves and become conscious, active participants in changing society.

The regime fomented horrendous pogroms to create disarray in the revolution. The Petersburg soviet’s role was of paramount importance in preparing to defend the city:

“The gun shops, ignoring all police restrictions, carried on a feverish trade in Brownings [a type of gun]. But revolvers cost a great deal … and the revolutionary parties and the soviet had difficulty in arming their fighting detachments … All plants and workshops having any access to iron or steel began … to manufacture side-arms. Several thousand hammers were forging daggers, pikes, wire whips and knuckledusters. In the … soviet, one deputy after another mounted the rostrum, raising their weapons high above their heads and transmitting their electors’ solemn undertaking to suppress the pogrom as soon as it flared up.”

In the factory areas, they organised a real militia. Special protection of the buildings of the revolutionary press was organised while “the journalist wrote and the typesetter worked with a revolver in his pocket”.

The monarchy could not stop soldiers guarding the factories being influenced by the workers. They were saying: “As soon as you rise, we’ll rise too; we’ll open up the arsenal for you”.

The existence of the soviet enabled these informal links to become formal, with soldiers speaking at its meetings. The soviet in Saint Petersburg issued a Manifesto to the Soldiers which read in part:

“You often turn to us … for advice and support … Brother soldiers, you are right … The government set up a court-martial to judge sailors and soldiers in Kronstadt, and immediately the workers of Petersburg went on strike everywhere … We are bound by the same chains. Only the united efforts of the people and the army will break those chains.”

A soviet of soldiers’ deputies was formed, and soldiers’ representatives joined the workers’ soviet.

Workers in Saint Petersburg began to work an eight-hour day, rather than wait until it became law. With the defeat of the revolution, the eight-hour day was systematically reversed. A soviet executive member concluded:

“We may not have won the eight-hour day for the masses, but we have certainly won the masses for the eight-hour day. Henceforth the war-cry: Eight hours and a gun! shall live in the heart of every Petersburg worker.”

The centralised, democratic structure of the soviet made organising all these struggles much more effective than if left to random workplaces operating independently. It enabled the working class to begin to act as an alternative government.

In 1905, the Saint Petersburg soviet stood at the centre of the revolution. When it was crushed by the authorities, it signalled the beginning of the defeat of the revolution.

On 4 December, armed police and soldiers loyal to the monarchy surrounded the soviet as delegates from industry after industry reported support for the Moscow soviet’s call for another general political strike. They would be arrested, and the revolution crushed, but they made one last stand of defiance:

“The sound of loud metallic banging came from downstairs. It was as though a dozen blacksmiths were working at their anvils. The delegates were smashing their Brownings so as to prevent them falling into the hands of the police!”

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