For much of this year, widespread protests have engulfed Israel in response to the Netanyahu government’s attempts to overhaul the state’s judiciary. Corporate media in the United States (e.g., LA Times, 3/27/23; Politico 3/31/23) present this situation as a “crisis of democracy” in Israel. Since the demonstrations began on January 7, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have run a combined total of 194 pieces that contain some variety of the words “Israel,” “crisis” and “democracy.” Only 77 of these, or just under 40%, include some form of the terms “Palestine” or “Palestinian.”
This shortage of references to the Palestinians is startling, considering that the Israeli government controls the lives of approximately 14 million people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, half of them Jewish and half of them Palestinian. These include 2.6 million Palestinians living in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation and without political rights, and 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, where Israel prevents them from enacting their political rights and confines them to an open-air prison. A further 350,000 Palestinians living in eastern Jerusalem, which was illegally annexed by Israel in 1967, nevertheless do not have the right to vote in Israel’s national elections.
Roughly 1.9 million Palestinians, living on the land that Israel has controlled since 1948, do have Israeli citizenship and can vote in Israeli elections, but discrimination against them is enshrined in law.
In other words, of the 7 million Palestinians over whom Israel exercises authority, approximately 5 million have no say in who governs them or how, while Israel relegates the remaining 2 million to second-class citizenship. By writing about a “crisis” in Israel’s “democracy,” without foregrounding or most often even mentioning the fact that Israel completely disenfranchises some 5 million Palestinians, coverage in the Times, Post and Journal whitewashes the apartheid that fundamentally disqualifies Israel as a democracy.
Mischaracterized as democracy
Wall Street Journal (3/29/23): Despite the “refrain from the American left that Mr. Netanyahu’s elected government is somehow a threat to Israeli democracy…Israeli democracy is alive and well.”
Much of these papers’ commentary on the crisis in Israel nevertheless mischaracterizes Israel as a democracy. The Times’ Thomas Friedman (3/28/23) said that Israelis are demonstrating “to ensure the 75th anniversary of Israeli democracy will not be its last.” According to the Journal’s editorial board (3/29/23), “If we’ve learned anything in recent weeks, it’s that Israeli democracy is alive and well.” The Post’s Jennifer Rubin (3/29/23) wrote:
The Israeli episode holds lessons for the United States and other democracies. First and foremost, unity is essential. Whatever differences on policy issues exist, refusal to join hands with those with whom you disagree is a fatal error when trying to save a democracy. It’s essential to persuade citizens to put loyalty to democracy above loyalty to party or institutions (even the military). Without a democratic foundation, no other political cause or institution can survive.
These are propagandistic descriptions of Israel, not only because the state denies more than a third of the people it governs the right to vote, but also because it is holding 4,900 Palestinian political prisoners and has a decades-long habit of assassinating Palestinian political leaders. In addition, it prevents Palestinians from exercising key democratic rights, such as press freedom (Electronic Intifada, 4/13/21) and the right to organize and express themselves politically: As Human Rights Watch (4/27/21) noted, “[Palestinians] can face up to ten years in prison for attempting to influence public opinion in a manner that ‘may’ harm public peace or public order”:
The [Israeli] army regularly uses military orders permitting it to shut down unlicensed protests or to create closed military zones to suppress peaceful Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank and detain participants. One military order, for example, imposes a prison term of up to 10 years on civilians convicted by military courts for participating in a gathering of more than 10 people without a military permit on any issue “that could be construed as political” or for displaying “flags or political symbols” without army approval.
Can you really describe a country that imposes such a rule on roughly two million people as a “democracy”?
A defining feature, not a possibility
Gershom Gorenberg (WashingtonPost , 3/23/23) warns that limiting judicial review “would weaken Israel’s already fragile democracy”—though Israel’s Supreme Court hasn’t prevented the disenfranchisement of the vast majority of Palestinians under Israeli control.
Meanwhile, Gershom Gorenberg wrote in the WashingtonPost (3/23/23) that “Netanyahu and his henchmen” are seeking “to undo liberal democracy in Israel.” To him, even as Israel is a “fragile democracy,” it is one that “Israeli society…owes allegiance” to, and which it “has taken to the streets…to defend.” Gorenberg warns that, if Netanyahu successfully weakens the courts,
the most right-wing coalition in Israeli history could follow with laws harming the rights of women, the Arab minority, LGBTQ citizens and the press. A lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party has already submitted a bill aimed at disqualifying prominent Arab politicians from running for the Knesset.
It may be true that Netanyahu’s gambit could make life even worse for Palestinians—the “Arab minority” to which the author refers—living on the Israeli side of the Green Line. But it’s dishonest for Gorenberg to present “laws harming the rights of” Palestinians as a hypothetical possibility, rather than a defining feature of Israel’s past and present.
Israel already has 65 laws that explicitly discriminate against Palestinians “on the basis of their national belonging,” and Gorenberg only mentions one of these in his article: the nation-state law that, among other racist provisions, says that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is solely for the Jewish people,” even though 20% of the citizens of Israel are not Jewish.
‘Better health than believed’
Bret Stephens (New York Times, 3/28/23) defends Israel’s “democracy” without ever using the word “Palestinian.”
Two observers of the protests in Israel even praised Israel’s commitment to “democracy.” Bret Stephens of the New York Times (3/28/23) asserted that, “if Israel’s democracy is to be judged, let it at least be judged against other democracies. By that standard, it may be in better health than is sometimes believed.”
Stephens seems to be using a novel definition of democracy, wherein the practice allows for sweeping prohibitions of political parties: The Human Rights Watch report (4/27/21) that I refer to above notes that, as of 2020, the Israeli Defense Ministry had “formal bans against 430 [West Bank Palestinian] organizations, including the Palestine Liberation Organization that Israel signed a peace accord with, its ruling Fatah party, and all the other major Palestinian political parties.”
Nor, HRW goes on to note, are Palestinian parties inside Israel exempt from similar treatment:
Legal measures aimed at protecting the Jewish character of the state that discriminate against Palestinians undermine the pledge in Israel’s Proclamation of Independence to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Palestinian citizens vote in elections and have served in the Knesset, but Israel’s Basic Law: The Knesset—1958, which has constitutional status, declares that no candidate can run for the Knesset if they expressly or implicitly endorse “negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Israel’s Law of Political Parties (1992) further bars registration of any party whose goals directly or indirectly deny “the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” While the Supreme Court often opts against disqualifying candidates for violating these provisions, the provisions formally block Palestinians from challenging the laws that codify their subjugation and, in so doing, diminish the value of the right of Palestinian citizens to vote.
In other words, in Israel’s allegedly vibrant “democracy,” Palestinians can run for the legislature as long as they don’t endorse Palestinian equality. Or, to put it another way, Palestinians have the right to participate in Israeli “democracy,” provided they don’t call for Israel to become a democracy.
‘Harsh repression’—’elsewhere’
Nadim Koteich (Wall Street Journal, 4/10/23): “The Palestinian issue shouldn’t be the sole metric by which we measure Israel’s standing as a democracy,” because “few countries in the Middle East have a sterling record when dealing with ethnic or racial minorities.”
Similarly, the Wall StreetJournal’s Nadim Koteich (4/10/23) claimed that there is “a distinction between the demonstrations in Israel and the protests elsewhere in the region,” where dissenters often face “harsh repression in the form of lawless imprisonment and execution.” However, Israel routinely enacts precisely such brutality against Palestinians.
For example, during the 2018–19 Great March of Return, Palestinians in Gaza held weekly demonstrations near the barrier that Israel uses to fence in the Strip. The demonstrators’ demands were that Israel lift the siege of Gaza and allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as UN Resolution 194 stipulates. The UN reports that
Israeli forces responded by shooting tear gas canisters, some of them dropped from drones, rubber bullets and live ammunition, mostly by snipers. As a result, 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed, and over 36,100, including nearly 8,800 children have been injured.
You probably won’t read about in your daily paper, but Israel’s real crisis of democracy is that Israel is not a democracy.
AGAINST THE CURRENT has begun an important discussion on the nature of Leninism. Writing for the Revolutionary Socialist League, I agree that there are ‘Two Souls of Socialism” (the title of a 1966 pamphlet by Hal Draper), an authoritarian socialism-from-above and a democratic/libertarian socialism-from-below. Draper believed that Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky were on the side of socialism from-below. So does Alan Wald, adding “the Trotskyists” and the Sandinistas.
Without agreeing with everything Tim Wohlfarth says, he raises another possibility: that the dividing line between the two sorts of “socialism” may run through the work of Lenin, Trotsky, and — in my opinion-Marx.
There are both authoritarian and democratic sides to Leninism and Marxism. Unfortunately, the “heirs of Marx” today are mostly either state-capitalist dictators or social democrats-both supporters of capitalist imperialism and statism. We need to investigate what is the flaw in Marxism which permits it to be used by such statist forces.
Anarchism too has its libertarian and authoritarian “souls.” I believe that we need to work toward a new synthesis of Marxism and anarchism, to create a libertarian socialism which is revolutionary, radically democratic, and self-managing.
Paradoxically, Lenin opened up the possibility of such a resynthesis at the time of the Russian Revolution. Influenced by the mass upheavals, he declared (in State and Revolution) that the capitalist state must not be replaced by a new bureaucratic regime but by an association of workers’ and farmers’ councils (soviets), backed by an armed people: the commune or council-state. The revolutionary party was urgently needed to fight for this program against other political programs, but it was not intended to become the new state.
In practice, Lenin abandoned the commune-state program. The repressive, bureaucratic machine which grew up during his rule was only partly due to objective pressures. At no time did Lenin announce, ‘We have to outlaw other parties on the Left because of conditions of civil war, invasion, blockade and mass starvation. This is a temporary measure which we will reverse as soon as practical. Meanwhile, foreign Communists should not take this situation as a model.” Quite the contrary. Lenin simply had no notion of pluralistic socialist democracy. (For a review of the facts, see C. Sirianni, Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: the Soviet Experience.)
The basic problem for Leninism, as for Marxism, is the (Hegelian-derived) belief that the laws of history, as brilliantly analyzed by Marx, are absolutely true and that we can be completely sure of them. This is expressed in the phrase, “socialism is inevitable.” The party claims to know these laws, with full certainty, and even to embody them. This is expressed in the phrase, “the party represents the working class.”
If we — and we alone — have the absolute knowledge of the way forward, then we would feel justified in outlawing other parties, suppressing strikes, repressing the peasants, and generally bashing in convenient people. Revolutionaries in other countries may feel critical of such terror, but would finally justify it as the “revolutionary process.”
Central to Alan Wald’s argument is his belief that Leninism might correct itself “from within its tradition.” The real question is whether any of the major Leninist tendencies is likely to correct itself from within, when their movement is in the other direction. 99% of today’s Leninists advocate a one-party, top-down dictatorship.
Alan claims that ” … for the past fifty years… the Trotskyists have championed multi-party systems. ..with ever-increasing vehemence.” Trotsky left his followers a two-sided inheritance: the call for multi party soviets, and the belief that the Soviet Union was a “workers’ state,” merely because industry was nationalized — even though the workers were powerless and exploited.
Occasionally today’s Trotskyists may refer to his democratic ideas, but mainly their politics emphasize his statist side. Generally they continue to “defend the Soviet Union,” are enthusiastic supporters of Castro’s one-man dictatorship, support the invasion of Afghanistan, and so on.
Alan also praises the socialist pluralism of ” … the followers of Max Shachtman in later years.” In his later years, Shachtman supported the U.S. in the Vietnam war and his followers now staff Reagan’s State Department.
Alan apparently claims the Sandinistas as fellow Leninists who also advocate multi-party socialism. Although Nicaragua is not a totalitarian state like Cuba, it is dominated by one party. In any case, it is not run by workers’ and peasants’ soviets, managing the economy and the state from the bottom up. To endorse the Sandinistas is actually to reject the commune-state, one of the best parts of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s heritage. That Alan does not see this is proof of the weakness of his “critical Leninism.”
At one point Leninism was probably the best of the alternate programs — after all, no one else was advocating multi-party councils either. But now it has come to a dead end, including its Trotskyist off shoot. We can only save its contributions if we are prepared to work on a broader integration of the libertarian “soul of socialism.”
On this day in 1871, the Paris Commune began its brief history before a conservative government drowned it in blood. While it lasted, the Commune sketched out a new way to run a major city based on democracy and the public good, not private profiteering.
National guardsmen pose in front of an artillery barricade in the Place Vendome, during the civil war between the Third Republic and the Paris Commune, following the Franco-Prussian War. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
The Paris Commune ended in mass violence with the slaughter of thousands of Communards on the barricades and the burning of much of the city. This final struggle forged the Commune as an iconic event in the history of socialism and the collective memory of popular struggle.
Yet it is now only vaguely remembered that before the Commune’s demise, the people of Paris had set about reconstructing authority and governance in the city along unprecedentedly revolutionary lines, grounded in the popular euphoria surrounding the central government’s retreat from Paris on March 18, 1871.
Despite near-constant threats to the Commune’s existence from the rival government occupying Versailles, the audacious common folk of Paris imagined and began to constitute a new city and a new politics of their own design. Time, as it turned out, was short.
Birth of the Commune
The surrender of Napoleon III to the Prussian army on the outskirts of Paris in early September 1870 had set the stage. A provisional government faced little choice but to mobilize the population in defense of Paris and other major cities.
The Paris Commune ended in mass violence with the slaughter of thousands of Communards on the barricades and the burning of much of the city.
Into this political space a broadly republican popular movement leapt forward to provide organization for resistance and to claim the right to self-governance. This meant enhancing the National Guard, organized in neighborhood-based units and only minimally under a central leadership already badly discredited by the military debacle of the previous weeks.
Encircled by the Prussian army, Parisians endured months of privation unequally distributed along class lines. At the same time, cut off from outside political and military support, Parisians invested local government, reinforced by the National Guard, with greater authority, through the “localization of activity.”
That strategy included the formation of cooperatives, local political clubs, and secularized public schools. November municipal elections brought a significant augmentation of the Left’s influence, though well short of a dominating presence except in a handful of arrondissements.
The advent of the Commune came only in the aftermath of a succession of events that profoundly altered the political stakes for a besieged Paris. First came the signing of an armistice on January 28, 1871, between the provisional national government ensconced outside the city at Versailles and the Prussians.
The terms of the armistice proved humiliating and included the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, a substantial indemnity payment, and a brief symbolic march of Prussian troops through the heart of Paris. A newly emboldened, broadly republican movement in which the Left’s influence had grown dramatically seized the role of defending the “fatherland” by asserting Paris’s autonomy.
The months of resistance and hunger set the stage not only for national resistance but for a civil war. On the one hand stood the Communards, and on the other, a discredited national government barricaded with its middle-class supporters at Versailles and in the rural areas adjacent to Paris.
The government’s failure to recapture cannons that were under the control of the Central Committee of the Parisian National Guard crystalized an already polarized politics. The central government added fuel to the fire by rescinding the Commune’s moratoriums on the sale of goods in government pawnshops and reinstituting the payment of rents and other bills that had accrued during the siege.
The First Order of Business
For an all-too-brief period, before being overtaken by brutal and ultimately cataclysmic suppression at the hands of central government troops under the command of Adolphe Thiers, the Paris Commune provided a unique setting for new forms of local governance to crystalize and challenge the traditions of urban bourgeois hegemony.
The Paris Commune provided a unique setting for new forms of local governance to crystalize and challenge the traditions of urban bourgeois hegemony.
Following the final withdrawal of the central government in March, the Commune issued a succession of declarations outlining in broad principles what was already being carried out to varying degrees in the streets and arrondissements. The first order of business was to establish viable democratic polities and governing procedures in the spirit of the Proudhonist vision of local associationism, which had deep roots among Parisian working people.
Municipal elections on March 26 produced a new governing council for the self-declared Commune of Paris. While attacking bureaucratic control by setting maximum salaries of officials and breaking lines of authority from the central government, the Commune also limited the claims of landlords and creditors, affirmed “municipal liberties,” and circumscribed religious authority.
The communal vision came somewhat more sharply into focus with the famous April 19 Declaration, even as the prospects for all-out civil war deepened. A month of political contention and two municipal elections had set the stage for a programmatic statement of far-reaching scope. The former mayors and deputies had shown their class colors and largely retreated to the protective embrace of Adolphe Thiers’s Versailles government-in-waiting.
The Declaration of April 19 was vague at key points, and its aspirations were ultimately overwhelmed by the imperative to defend militarily the fragile social and political space within which the Commune defined itself. Nonetheless, it delineated the outlines of an alternative social order. This was to be a city within a federation of similarly constituted cities.
Such a locally constituted republic would forge an alternative unity of French citizens. Through the free exercise of liberties within self-governing municipalities, cities would claim democratic control of their own budgets and administration. They would expand municipal services, create a whole new set of institutions ranging from public schools to cooperative workshops, and while not directly attacking property, would “universalize power and property,” as circumstances might dictate.
Their vision was prescriptive, open-ended, and optimistic about the promise of municipal self-government. Future generations of municipal socialists would draw inspiration from that promise and the project of “social regeneration.” More importantly, the experience of governing in those early days suggested more powerfully than prescriptive declarations the tangible meaning of the municipal social republic envisioned.
Haussmann’s Legacy
Though piecemeal and incomplete, the Commune took some concrete steps to implement this vision both before and after the declaration. Some initiatives had been rooted in communal resistance to monarchist authority over the years immediately preceding the Commune.
Ironically, the bourgeois transformation of Paris created conditions that promoted a diverse new citywide working class.
The massive reconstruction of Paris at the hands of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the prior two decades took on legendary status, thanks in part to his own self-promotion. The construction of wide boulevards less susceptible to barricading and the destruction of many old, central working-class neighborhoods created a new urban landscape into which the rapidly expanding population of Paris flowed with unpredictable consequences.
That expanded population included large numbers of construction workers and stonemasons, some of whom had long been part of regular seasonal migrations to Paris from other parts of the country, like the Creuse. Their slow displacement from the central boarding houses and hiring fairs of the Place de Grève accompanied more permanent settlement in the new working-class neighborhoods on the periphery.
Whether by reputation for chronic contention with authorities or because of the new solidarities in their adopted neighborhoods, the stonemasons and other building workers were overrepresented among the arrested and deported Communards following the final street battles in late May.
Systematic studies by Jacques Rougerie, Manuel Castells, and others confirm that this “urban revolution” was not driven by a new proletariat but rather, as Rougerie termed it, “an intermediate working class” which included building workers, traditional artisans, and a significant component of shopkeepers, clerks, and professionals. As Castells put it:
They were the people of a great city in the process of mutation, and the citizens of a Republic in quest of its institutions.
David Harvey has shown that the “Haussmannization” of Paris in the years after 1848 produced urban space more starkly organized on class lines that set the stage for the upheaval of 1871.
Ironically, the bourgeois transformation of Paris created conditions that promoted a diverse new citywide working class infused with the scent of a broader internationalism that potentially challenged the bourgeoisie’s “superior command of space.” And that challenge, as Roger Gould has argued, grew precisely out of the neighborhood solidarities of these new “urban villages” that encompassed a new class.
Harvey and others have enumerated workers’ urban initiatives in the Commune that reflected their own claims over the control of Parisian space. The organization of municipal workshops for women; the encouragement given to producer and consumer cooperatives; the suspension of the night work in the bakeries; and the moratorium on rent payments, debt collections, and the sale of items from the municipal pawnshop at Mont-de-Piété reflected the sore points that had bothered working-class Paris for years.
In some cases, during the days immediately following March 18, as Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray recounted, “former subordinate employés” assumed new responsibilities, as happened for instance in the postal service. They had to improvise with limited resources in the face of sabotage by departing higher officials.
The Commune’s brutal denouement has, in some respects, obscured the innovative, localist social and political reforms that it briefly instituted and that it passed on to social democratic reformers who, in the 1890s and beyond, sought to craft a municipal socialism shorn of the revolutionary aspirations and the risks that were all-too-brutally embodied in the crushing of the Commune.
Interpreting the Commune
Memory of the Commune lingered for decades, not only in the nightmares of the bourgeoisie and their reformist allies but among social democrats who, like their Communard forbearers, saw in the city the opportunity to address the immediate grievances workers continued to face and to dream of an alternative social and political order they might constitute in cities.
Contestation over the memory and meaning of the Commune unfolded most vigorously among socialists themselves.
The paradox of brutal defeat in defense of what increasingly came to seem the utopian promise of municipal revolution was not lost on subsequent commentators. Contestation over the memory and meaning of the Commune unfolded most vigorously among socialists themselves.
Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France in its earliest editions provided almost instant history of the events in Paris as they unfolded. Drawing on what limited sources he could find — newspaper accounts, smuggled letters, and occasional firsthand reports — Marx cobbled together a report to the General Council of the First International delivered in late May 1871 just days after the final massacre of Communards. Marx’s agenda was multilayered, and each layer subsequently fed into the memory and constructed meaning of the Commune.
First, he sought to assert the proletarian character of the revolt, though he would subsequently revise that assessment. Second, and perhaps most basically, he defended the nobility of the Communards’ revolt and sacrifice, seeing it as a watershed event in the promulgation of socialism, though its immediate consequences were clearly more ambiguous.
Third, he stressed the state-dismantling and state-building features of the Commune in ways that implicitly challenged the anarchists’ celebration of what they asserted was its nation-state–destroying character. Subsequently, he would belittle the moderation and “feel-good” measures undertaken by the Commune in the days and weeks following its initial creation.
A further subtext in the responses of Marx, Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and other Marxists was the continuing ideological war with Proudhonist associational influences, which, in their view, had been all-too-manifest in the Commune. Its emphases on localism, decentralized democracy, and producerist cooperative economy were seen as harbingers of a different socialist order, one that subsequently would continue to animate the practical reform programs of municipal socialists.
Communal Spirits
The horrific scenes of the Commune’s suppression between May 21 and 28 provided ample material for the elevation of those events to legend. Estimates of those slaughtered in battle or by execution ranged from seventeen thousand to forty thousand. Nearly fifty thousand were arrested, many sent into exile as far away as the French colony of New Caledonia in the South Seas.
The horrific scenes of the Commune’s suppression between May 21 and 28 provided ample material for the elevation of those events to legend.
Subsequent observers would continue over the next decade and more to attempt to make sense of the stirring events in Paris or, in the case of anti-Communard bourgeois commentators, to contest or efface its memory. In France, socialist politics became a tangled web in which the Commune served as a touchstone for both “possibilist” and “impossibilist” factions.
Paul Brousse, who served a “political apprenticeship” as an anarchist, came to believe in the revolutionary promise cities held, despite the failure of the Paris Commune. He advocated “le Socialisme Pratique” wherein “meaningful socialist measures could be achieved on the local level prior to revolution at the centre.”
The key was a shift in tactical thinking away from violence toward politics. Others drew parallel conclusions, albeit in different contexts. Mary Putnam, an American living in Paris as the events of May 1871 unfolded, enjoyed close ties to a family sympathetic to the Commune and believed the events she witnessed signified a legitimate defense of “municipal rights.”
The Commune continued to be honored as a moment of socialist martyrdom, and anniversaries and other symbolic occasions provided opportunities to affirm the sacrifices of the Communards on behalf of socialism. International commemoration of the Commune and particularly the date of March 18 became, in the words of Georges Haupt, “an idea, a profession of faith, and a confirmation of a historical future, of the inevitable victory of the proletarian revolution.”
But even as commemoration of the Commune became a fixture of socialist rhetoric and iconography, so did the debates over its meaning intensify. The relevance of the Commune to the ongoing project of socialist transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the deep polarization within the movement itself.
American socialist Phillips Russell, visiting Paris in May 1914, on what turned out to be the eve of the Great War, joined a procession of “thirty, perhaps forty thousand . . . working men and women, and children too,” in commemoration of the Commune. The huge crowd grew suddenly silent as it approached a wall in the Père Lachaise cemetery.
This was the spot where, as Russell recalled, “the workingmen and women, who took charge of Paris forty-three years ago and ran it peacefully and well,” had been mowed down by the army of Thiers, “their bodies piling in heaps against the wall.” Deeply impressed by the commemoration, in the face of a massive police presence, Russell “learned that the spirit of the Commune still lives in the hearts of its working people.”
The following is the transcript from Tempest’s Building the Revolutionary Left Today panel. Panelists present the questions and takeaways from their experiences in the revolutionary Left.
Luis Meiners: Building on some of the experiences and debates that we are having in Argentina, I will try to draw some conclusions that can speak to the challenges of the revolutionary Left from an international perspective. Beyond specific national situations and characteristics, which are always incredibly important, there are also many challenges that are common to a revolutionary socialist Left internationally.
First, we need to define the challenge: How do we build revolutionary organizations that are rooted in the struggles of the working class and the oppressed, and that can organize and influence these broad layers to play a decisive role in the class struggle?
In other words, how do we move from smaller propaganda groups organized around ideological coherence to organizations that can have a broader influence and impact when the situation changes internationally or nationally? How can we organize the thousands that radicalize in specific moments?
One of the challenges of the revolutionary Left is that when the situation is open to its ideas, when sections of the working class and of the mass movements have turned to the left, many of our organizations have not been up to the challenge of meeting the moment. Making the step from a propaganda group to a broader revolutionary one is a common element in all discussions regarding revolutionary organization.
In Argentina, this debate was rooted in the 2001 experience. The Argentinazo was a mass popular uprising where a broad section of the working class, the middle class, students, etc., turned to the left quite radically and quite quickly. This had different expressions.
The popular assemblies (asambleas populares) sprung up all around the country, especially in Buenos Aires, which brought people together in a direct democracy model to debate a whole range of issues in which the Left played a role. There was also the piquetero movement of unemployed workers and the student movement.
In all these movements the revolutionary Left, which was essentially composed of relatively small groups, played a role,. One of these groups was the MST, which had come from the MAS (Movimiento Al Socialismo) – the largest revolutionary party in Argentina during the 1980s which had more than 10,000 members.
Argentine savers demand their money back from the financial Corralito in front of the BankBoston headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina. One of the many demonstrations composing the 2001 mass uprising Argentinazo. Photo Credit: Barcex.
But a crisis in that party left behind smaller groups. So, when the Argentinazo happened, the revolutionary Left, composed of these smaller groups, were suddenly playing important roles in the class struggle. For example, the revolutionary socialist Left, the MST, and other organizations won the leadership of the main student federation in the country, the Federación Universitaria de Buenos Aires. This is a student federation that groups together 300,000 students from the biggest university in the country. The Left won decisive influence in several unions, and all of this was driven by relatively small groups.
So, the question is: When there was a mass turn to the left (and despite having managed to play a role and have electoral influence) why couldn’t the revolutionary Left emerge from that process with a mass-based party, a broad vanguard party or something similar that could bring into the organization thousands of radicalizing people?
We did emerge from the 1990s (a period extremely hostile for the revolutionary Left in Argentina and in many parts of the world) and we did grow, but we were not able to fully seize the opening provided by the Argentinazo to make a qualitative leap forward in the task of building a revolutionary organization . This outcome was one of the reasons for the re-composition of the political regime under Nestor Kirchner after the 2001 uprising.
What conclusions were debated in the MST from this experience?
One of the main issues was how to relate to broader radicalizing layers of people who are not coming from the same political background. When people radicalize, they’re not coming from Trotskyism or from revolutionary Marxism. They’re coming from very different places. Also, many people had poor experiences with Stalinist parties, and so there was a certain hostility directed toward the revolutionary Left.
Another question was on how to broaden the democratic aspects of democratic centralism in our organizations and make them as democratic as possible to be able to incorporate the radicalizing layers of people and their experiences into our organizations.
There had evolved certain defensive modes of organization… in which complete political and ideological unity was necessary before anything else. This model hampered the possibility of moving from a small propaganda organization to something that had broader political influence.
In 2006, for example, MST reformed the internal statutes of the party to try to incorporate some of these conclusions and debates. We needed to change some of the ways in which democratic centralism was put into practice. Stalinism completely distorted democratic centralism, and some of these distortions had been inherited by trotskyist currents; like the idea of needing to have absolute complete political unity, bureaucratic centralism, etc. to build organizations. This idea also related to international experiences and a period in which the revolutionary socialist Left was in a very small minority and in a very hostile environment in different parts of the world. We thought it was very important to keep the flame alive, to keep alive the ideas of revolutionary socialism against currents of socialism-from-above in its different expressions, which were on the rise.
There had evolved certain defensive modes of organization in which any small difference led to a rupture within the organizations. This led to monolithic organization in which complete political and ideological unity was necessary before anything else. This model hampered the possibility of moving from a small propaganda organization to something that had broader political influence. So, a second question really is about the need to move away from this defensive model.
The third question is internationalism, as a practical consideration, and not only as a theoretical position or a moral stance. Beyond the fundamental principle of solidarity with the oppressed and exploited people all over the world, we also have to build international organizations.
The problems that revolutionary socialists face cannot be resolved by an isolated group, we are better equipped to face them if we work together with comrades from different parts of the world. If we build international organizations, within them, we can incorporate different views from different traditions that have shaped the revolutionary socialist movement today.
Today, there is no single current within the revolutionary socialist movement internationally that can claim to have the answers to all these questions. The answers to some of these questions are going to come from the convergence of different revolutionary socialist traditions that have been built for the last 50 to 60 years.
There is a need to build broad international organizations. There is also a need to debate how we can build revolutionary organizations so that we can move away from being small propaganda groups and meet the moments of broader radicalization.
Rabab Elnaiem: I always have to start by giving glory to the Martyrs of Sudan and saying “Long Live the Struggle for the People of Sudan.” It’s exciting to be among the Left in Sudan right now. And it’s also very challenging and sometimes very frustrating.
Around 2013, we had the first wave of the revolution. Within the span of three days, we had lost around 200 people who were killed in the streets of Khartoum and other cities around Sudan. And ever since, we’ve seen different strains of a second wave of the revolution in Sudan in terms of building revolutionary organizations.
We’ve seen a lot of organizations that are made up of younger people that are trying to break away from older political parties within Sudan. This was not an initiative on the part of the new organizations. Instead, it was a reaction and an expression of frustration with the absence of a political will – seeing all the conditions of the revolution, and yet no action for revolution.
Within all of this, we’ve seen a lot of voluntary work: a lot of people trying to build more of a dual power situation, but doing so without an ideology, without a radicalized working class or radicalized everyday people. People were trying to build a substitute state by doing a lot of volunteer-NGO-type of work.
In 2018, we saw the rise of the Sudanese Professional [Nurses] Association. Their first big intervention into the public sphere in Sudan was based on a minimum wage study. Within the second wave of the revolution of December 2018, we saw the people taking to the streets demanding bread and better health services, but at the same time waiting for some type of leadership. And so, the Professional Nurses Association was basically thrown into that situation without necessarily having the right ideology or theory, and they have been trying to lead the people in the streets.
One of the first lessons that we’ve learned is that Sudan’s Professional Association is a part of the formal economy. But at the same time, large sections of the Sudanese economy is based on the informal sector, the services sector, rather than the productive sector. Sudan’s Professional Association, although they do speak for a lot of workers, they don’t have a build-up-from-below approach.
From 2013 to 2018 and up to today, we’ve seen the rise of resistance committees based on neighborhoods and workplaces. But within these are the same groups that were trying to break away from politics, as if politics or having a radical ideology or being radicalized is frowned upon. And that’s why we’ve seen the first slogan of the revolution being “Just Fall.” It does not speak of building.
What do we want after the fall of the previous regime? Do we want socialism? Do we want state capitalism? What are we trying to achieve? We’ve seen the development of slogans, but I think one of the lessons that we need to focus on right now in Sudan, and around the world, is how to radicalize everyday people.
Everyday people are already engaged with slogans, but we need to do the work of translating the slogan into a political movement with a very clear bias towards socialism, toward building institutions from below.
To go back to the statement that I started with: It is exciting to be on the Left in Sudan. It’s also the most frustrating time because there is a lot of drift, a lot of disconnect within the Left itself. There is a lot of talk of people waiting for a revolutionary party as if that revolutionary party is going to come out of nothing or just be built overnight.
Regardless of the political parties that exist right now and that are adopting the three slogans of the revolution (whether it was the first slogan of the revolution “Just Fall,” the second slogan of “Freedom, Peace and Justice”, or the “Three No’s”: no negotiation, no compromise and no legitimacy for the Army), there is a frustration and the lack of an ability to see one’s personal struggle within the bigger struggle. This creates a disconnect that doesn’t allow a lot of room for building revolutionary organizations from below.
For example, we see this a lot within the feminist agenda. We have a younger population, whose struggle is not necessarily aligned within the larger struggle. They don’t see their struggle within the broader struggle. So, we are at risk of recreating the same mistake that happened in 2013. We are in this state of trying to radicalize based on a very clear ideology but we’re trying to build so many organizations. This will create a big disconnect within the Left and lead nowhere.
Some people think we already have a revolutionary party. Some people think that this party is not revolutionary enough. But at the same time, they’re not necessarily working to radicalize the party itself or building another alternative. If one doesn’t want to work within a given party, one can build an alternative, right?
The lesson from more than three years of the Sudanese revolution is whenever we come up with a slogan which is adopted, and has a basis in daily life, we need to do the work of [realizing] those slogans. What do we mean by “freedom,” “peace,” and “justice”? What does that mean in terms of economic policies? Are we going to break away from neo-liberal policies? Will that translate into “freedom”? What is “peace”? Do we build peace from above? Or do we build it from below through the redistribution of wealth and power to different areas within Sudan?
Sudanese demonstrators with the ‘freedom train,’a Sudanese Railways train they commandeered and rode to a mass sit-in at the General Command of the Sudanese army in Khartoum. One of the demonstrations of the Sudanese revolutions. Photo Credit: Manula Amin.
What do we mean by “justice”? Is “justice” sustainable without having “peace” and “freedom”? Whenever someone is taking to the street and chanting the slogan of “Freedom, Peace, and Justice,” that person has their own radical agenda for how we are going to [move toward] “freedom,” “peace,” and “justice.”
Whenever we have that radicalization of the slogan itself by bringing it into the daily life of the people, we are closer to a dual power situation. We are technically in a dual power situation today, but at the same time, we don’t have a strong enough revolutionary organization built from below.
Andreu Coll: The main political experience I’ll explain is the building of Podemos and why and how we left that initiative when it turned to the political mainstream.
Podemos arose from a very particular political and economic situation during the crisis of 2008. There was a very severe regime crisis here in Spain. The monarchy, the main political parties, the judiciary, and the national question were all in a very big political crisis.
Podemos had two premises. One was the indignados movement in 2011, which was a radical revolt against the economic and political system which included the main parties and unions. They joined due to the passive attitudes toward the crisis on the part of the government. The other was the Syriza hypothesis. This was a new sort of independent party, non-sectarian and independent from the socialist party, that had strong links with social movements.
We were, at the time of the indignados movement, one of the currents of the Marxist Left that had an active role in that movement. Other organized currents were very critical and denounced the movement as petty-bourgeois.
In this framework, we always insisted on the need to have, in political terms, a medium-term approach of trying to transform this revolt into a concrete program and project. From this point of view, we had to fight a double illusion. When we had the rise of the movement, we had to insist on countering a movementist, anti-party illusion; in Bensaid’s words, a social illusion – to think that the movement is enough in itself as an alternative.
On the other hand, later there was the electoralist, governist, reformist, and political illusions, as Bensaid said, when we built Podemos. In some cases, the same comrades went from one side, and then to the other. We had to bend the stick on this issue too against the careerists in the movement, and later when we built the new party.
Our role was to try to build a new radical party linked to new generations. And this was a result of an agreement with Pablo Iglesias—and his very close team of comrades—and our organization at the time. Although they later presented us only having had an interest in building with them after the initiative, this was false. We were part of the building of Podemos from the start.
The main problem was that once they met with conflict with the system, with the media, with the establishment, they had a very moderate and defensive attitude. They didn’t benefit from the strong political crisis that allowed us to build an alternative common sense, breaking with all the neoliberal prejudices that were very rooted in society at the time. Unfortunately, this moderate turn towards the right allowed other parties such as Ciudadanos to tip the balance away from Podemos, emptying any critique of neoliberal order.
One of the main critiques we held at the time was this theorization of Podemos as an electoral war machine, as both [Íñigo] Errejón and Pablo Iglesias developed at the time. They also posed a false opposition between new and old politics. This was useful against the main establishment, but it was also useful to direct criticism at a more militant left that had a more democratic procedure and internal organic existence.
In the meantime, they developed this Bonapartism, one could say, which was also opposed to internal democracy and to clearer procedures such as having proportional leadership bodies, etc. And they were constantly counterposing an electoralist urgency to a patient party of building, educating, and structuring over the medium term.
From the beginning we had these two souls in Podemos (later we would have three): the Eurocommunist view of Iglesias and his team and the more populist view of Errejón.
Our main battle was always to emphasize the centrality of a new party outside of parliament as well as the task of renewing labor and social movements as a whole. This was our main approach. Our theory and aim were the need for a broad, pluralistic movement party. We were defeated maybe because we underestimated the strength of the Bonapartist role played by the central leaders and their media influence.
But the main strategic perspective for us was to have total independence from social liberal parties (mainly the PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrera de España) and a critical balance sheet of the defeat of the Syriza government in Greece. We thought that if they had been defeated in Greece with a moderate orientation, and if we were ever to have any chance of reaching power as Podemos, the reaction of the establishment, the European Union, would be even more harsh and radical against any change.
Unfortunately, the leadership of Podemos had the total opposite view: the view that Spain is far too important to be treated in the same manner as the Greek people. So, there was no critical assessment of the lessons of Greece. Unfortunately, that accelerated the adaptation of the leadership to the political regime, accepting a capitalist economy, and the EU framework.
From then on, we had to struggle, to regroup as many comrades as possible to break away because we couldn’t have any political coherence remaining inside Podemos if they joined the government, which they eventually did.
We survived because we always struggled to maintain an independent revolutionary organization with strong strategic reference points alongside the prioritization of education through our summer universities like the Socialism conference in the U.S. We were able to engage with many new activists who didn’t share our political background but were able to understand our critiques which were always concrete, offering concrete choices and orientations, and never abstract or ideological in the worst sense of the term.
Although we were defeated, Anticapitalistas is a stronger party. We have a stronger and renewed leadership that has been able to integrate the lessons from our mistakes in Podemos. We’re more strongly rooted. We have some comrades with an important mass influence even in the media, especially Miguel Urbán and Teresa Rodriguez (the mayor of Cadiz). We have the means for real electoral capability, going further than propaganda campaigns in upcoming electoral initiatives.
The main tasks today for Anticapitalistas are to improve labor militancy in new struggles and campaigns around pensions, salaries, and against inflation, and finally to relaunch our feminist and youth activity.
Natalia Tylim:I’m going to talk about the U.S. and use the experience and some of the perspectives of the Tempest Collective to inform some of my points.
In the U.S., there’s a need to reassert a baseline argument about the need for revolutionary organization and to clarify that needing revolutionary organization doesn’t mean you do that instead of the work you’re a part of in movements, in unions at the workplace, or in broader political formations. Rather, it’s a necessary precondition of the work that we do if we want broader organizing to be able to build toward a socialist project, independent class power, and an end to this world system that is driven by the imperatives of the market and is pushing humanity and the earth itself to the precipice.
This sounds like a very basic starting point, but in the last number of years in the U.S. I’ve seen how necessary it is to clarify and assert very basic principles. Horizons matter. And some of the horizons on the U.S. Left have become very limited in the last several years.
But the horizons express themselves in day-to-day political work. And we urgently need more organized democratic spaces that bring together comrades who share a general base of politics so that we can debate perspective, strategy, and tactics. This is necessary to win people to our politics, perspectives and strategies and it is the only way we can effectively be involved in this urgent, broader work that’s going on all around us. And every one of us needs to find a way to be involved in organizing. Everywhere we are, the Tempest Collective sees ourselves as a product of the weaknesses and inroads that the last generation of the revolutionary Left faced.
Horizons matter. And some of the horizons on the U.S. Left have become very limited in the last several years.
Luis spoke to a similar dynamic: the failure of smaller, revolutionary socialist organizations to relate to and be part of the radicalization. We are a product of the explosive political openings that exist in the period since the world financial crisis of 2008. This crisis is not simply a contingent set of circumstances in the United States based on who the presidential candidates were over the last two election cycles. It’s an international phenomenon.
At the founding of the Tempest Collective in the summer of 2020, most of our membership came either from the ISO, (the International Socialist Organization) which collapsed in 2019, and from the organization Solidarity.
Two years later, about half of our membership doesn’t come from either of those organizations. A lot of the newer members have politicized more recently, either through the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), or through the George Floyd uprising and more recent touchpoints of struggle.
Those of us who come from the ISO and Solidarity have a lot to say about our experience in the revolutionary Left and the lessons and assessments we’ve taken from that. Among us there are different assessments of those experiences. It has been challenging to develop a shared assessment of what the lessons are. It has also been challenging to bring those experiences together with newer members who don’t share that same history or the same language in which older members have been trained or developed.
We’re finally beginning the process of being able to develop a more collective balance sheet of these things. We’re only at the start of this process. There is a general consensus in Tempest that whatever the factors were regarding the life (or in one case, the collapse) of our former organizations, there’s something really important that’s happening more generally (and internationally) in terms of radicalization and polarization.
Discussion of revolutionary socialist organizations was held at the Socialism Conference of 2022 in the U.S. Photo Credit: Annabella D.
We launched our website Tempestmag.org in early August of 2020. At this time, the COVID-19 pandemic had already killed 150,000 people in the U.S. The murder of George Floyd had just unleashed two months of historic multiracial, anti-racist rebellion. There were 20 million people in the streets that summer in defense of Black bodies and with openly abolitionist horizons.
We saw the natural disaster of COVID and the George Floyd rebellion as the most recent examples and expressions of this international multi-sided crisis in the U.S. These developments followed the rise of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the election of Donald Trump which were expressions of the same crises. There was the important, but episodic, rise of labor struggles with both wins and losses.
In Tempest, we didn’t see all these as U.S.-specific phenomena; they were part of an international experience that includes the debt crisis in Greece and Spain; the rebirth of reformism with a populist face like Corbyn, Melenchon, and Iglesias; the political revolutions and the subsequent reactions to them in the Middle East and North Africa; and the contradictory role of the Pink Tide governments in South America.
To understand the moment, I’ll quote from an editorial when Tempest launched:
The socialist movement in this country has not always been an outside, negligible force. For decades in the last century, it was an integral part of working class communities, politics, and struggle. It was the force which built the labor movement, which later helped, support and sustain civil rights struggles, which ensured that the New Deal concessions from the ruling class had to be made and opposed decades of bipartisan imperial policies. It was the relentless internationalism and principled opposition to all forms of oppression that made these and other victories possible. The coerced separation of our movement from our class is a wound from the middle of the last century; yet it is a live wound which makes itself felt broadly in our organizing and in our personal lives.
The editorial concluded,
If there is a single imperative which drives the Tempest project, it is not letting this opportunity be lost. The Left must lay the foundations for independent and democratic organizations of self-activity and struggle and must ensure that these organizations are deep-rooted and organically reflect and represent the working class. To do this also requires us helping re-cohere a resurgent revolutionary current.
This editorial pointed to a silver lining in a growing objective crisis we face: the growing audience for radical abolitionist, socialist, and revolutionary politics. It also points toward an issue that has followed us most of our political lives and that the Left has faced in this country for decades: the historic shortage of a class-conscious layer of fighters. Some call this the “militant minority” who can be won to socialist politics and outlooks and who would facilitate the development of a strong politically independent organization of the working class and the oppressed.
Without such a layer and without such organizations, it’s hard to imagine the type of sustained struggle that can overthrow the rule of capital. Socialists in the U.S. have not figured out how to meet the challenge of the impasse. In addition, the organizational expressions of the last generation of revolutionaries who attempted to do so have also left much to be desired.
In country after country, revolutionary organizations have split. The forces of the revolutionary Left have weakened. Organizational crises are not just about individual organizations or individual countries.
There are three things that I think are relevant lessons that require more discussion. These are issues that have often proven existential for organizations. All these underlined weaknesses in an organizational form that developed in periods of low-level defensive struggle. They hampered our ability to relate to the radicalization that was unleashed after the 2008 financial crisis. To be clear, this is not about a specific organization. Instead, these are generalizations from the revolutionary Left internationally.
First, there is a misunderstanding of the Leninist tradition, or what is meant by “Leninism.” Leninism is a rich and adaptive political tradition, but it has too often become defined as a fetishized organizational form: a bureaucratized democratic centralism. At heart, Leninism is defined by something most of us will probably find uncontroversial: that organizations should have democratic decision-making and centralized action. This notion didn’t start with Lenin. But what came to define the Leninist political tradition was a bizarre form where unity of action too often gave way to an unhealthy and uncritical unity of thinking.
Second, there has been a failure to fully grapple with and digest the dynamics around politics of gender, sexual violence, and social reproduction. Some of this consists of unresolved theoretical questions which came up during the 1970s feminist movement, but a lot of it consists of new issues that have been brought to the fore because of the ways neoliberalism produced revolutions, upheavals, and movements in response to the heightened social reproductive burden and the growth of the right.
Within our organizations, some of this crisis of sexual violence was experienced as a political opening for accountability that was never fully digested, which made it much harder to address these issues within our organizations with a common framework when they appeared. And they will continue to appear. It is not an “if” but a “when,” because they are so embedded in society. For some organizations, there’s been an effort to reject the need for a reckoning with these questions at all, seeing them as concessions to so-called “identity politics.”
Third, there’s been a failure to fully grapple with the problem of revolutionary organization, which David McNally has written about for Tempest (following Hal Draper and Duncan Hallas from earlier generations), regarding the challenges of the lack of an actual working class vanguard in all of its diversity in the United States and in much of the world. We have to start by advocating the possibility of such a vanguard instead of being able to point to what it does in its might. This is intimately tied with how we understand our goals, and how we build in a non-sectarian manner, with a modesty about what we do represents in our context as small groups of revolutionaries.
Regardless of the challenge we face of not yet having a vanguard, we need subjective revolutionaries to come together into explicitly revolutionary formations. We need revolutionaries to be organized together, not to the exclusion of the broader political work, but because of the broader political work.
Organizing with small groups of people is not the same thing as organizing in a sectarian way. On the flip side, we should not privilege small-group life over the prioritization of also building broader formations. The Left is healthier with a broad, healthy socialist milieu, and we welcome and defend that.
It’s a mistake to reject with a single stroke the broad party experiences in the U.S. DSA was an element of that broad party experience here, and we have much more to learn from other countries about this.
Organizing with small groups of people is not the same thing as organizing in a sectarian way. On the flip side, we should not privilege small-group life over the prioritization of also building broader formations. The Left is healthier with a broad, healthy socialist milieu, and we welcome and defend that.
Tempest has felt the weight of the COVID moment. For years, we’ve been limited to online forums, which are important, but which also are self-selecting and make it hard to be able to develop the type of audience that we know is out there for revolutionary politics. Moving towards more local work is where we’re starting to make inroads.
Tempest does not have it all figured out. But we believe urgently in the need to be able to address these questions and to figure them out together. We don’t think you can figure them out as individuals in the broader movement. We need more spaces like this to have these discussions and I welcome anybody who’s interested to join Tempest if this project sounds like what you’re looking for.
It’s no wonder that German socialist, Clara Zetkin’s legacy has been erased by the corporate sponsorship of #IWD, argues Katherine Connelly
Cliff and Isaac join Jesse Olsavsky, author of The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861, for a discussion on his book on the early abolitionist movement. They discuss the textbook history of abolition, and how this masks the role of runaways and other radicals substituting them for a white middle-class leadership, what Vigilance Committees were and how they acted, the exchange of ideas between different social groups in the abolitionist movement, the role runaway interviews had on the movement and its parallels today. They also talk about the Fugitive Slave Act and its effect on the Committees, the international dimension of abolitionism, the abolitionist view of the U.S. republic and the links between abolitionism and other movements.
CHAPTER SIX THE PARIS COMMUNE ILLUMINATES AND DEEPENS THE CONTENT OF CAPITAL 1) The Despotic Plan of Capital vs. the Cooperation of Freely Associated Labor Marx had begun his analysis of capitalism some three decades before the establishment of the…
In Paths of Revolution, the leftist militant, journalist, political prisoner, public intellectual, historian, Adolfo Gilly bears witness to the tumult, triumphs, and defeats of the Left in the twentieth century in Latin America. Tracing a lineage from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Central America’s guerrilla movements, from Mexico’s Zapatista uprising to the indigenous mobilizations that swept Evo Morales into power in Bolivia, in these essays, Gilly captures what drives people to action under different forms of domination and what just might stand to illuminate the state of the Left in the Americas today.
Nicaragua and Bolivia: Two Paths (1980)
Twenty-four years ago, having just arrived in La Paz, I saw the Bolivian miners’, workers’, and peasants’ militias. It was my first sight of figures who up to that point had been mythical as far as I was concerned: workers and campesinos, armed and organized in their unions. A knot of emotion formed in my throat. The revolution of April 1952 was still fresh, the revolution that broke out in order to carry into power Víctor Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Zuazo—elected president and vice president in 1951 but prevented from taking office by a military coup. Insurrections in La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí defeated and dissolved an army formerly at the service of mining tycoons and imperialist powers, which the people had called “the massacring army.” Its weapons were transferred into the hands of trade-union militias.
In 1952 the mines were nationalized, and in 1953 the agrarian reform was launched (when peasants had already occupied many haciendas). After that, the revolution stalled; the militias’ weapons began to age and they ran short of ammunition. The professional army was patiently reorganized, first by Paz Estenssoro and then by Siles Zuazo, and equipped with high-caliber modern weapons supplied by the US. At the same time, the state began to promote capitalist accumulation, private enterprise, and imperialist investments. The new army and new bourgeoisie developed side by side until, with the coup of 1964, that army once again seized power, resuming its murderous history. Everyone remembers one of the most notorious massacres, which took place on the feast of St. John in 1967, only months before the killing of Che Guevara.
Bolivia has one of the strongest and most politically conscious mass organizations in Latin America: the mining unions and the Central Obrera Boliviana as a whole. But in the absence of a political party to counter the national bourgeoisie and lacking weapons against the massacring army, consciousness, combativeness, and organization may suffice for heroic resistance—with dynamite and last stands on the barricades —but not for victory. It was Juan Lechín, one of the prime movers of the policy that led to disarming the militias, who affirmed that a military coup would be resisted by means of a general strike and some roadblocks. In Argentina in 1955 and 1976, in Chile in 1973, and in other countries at other times, that old formula encouraged the most fateful of delusions: the idea that the workers might resist, after the fact and empty-handed, a military coup that has been technically and scientifically designed to slaughter them. Via the same disastrously passive policy, the Peronist union bureaucrats paved the way for the military dictatorship established in their country in 1976. And it was the Argentine military that provided advice and guidance for the [July 1980] Bolivian coup, with its methodical project of mass murder, according to denunciations recently made in Managua by Jaime Paz Zamora, the vice president-elect of Bolivia.
A few days ago, watching the Sandinista militias in Estelí, I recalled the Bolivian campesinos parading by just as these were doing, a quarter of a century ago, confident of their revolution and marching with the very same gait.
I saw the Sandinista army, and the militias, too, in Managua on July 19th. The old army has been destroyed right down to the roots, and, unlike in Bolivia, the leadership of the revolution has no intention of rebuilding it; only the counterrevolutionaries dare suggest such a thing. I observed the discipline, the supple, easy stride, the modern weaponry of the Sandinista armed forces. I recalled the Bolivians once again, presently being slaughtered by another coup, despite the indescribable heroism with which they have resisted and even dismantled so many others. And I not only saw but keenly felt the radical difference between the two. It’s right that the army should be Sandinista, despite the objections of [Alfonso] Robelo, the Consejo Superior de la Empresa Privada (Private Enterprise Council), conservatives, and others; it’s right for troops to train intensively; it’s right that this army should act as the shield of this revolution, until other, neighboring ones come to lighten its load and make the road ahead less arduous.
Those who prioritize democracy over class can say what they like: the unending martyrdom of Bolivia is their answer, the unfailing result of what they propose. The Bolivian Revolution was only able to hold out for so many years because it formed militias, implemented an agrarian reform, nationalized the mines, and was sustained by unions with a combativeness and a tradition of struggle beyond compare. If it was unable to hold out longer, it’s because all of this was interrupted halfway through, and the regrouping of capitalism and its army did the rest.
Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about Thanksgiving and his book “Our History Is the Future,” and the historic fight against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
Argentine savers demand their money back from the financial Corralito in front of the BankBoston headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina. One of the many demonstrations composing the 2001 mass uprising Argentinazo. 
Sudanese demonstrators with the ‘freedom train,’a Sudanese Railways train they commandeered and rode to a mass sit-in at the General Command of the Sudanese army in Khartoum. One of the demonstrations of the Sudanese revolutions. 
Discussion of revolutionary socialist organizations was held at the Socialism Conference of 2022 in the U.S. Photo Credit: Annabella D. 
