The Barricade or the Ballot?

A lesson that history teaches is that militancy is not the same thing as being revolutionary and should not be confused with it. The German workers in 1918-23 were among the most militant in central Europe and to all appearances wanted a council republic. In reality, however, the Social Democratic leaders had little difficulty in misleading them, by representing conventional democratic reforms as socialistic or at least as steps toward the achievement of a "socialist" society. Ebert and his collaborators on the Council of People’s Commissars easily steered the German workers toward acceptance of a basic democratic republic clothed in socialist rhetoric. The Social Democrats believed that a revolution made by a  minority must inevitably result in civil war, as proved to be the case in Russia, and that if a minority coup succeeded, it could maintain itself only by establishing the dictatorship of a minority over a majority. This prospect induced Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, to declare in 1918 that he detested revolution like “sin.” The majority of the German working class were not revolutionary. The German proletariat was perhaps the working class most socially integrated into the existing capitalist system of any in western Europe, and in caution and moderation it differed from other European working classes in degree, not in kind. In fact, the proletariat as a whole has generally feared insurrections--and has acted in an insurrectionary manner only under the most exceptional circumstances. The three-day armed demonstration, the Spartacist Uprising, of the Berlin workers in early January 1919 does not invalidate this conclusion.

 The KPD and the KAPD with  their “revolutionary" gymnastics tried to turn every strike into an uprising, every uprising into an insurrection, and every insurrection into a revolution. Yet only three thousand Freikorps troops were all that was needed to disperse about ten times as many fairly well-armed Bremen workers in 1919. In pursuit of the rebel Max Holz required only the State's resources of the police not even the army. A well-organized well-trained, well-equipped, and relatively disciplined military units have an ability to quell massive popular insurgencies. Revolutionary success often depends not only upon the formation of a similarly organized and trained insurgent force but also upon the willingness of the rank-and-file military forces to shift their loyalties and support to the revolutionaries. Moreover, modern weapons have rendered military-style insurrections ever more irrelevant. The ruling classes have all the advantages of a technically sophisticated and politically disinterested professional volunteer military force, supported by an effective war machine.  Against such forces a poorly trained, decentralized, and egalitarian force will most likely succumb to defeat.

Thus the most crucial task for the socialist movement today is to win over to its views the great majority of the population. Revolution need not be conceived as a violent transformation of society. With the support of the great majority of the population, in an era where politics has come to mean a manipulative game played among distant elites which has led to a disillusionment and lost of trust in conventional institutions like political parties and trade unions, traditional political institutions can, nevertheless, be transformed and democratised to become the primary means for changing society.

Adapted from writings of Murray Bookchin's, Third Revolution