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World revolution is theMarxist concept of overthrowingcapitalism in all countries through theconscious revolutionary action of the organizedworking class. For theorists, these revolutions will not necessarily occur simultaneously, but where and when local conditions allow arevolutionary party to successfully replace bourgeois ownership and rule, and install aworkers' state based onsocial ownership of themeans of production. In many Marxist schools, such asTrotskyism andcommunist left, the essentially international character of theclass struggle and the necessity of global scope are critical elements and a chief explanation of the failure ofsocialism in one country.
The end goal of such internationally orientedrevolutionary socialism is to achieveworld socialism, and later, acommunist society.[1][2]
TheOctober Revolution of 1917 in Russia sparked arevolutionary wave ofsocialist andcommunist uprisings across Europe, most notably theGerman Revolution, theHungarian Revolution,Biennio Rosso, and therevolutionary war in Finland with the short livedFinnish Socialist Workers' Republic, which made large gains and met with considerable success in the early stages;see alsoRevolutions of 1917–1923.
Particularly between 1918 and 1919, it seemed plausible thatcapitalism would soon be swept from the European continent forever. Given the fact that European powers controlled the majority of Earth's land surface at the time, such an event could have meant the end of capitalism not just in Europe, but everywhere. Additionally, theCommunist International (Comintern), founded in March 1919, began as an independent international organization of communists from various countries around the world that evolved after theRussian Civil War into an essentiallySoviet-sponsored agency responsible for coordinating the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism worldwide.
With the prospect of world revolution so close at hand, Marxists were dominated by a feeling of overwhelming optimism, which in the end proved to be quite premature. The European revolutions were crushed one by one, until eventually the Russian revolutionaries found themselves to be the only survivors. Since they had been relying on the idea that an underdeveloped and agrarian country like Russia would be able to build socialism with help from successful revolutionary governments in the more industrialized parts of Europe, they found themselves in a crisis once it became clear that no such help would arrive;seesocialism in one country.
Thepower struggle in the Soviet Union which emerged during Lenin's illness and eventual death would also determine the prospect of world revolution. In particular, the leadership of theGerman Communist Party had requested that Moscow sendLeon Trotsky to Germany to direct the1923 insurrection. However, this proposal was rejected by the Politburo which was controlled byStalin,Gregory Zinoviev, andLev Kamenev who decided to send a commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist Party members.[4] According to historianIsaac Deutscher, Trotsky had explicitly supported world revolution throughproletarian internationalism but opposed the means through military conquest as seen with his documented opposition to thewar with Poland in 1920, proposed armistice with theEntente and temperance with staginganti-British revolts in the Middle East.[5]
After those events and up until the present day, the international situation never came quite so close to a world revolution again. Asfascism grew inEurope in the 1930s, instead of immediate revolution, the Comintern opted for apopular front with liberal capitalists against fascism; then, at the height ofWorld War II in 1943, the Comintern was disbanded on the request of the Soviet Union'sWestern allies.
The liberation of humanity from the yoke of capitalism has become the immediate combative task of the international proletariat. The proletariat must overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie, establish thedictatorship of the proletariat and Soviet power, expropriate the land, banks, transport, and industry from the capitalists, and proceed along this path toward the complete abolition of private property and classes, and the creation of a communist economic system and society.
The material prerequisites for the world revolution are present; its victory depends only on the will to fight and the strength of the proletariat.
Only when the proletariat has finally freed itself fromreformist illusions, has broken with the bourgeoisie’s allies in the camp of theSecond International, and begins the struggle under the leadership of the communist parties and the ThirdCommunist International — the revolutionary leader and representative of the working masses of the entire world — only then is the victory of the proletarian revolution possible.
The essential condition for the establishment of proletarian power is to win the majority of the working class to the foundations and aims of communism. In the struggle for its dictatorship, the proletariat, under the leadership of the communist party, employs methods of mass revolutionary action (demonstrations, the factory-committee movement, strikes [partial and general], production control, factory seizures, armed uprisings, etc.).
It utilizes bourgeois-democratic institutions (parliaments) in its struggle, seeking to dislodge capitalism from its positions on all issues of the daily life of the working class, undermining and exploding these institutions from within.
A new upsurge of revolutionary feeling swept across Europe in theaftermath of World War II, though it was not as strong as the one triggered by World War I that resulted in afailed socialist revolution in Germany and asuccessful one in Russia. Communist parties in countries such asGreece,France, andItaly had acquired significant prestige and public support due to their leadership ofanti-fascist resistance movements during the war; as such, they also enjoyed considerable success at the polls and regularly finished second in elections in the late 1940s. However, none managed to finish in first and form a government.
For communist parties inEastern Europe, meanwhile, though they did win elections at around the same time, Western media criticized the lack of liberal democratic elements in their rise to power. Nonetheless, communist movements in Eastern Europe proliferated, even with some local cases independent of the USSR, such as theYugoslav Partisans led by the future leader of YugoslaviaJosip Broz Tito, who had led the struggle against fascism andAxis occupation during World War II.
Student and worker revolts across the world in the 1960s and early 1970s, coupled with theChinese Cultural Revolution, the establishment of theNew Left together with thecivil rights movement, the militancy of theBlack Panther Party and similar armed/insurrectionary "Liberation Front" groups, and even a bit of a resurgence in thelabor movement for a time once again made it seem to some as though world revolution was not only possible, but imminent.
However, thisradical left spirit ebbed by the mid-1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a return toright-wing, economicallyconservative ideologies (spearheaded, among other examples, byThatcherism in theUnited Kingdom andReaganomics in theUnited States) andfree-market reforms in China andin Vietnam.
The seeming triumph ofneoliberalism as the sole world-ideology led some liberal and conservative writers, such asFrancis Fukuyama to write, as in his workThe End of History and the Last Man, that although Marxist and Hegelian theory was correct in thatdialectical materialism had led to an ideal society, this society was in fact late-twentieth century liberalism, and that there would be no further political change beyond the confines of capitalism and liberalism for the foreseeable future.[6] Indeed, according to Marxist literary criticTerry Eagleton this acknowledgement of the fundamental reliability (though tweaked) of Marxist theory, yet the denial of its global applicability in the face of ascendant Reaganite and Thatcherite dogma, led to a contradiction at the heart of society in the 1980s and 1990s:
One might have thought that if Marxism was true in 1975, as many then claimed it was, then – short of some immense sea-change in the world itself – it would also have been true in 1985. But in 1985 it was mattering less whether it was true or not, just as the existence of God was a burning issue in 1860 but hardly so a century later. Marxism was now less a disconcerting challenge than the irritating or endearing idiosyncrasy of those unable to relinquish an imaginary selfhood inherited from the past. It belonged irrevocably to the great epoch of modernity, within which, whether true or false, it figured as an entirely intelligible project. Once that age had passed into a different problematic, Marxism could be seen as at best a set of valid responses to a set of questions which were no longer on the agenda. It thus crossed over, in the eyes of some, from being false but relevant, to true but superfluous.[7]
WithinMarxist theory,Vladimir Lenin's concept of thelabor aristocracy and his description ofimperialism, and – separately, but not necessarily unrelatedly – Trotsky's theories regarding thedeformed workers' state, offer several explanations as to why the world revolution has not occurred to the present day. Many groups still explicitly pursue the goal of worldwide communist revolution, calling it the truest expression ofproletarian internationalism.
In a 1936 interview with journalistRoy W. Howard, Stalin articulated his rejection of world revolution and stated that "We never had such plans and intentions" and that "The export of revolution is nonsense".[8][9][10]
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