Review: When workers don't step up: a history of recent revolutions

John Rose, Revolutions Thwarted: Poland, South Africa, Iran, Brazil and the Legacies of Communism, edited by Alex Callinicos and George Paizis, Bookmarks Publications 2025.

“Self-management” – the demand for genuine working-class control at the point of production – was one of the defining slogans of 1968. The struggle for workers’ control inspired a generation of socialists and radical activists in the late 1960s. The late British Marxist John Rose was one such activist. In Revolutions Thwarted, Rose examines a series of revolutionary upheavals that took place in the late 1970s and ’80s – the period in which the great hope of the 1960s and early ’70s had been crushed by a reactionary tide and the emergence of neoliberalism. Rose sets out to test these struggles against what he refers to as his “1968 assumptions”. Did they have the same revolutionary potential for workers’ control of production?^[1]

Across four case studies of mass struggles in Poland in the early 1980s, Iran in 1979, Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s and South Africa at the end of apartheid, Rose concludes that workers’ control was not some relic of the sixties upturn, that “self-management resounded across four continents” (p.346). The energy and creativity of the working class in struggle shines through the book, especially in the numerous moving interviews with participants that breathe life into the accounts of the uprisings. They are reason enough to read the book. For instance, we hear from Kapuscinski, an activist in the Solidarność revolution of 1980, which he described as “an attempt to create new relations between people, in every location and at every level…the guiding theme…the principle of mutual respect (p.129).

As well as testimony like this, Rose’s own revolutionary perspective cuts against the usual pessimism of accounts of revolutions in this period. Many left-wing critics of neoliberalism assumed it was virtually inevitable and wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force.^[2]

Revolutions Thwarted is an important counter-argument. Even periods of working-class retreat, such as the neoliberal period, are punctuated by rebellions which open up the potential for revolutionary change. The global class war is never a totally one-sided battle. Notably, each of the four uprisings broke out after the wave of struggles from the early 1960s to mid-1970s had subsided. In each uprising the working class, from the dockyards of Gdansk to the mines of South Africa, moved on a scale that gave them the potential to lead social revolutions resulting in workers’ power. Iran and Poland, where embryonic forms of workers’ power emerged, represent the most developed of these processes.

This potential, however, was not fulfilled. The fall of South African apartheid, the end of the Brazilian dictatorship and the eventual collapse of Polish Stalinism, despite being driven by workers’ revolt, took the form of negotiated exits to parliamentary democracy. In Iran, the revolution was hijacked, then defeated by conservative Islamist forces. These defeats were not just the work of outside forces. Many of the official leaders of each revolutionary struggle were not capable of or motivated to destroy capitalism. In different ways, their goal was to restructure it. Some, like the leaders of Solidarność, even saw neoliberalism as preferable to socialism. In all four cases, the ruling class was reconstituted but workers remained exploited. New kinds of authoritarianism replaced the old.

This was not inevitable. So how were these revolutions thwarted? This is the question Rose seeks to answer: “how and why did independent workers’ movements that played a decisive role in removing tyrannies in these countries…lose the political initiative?” (p.33).

Rose begins by charting the development of the theory of revolutionary politics and organisation from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Two key concepts in this section frame the rest of the book – self-emancipation and the importance of the revolutionary party, and especially worker leaders within it.

Working-class self-emancipation lies at the heart of revolutionary Marxism, and revolutions under capitalism always point to this potential, especially when the working class plays a leading role. This is completely counter to Stalinist politics, which grossly distorts Marxism in theory and practice. Stalinists betrayed workers’ revolutions across the world, from China in 1927 and Spain 1936 to the post-WWII uprisings. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Stalinism was still one of the key barriers to revolutionary success. In the case of Poland, Stalinism was the active counter-revolutionary governmental force. In South Africa and Iran, Stalinist “Communist” organisations acted as forms of pro-capitalist reformism in the workers’ movement, seeking to keep the working-class struggle within bourgeois-democratic bounds. In Brazil the negative example of Stalinism globally acted as an ideological barrier to the development and spread of an independent revolutionary politics.

Against this, Rose stresses the continuity of self-emancipation, from the politics of Marx and Engels to the revolutionary experiences discussed in the book. He writes: “[A] ‘Communism’ that claims to speak and act on behalf of the working class, without their active participation, cannot be the same communism that Marx, Engels and Lenin originally intended” (p.103). Great waves of struggle, however uneven, throw up the first shoots of workers’ democracy from below. The struggle for workers’ control in all four uprisings confirms the Communist Manifesto’s prediction that workers can “seize control and reorganise production in their own interests”.^[3]

But green shoots do not inevitably reach maturity. The workers’ movements in Poland, South Africa, Iran and Brazil also highlight the inadequacies of syndicalism. To truly win “self-management”, the working class must smash the capitalist state. Workers cannot seize the means of production without confronting the state. Rose charts how the syndicalist politics of the left of the workers’ movement (particularly in Poland, South Africa and Iran) failed to rise to this challenge. Working-class power was never directed into a political challenge to the state which could pull behind it other oppressed sectors of society.

The missing ingredient was a Marxist party which could have charted a strategy for revolution. In particular, Rose explores the role of worker leaders in such a party. He defines worker leaders as those who emerge in independent workers’ struggles. It is not a description of a few talented individuals but of the “most articulate exponents of a fascinating trend in revolutionary periods, the opening up to knowledge, previously understood to be beyond the reach of the ordinary man or woman” (p.338). Such a layer of activists emerged in each rebellion explored. Yet, the lack of clear revolutionary organisations meant emerging worker leaders were not fused into a cadre and leadership of a party which could have led to victory.

The task of creating such parties remains. For activists dedicated to that project, Revolutions Thwarted is worth reading.

Owen Marsden-Readford is a socialist activist based in Sydney.

References:

Harvey, David 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1848, The Communist Manifesto. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

1. John Rose sadly died before the publication of the book, which was posthumously edited by Alex Callinicos and George Paizis.
2. See Harvey 2005.
3. Marx and Engels 1848.