As capitalism is a global system, socialism in one country can not survive.

　　In 1918, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, said, “It is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed.”

　　The Russian working class, led by the Bolsheviks, had conquered power a year earlier.

　　But all the leading figures in that revolution believed that only if the revolution spread could it possibly survive.

　　Russia had a low level of overall industrial development before the revolution.

　　And the First World War and the years of civil war against the new workers’ state destroyed much of what had existed.

　　By the end of the war in 1920, 14 foreign armies had invaded Russia to fight alongside the counter-revolutionary forces led by generals from the old regime.

　　The fighting destroyed factories and transport networks. It saw crops burned and stolen.

　　Five million people died—with many more perishing from hunger and disease. And the brutal wars crucially sapped the force that built the revolution.

　　The working class, small in 1917, was reduced to just 43 percent of its size before 1914.

　　Russia could not exist as an island of socialism in a sea of hostile capitalist states.

　　The heroism of the Bolsheviks, the rest of the working class and the poorer peasants could for a time hold back capitalist restoration.

　　But in the longer term the economic and military power of imperialism would squeeze the life from the revolution.

　　The hope was in revolutions elsewhere. If workers in Germany, for example, overthrew their rulers and seized control as the Russians had done then great new opportunities could have opened up.

　　Wider revolutions could have boosted the material wealth available to the Russians and acted as a bridge to further insurrections in other countries.

　　Eventually the basis would have been there for a world of cooperating workers’ states without capitalist competition and borders. Such a vision was not an idle dream.

　　German workers rose in revolution in 1919 and 1923. In Italy crucial sections of workers occupied their factories in 1919-20.

　　But in both these cases there was no revolutionary party like the Bolsheviks to group together and lead the most advanced sections of the working class and its allies.

　　Mutinied In Germany troops and sailors mutinied and workers set up workers’ councils to run society.

　　But they were outmanoeuvred and then destroyed by reformist forces.

　　In Italy in September 1920, when engineering bosses responded to a strike with a lockout, half a million workers took over the factories and declared workers’ control.

　　In the city of Turin the occupations took on elements of dual power, as working class democracy opposed that of the official government and armed workers defended the factories.

　　But, lacking revolutionary leadership to displace them, the trade union leaders maintained control. They ended the factory occupations and the land seizures by the peasants.

　　Capitalism, which had been teetering on the brink of extinction, hurled back the revolutionary wave.

　　Under capitalism the global nature of production sees the imperialist plunder of the resources of the Global South.

　　The system exploits and oppresses workers everywhere and bears down particularly harshly on those in poorer countries.

　　Its coercive power has to be overthrown by international revolution that unfolds on a national scale and then spreads.

　　Otherwise it will strangle any attempt to create a better form of society.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Wei Xiaoxue

　　From:https://socialistworker.co.uk/2024/05/why-a-revolution-has-to-be-international/（2024-5-28）