Animal Balm – The Noble Art of Getting Orwell Wrong

 

 

The trailer for the new Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings) directed reimagining of Animal Farm has caused apoplexy among the right-wing guardians of George Orwell’s true message. With which there can be absolutely no messing. By order of God himself.

As is well known, Orwell’s novella is a thinly-veiled allegory of the descent of the Russian Revolution into Stalinist totalitarianism and repression. The dream of freedom and equality and liberation from human slavery is gradually turned into a nightmare of repression by the domination of the pigs, led by Napoleon (Stalin). In the end, the animals of Animal Farm are worse off and work harder than animals on neighbouring human-run farms. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

This is where communism leads so don’t go getting any ideas is what they want you to think Animal Farm is saying.

Serkis’s unpardonable sin is to have ‘updated’ the plot of Animal Farm to make it about capitalism. The film, 15 years in the making apparently but only a trailer has been made public so far, has a tech billionaire plotting to take over Animal Farm and allying with pig dictator Napoleon to do so. Rather than leading a communist enclave, Napoleon now craves to “belong among the ruthless human billionaires”. And there are fart jokes, which last I checked weren’t in the original book.

Cue a predictable torrent of outrage from the sentinels guarding Saint George’s official message. The new Animal Farm is a “complete perversion of the book”, “they literally INVERTED Orwell’s message”, “It guts the entirety of the book’s message,” “Orwell must be spinning in his grave”, etc, etc.

Central Unintelligence Agency

It might be possible to take this avalanche of offence more seriously if the film adaptations of Animal Farm that have already been made, such as the iconic CIA-financed 1954 animation, weren’t also – while, unlike Serkis, outwardly sticking to the original plot – “complete perversions of the book”.

The problem for it seems almost everyone who wants to adapt Animal Farm is the way Orwell ends it *. In the final chapter, neighbouring farmers, including the old established farmer Mr Pilkington, come to visit the now unassailable pigs on Animal Farm. In the analogies of the book, Pilkington represents the West (Britain and France basically) while another farmer, Mr Frederick, who brutally mistreats his animals and leads a failed attempt to destroy Animal Farm (‘The Battle of the Windmill’, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) is a stand-in for Hitler.

“Years later” it is Pilkington who comes to Animal Farm clutching an olive branch, lauding the fact that “a long period of mistrust and misunderstanding” was now over. “Between pigs and humans,” he declares, “there was not, and there need not be, any clash of interest whatever …. If you have your lower animals to contend with … we have our lower classes.”

A gratified Napoleon clinks beer mugs with Pilkington, regretting the unfortunate misconception that Animal Farm had been trying to stir up rebellions by other animals on neighbouring farms. He then announces that, henceforth, Animal Farm will revert to its old pre-rebellion name under Mr Jones, the Manor Farm.

There then comes Orwell’s kicker of a last line:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and looked from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Seriously, could this be any more obvious? Orwell is saying that the communists, Stalinists whatever you want to call them, were becoming indistinguishable from the exploitative capitalist countries that surrounded them, a fact celebrated by the latter.

But such an ending was unacceptable to the CIA in 1954. In that adaptation of Animal Farm, “pig delegates come from far and wide” ** to celebrate their supremacy with Napoleon. No human is in sight. This scene so incenses the watching animals that they rise up in revolt, overthrowing their porcine overlords. This was described by one critic as “a wholesale inversion of Orwell’s ending”.

Ironically, in portraying the pig dictator Napoleon’s “desperation to belong among ruthless human billionaires”, the new version of Animal Farm may be truer to Orwell’s actual message than its supposedly more faithful predecessors.

The History Nobody Knows

Because the events and history that Orwell was drawing on in the conclusion of Animal Farm have been deliberately forgotten, and in the current era of compulsory Russophobia are unlikely to be remembered. The uncomfortable kernel of that history is that Stalinism, while internally incredibly repressive (in that sense the story of Animal Farm hit the nail on the head) was externally totally hostile to revolution, desiring nothing more than, in Orwell’s words in Animal Farm, “normal business relations” with its capitalist neighbours.

Orwell was inspired to write Animal Farm (and its equally famous successor Nineteen Eighty-Four) by his experience in fighting on the Republican side against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. There he saw first-hand the role of the Soviet Union (then run by one man, Joseph Stalin) in destroying the anarchist and syndicalist revolution that had gripped Catalonia and other Northern provinces and that Orwell enthusiastically supported.

In the only instance of Stalin’s feared secret police (Napoleon’s dogs) operating in a Western European country, left-wing opponents of the Communist party were hunted down, tortured and disappeared. You can see something of this atmosphere in the Ken Loach film Land and Freedom. Orwell himself feared for his life and had to secretly slip across the border to France.

Contrary to the presumption of Western historians that in the 70 years of its existence the Soviet Union had an unvarying policy of fomenting world socialist revolution, the actions of Stalin and his henchmen in Spain were aimed at reversing a revolution. “The Russians,” as Orwell was later to write, did “all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class”.

Why on earth would devout ‘communists’ do that? The answer lies in Stalin’s (prolonged) desire to do nothing to offend the Western capitalist countries in the hope that they would agree to ally with the Soviet Union against the threat of Nazi Germany. This alliance – the so-called ‘Grand Alliance – did eventually come about after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 but it was a definite last resort for Britain and France who would have much preferred that Hitler leave the West alone and concentrate on the barbarians to the East.

Stalin pursued the same policy in the Grand Alliance – that of appeasing the Right and supporting non-Fascist conservatives in the West – as he did in the Spanish Civil War. For example, in the so-called ‘Salerno Turn’ of March 1944, Italian Communist party leader Palmira Togliatti – under instructions from Moscow – joined with ex-Fascists and monarchists in a unity government and disbanded the Communist resistance. In war-time Britain, the Communist party, in decidedly non-revolutionary fashion, threw its weight behind Conservative party candidates in by-elections.

Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, i.e. when this war-time alliance between official Communism and actually existing capitalism was in full bloom. And many people overlook the fact that the book was not merely a barely disguised history of the Russian Revolution and the depredations on Stalinism in the 1930s, it was also a prediction. The last historical event ‘covered’ by Animal Farm was probably the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – in the book ‘The Battle of the Windmill’. The animals, at immense cost, beat back Mr Frederick’s (Hitler’s) men. Although, at the time Orwell was writing Germany hadn’t yet been expelled from the Soviet Union, it was clearly going to happen.

Thereafter, and especially in the last chapter (‘Years passed…’), the book becomes Orwell’s prediction of what would happen, based on what was already happening in the ‘Grand Alliance’ between Stalin and the West. That capitalism and communism would merge, or to be more specific communism would become indistinguishable from capitalism, losing all traces of its revolutionary origins. Symbolically, in the penultimate page of the book, Napoleon/Stalin announces that Animal Farm will no longer be called Animal Farm – it will revert to the name it had under the ‘old regime’ of Mr Jones.

Of course, as it turned out, none of this actually occurred. Rather than converging, Stalinist communism and Western capitalism faced each other down for decades in the Cold War – ironically a term coined by Orwell himself in 1945. Stalin instituted socialist revolutions from above in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and the West seriously considered invading the Soviet Union after Nazi Germany was no more.

But two things should be borne in mind. Outside of the confines of its buffer, Soviet communism remained non-revolutionary even, in Orwell description, “counter revolutionary”. Stalin and his successors never reneged on the “percentages agreement” hammered out with Churchill in October 1944, whereby each side was given control over its zone. This is why Italian and French Communists tamely left post-WW2 governing coalitions in their respective countries despite the huge well of support they enjoyed after leading the war-time resistance, and why Britain and America were given carte blanche to fight the Left in Greece (in fact also while the Second World War was still raging). This was their zone and they could do what they wanted in it.

Secondly, Stalin did avidly court the West (notwithstanding the interlude of the Nazi-Soviet pact) for about a decade (1934 to 1944). And this was the context in which George Orwell wrote Animal Farm.

After the Thaw

However, the passing of the Cold War and of the state that Stalin led for 29 years did not lead to more honest adaptations of Animal Farm. The ending of the 1999 Babe-style version (with talking animals) is, if anything, even more ridiculous than the 1954 CIA-financed animation.

In this version, the animals leave Napoleon’s dystopia which eventually collapses of its own accord (get the symbolism?). In time, a new human family comes to take over, promising that the mistakes of the past won’t be repeated. In a final voice-over narration, Jessie the sheepdog gasps “And now at last, we shall be free!”

How wonderful. Given that, in the real-world, the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union after 1991 had led to the biggest decline in life expectancy, outside of war or famine, in human history, that final line should be seen, in retrospect, as somewhat ironic.

In truth, Animal Farm was a subversive book that satisfied virtually no-one. It was, predictably, banned in the Soviet Union. But ostensibly supportive Ukrainian and Russian translations in the late 1940s also saw fit to delete certain offending passages. There then came the travesty of the CIA-approved version of 1954, to be followed 45 years later by an even more inept interpretation.

And despite the weary, fatalistic assertion that Animal Farm is a parable of the inevitable fate of all revolutions – “humans are not equal and you can’t force them to be” – the book retains its pep 80 years after its publication precisely because it is not inherently pessimistic – the novella ends with the animals finally realising what is going on.

Orwell was a democratic socialist (and a real one, he thought Attlee and co. were sell outs) lambasting communist totalitarianism for becoming no better, probably even worse, than capitalism. HG Wells called him a “Trotskyist with big feet”. If Animal Farm was really a conservative critique of revolution as such, its author would hardly have bothered to fight for a real revolution in Spain, nearly being killed in the process. Why fight for something that would inevitably be perverted anyway?

In point of fact, Orwell did criticise precisely the fatalistic, conservative attitude that Animal Farm supposedly embodies. In 1946 (a year after the publication of Animal Farm), he wrote an essay admonishing the shallowness of ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, a man who had precisely concluded that because the Russian Revolution had ended in oppression and murder, “This is what revolutions lead to”. Orwell’s response was:

Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.

The “unwillingness to admit this”, in Orwell’s words, had led all adaptations of Animal Farm to be travesties of the original book. Perhaps because Serkis’s version gets Orwell so wrong, it can turn out to be more right than any of its inglorious predecessors.

 

*Orwell’s endings, even of his ostensibly non-political novels, always seem to confound the adapters of his works. The end of the 1997 film version of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for instance, is a joyous celebration of the belated maturity achieved by its ‘hero’, Gordon Comstock. But in the 1936 novel, the final act – putting an aspidistra in the window – is portrayed as a resigned succumbing to middle class respectability, after years of impotent defiance. Again a “wholesale inversion” of Orwell’s meaning.

** This makes no sense from the point of view of the book – or indeed the film. Both show Napoleon’s Animal Farm dedicated to trading with the surrounding human-run farms, so where exactly do these “pig delegates” come from? Their presence might ring more true if Snowball (Trotsky) had won the battle for control with Napoleon (Stalin) because he was dedicated, unlike Napoleon, to “stirring up rebellion” on neighbouring farms. But early on in the book, Snowball is chased out of Animal Farm by Napoleon’s dogs, never to return.

O Robot, Where Art Thou?

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in The Communist Manifesto. To Marx, capitalism was oppressive, immiserating and dehumanizing but, in the final analysis, progressive because the technological leaps it entailed paved the way for a rational, socialist society.

Nearly a hundred years later another economist, Joseph Schumpeter, made a very similar point, but this time from a pro-capitalist perspective. He referred to the “gale of creative destruction … that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one and incessantly creating a new one”.

The sociologist Randall Collins, whose essay on the cognitively astute robots that will progressively decimate middle class employment I reviewed in part one, relies on the same intuition. Capitalist competition dictates that the replacement of human labour with machines will inexorably go on for the next 20, 100 or theoretically 1,000 years, he claims, unless something extrinsic to the system calls time on capitalist competition.

However, capitalist competition isn’t proving as revolutionary as it’s supposed to be. Were the digital/robot revolution to be merrily scything through the analogue economy, this would show up in soaring productivity figures, which measure output per worker. In reality, productivity in the advanced capitalist countries has rarely been lower. It currents stands at 0.3%, down from the 1% of the pre-crisis years. And nothing like the 5% achieved in the 1960s and early ‘70s. In Britain, productivity fell by 0.5% in the first three months of 2017. And the productivity enigma is not limited to advanced economies – regions like Latin America show similar inertia. The gale of creative destruction has turned into an oppressive stillness.

Equally, unemployment shows scant signs of the robot revolution. If robots were stealing all the jobs, thousands of people would find themselves surplus to requirements. The official unemployment rate is 4.8% in the UK and 4.7% in the US. Assuredly, these figures need to be read in the light of the millions who have given up looking for work or are economically inactive, but they do not appear to mask steadily rising structural unemployment caused by technological displacement.

And the jobs being ‘created’ are not ones entailing the supervision of machines; they are menial. The number of hand car washes in Britain now stands at 20,000 while their mechanised equivalent, the rollover cash wash, has halved in number in ten years. In the words of one commentator, this is “a kind of reverse industrialisation”.

Collins himself notes that the “biggest area of job growth in rich countries has been low-skilled service jobs, where it is cheaper to hire human labour than to automate.” In the US, he says, one of the most impressive employment growth areas is (as of 2013 when he was writing) tattoo parlours.

This is not to claim that new technologies are not being conceived or realised. Most people, by now, have heard of 3-D printing, self-driving cars and nano-technology. But they are not being utilised in the economy. This is not a new development, though perhaps it is new for capitalism. The steam engine was invented during the Roman Empire but was not commercially exploited until the 18^th century.

David Graeber attributes part of the reason for technological stagnation to the corporate form. In Marx’s London, says Graeber, scientific and technological innovation was the order of the day because individual capitalists, rather than conglomerates, dominated. But in the 20^th century, corporations gradually extended their iron grip and creativity declined.

There is something to be said for this. The point of a corporation is not to encourage competition but stamp it out – to achieve monopoly and restrict entry to the market to other firms. Once market dominance has been achieved, you then aim to maximise take-up of your products (two or three of the same gadget for everyone) and to restrict labour costs (by moving your production to China for example). But technological innovation brought by a rival company breathing down your neck is less desirable.

However, I don’t think this tells the whole story. The really glaring declines in productivity have occurred after the 2008 financial crisis. The official story is that government stepped to make sure credit continued to flow through the system and to set the private economy back on the virtuous path of self-regulation. But in reality what emerged was the simulacrum of a competitive system, and one particularly ill-suited to technological innovation. The priority was to preserve the system, and that overriding aim sacrificed what technological dynamism there was.

It’s undisputed that what characterised the world economic system before 2008 was overwhelming debt – debt miring banks, corporations and subsequently governments, debt asphyxiating consumers as wages failed to grow. But far from falling after the crisis, debt has continued to mount. In 2015 it was revealed that global debt had risen by over 40% since 2008, climbing to $57 trillion. Ultra-low interest rates throughout the world have made that debt manageable (by minimising interest payments) even while it continues to mount.

But this ‘preservationism’ has facilitated the after-life of a growing number of ‘zombie’ companies – firms so much in debt that their income only covers the interest payments they have to make. According to the OECD, across nine European economies (including the UK), between 5 and 20% of the total sum of private capital is sunk in zombie companies. It is estimated that there are between 108,000 and 160,000 such undead companies in the UK. And there are presumably many more near zombies. It no accident that genuine technological innovation is the preserve of a few mega corporations, such as Apple, who are awash with cash. Most companies don’t want to risk investment in untried technology.

“The fundamental tenet of capitalism, which holds that some bad companies need to fail to make way for new and better ones, is being rewritten,” says one management consultant. Farewell Joseph Schumpeter.

This might explain the growth of menial, low paid, temporary work rather than robotic technology. Such work guarantees profit but requires minimal capital investment in new equipment. According to Adair Turner, the former head of the UK’s Low Pay Commission, “there is something about the economy which – left to itself – will proliferate very, very low paid jobs.” But, of course, the economy has not been ‘left to itself’ – its financial system has been subject to a multi-trillion dollar bail-out and central banks across the world are still in the process of ‘tapering down’ a Quantitative Easing programme that has created $12.3 trillion out of thin air.

This economic settlement also indicates that the scenario painted by Randall Collins – one where capitalist competition ordains the rapid robotization of the economy, throwing 50 or 70% of people out of work by mid-century – will take much longer to come to pass, if it does at all. A new and deeper financial crisis will almost certainly get their first.

However, there is, at root, something strange about dreading technological progress – desultory or transformative. Collins’ nightmarish near-future – where a tiny elite owns all the automated businesses and computer equipment and the vast majority of people fight over the scant number of jobs serving them – is peculiar to a very particular kind of social structure. One in which a person’s livelihood is dependent on whether they can make themselves useful to the ‘productive apparatus’. In these circumstances, being displaced by a machine is clearly very threatening.

But automation loses its menace if people’s income is divorced from work; if the income they receive to live on has nothing to do with their ability to sell themselves to an employer, or the capacity of a machine to perform a task more efficiently than a human can. Once this practical and conceptual breakthrough has been made, far from being something to be dreaded, technology acquires a very different complexion. It becomes something to be welcomed.

The thinker who most embodied this leap in understanding was Murray Bookchin. Back in 1965 (its five decades old lineage revealing in itself) he wrote an essay entitled Toward a Liberatory Technology that belied contemporary attitudes of ‘deep pessimism’ and fatalism towards the effects of technology. “After thousands of years of tortuous development,” Bookchin wrote, “the countries of the Western world (and potentially all countries) are confronted by the possibility of a materially abundant, almost workless era in which most of the means of life can be provided by machines.”

The real issue to Bookchin was not whether this technically transformed economy could eliminate repetitive and thankless toil, “but whether it can help to humanize society”. Technology, he claimed, did not have to enslave humanity or result in legions of passive automatons mesmerized by gadgets. It could just easily facilitate a revival of craftsmanship, producing products that people can personalise themselves or freeing them to pursue ‘unproductive’ activities.

But the primary liberatory potential of technology lay in the fact that it could give people the free time and energy to manage society themselves. Past revolutions, such as the French or the Russian, had shown tantalising glimpses of this possibility. The Parisian sections of 1789 or the Petrograd soviets (councils) of 1917 were democratic assemblies which everyone could attend and participate in the hitherto privileged act of ‘policy making’. However, the brute fact that these societies were mired in conditions of material scarcity meant, said Bookchin, that the mass of people had to return to the role of mute wage slaves reproducing the means of subsistence, while “the reins of power fell into the hands of political ‘professionals’”.

Future society – and specifically the robotized society predicted by Collins – has no such restraints. It is only the outcome of a perverse social structure that, in a material environment where robots and computers carry out the vast majority of work, people fight among themselves for the right to serve the elite. Nor is it inevitable that, as Collins predicts, that post-capitalist society oscillates between the bureaucratic oppression of central planning and market capitalism. Fully automated luxury communism can not only facilitate a self-managed society but also satisfy myriad wants far better than the Stalinist planned economies of the post-war years. “From the moment toil is reduced to the barest possible minimum or disappears entirely,” said Bookchin, “the problems of survival pass into the problems of life, and technology itself passes from being the servant of man’s immediate needs to being the partner of his (sic) creativity.”

I think three things are becoming increasingly clear: (i) Automation determined by capitalist competition will magnify current inequalities of wealth and power, leading to a dystopian future (ii) Far from revolutionizing the ‘productive forces’, the corporate, debt-riddled, state-reliant economy that has emerged from the 2008 global financial crisis is proving conspicuously bad at instituting technological innovation, preferring old-fashioned exploitation of human labour, and (iii) A post-capitalist society can choose which technologies to expedite, without any concern about the consequences of throwing people out of work. It can also facilitate enduring democratic self-management for the first time in history. Given (i) and (ii) are not remotely desirable and will likely precipitate huge conflict and war, getting to (iii), however difficult, is the only rational course of action.

The Third Revolution by Murray Bookchin

I thought I’d post an 11 year old review of a book by the American thinker Murray Bookchin about the Russian Revolution. Called The Third Revolution, it is the third volume of a mammoth four volume history of the revolutionary tradition, stretching from the English Levellers of the 17^th century to the Spanish Revolution 1936-37. The first two volumes are available in paperback but sadly the publishers rather lost interest after that and (still I think) you can only get the last two volumes in very expensive hardback. That’s a shame because they are all very interesting.

After his death in 2006, Bookchin has posthumously become rather famous for being the inspiration behind the Syrian Kurdish revolution. The Kurdish PPK leader Abdullah Öcalan started reading Bookchin in the Turkish prison where he is still incarcerated and things developed from there. The relevance was that Öcalan had concluded that forging a state for the Kurds was impossible and inherently coercive anyway. So rejecting Marxism-Leninism and armed struggle, he turned to Bookchin’s ideas of confederalism. This involves political and economic power being vested in face to face assemblies of citizens, which send delegates to higher councils and so on. It’s a directly democratic alternative to nation-states and representative government, which Bookchin rightly pointed out, always descends into oligarchy. I want to look at the Kurdish revolution and its applicability to Europe and North America in a later post, but first the review of The Third Revolution. (It’s a little known fact and fascinating to me that the first Bolshevik government in Russia was a coalition. They never end well).

It is curious that the Right now seems more interested in the Russian Revolution than the Left. A source of righteous horror for conservative historians that proves the inevitable trajectory of radical social change towards totalitarianism and mass murder, the left, by contrast, seems happy to consign the whole enterprise to the dustbin of history.

But veteran American leftist, Murray Bookchin has been rummaging around where others now disdain to look. This book is the penultimate volume in a mammoth history of “revolutions from below” from the Levellers of 17th century England to the anarchist-dominated Spanish revolution of 1936-7. Neither apologia or indictment, it does not deny the incipient totalitarianism or the ruthlessness, of the Bolsheviks under Lenin, but also recovers the radical democratic possibilities of the Revolution, however briefly they were realised before being snuffed out. It is a reinstatement of the Revolution as more than the precursor to Stalin’s terror.

It is a history that the author seems uniquely place to write. A teenage communist, later Trotskyite and union activist, Bookchin became an anarchist in the ‘60s and one of the first modern ecological thinkers, fusing the two strands of thought in a philosophy known as social ecology. He grew up in the revolutionary tradition. His Russian grandparents even smuggled guns into the country on the eve aborted 1905 Revolution.

It is this background, which gives the book is vivid closeness to its subject and almost journalistic, ground-level description of events. It often reads like the Russian epic it is describing, rather than the dry academic tomes of an EH Carr.

The core of the book is the description of the radical democratic revolution Russian underwent after the overthrow of the monarchy in February. Not in government (the provisional government that replaced the Tsar appointed itself) but in the elected factory, neighbourhood and village committees, in the workers’ militia that outnumbered the police, and in the district soviets (or councils) which sprang up across Petrograd and Moscow, quite independently of the Bolsheviks and other socialist parties. “Workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants created a dazzling new social and economic reality that remade the institutional structure of Russian society,” writes Bookchin.

The factory committees, for example, apart from demanding rights such as the eight hour day and vetoing the appointment of unpopular managers, concerned themselves with all aspects of worker’s daily lives: “They saw to the saw the workers’ food supply, opening canteens and establishing co-operatives as hunger set in ... in time they took responsibility for the formation of workers’ militias, educational and cultural affairs, and campaigns against gambling and drunkenness ... Virtually no aspect of life escaped the attention of the committees. In one instance a committee took it upon itself to decide whether to busy scented soap for the workers.”

This sudden blooming of democracy after centuries of stifling autocracy created a momentum for change that the Provisional Government and the Petograd Soviet, dominated by orthodox Marxists who wanted to act as handmaidens to a bourgeois revolution, could not control. At a mass demonstration in July 1917, one sailor grabbed hold of the Socialist Revolutionary leader Victor Chernov, screaming: “why don’t you take power, you son of a bitch, when we are giving it to you!”

One revolutionary was prepared to. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, had a profoundly unMarxist attitude of the power of individuals to change history and a personal maxim of “let’s just do it, then we’ll see” uncannily in tune with the advertising slogan of a modern footwear manufacturer. Bookchin does not condemn the bloodless Bolshevik coup of October 1917 which merely put the unelected Provisional government out of its misery. In fact early Bolshevik rule was distinctly libertarian, resembling the programme of Russia’s anarcho-syndicalists. Workers’ control in the factories was legalised, an immediate end to the war with Germany promised, land pledged to the peasants, equal rights for women and social insurance for workers were introduced, and the army replaced with a militia in which officers were elected.

Tragically it did not last. Whether obsessed by survival after the failure of western Europe to follow Russia into revolution or dominated by Lenin’s inherent authoritarianism, Communist rule gradually descended into dictatorship. Other socialist and revolutionary parties were kicked out of factory committees and soviets and arrested, workers were gunned down when they went out strike and a secret police or Cheka was established under the Polish poet Felix Dzerhinsky. Lenin was reduced to mouthing doublethink that “there is absolutely no contradiction between Soviet, that is socialist, democracy and the exercise of dictatorial power by individuals.”

But the descent into totalitarianism could have been averted. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, short-time coalition partners of the Bolsheviks, had a different vision of Russia’s future based on worker’s control in factories, the traditional communalism of the peasantry and freedom for all socialist parties. In July 1918, furious at the German army’s continued incursions into Ukraine after the signing of the Brest Litovsk peace treaty, two members assassinated the German ambassador. Supported by 2,000 soldiers, the Left SRs barricaded themselves into the barracks of the Cheka, took over the telegraph office and declared that Communist rule had been overthrown. Lenin, with only 700 troops to defend  his regime, doubted whether he could hold out till morning. But the insurgents’ nerve failed them and their entire party leadership was subsequently arrested.

Finally in 1921, the Kronstadt sailors, ‘the pride and glory of the revolution’ according to Trotsky, rose up and called for a ‘third revolution’ to end the ‘commissarocracy’ and restore democracy to the soviets. But the Petrograd workers, exhausted by years of near famine conditions, did not respond and after a bloody battle the rebels were transported in chains through the streets of the city and then killed. “The Revolution had all but come to an end.”

The Third Revolution rescues from historical amnesia the men and women who fought and often died in revolutions that, however fleetingly, brought into reality radical ideas of freedom and democracy. But they ultimately were defeated. It was the authoritarians - the Cromwells, Robespierres and Lenins who emerged victorious. A lingering questions remains after reading this book - why do revolutions seem to inevitably devour their own ideals?