I am going to tell you that all genuine revolutions are built on the same basic foundation, but you shouldn’t believe anyone who makes sweeping generalizations like that.
I am going to tell you that all genuine revolutions are built by local decisionmaking bodies (councils, let’s call them) that then network or federate together to build a larger, revolutionary society.
And I’ll start with the saddest example I can think of.
All power to the soviets.
In March 1917, the Russian people had their February revolution (they were working with a different calendar back then, so February was in March) and threw out the Tsar and then tried to figure out, as all people in that situation must, what the fuck to do next. They spent most of the year ruled by what gets called “dual power.” Two different systems of governance co-existed, awkwardly. On one side was the Duma, the top-down “democratic” structure that looked more or less like any western republic. On the other side were the soviets, the democratic-without-scarequotes workers councils that then networked themselves up into a larger congress.
By and large, the Duma was the government of the moderates and the soviets was the government of the radicals. The radical faction (bolsheviks and anarchists and left-socialists) demanded that power reside in the soviets, rather than the Duma. Their slogan was “all power to the soviets,” a slogan that meant, more or less, “all power to the people.”
As far as I can tell, the slogan was coined by Vladimir Lenin.
Unfortunately for pretty much everyone involved and for the history of socialism in the 20th century, Lenin didn’t mean what he said. He spoke of workers’ power, but he meant to take personal power.
When the Russian people had their October revolution (which was, frankly, more of a coup—the anarchists controlled large chunks of the military and ousted the Duma from power by force), political pluralism lasted only a few months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks centralized the power at the top of the Soviet structure, disenfranchising the very soviets they’d claimed to want to invest with power and arresting, outlawing, and killing the other folks who helped them in both revolutions (such as the anarchists and the left-socialists).
These days, Bolsheviks and their apologists will tell you that the centralization of power and the seizing of state power were necessary in order to have a socialist revolution, but the thing is, they’d already had a socialist revolution. They’d built a vast, coordinated network of workers councils all across their gigantic country and ousted both the Tsar and the representative democracy, only to have a few of their leaders pull a bait-and-switch on the workers to create an authoritarian state.
It was decentralization and pluralism that defeated the Tsars, it was decentralization and pluralism that defeated the Duma (albeit in more questionable ways). It was centralization that swept in, turning the slogan “all power to the soviets” into a sick mockery of itself.
People didn’t take any of this lying down, and there was a whole civil war with an awful lot of sides (there was a white army, a black army, a red army, a green army, and various nationalists who just wanted to be free from Russia entirely). But in the end, the Bolsheviks triumphed. After one last stand for socialist pluralism in the Battle of Krondstadt, the people who wanted (by my definition) a genuine revolution were defeated.
Then Stalin came to power and started the purges that saw most of the surviving Bolshevik revolutionaries murdered—the two ideologies that have killed the most communists (including Bolsheviks) are fascism and… Bolshevism.
It’s worth knowing that Stalin coined the term “Marxist-Leninism” to describe his own belief system, not Lenin’s. It’s easy enough to imagine that “Marxist-Leninism” means “the political ideology of Lenin, rooted in the ideology of Marx,” because that’s what it sounds like it should mean, but a more accurate word for it would be “Stalinism.” Followers of Lenin specifically are just called “Leninists.” I assume Stalin coined his beliefs “Marxist-Leninism” in order to present himself as the legitimate successor of Lenin, in contrast to his political rival Trotsky.
Meanwhile, the Soviets? They never saw power. The work of millions of rank-and-file socialists, communists, and anarchists was destroyed. Not by the capitalists, though the capitalists tried. Not by the monarchists, though the monarchists tried. The work of the people was destroyed by their own leaders.
This is why I’m an anarchist. Not because anarchism is the single true ideology or the only means by which to improve society, but because skepticism of power is core to my understanding of the world. But no part of me believes that only anarchists fight for what I would call genuine revolution. Some of the examples I look to have been built by people who call themselves socialists, or communists, or even Communists. Some of the examples I look to have been built by people with simply no time for western ideological labels.
I have no interest in trying to claim those revolutions in the name of Anarchism (or even anarchism). They are simply revolutions that I appreciate as someone concerned with individual and collective liberty. Political and ideological labels, after all, will only get us so far.
I started with the saddest example I could think of, not because I revel in some kind of defeatism, but because it’s likely the most famous (and misunderstood) example of a revolution built on a foundation of local councils. The project of the Left in the early 20th century was to create and empower local councils. Some attempted to create soviets—often under that name.
The German revolution of 1918 was full of workers councils (defeated, this time, by a more traditional parliamentary republic, the Wiemar republic). The Limerick Soviet of 1919 in Ireland took over their own city. It grew out of a general strike, and for two weeks workers handled the distribution of food and utilities and all the needs of the people in the city.
The same time period saw the rise of syndicalist labor unions, in particular anarcho-syndicalist unions, that seek to empower workers directly to meet their own needs and to organize power in a decentralized way. It was the anarcho-syndicalists who built revolutionary Catalonia in the 1930s, after defeating Franco’s fascist coup (and before losing the longer, grinding civil war). During the revolution there, trade unions and local councils took power and kept the economy running.
It’s curious how American libertarians tend to view socialism as antithetical to freedom and democracy, but in revolutionary Spain, the workplace itself was democratic. In capitalist democratic republics, we’ve accepted the idea that democracy stops when the time clock starts. There’s simply no reason we should accept that.
The roots of socialism are fiercely democratic and liberatory. We tend to view the basic idea of socialism to be “everyone should share stuff,” and that’s a major part of it. But in the 19th century, socialists talked just as much about how the point was the empowerment of the individual:
When class-robbery is abolished every man will reap the fruits of his labour.
—William Morris, 1884
It sounds counterintuitive, after a century of capitalist and capital-C Communist propaganda, that socialism wants us to have what we make. But it’s really quite simple: the owners are stealing from you. That’s where their profit comes from. I would certainly rather share (and be shared with) than have the rich steal from me.
Before industrialization, the individual artisan had some degree of freedom. After industrialization, our best bet to actually control our own lives, and not have what we produce be stolen from us, is collectivization. A collective farm is actually the logical progression from individual homesteads, and represents preserved independence, not subservience. Subservience is what we get when we submit to top-down structures, like capitalism or capital-C Communism.
Cooperativism is what allows us to retain dignity and freedom in the modern, industrialized world, and that’s something we have learned in part from groups like the Colored Farmer’s Alliance and Cooperative Union, which was active in the US south from 1886 to 1891. They would not have described themselves as a revolutionary organization, nor even any sort of Left project, and there is shockingly little written about them, but for five years this group (that might have had more than a million members) worked tirelessly to break the sharecropping system that had replaced slavery but still kept Black people subservient to their same former masters.
The rise of industrial agriculture all but ruined the idea of eking out a living as an individual farmer, and it was by cooperative ownership that Black farmers had a chance in hell of competing. The Alliance set up cooperative stores across the South where people could purchase the tools they needed at cost, or take out loans to buy out their mortgages away from exploitative deals with white landowners.
That particular group came to an end after it called for a cottonpicker strike in 1891 that left a few dozen workers dead at the hands of white vigilantes, but its work continues. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, for example, works to this day to keep farmland in Black hands through cooperative ownership.
And that group, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives? It’s part of a larger radical economic project, one that is frankly one of the most revolutionary projects operating in the US today, a group called Seed Commons.
As full disclosure, I used to work for Seed Commons, mostly writing grants. I’m proud of that work though, and only left because podcasting takes up all my time these days.
Seed Commons is a group that works on reversing the economic extraction that continues to impoverish certain communities (especially but not exclusively racialized communities) across the country.
(Sorry, I wrote grants for them, so I accidentally fall into the jargon when I talk about them.)
In short, Seed Commons is a cooperative of loan funds (including the Federation of Southern Cooperatives) who work together to get money into the hands of cooperative businesses. They pool resources but share decisionmaking and retain local autonomy—it’s a bottom-up structure like those found in genuine revolutions, even if it is working on building economic power rather than political power.
Since it’s a cooperative itself, it got its start in all sorts of places. One group got its start keeping land in the hands of Black farmers through the power of collectivism. Another got its start as an immigrant community banding together to buy their own trailer parks. Another has been working to turn Baltimore into a hub of the cooperative economy, with infoshops and pizza stores and ice cream makers and cafes. Another got its start financing the workers who took over their own factories in Argentina, then returning home to the US to finance workers who took over their own factory in Chicago.
I’ll probably write about Seed Commons in greater length sometime, but basically, cooperativism is the mechanism by which we are able to stand on equal footing with larger power structures (whether state governments or international corporations). We have to band together to rule ourselves collectively, otherwise we’ll be ruled from above.
There are living examples of this model of “genuine revolution” (a phrase like that really does deserve scare quotes), though all of them are under attack (literally) as I type this. The same as individual farmers don’t stand much of a chance, individual revolutionary movements require other groups to work together with in solidarity.
In Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatistas have been fighting for decades. The Zapatistas began as a traditional Marxist-Leninist revolutionary project. A handful of would-be revolutionaries moved to the mountains at the southeastern border of the country, presuming they could lead the people there in a traditional Marxist-Leninist way. They would be the vanguard, who would educate the masses.
They weren’t, however, bad people or fools. So when they showed up, rather than teaching the indigenous people of the area how to resist, they learned instead. Now the group is indigenous-led and focuses on the ideas of “good governance,” which involves, well, local councils that coordinate with one another to build a larger society. The exact details have changed over time, as they’ve learned from their mistakes and as their situation changes, but the basic idea has remained the same.
After years of preparation in the mountains as guerillas, the Zapatistas made an attempt to seize state power in Mexico, on January 1st 1994. Then, though, they listened to the people of Mexico who said that they didn’t want a violent revolution. So the Zapatistas have worked on building power through other means ever since.
They spurred on a series of “encounters” with grassroots groups all across the world to coordinate a global struggle against capitalism, colonialism, and what we might generally call “bad government.” This led to the successes of the alter-globalization movement of the turn of the century, which laid out the groundwork for much of the modern Left. And, if nothing else, the alter-globalization movement is what swept me up when I was a teenager. So without the Zapatistas, you might not be reading my words today.
They call what they do “Zapatismo,” and one of their slogans, one that is etched into my heart, is that they fight for a world in which many worlds are possible.
A few continents away, in Southwest Asia, there’s the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or what’s usually called Rojava. There, they practice a system called Democratic Confederalism. It’s an ethnically, religiously, and culturally pluralistic society that is trying to build a bottom-up democracy in the middle of one of the most protracted and complicated wars in the world today. They have built that democracy by, you guessed it, empowering local councils which then coordinate with one another to build a larger society.
The movement there has its roots in the Kurdish struggle for independence. Like the Zapatistas, it started with a traditional Marxist-Leninist group, this one called the PKK. But its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, started reading anarchist theory while he was in prison. In particular, he read books by Murray Bookchin (who spent most of his career calling himself an anarchist, but eventually started calling himself a “libertarian municipalist”).
Ocalan realized that these anti-authoritarian ideas better matched indigenous Kurdish culture and methods of decisionmaking. Ironically, since he was in charge, he was able to shift the politics of his group away from authoritarianism and towards what he calls democratic confederalism.
Then, when the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, people in Kurdish controlled regions began to practice that democratic confederalism. From the start, they were very clear that it wasn’t a Kurdish national project, but instead a multi-ethnic project. They were instrumental in the military defeat of ISIS, but as I write this are in a desperate situation.
There is a reason that this basic revolutionary strategy (of building power at a local level and then federating) has resonated with (or been developed by) so many different indigenous revolutionary groups in far-flung places. It works. It works both in terms of how to structure power but also in alignment with the human psyche.
This method of organizing happens so often that it seems to be the natural way we try to get things done. I’ve seen this pattern time and time again in both formal and informal situations. Left to our own devices, all of us understand the need for cooperation but also all of us understand that we are each other’s equals (or at least that no one is inherently in charge of us).
The Plaza movements of 2011 follow this pattern as well. Across the world, people began to occupy public plazas and build councils to take and exert popular power. Most of those movements collapsed after various lengths of time. Others toppled governments, though with mixed results.
How to actually build these councils, how to federate them, and how to use them to take power over our own lives, are more complicated questions that I don’t have the answers to. I suspect that the only way to learn the answers is to determine them collectively—no single theorist or movement is going to be able to accurately determine the best course for all of us. We have to actually get together and do this thing in order to find out exactly how we will do it.
History gives us a lot of examples though, of things that can go right and things that can go wrong. Most of the time, most of these groups don’t actually manage to take enough power to challenge state and corporate structures in a meaningful way. Other times, when groups do manage to challenge power (whether through mass protest or through armed insurgency or because of a power vacuum in a failed state), their energy is co-opted either by traditional state power (such as when mass movement energy is co-opted by a political party) or by authoritarianism within the council-based movement (such as in the case of the Russian revolution).
Other times, like in Chiapas and Rojava, groups manage to hold on to regional power for decades at a time. Best as I can tell, it’s through political education that they’re able to resist both state and internal co-optation—if you teach people what tricks to watch out for, they’re more resilient against those tricks, logically enough.
The best chance for existing revolutions like Chiapas and Rojava is if they are able to serve as an example for more of us to start our own revolutions, if they remind us to look at the crumbling state around us and form networks of regional councils by which to exert power over our own lives.
If there’s one thing reading history has taught me, it is that anything is possible.
Addendum
In case you were wondering “how will Margaret try to tie Tolkien into all of this,” I’d like to revisit, really quickly, the Russian revolution.
During the Russian Revolution, Lenin claimed to empower the soviets, which were numerous and built from different sorts of classes of people, but worked in secret to bind them all in service to him.
Or, as Galadriel described the Russian revolution in The Fellowship of the [Soviet],
It all began with the forging of the Great [Soviets]. Three were given to the [white collar workers]; [who perceived themselves as] immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven, to the [proletariat], great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the [peasants], who above all else desire power [as Marx famously theorized that peasants were inherently reactionary, although this has been proven incorrect]. For within these [soviets] was bound the strength and the will to govern over each [type of worker]. But they were all of them deceived, for another [soviet] was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord [Lenin] forged in secret, a [Congress of Soviets], to control all others. And into this [soviet] he poured all his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One [soviet] to rule them all.
That addendum was really a fantastic conclusion to the article <3
"For they were all of them deceived, for another [soviet] was made," is amazing, and I might steal it for an exam essay question in the Communism As Civilization class I'm taking right now. I will cite this substack post.