Reversing the default of upward concentration of wealth is not the natural fruit of growth, productivity or moral progress.
It requires the conjunction of two conditions:
- Organised power from below – accumulated capacity to act collectively against the dominant order, whether as strategically concentrated industrial labour, as administratively governed rural base areas, or as long-organised parliamentary and union movements. This is the leverage.
- External shock – a rupture that weakens the dominant order’s coercive monopoly, classically a catastrophic war but in principle any process that strips the existing order of the ability to suppress challenges it would otherwise crush. This is the opening.
Each is necessary; neither is sufficient. The same combinatorial structure explains both revolutionary outcomes in the imperial periphery and reformist compression in the capitalist core – different forms, same underlying logic.
Successful cases
Russia, 1917. Petrograd in 1917 held around 400,000 industrial workers, more than 70 % of them in factories of over 1,000 employees – among the highest concentrations of large-factory labour anywhere in the world at the time.Smith (1983). Foreign-financed late industrialisation had produced what Trotsky called combined and uneven development: a country agrarian in the aggregate but hyper-industrial in exactly the cities where state power was contested.Trotsky (1932). The First World War supplied the shock: the Tsarist state disintegrated under three years of military catastrophe, supply collapse and elite delegitimation before the revolutionary movement had to face it directly.
China, 1949. China forces a generalisation of what “organised power from below” can mean. After Chiang Kai-shek’s purge of communists in Shanghai in 1927, Mao inverted the orthodox proletariat-as-revolutionary-class thesis: the peasantry, organised through territorially governed base areas, became the revolutionary substrate.Mao, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927). By 1949 the CCP governed perhaps ninety million people through Yan’an and the other base areas – not an army that suddenly had to learn governance but a parallel state absorbing the formal one.Selden (1971/1995). Decades of administrative accumulation substituted for the industrial concentration that gave Petrograd its leverage. The Japanese invasion of 1937 – 45 supplied the shock, hollowing out the Nationalist state militarily, fiscally and politically.
The post-war compression, 1945 – 75. The same logic operated, in a reformist mode, in the capitalist core. Organised labour movements with decades of accumulated capacity met the shock cycle of 1914 – 45 – two world wars, depression, fascism – and forced political settlements (progressive taxation, welfare states, full-employment policy) that held r below g for a generation.Piketty (2014), 26. These were not revolutions but they were redistributions, and they fit the same two-ingredient structure: leverage that had been building since the late nineteenth century, plus the most catastrophic external shock the capitalist core has ever absorbed.
Failures
Each of the period’s failed revolutionary attempts lacked at least one ingredient.
Germany, 1918 – 19. Europe’s largest organised industrial proletariat and the world’s most sophisticated Marxist party met no comparable state collapse. The army went home intact, the bureaucracy and judiciary continued, the Allied powers underwrote the Weimar republic.Weitz (1997). Maximum leverage, insufficient shock: no revolutionary outcome – and the conservative coalition that survived intact would enable fascism a decade later.
Hungary, 1919. Béla Kun’s Soviet Republic copied the Bolshevik script in form but had no equivalent of the Russian peasant revolution behind it, and his nationalisation of estates instead of distributing them alienated the rural majority. Imported form without indigenous leverage; gone in 133 days.
Indonesia, 1965. The PKI had perhaps three million members – the largest non-ruling communist party in history – but faced no state-breaking shock and a coherent counter-revolutionary military backed by United States intelligence. Mass civilian organisation without the rupture that would weaken its antagonist; between 500,000 and over a million were killed.
Considerations for strategy
Leverage can be conceptualised as both deriving from a new technology and from long-term building of organisational capacity and dual power.
Currently plausible candidates for an external shock:
- Climate disruption forcing fiscal-administrative breakdown in peripheral and then core states (slow-burn over decades)
- AI-induced labour displacement breaking the fiscal contract – mass tax-base erosion before redistribution mechanisms adapt
- A polycrisis-style erosion that doesn’t break states but degrades their counter-revolutionary capacity over time
References
- Piketty (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
- Skocpol (1979), States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China.
- Smith (1983), Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917 – 1918.
- Selden (1971/1995), The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China / China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited.
- Tilly (1978), From Mobilization to Revolution.
- Trotsky (1932), The History of the Russian Revolution.
- — (1928), The Third International After Lenin.
- Weitz (1997), Creating German Communism, 1890 – 1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State.