Great Revolutionaries
By Peter Taaffe
Published by Mentmore Press, 2025, £9.99
Reviewed by Martin Powell-Davies
A search through the back issues of Socialism Today will quickly reveal a huge range of articles written by Peter Taaffe, the former general secretary of the Socialist Party.
Peter’s writing, over many decades, helped provide theoretical clarity at a time when others were disorientated by the long post-war upswing of capitalism, and again after the collapse of Stalinism. Peter was also adept at explaining revolutionary theory in a way that young workers, new to the ideas of Marxism, could understand.
However, as someone who really understood the ideas of Marx, he also knew that it is never enough for philosophers simply to ‘interpret’ the world, the point is to change it. That’s why Peter always sought to explain how the ideas of Marxism can be applied to today’s world – in order to change it for the better.
Peter sadly died, after a long illness, in April this year. However, his articles and books leave behind an invaluable legacy. That is why Mentmore Press is working on a series of books which will bring together selections of Peter’s writings, beginning with a first collection entitled ‘Great Revolutionaries’, to be released this autumn.
This first book, a compilation of twelve different articles, provides an introduction to the ideas of six great revolutionaries, and explains how they sought to apply them in action. They are: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of ‘scientific socialism’; Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution; and Gracchus Babeuf and Rosa Luxemburg, revolutionaries, like Trotsky, killed for their socialist beliefs.
Marx and Engels developed their ideas by studying the ideas and struggles of previous generations. That included the ideas of the first ‘utopian’ socialists, such as the heroic French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, the ‘father of communism’, featured in the first chapter of this book.
The following chapters, on Marx and Engels, explain how they developed the ideas of ‘scientific socialism’, founded on the materialist philosophy that it is ‘conditions that determine consciousness’, and not the other way around.
Their recognition that history has been driven by class struggle, and their exposition of the driving forces and inner contradictions of a capitalist economy, led them to conclude that the organised working class would be capitalism’s ‘gravediggers’. That’s why they also wrote at length on workers’ strikes and on the role of trade unions, an aspect of their writings usually ignored by supposedly ‘Marxist’ academics but summarised in a chapter of this book.
Knowing that any permanent gains could only be won by the working class through socialist change, they also fought for workers to build their own independent mass parties. Marx was instrumental in the construction of the International Workingmen’s Association, the ‘First International’. Again, this revolutionary activity is explained in Peter’s articles.
The chapters on Lenin, Trotsky and the 1917 Russian revolution provide an answer to the many lies and distortions that bourgeois writers and historians have written – and continue to write – to try and conceal the genuine ideas of Marxism from a new generation of socialists, ideas that can arm the working class to clear away their rotting system of capitalism.
Peter sets out Lenin’s ideas on the necessity of building firmly organised but highly democratic revolutionary parties, as well as Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’, still vital in a world where millions of lives remain blighted by landlordism and national oppression. The articles also set out the reasons why Stalinism arose from the isolation of the Russian revolution and the devastation of its already weak economy following the civil war that had threatened to strangle the revolution at birth.
The book also sets out the revolutionary legacy of the heroic Rosa Luxemburg, brutally murdered after the defeat of the January 1919 uprising in Berlin. In this, and other chapters, Peter outlines not just the mass struggles that took place in Germany at that time but also other twentieth century revolutionary events that provide important lessons for today, such as those in Spain, China and Cuba.
A book of this nature can inevitably only be an introduction to the lives and legacy of these great revolutionaries, and to the ideas of Marxism. To help those who want to find out more, detailed endnotes have been added to further explain some of the events and terms referred to by Peter, and also to provide references to the sources of many of the quotations, so that readers can further explore these original works if they so wish.
Peter’s articles show how Marxism, correctly applied, not by rote but as a method of analysis, helps to provide a political compass. For example, in the article on The Communist Manifesto, written in 1998 when it seemed that ‘globalisation’ of the world economy was able to transcend national boundaries, he pointed out, tellingly, that “a serious recession or slump would inevitably result in the introduction of protectionist measures by the different national capitalists, probably on a regional basis through the different blocs”.
Nowhere in the book does Peter present a picture of these great revolutionaries as being infallible leaders ‘deified’ in the sorry traditions of Stalinism. Instead, he explains that “all parties and leaders make mistakes, but the essence of the matter is to learn from them”. Throughout the book, mistakes that may have been made – over timescales, over theory, over organisation – are pointed out, to be evaluated and learned from today.
Some of those mistakes are ones that have direct relevance today. For example, Peter discusses why some of the new left parties that rose in the wake of the 2007-08 ‘Great Recession’, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, also quickly lost support as well. In the chapter on Trotsky’s Life and Legacy, Peter warns about how Podemos was undermined by the top-down methods of its leadership who “deny the right for different trends of opinion to openly and democratically get together, formulate alternative ideas, aspects of the programme, and if necessary, to fight for these ideas within the structures of common organisations”.
Of course, there’s a risk in publishing a book on ‘great revolutionaries’ of giving the false impression that revolutions are made, not by the action of the masses, but through the individual ‘genius’ of charismatic leaders. Not at all. As Trotsky wrote in the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution: “The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny”.
Nevertheless, as discussed in the chapter on Leon Trotsky’s relevance today, revolutionary parties, and their leading cadres, are a vital – and necessary – component in a successful revolutionary struggle. As Trotsky puts it bluntly: “If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution”. However, Lenin and Trotsky weren’t just accidents of history, but a product of it, gaining their ideas and training through their living experience in the workers’ movement over decades.
As this book sets out, Lenin and Trotsky explained that four key conditions are needed for a revolution to succeed: a split in the ruling class; a determined working class, ready to take decisive action; the middle layers in revolt and looking towards the working class for a way out; and lastly, but in Trotsky’s words “the hardest thing of all” to have in place, a mass revolutionary party with a trained, farsighted leadership that can ensure the movement of the masses succeeds in changing society.
Just as these great revolutionaries studied the struggles of the past to help them try to build such a party in their lifetimes, today a new generation of socialists needs to do the same. The clearly explained ideas of Marxism, and the lessons of workers’ struggles, both successes and failures, that are included in this book can only assist in that process.