The Revoulountary Wave

Result of Revoloutionary Wave https://i.redd.it/9nctuzdsyz861.jpg In the decades after World War Two, the United States established itself as a global economic, military, and political hegemon, a status which was cemented by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. From the start of the first Cold War up until the early 21st century, its military and intelligence services suppressed leftist movements around the world, and its enormous financial apparatus kept the global economy working towards its interests. So naturally, when it imploded in 2017, the geopolitical house of cards collapsed along with it, ushering in an era of upheaval the likes of which had not been seen since the great revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The first card to fall was France. Scrambling to build a replacement for the American-dominated NATO, the French government under Marine Le Pen founded the ECANAC (the European Central Army-Navy-Air Command) initiative along with its allies in the European Union, an endeavor it funded by slashing its national healthcare budget. The French people, unsurprisingly, were unhappy with this. The events in France spurred on explosive populist movements in other countries just as latent tensions elsewhere in the world were beginning to boil over, culminating in what has been dubbed the revolutionary wave of 2020.

The Red Spring

Full article: The Red Spring

Class tensions in France were already running high thanks to the ongoing economic depression when the Le Pen government announced the intended source of ECANAC’s funding. The stormclouds gathered as December gave way to January, and peaceful protests against the plan grew larger and more agitated. Lightning first struck on the 29th of January, when the IWW—the largest union in the country by that point—called a general strike. The economy shut down overnight as a powerful mass movement materialized from the scattered protests of the previous month. Wildcat strikes began popping up where more conservative unions would not band together in solidarity with the IWW.

The Euro, already hovering over the pit of financial collapse from which it had just spent the last three years escaping, fell off a cliff as all productivity ceased in France. It dragged banks with it, forcing shutdowns and foreclosures not just in the troubled republic but across the continent. More angry workers took to the streets in response, fanning the flames of the strike into an uncontrollable blaze.

Harsh state repression and the coronavirus quarantine of March and April nearly crushed the movement, sapping its momentum until many of its participants were ready to surrender. Then, whether out of hubris or simple incompetence, the government made what would undoubtedly be remembered as one of the biggest missteps in history. On the tenth of May, a Parisian police raid on the annual conference of the Fifth International landed several popular French radicals in jail, a small tactical victory in exchange for an enormous strategic blunder. The arrests were the political equivalent of driving a leaky gasoline truck into the embers of a house fire minutes from being extinguished. Immediately, the dwindling picket lines exploded to beyond what they had been even at the movement’s heyday in January. Courthouses and banks were burned, prisons were besieged and emptied of prisoners, including those arrested on the tenth, and the streets became a warzone.

The violence escalated further into guerrilla warfare as troops were called in to crush the uprising, often violating French and international laws in the process. This, too, failed to hold the line, as leaked documents revealing a plan to slash military pensions provoked mass defections from the armed forces. Emboldened, the IWW directed workers to begin forcibly collectivizing the nation’s industry and infrastructure. By mid-July, Le Pen’s government had fled to French Guiana to govern in exile, and the French high command was forced to surrender to the revolutionary coalition in Paris.

As the newly-established Socialist Republic of France set about laying the framework for its system of government, it fended off counter-revolutionary assaults on all sides. Private security forces continued to resist collectivization with a campaign of harassment against the workers’ collectives being established across the country, dragging out a low-grade insurrection well into the autumn. More worrisome to the young socialist state was the cooperation between stubborn military holdouts, sections of the gendarmes, and militant far-right Le Pen supporters, who formed a nationalist paramilitary group that retook sizable portions of the countryside with shocking brutality and, allegedly, support from foreign intelligence agencies. At the time of this writing, the socialists and nationalists remain in a bitter struggle for the last pieces of contested territory.

The various factions responsible for the revolution—chiefly the IWW, the Socialist Party, the French Communist Party, and the New Communards—settled on a constitution in November, and ratified it by popular vote on December first. The FSR is unique among socialist states for its implementation of “dual power by design,” and for its unusual brand of democratic centralism which allows “allied parties '' (independent political parties approved by the vanguard) to contest the ruling party in certain elections, so long as centralist principles are adhered to during the legislative process itself. Former Socialist Party leader Hugo Bachelot is currently serving as acting president and is expected to win the nation’s first general election on January 3rd.

Reactions to the Red Spring

The Red Spring shook the world almost as hard as the start of the Second American Civil War had three years earlier. Fearing that the specter of revolution would arrive on their doorsteps next, foreign governments quickly moved to suppress left-wing movements within their own borders. Of particular concern were those that had participated in the Red Spring or were adjacent to ones that had via membership in the Fifth International. On September 21st, the parliament of the United Kingdom voted to declare the IWW a terrorist organization, outlawing participation in its activities and giving its members one week to resign or face prison. That week, the legislatures of Spain, Germany, and Ukraine approved similar measures, with Italy and Brazil not far behind. Vladimir Putin of Russia outlawed the IWW by decree not long afterwards. Sweeping police raids against unions and left-wing parties began in all of these countries, sparking outbursts of violence as people took to the streets in protest. Meanwhile, loose ends from France’s colonial past quickly returned to the forefront of international affairs, wreaking havoc in Latin America and Africa.

The reactionary backlash from governments around the world, the chaos of the collapsing French colonial apparatus, and the new economic anxiety caused by the floundering Euro combined to produce what had been thought of for more than a century as a relic of the past: a revolutionary wave, in the spirit of 1848, 1830 and other such years of crisis from the tumultuous nineteenth century.

Australia

In Queensland, miners on a one-day strike in solidarity with the British IWW were violently suppressed by state forces on the 24th of September. Indignant miners walked off the job in droves to protest the treatment of their colleagues, totaling about twenty thousand strong (one-tenth of the Australian mining labor force) at the peak of the strike. Most of the strikers returned to work in two weeks’ time when their employers offered to let them keep their old jobs in spite of the illegal nature of the strike, but a dedicated core of five thousand or so refused to surrender until the strikers arrested on the 24th were freed. Without fifteen thousand comrades by their side to intimidate the police into pacifism, the remaining strikers faced escalating violence as they held out into late October. In the waning days of the strike, a small cadre of radicals desperate to awaken something in the masses stormed the Telfer Mine in Western Australia with small arms and began an occupation of its central facilities. They were cleared out with lethal force once it became clear there were no hostages involved, and the remaining strikers hastily went back to their jobs to avoid being targeted for arrest in the aftermath, thus bringing a quick end to the Australian chapter of the revolutionary wave of 2020.

Brazil

The Brazilian legislature outlawed membership in the IWW on September 30th, kicking the legs out from under a growing movement of radical trade unionism in the country. Riots broke out in major cities the night the bill was signed into law, leading to dramatic clashes with police that lasted until morning. Taking their cue from the police raids on IWW offices, nationalist supporters of president Bolsonaro targeted the offices of other unions for acts of vigilante violence with little rhyme or reason, and no pushback from the authorities. Reacting to the lack of police protection, unionists and communists set up armed patrols to clear the streets of nationalist mobs, resulting in several deadly shootouts. In Rio de Janeiro, where both the rioting against the anti-IWW law and the nationalist vigilantism were the most severe, armed leftists declared large swaths of the Rocinah favela an autonomous zone, sealing off major streets in and out of the neighborhood with makeshift barricades. Bolsonaro called in the army and the autonomous zone was crushed in short order, but its legacy as a stunning show of defiance survived.

Françafrique

One of Hugo Bachelot’s first prerogatives as acting president of the SRF was to cancel all outstanding colonial debts held by the country’s former possessions in Africa. This provided the Françafrique a powerful incentive to recognize the SRF’s legitimacy, which was only compounded when Bachelot recalled all overseas French troops, including almost 4,000 stationed in sovereign African nations. Most outposts remained loyal to the exiled Le Pen government, and thus refused the call, but there were mutinies of men who had grown disenchanted since the military pension scandal, and in Djibouti the mutineers won out. Hardly able to keep a thousand foreign soldiers in the country against their will, the Djiboutian government helped return them to France in early August after several days of uncertainty.

The situation in France’s other former colonies was more complex. The garrisons there elected to remain at their posts, but as their host nations, grateful for the debt relief, became the first non-socialist nations to extend recognition to the SRF, it became less clear whether they were playing the diplomatic role of guests or trespassers. Finally, in October, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, and Senegal jointly expelled the French expeditionary forces from their borders. They refused to go, and instead of forcing them to, the Le Pen government stated that it would negotiate the withdrawal of the troops when the governments in question ceased to recognize the SRF and resumed paying their colonial debts. Rather than allow themselves to be blackmailed by an occupying army into reassuming their debts, the African nations promptly laid siege to the French military bases and deported the troops stationed there to mainland France.

French Guiana

In the days before the socialists captured Paris, Le Pen and her government fled to French Guiana to serve as a government in exile. To ensure its survival, the regime vested itself with almost unlimited power, asserting total supremacy over the local government and suspending civil liberties so that it had free reign to crush the radical press, arrest revolutionary organizers, and detain, torture, and execute subversives without a proper civil trial. Most of this was done in secret, of course, but word inevitably spread. This, coupled with the collapse of the French economy and the revolutionary fever sweeping the world, put a ticking time bomb under the exiled government from the moment it set up shop in the Americas.

It detonated in November, when fresh riots over the suspicious disappearance of an indigenous rights activist and ongoing riots against price spikes merged into one furious uprising against the new status quo. The settlements outside of Cayenne began tossing off French authority in brief spurts of insurrection as unrest raged on in the capital, until a mob finally stormed the government offices on December 20th, bringing Le Pen’s administration to a grisly end with a lynching.

The process of establishing a new government in the ashes of the toppled one is still underway at the time of this writing.

Germany

Germany was one of the first countries to declare the IWW a terrorist organization, with its Bundestag following the example of the UK’s parliament on September 25th. Massive street protests in the leadup to the vote descended into riots in its wake. Germany’s role in the revolutionary wave was tamer than most of the others, but it is notable for the size of the demonstrations against banning the IWW—a march in Berlin drew 40,000 people; protests in Munich and Stuttgart each drew in more than 15,000.

India

Though perhaps not quite the most dramatic events of the revolutionary wave, the developments in India were certainly the largest by sheer volume of participants. They started as events in many countries had: a solidarity strike. Around five million Indian workers went on strike for a day on the thirteenth of October to show their support for the IWW (which by that point was outlawed in six countries), a record-breaking number by the standards of most countries but modest in Indian terms. Threatened by it all the same, prime minister Modi sent troops to the strike’s epicenter in Kerala to stop it from getting out of hand. As it had in country after country that year, the heavy-handed approach proved to be the riskier one. Violence broke out, and the blame fell on the Combined Indian Communist Parliamentary Front, which had organized the strike—both predictable outcomes. Modi’s government made the classic mistake of having CICPF’s leader Amoli Malhotra arrested for inciting violence, which only inflamed the situation—yet another predictable outcome. A second strike was called to force Malhotra’s release, and with a more concrete goal in mind, this one brought more than thirty million people out of their workplaces. The CPI(Maoist), longtime adversaries of the CICPF, even got involved in their own way with a series of armed raids on government offices in the rural north. Desperate to avoid a wholesale revolution, Modi backpedaled, and on November ninth Malhotra was released on the condition that he would step down as party leader before the 2024 general elections.

Italy

Italy’s parliament followed the UK’s example on October 3rd. In addition to banning the IWW, it expanded the government’s power to regulate political speech, which it immediately used to shut down several major socialist newspapers. Wildcat strikes flared up in fits and starts throughout the fall and into the winter, while protests in major cities occasionally broke out into street fighting. As of January 2nd, the unrest in Italy is ongoing.

Japan

Japan saw historically large protests in October and November after the national diet outlawed the IWW. Two weeks after the passage of the law, an estimated four million people participated in a march in Tokyo, constituting the largest protest in world history. When a bill was submitted to the legislature which would forcibly dissolve the Japanese Communist Party for participating in the Fifth International, most of Tokyo’s 30,000 dock workers went on strike, and a second march with over a million participants was held. The second bill was ultimately defeated, and after sanitation workers joined the striking dock workers, the law illegalizing the IWW was repealed.

Mexico

Instead of going after the IWW, the Mexican government decided to make the long-standing autonomous zone in Chiapas the outlet for its reactionary zeal. Their hope that singling out a smaller, region-specific movement with less press coverage would spare them the uproar tearing through other countries turned out to be misplaced optimism. “¡Viva Zapata, viva Chiapas!” became the rallying cry of a new agrarian populist movement as troops moved south to drive out the Zapatistas. Poor farming communities in southern Mexico mobilized to the EZLN’s defense, sending armed patrols to block off roads and parading through state capitals with rifles. Deadly firefights broke out in October and November, and on November 14th a bomb destroyed a bridge as a federal caravan in Oaxaca as a federal caravan was crossing it, killing four. The violence is ongoing as of the time of this writing.

Russia

The IWW’s fairly small footprint in Russia allowed Putin to ban it by decree without much resistance. What really agitated the country’s socialist currents was when the federal assembly, at Putin’s behest, forced the New Russian Communist Party to dissolve. The NRCP, a non-electoral alternative to the aging Communist Party of the Russian Federation, had grown popular with the Russian youth during the 2010s, and was one of the early participants in the Fifth International. Former members protested its dissolution with marches and occupations, most importantly the sixteen-day occupation of the Red Square in Moscow. Not one to tolerate such things, Putin ordered the army to clear the square on October 21st. They made short work of the demonstrators, and the protests elsewhere in the country grew weaker and more sporadic as morale declined. By December, the movement was dead.

Spain

As the Euro disintegrated in the summer months, a series of anomalous movements in the Spanish stock market ignited a disastrous bank run that forced the country’s financial institutions to shut down. Tempers ran short, and the bank runs quickly became bank burnings in many cities. Strict curfews were imposed in Madrid and Barcelona, but weren’t enough to deter a mob several thousand strong from overwhelming the police and storming the lower house of the Spanish legislature on September 28th, three days after it sent a law banning the IWW to the senate. The rebels held the building for two hours before the army arrived to expel them.

Turkey

Like Germany’s, Turkey’s experience with the revolutionary wave was relatively tame. Street battles between leftists and right-wingers grew out of leftist demonstrations in solidarity with the IWW and raged for three weeks in September and October before the military restored order.

Ukraine

The crisis in Ukraine sprouted from an earlier conflict, starting with a foiled anarchist plot to assassinate the president in 2018. When European governments began suppressing the IWW, far-right extremists in Ukraine took it as a sign to begin attacking the IWW and the Communist Party of Ukraine to “cleanse the country of the left.” Offices were ransacked and officers publicly assaulted, with only meek condemnation from the government. Like in Brazil, leftists responded by forming self-defense squads. The state was quicker to crack down on these than the nationalists who started the whole affair, eliciting protests and calls for the president to resign. Harsh police repression forced the protests and the self defense squads into retreat and then surrender by mid-December, but not before the government was convinced to take stronger action on the right-wing mobs.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom opened the door for the period of backlash against the left on September 21st with the first of many acts designating the IWW a terrorist organization. Wobblies were given a week to abandon ship before membership in the union would land them in prison, though the police began their raids and arrests without delay during this “grace period,” allegedly to preemptively neuter the left’s ability to conjure up any violent retaliation.

The retaliation came to pass anyway. Demonstrators gathered outside Westminster by the thousands on the day the law was handed down, at one point crashing through a police cordon in an attempt to rally an assault on the building. They then went on strike illegally to try to get parliament to repeal the new law, uniting behind the banner of the IWW as a symbol of defiance. With the IWW in retreat, the strike was poorly organized and collapsed after a little more than a week, but as would soon become the recurring theme of 2020, the government very nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. On October 11th, parliament voted to override the Scottish Independence Referendum Act passed earlier in the year, thus calling off the referendum scheduled for 2021 on the grounds of “interference by international extremists manipulating British politics against British interests.”

Denying the Scottish people a chance to vote on independence caused quite a stir, giving the strike new life in Scotland, vigor then made its way back south to revitalize the movement in England. On November 7th, parliament was forced to backtrack, and opinion polling showed that Scottish support for independence had jumped from a virtual coin toss at 48% to a possible landslide at 61%. Westminster lost even more ground on December 2nd, when the assembly of Northern Ireland voted to set about scheduling a referendum on Irish reunification.

Miscellaneous

Canada

Canada’s troubles began long before the Red Spring. Left-wing Québécois separatism was on the rise as early as the late 2000s. Its most radical expression was in the formation of the Quebec Liberation Army, an underground group of socialist Québécois determined to fight capitalism and federal authority with the only tool available to such a small league of violence-hungry revolutionaries: terrorism. On February 13th, they made their first stab at it by sneaking a bomb into a venue prime minister Ignatieff was supposed to attend on a visit to Quebec City in three days’ time. Ignatieff arrived in the city an hour later than intended, and the bomb’s only casualties were the venue’s waitstaff.

Several of the group’s other acts of terrorism were more successful. Between February and September, they took credit for a dozen bank robberies and two more bombings, as well as a shooting that hospitalized the minister of justice. When they shot and killed finance minister Scott Brison in October, Ignatieff put troops on the ground in Quebec, causing no small amount of turmoil in the House of Commons. Despite the emergency measures in place, the QLA managed to kill again in November, this time incinerating the Canadian representative on the International Monetary Fund’s board of directors with a car bomb. As of January 2nd, the situation in Canada remains unresolved.

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Ghana

Ghana’s economy suffered as much as any other when the United States collapsed in 2017. The reshuffling of global economic priorities in the aftermath left it with a yawning trade deficit which cascaded down the economic hierarchy, first as higher taxes on gold and oil exports, and then as lower wages for workers in those industries. Poverty steadily rose in 2018 and 2019, leaving the country with untenably large unemployed, poor, and at-risk populations at the turn of the new decade. To make matters worse, an uptick in average fertilizer prices around the world inflated food prices, leaving hundreds of thousands of Ghanian people starving. The government’s policies during this time did not suggest a sympathetic approach to the people’s suffering.

Bread line riots in November evolved rather suddenly into an armed uprising against the government. Rebels in Accra expelled law enforcement from roughly a third of the city, forcing the government to temporarily flee to Kumasi. With the leadership of the “Neo-Nkrumists,” militant socialists allied with the Pan-African Vanguard League, they declared their autonomous zone the “Accra Soviet” and set about collectivizing the city’s industrial assets.

Shocked by the abruptness of the rebellion, the Ghanian government asked its neighbors to help crush it, but at the request of their new ally the SRF, they opted for a policy of non-interference. Ghana then turned to ECANAC, which gladly offered its services to help resist the tide of revolution. British SAS soldiers flew into Ghana on December 10th and helped the military destroy the Soviet in four days of merciless urban warfare.

Israel and Palestine

Sectarian violence took hold of Palestine in November when Israeli soldiers fired live rounds into a crowd gathered for a candlelight vigil in honor of a young boy killed by the IDF in the West Bank. Riots against Israeli authorities quickly turned towards West Bank settlements, then spread to the Gaza Strip as the IDF reacted harshly to the uprisings. The revolt is already being dubbed the “Third Intifada,” and is ongoing as of January 2nd.

Thailand

Starting in late spring, the Thai people rose up against the military junta which has ruled the country since 2014. By November, with entire cities out of the regime’s control and the threat of a real attempt to overthrow the government appearing realer by the day, the National Council for Peace and Order finally agreed to schedule a general election for May of 2021.

United States

The revolutionary wave struck the United States (or what had once been the United States) thrice. Black rebels fired the opening salvo in late July when they rose up against the Sons of the South, capturing large parts of Savannah, Columbia, Huntsville, and then Jackson as the revolt spread to the FRA in August. Their plan was to destabilize the Sons for long enough to coax black communities elsewhere in the south into revolutions of their own, ideally creating the conditions for the emancipation of black people from the Sons’ neo-segregationist policies. This, unfortunately, did not come to pass. Each uprising in Sons territory was crushed with terrifying force and no respect for the rules of war. Aid groups active in the region reported flagrant violations of human rights both in the initial urban warfare and in the weeks-long reprisals that followed. The Jackson uprising was handled more delicately, but only by comparison to the Sons’ war crimes.

Unrest struck the PGUSA next. As early as June, tensions were noticeably mounting between the Navajo nation and the LAPG, a trend which continued when the two provisional governments merged. Most of the agitation was coming from Native Guardian League operatives, but it resonated with a deeper resentment many Navajo felt towards the US government, which was exacerbated by the withering toll Covid-19 took on the community. The first real fighting began in September, with armed standoffs in Cameron, Arizona and Shiprock, New Mexico near the end of the month. Though it went mostly unnoticed as the election and the Gulf crisis dominated the news cycle, open insurrection soon broke out on the reservation as Navajo rebels engaged federal forces in hit-and-run attacks from Tuba City to Gallup. With the FRA tying down its forces in the Albuquerque-Santa Fe area, the PGUSA was unable to commit significant resources to putting down the rebellion, so when the Navajo captured the critical Glen Canyon dam in November, they were forced to negotiate a settlement granting them independence.

The highly disputed presidential election that year set off a third uprising on US soil. Convincing evidence of fraud sparked protests and rioting from infuriated supporters of Bernie Sanders, who won the popular vote by a large margin but lost the electoral college to the incumbent Andrew Cuomo in a contest with severe irregularities. College students forcefully occupied administrative buildings on sixteen campuses, mimicking the dramatic student protests of the 1960s. Marches in the PGUSA’s major cities gathered steam, their participants calling for new elections and Cuomo’s resignation. There was talk of a general strike, but it never made its way from radical student circles into workplaces—not without a push. On December 5th, longshoremen in New Jersey and New York went on strike, not because of the election, but because they objected to the PGUSA’s latest offensive against the Eastern American Worker’s Army and the role they played in it by loading and unloading war materiel being shipped in from Europe. The strike spread further along the supply chain, first to truckers and then to railroad workers in a revival of what the men and women on the picket line were calling “the spirit of 2011.” The two movements then merged into a powerful coalition of students and workers demanding peace on the eastern front, fair elections, and Cuomo’s resignation. As of January 2nd, a temporary ceasefire has been called between the PGUSA and EAWA, but the push for new elections is ongoing.