The fight for workers' power : revolution and counter-revolution in the 20th century

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter. In the early nuclear age, experts anticipated that all technologically-capable states would build these powerful devices. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late-1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and across decades the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons. Why do most states in the international system adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements. The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap. The horrors of 20th century capitalism threw up numerous challenges by workers and peasants, who rose up in their millions to fight the system. Inspired by the successful 1917 Russian Revolution, they repeatedly created their own institutions of collective power and in doing so demonstrated not just how to organise their struggles in the present but also how to build a world free of capitalists, landlords and generals. But these revolutionary movements quickly confronted counter-revolutionary forces, both in the repressive machinery of the state and in the workers' movement itself - trade union and political leaders with no interest in seeing workers take power. Defeating such forces required that at least the leading militants be organised in revolutionary parties dedicated to seeing the struggle through. The victorious Russian revolution brought hundreds of thousands of working class militants together in new Communist parties dedicated to working class emancipation, but tragically the revolution's defeat at the hands of the dictator Joseph Stalin turned these parties into vehicles for betrayal. From Britain to China, from Hungary to Australia, this book tells the story of these inspiring working class struggles and uprisings and recounts the fights within the workers movement over strategies and tactics to take the struggles forward. The Russian Revolution of 1917 announced to the world that a new era had dawned. For the first time workers had succeeded in taking power. The fight was now on for the loyalty of the workers' movement internationally - between the established social democratic leaders who had betrayed their followers by backing the imperialist slaughter of World War I and the new communist parties, organised in the Communist International, dedicated to bringing down the capitalist system. The battle for leadership took place in the context of a massive upsurge of working class struggle where the formation of workers' councils put the question of workers' power on the agenda in country after country. Tragically, the revolutionary wave was defeated and the, now isolated, Russian workers' state was smashed by a rising bureaucracy led by Stalin. The new Russian dictator proceeded to turn the Communist International - formed as a weapon to fight class war against the capitalists - into a counter-revolutionary weapon in the hands of the new ruling class in Moscow. This book tells the story of the rise and fall of the Communist International and the lessons it has for us today