Is there no point in a country-wide revolution unless there is certainty that it will be followed by revolutions around the world?

I apologize, this comment is to long.

Im a communist too, but you said

Every social revolution was an international revolution

and your talking about "the" communist revolution, there as of yet has never been anything close to global communist social revolution. Their have been small scale communist social revolutions, a few have been regional, encompassing a few geographically close countries, but most happened only in one nation. I would also hesitate to call them truly "social" revolutions. For the most part a fairly small portion of the population adopted a Marxist, or in some way communist, mode of thought, instigated a political or armed revolution, and then, only after they controlled at least part of the state, introduced the rest of their population to this way of thinking. The Russian revolution began in Saint Petersburg as a small scale social revolution, proletarian citizens heard the ideas being exposed by people like Lenin and adopted a similar way of thinking. They then took up arms, took on a political aspect, and preceded to spread their ideals through word of mouth and official propaganda. It spread out from that one city, and only because people who already held Marxist ideas were already there to spread them.

I was comparing those absolutely Bourgeois social revolutions because I felt they came closest to the concept you were going for, they were not communist but they were times when large groups of people changed they way they thought in a short time, which is what a communist social revolution would have to achieve. The obvious example I was dumb to leave out was the wave of successful and unsuccessful communist(ish) revolutions beginning with some of the first proponents of Marxism, achieving its first material gain in the USSR, and spreading through Easter Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

The individual national revolutions were not international social revolutions, but the idea that was inspiring them all could be called one. That is the closest thing to a previous communist social revolution, and it started in the late 1800's, slowly spread across the world for more than 100 years, spawned numerous nations, and either ended in 1992, or continues to today. Social revolutions are based on ideas, ideas don't manifest in peoples heads once the material conditions for their arrival are achieved, they spread from person to person like a germ. Any social revolution, communist or otherwise, will begin somewhere. Even if people across the globe share that idea, there will be a place where it achieves early successes. That will encourage others to adopt it, and people who already hold those beliefs will have a much easier time spreading them.

I'm not saying a international revolution can not happen, it absolutely can, but it will not happen uniformly across the globe at once. It will have to start somewhere, and spread from there, leaping political and geographical divides as ideas spread in person and through technology. It will have to be hard fought, and it will take time. Even if half of the working people in every city and town on earth decided it was time they would face more resistance in some places than others, there would be a first, and a last pace to fully embrace it.

/r/leftcommunism Thread Parent