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Hinge Points Episode 2: So You Say You Want a Revolution (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-12 22:01:01
Imported:
2026-06

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Matt and Danny Bessner, from the American Prestige podcast, do a deep dive into the German Revolutions of 1918-1919. They compare the revolutions to what was going on in the Soviet Union, explore the splits within the socialist camp, and analyze the various events of the revolutions, asking whether or not the revolutions provided a real potential "road not taken" in 20th century history. Would things have been different if the international left had found a home in Germany instead of the Soviet Union?

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Comments

Sheldon Kirkham

German socialists? Newcomer lefty says what?

Dylan

Need me some slop

Absolute Unit

germany has a rich socialist tradition, youre lucky you get to learn all this

Matt James Rich

Hey! Bonus ep 6 for Hell of Presidents isn't on Stitcher anymore.

Clint Pelvis

not total garbage I guess 🤷‍♂️

Clint Pelvis

u need to subscribe to stitcher platinum for that one

Kasz

The guy who invented Marxism was German believe it or not

Sheldon Kirkham

Karl Marx war ein Deutscher? Kein weg mensch!

Greg

Good quick observation on the idea of Democracy (broadly defined) or at least democratic expectations moving in-line with the needs of military mobilization. Can’t help but notice that U.S. wars are fought with less and less of a general mobilization and that they directly enlist a narrower slice of the population (plus some contractors too, of course). Wonder if that corresponds with anything

Mad Larkin

These segments - which I love - have the most jarring and off-putting intro. And that's even compared to the CtH standard intro Edit: I get it, you're all going to keep drinking that garbage

T

No, it owns.

Greg

I kind of like the goofy music to this segment. Perfect soundtrack for “This is how everything got fucked!”

Zach Feece

Could you guys include a reading list for these episodes?

T

Such a good series. I'm basking in the hopeful vibes.

Alexander Fuchs

hmm watch the Rosa Luxemburg biopic by Margarethe von Trotta - and also her greatest film "Juliane and Marianne" while youre at it :)

Zach Feece

Thanks! I’ll check them out

NYCM&AHole

Ihr sollt ja lernen, deutsch richtig auszusprechen :)

Nick Anaclerio

On the topic of spontaneous workers' formations vs. established labor parties within bourgeois democracies, it'd be cool to get some discussion of the operaisti in 60s Italy. Not sure if that moment really counts as enough of a key moment of historical course-setting to qualify for the series' theme tho

Øystein Monsen

The postulated impossibility of maintaining a loyal party elite seems belied by the Spartakist formation and Zimmerwald breakaway groups. The obvious missing co-ordinating factor would be the Spartakist leadership somehow surviving the Berlin uprising and assuming leadership with their OG anti-war credibility and Lenin's blessing - remember, he has a lot of time for Luxemburg and Liebknecht at this point and is basically the King Of Revolution in 1918-19. It would be very, very hard but that kind of leadership has the clout and organisational wherewithal to maybe pull it off. Also one may want to look into the doctrines if United front politics vs Popular front politics - the jargon of social fascism is very easy to misunderstand because it seems so weird today.

Julie Baxter

German Socialists emigrated to Texas after 1848, only to get their asses kicked when Texas seceded (see the Nueces Massacre), and then they became cattle.

emmagineering

hinge points theme music was an instant classic!

Litano

This episode seems like a pretty cut-and-dry argument for accelerationism, if I'm interpreting it correctly. Socialist organizing aimed at ameliorating the worst features of capitalism only leads to a bourgeoified left that will eventually turn on itself, while the most violent excesses of capitalism lead to the sort of intense exploitation that produces class consciousness and sparks organic revolution. If both those statements are true, it seems like someone who wants to eventually bring about a socialist world almost would PREFER an ascendant right during times of relative stability. When given power reactionaries will only heighten contradictions and worsen the exploitation of the working class, while a relatively powerless left opposition cannot take any sort of socio-political space that could eventually be filled with organic proletarian resistance at the moment of reckoning. Is it fair to say that Christman thought is accelerationist?

Litano

To be clear, this isn't my own personal read on the situation. But it does seem like a natural implication of the history that Matt lays out in the episode

James Johnson

I love this content and I love the theme song. Matt and Danny have great synergy.

Matt Crossin

You can organise for improvements in conditions without being *integrationist* - putting yourself within the state or the union bureaucracy. That’s the danger of reformism, not the fighting for/winning of reforms itself. In fact, elections/entering the state have never been how reforms are won. They’ve only ever been extracted as concessions in conditions set by direct action against capital, outside of and against the state.

Matt Crossin

On the German revolution check out ‘All power to the councils’ published by PM Press

Terry Stack

The 1918 German Revolution, as Leon Trotsky aptly put it in 1930, was “not a democratic completion of the bourgeois revolution,” but “a working class revolution beheaded by social democracy: more correctly, it is bourgeois counterrevolution forced to preserve pseudo-democratic forms after the victory over the working class."

IHaveHemorrhoids

I love this fucking theme song Am I Mario party or am I marx? The answer? Fuck you

Ben L

2 episodes in and im realizing Christman just tricked us into listening to a pod about his homeland

Kinetics Video

I feel like it's true there is a lot of fabulism in left internet spaces (and that's maybe not the worst thing? Have you noticed how grey and dead most things are these days?) but this analysis of what sort of need needs to be felt for a revolution to happen seems flabby to me. Was George Washington and co starving? Was everyone in France going to die if the National Assembly didn't get called? Or are the rules for bourgeois revolution different?

chee rabbits

the point is the balance of risk. but yes, people were hungry in France. food shortages, bread famine, flour war, Revolution

David Andrews

Knowing little of the German revolution of 1918, I found this very informative.

Kai

Bit strange to compare Jan 6th to left rev activity (aren’t these things each other’s opposites?). Relatedly I’m frustrated by the lack of mention of the George Floyd summer—feels a bit (noting immediately that this is silly in response to a podcast) like we’re speaking into reality the lack of coordination between organization and dynamism (and their shorthand contemporary U.S. corollaries of Bernie left and GF uprising left) that is MC and DB’s diagnosis of this German history (and last episode it was even a self-diagnosis!). Big fan of this hinge points thing in general though!

Ellen Harold

You didn’t mention that Rosa Luxemburg went along with but was opposed to the Spartacist uprising and also disagreed with Lenin and his tactics. Also I think someone misspoke about the Location of the Ruhr Valley. I myself am still a bit unclear about exactly where it is, but my impression is it’s further north nearer to Belgium than to Baden.

Pipeman

The fact that the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) is being referred to with SDP (Social Democratic Party) is driving me kinda low key insane, even if it's technically valid.

Nobody

Accelerationism is hilarious. Let's brutalize millions of people and ruin the planet to no recovery for humanity because you might be able to fly a red flag somewhere

Ellen Harold

That insurrections have historically been defeated time and time again is historical fact, but has the idea ever been confirmed that making conditions a lot worse will speed improvement? My memory of Crane Brinton is hazy, since I read it when I was fourteen at the suggestion of my high school history teacher.

Sebastian Wittekindt

Loving this series but once again a bit unclear on the takeaway here. I think your analysis of the bourgeoise-ification of the SPD is fantastic but I severely disagree with your analysis that Ebert was the “Lenin of Germany”. Ebert was never a marxist or a revolutionary and always a reformist in the same way as any number of Mensheviks in Russia. Very clearly Rosa Luxembourg most closely filled that role in Germany, and we can literally go back and read Lenin’s praise and criticism of her role to see where things went differently. Bless her heart but she did not take the building of a serious cadre organization in the Bolshevik sense seriously enough and so when the revolutions of 1918 and 1919 came there was no communist party in Germany that could coordinate these different uprisings of the workers in a disciplined way, leading to the premature disaster of the Spartacist uprising. I think if we take this argument of organization seriously we get to a much more optimistic conclusion than Matt’s at the end, which is not that we can passively hope for a better flip of the coin but that we can actively organize to build a Bolshevik organization that can be there at the hinge point in our own future to coordinate for the successful socialist revolution ✊

Isaac Suárez

Great episode but there’s one thing that I believe y’all fail to consider. The reason why a large proportion of the center left turned against the USPD and Spartacists in such a violent manner came from the reports coming out of Russia following the October Revolution. Specifically, a large proportion of socialists and “orthodox” Marxists were horrified by Lenin’s seizure of power before the convocation of the Russian Constituent Assembly (it was this event that prompted the famous final showdown between the Left Mensheviks around Julius Martov and the Bolsheviks, where Martov and his delegation “walked out” of the Petrograd Soviet in protest of the Bolsheviks overthrow of Kerensky.) To Martov, the Menshevik Internationalists and Defensists and a large proportion of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries (the so called “Right SRs”) , this event was a betrayal of the socialist “Democratic” program. Whereas before there was held to be a common coalition of “Democratic” forces who aimed to gain power via the ballot box (to form a “bourgeois democratic republic” that was deemed necessary for a proletariat regime to develop), Lenin’s decision to take power and dissolve the elected Constituent Assembly was deemed an “opportunistic,” and “Blanquist” betrayal. Socialist parties in other countries were closer to the Mensheviks and Right SR’s on this issue and we’re generally disturbed by the October Revolution (which was fairly viewed as a putsch rather than a mass Revolution in the manner the February Revolution or the Revolution of 1905 had been.) The resulting violent civil war (where the red army committed a large number of atrocities against political opponents and violently requisitioned grain) would alienate them from older Marxist organizations in Europe and amplify the split created by the First World War. I think this, along with bureaucratic self interst, explains why a majority of the SPD’s members and nearly the entirety of its leadership sided against the Spartacists and Red Ruhr. I think underestimating the degree to which Lenin split from Marxist theory (specifically the idea that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” could arise without a “bourgeois capitalist” phase of development.) Even Lenin tacitly had to change course following the civil war when he implemented the “New Economic Program” which allowed for private ownership of land and private markets in which farmers could sell food surpluses (mostly because he realized “War Communism” had been a disaster and led to mass urban starvation and unchecked rural rebellions.) Even here, he did nothing to promote greater party democracy or popular participation in electoral politics, instead crushing the “worker’s opposition” and “Democratic Centralists” who tried to advocate for worker management of industrial enterprises (economic democracy) and/or infra party elections with public debates and a right to free speech (within the limits of a loyal socialist opposition.) Given the dominance of the CPSU over the Comintern after its establishment in 1919, which forced international communist parties to toe a common pro-Soviet line, it is unlikely that the KPD would’ve augured an alternative model of democratic socialism (far more likely, it would’ve tried to turn Germany into a Soviet Republic modeled on the USSR, a move which would’ve been unpopular outside of the ranks of the party.) All of his leads me to think that, even had the Spartacists succeeded, we would not have likely ended up with a “better” or “different” revolutionary outcome (in part because I doubt they would’ve won the civil war, since the Red Army at this time was quite weak and popular support for the Soviet model of revolutionary politics was questionable, even within the ranks of the left.) More likely there would’ve been a wholesale defeat of the radical left akin to what happened in Finland, Hungary or Bavaria.

Kinetics Video

I feel like the George Floyd protests bring in some confounding factors that make the comparison difficult. A lot of that organizing was premised on this idea that policing can be separately pulled out and fixed. The system we have requires the kind of policing that we do, and without that wider critique I don't know what any organization could have accomplished. Jan 6th had it's own incoherence, but at least it was pointed at these fragile ligaments of governing that could hypothetically be threatened by physical violence.

Jesse DeStasio

This series is really great, I'm learning a lot

Seph

Someone help a girl out and define what exactly is a Worker’s Soviet? Like what does it mean when they say they had a Soviet?

orc

This is already my favorite podcast, but the title and theme song don't match. Hinge Points is a very serious name, so I think the theme has to be more serious like something from Slate or BBC

Øystein Monsen

Luxemburg was the main bringer of charges of blanqism against Lenin, and she famously got her skull stove in in the Berlin uprising. It is entirely anachronistic to say that revolutionaries were disgusted or put off by Lenin: I think that the podcast's thesis is right in that the SPD (and, hell, most of the USPD) were simply no longer revolutionary. There's no clear measure of the mass base, but one assumes that the SPD wouldn't have turned to far-right veterans' associations if they could have quelled the revolt with their own workers' militias.

Isaac Suárez

I’ll also add that Lenin’s “Blanquist” tendencies were critiqued well before October. His split with the Mensheviks occurred, in part, over their differing views on party organization and democracy (Lenin is well known to have favored a narrower party organization composed of professional cadres who were drawn from the “advanced proletariat” and socialist intellectuals; his opponents, such as Julius Martov, favored a broader party membership with leadership being determined by election, rather than committee centered “Democratic centralism.”) These positions blurred during the 1905 revolution but became especially prominent afterward, when the Mensheviks wanted to form a coalition with left liberals and participate in the Duma elections while the Bolsheviks favored going it alone and pursuing revolutionary organizing under the cover of front organizations. Even here, Lenin was considered a leader of the far left of the Bolsheviks and was attacked for his eskewing of democratic methods and preference for underground, militant organizing over legal work. Rosa Luxemborg was one of many who pointed out Lenin’s stance on organizational questions would give rise to a single party, bureaucratic dictatorship. She however did support his revolutionary militancy and thus stood somewhere between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks on these issues (if she was in Russia she probably would’ve been closer to the “Interdistrict” group around Gorky, who wanted a reunification of the party, favored Party democracy but opposed the First World War.) Her greatest weakness was on organizational questions where she had to split the difference between a genuine commitment to Party and mass democracy and a preference for revolutionary militant over legal activism. This is part of what makes her such a tragic figure, an excellent critic and theorist but a poor for potencial alternative courses of history.

Teagan

I only listen to the wonderful intro song, skip all the annoying chatter.

DP

You nerds know a alt history podcast with Mann and Dan is your favorite shit relax with your comments. You just want to be invited on lmao

DP

I ant reading that I’m happy for u tho Or sorry that happened

Lulu

also, the American 'Revolution' wasn't really a revolution, it was a war for independence. It didn't turn over any order, the elites who were in charge before continued to hold power

Gengeros

Dear kind sir, you are spewing alot of ahistorical bullshit in your post I don't even know where to begin. You pretend all of these events are happening outside of the context of the largest mass human slaughter on earth called World War I. You are ignoring the average life expectancy of the average Russia was on part of that of India and China. You ignore the fact that Lenin not seizing power when he did meant the continuation of the human slaughter that is world war I. You ignore the Kornilov affair, a literal attempted military coup. I know how how on earth you can ignore shit like that. Oh but you think Russia can have a bourgeoisie capitalist democracy and it not just leading to Bonapartism and black hundreds slaughtering everyone? Here's the difference, Germany, UK, France, USA, these are all first world nations, Russia was third world. That is where the revolutionary energy is at, the east. Marxism has been moving more and more towards the east where the real proletariat energy and revolutionary spirt lies. You are a neo-Menshevik and would have sided with the imperialists. Also Lenin wasn't a fucking dictator and got out voted several times.

Sebastian Wittekindt

Soviet is just the Russian word for Council, same thing as the German Räte they mention on the podcast. These organs of workers democracy pop up spontaneously in various forms during pretty much every revolution ever. Usually this takes the form of a factory council in which the workers of a factory vote how to run that factory and (under socialist leadership) elect delegates to work with other councils to solve broader problems like Defense or food supplies, etc; However they often also form outside of that, in neighbourhoods, and army barracks, where the soldiers decide to overthrow their officers and vote on what to do, which is very important to the success of a revolution. The brilliance of the Bolsheviks was that they realized that the soviets in Russia were socialism in embryo and therefor unapologetically advanced the slogan “all power to the soviets”, which over time made them the most popular party as the workers realized they couldn’t depend on the reformists in the transitional government.

Rum Hamburglar

This is kindof a weird conversation insofar as it seems to ignore the world outside Europe? Like whatever you think of the socialist movements in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea etc, the blanket statement that revolutionary confrontation with the state was no longer possible is just demonstrably untrue. I think it’s a defensible position if you’re talking specifically about industrialized Europe, but that distinction isn’t really made. It comes off as really blinkered.

Rum Hamburglar

Naw, I understood it fine, I just don’t think that distinction between workers uprisings and peasant-led rebellions was actually made in the episode. The point was made multiple times that confronting the state is an overdetermined impossibility and that modern revolutionary ideologies are simply cosplay, with no differentiation based on context.

jules

asia especially is a huge blind spot for matt imo. maybe that’ll change in the future but iirc his field of study’s always been american history, with some more recent divergences into european history. not sure about bessner

Matt Crossin

Europe had plenty of potentially/actually revolutionary confrontations with the state after the German revolution: Italy’s two red years, the Spanish Revolution, the anti-fascist libertarian movements, hungary 1956, may 1968. others in South America too, like the non-parliamentary movement in Chile (which Allende undermined, and paid the price for)

Matt Crossin

Though of course where there is a real point here is that the counter-revolutionary path taken in the Soviet Union (and Germany) were very important factors in many of those movements being crushed.

Ian Fletcher

Love the podcast. Please get a better theme song!

Craig Burley

I cannot begin to express how bad this fucken theme music is.

Isaac Suárez

Chill comrade. I’m not ignoring any of these nor do I disagree with the error of continuing the war. The war was a massive error and should have given rise, by any leftist’s honest calculation, a revolutionary change. Also, obviously, Russia was poor and life expectancy was terrible. My pointing out the historic context of the events around the October Revolution and the German Revolutions doesn’t even directly refute the thesis of the podcast. All that being said, you have a ridiculous view of history and you have clearly been done a disservice by whatever biased, dogmatic sources you draw from. Lenin did not have unquestioned power within the Bolshevik Party but his organizational methods and leadership were obviously more autocratic than that which existed with other socialist parties. This fact was well recognized even by his contemporaries such as Julius Martin, Maxim Gorky, and Rosa Luxembourg (even within his own party, notably Bogdanov, Lunacharksy, Kamenev, Pokrovsky, and Bubnov.) His advocacy for seizing power from the provisional government was also unpopular across the left and his own party (which is why his “April Theses” were not even unconditionally embraced by the Bolsheviks, as evidenced by the refusal of the party to back the armed demonstrations of the Petrograd garrison during the “July Days” of 1917.) He was usually “outvoted” before 1917 within the Russian Social Democratic Party by the very Mensheviks you call “imperialist” (despite the fact Menshevik Internationalists such as Martov, Trotsky and much of their rank and file also opposed the War.) After the October Revolution (which was a limited action of the Petrograd military committee at Lenin’s direct orders against the Provisional Government) his authority over the leadership of the party increased and was augmented by the conditions of the civil war he initiated (after they defeated and imprisoned Kornilov on behalf of the Kerensky government.)

Isaac Suárez

You also completely forget (or ignore or don’t know about) how brutally Lenin repressed left wing opposition within the socialist movement. After the White Armies were defeated, he ordered the storming of the Kronstadt naval base where militant sailors had protested Bolshevik autocracy. He also oversaw the brutal repression of the Tambov Rebellion which was les by Left SRs against grain requisitioning (a rebellion that was only contained following Lenin’s abandonment of “War Communism” by necessity.) There was very good reason why many western socialist parties did not embrace his methods nor his interpretation of Marxist theory, beyond bureaucratic self interest.

Isaac Suárez

As a wannabe tankie I’m sure you may have trouble wrapping your mind around this but it’s possible to respect Lenin as a theorist, understand his actions within the context of their times, and not wholeheartedly embrace his actions nor celebrate his impact on the Soviet Union. I give him credit for expanding Marxist theory to encompass anti-colonial struggles and his organizations, practices that were effective within a certain context (that of a conspiratorial party during a civil war or anticolonial revolution.) All that being said, he strangled Russian democracy in the crib, utilized disastrous economic and military strategies during the civil war (which actually made life WORSE for the Russian people than even what they had experienced under Tsarist autocracy). War Communism blew up in the Red Armies face, time and again (as evidenced by the mass starvation in the cities that, once again, was actually more severe than what had even occurred during the war.) He effectively annihilated the politically advanced Russian proletariat through starvation, purges and poor military organization (which was part of the reason why he had to walk back his polices under the NEP.) The primary reason why the Red Army won was because the White Army was led by idiots (who never unified nor effectively appealed to nor enlisted the peasantry or national minorities), the left wing opposition was fractured (some, such as the Maknovist “Black Army” and Left SRs at times fighting with the Red and at other times allying with them against the Whites; some, such as the left Mensheviks, siding with the reds while in exile, and others, like the Komuch and Defensist Mensheviks and Right SRs siding with the Whites or local peasant Greens.) Lenin could’ve very easily lost the war and largely won, not because of his superior appeal to the proletariat, but because he promised to end the war and return the land to the peasantry (the second promise being repeated broken by War Communist policies and failed efforts at collectivization.)

Isaac Suárez

Also, get your factions right, I would’ve been an SR, not a Menshevik. Regardless, it’s stupid to post facto say who you would’ve “sided with” (or use that hypothetical as a cudgel like some wannabe Bolshie cosplayer.) If anyone’s interested, read “A People’s Tragedy” by Orlando Figges which is main source. His analysis is much stronger than whatever dated semipropaganda our dear comrade is half remembering.

gaylord

Zapata hat

Yup

Love Hinge Points and the theme music fucking rocks

Jocelyn

Where's time for my stories?? I'm tired of this history nerds mid life crisis change the chanel or whatever we do now. Let's see the slop chanel

blackFFillip

For a guy who knows German history in such detail, Danny's German pronouciation is comically bad.

blackFFillip

This is taught in 7th grade Texas History

Ben L

Dam that’s crAzy

Kurtis Johnson

The series is about Hinge Points of history right? Since it is focused on the story of the SPD in 1914, wouldn't that limit the conversation to Europe for the sake of depth in this specific subject?

The Children of Jack Acid

Hinge Points isn't good............ ...... ..... ..... ........................ ........ ........ ........... it's GREAT!

J N

hinge points, the podcast with content we love and a theme song we love to hate

Ellen Harold

Luxemburg biopic on Youtube, I believe. It's great!

Gustav

Most what you’re saying is out of date - especially your characterisation of the dispute between Lenin and Martov. After 1917 and especially during the cold war this was reworked up into an abstract split - democratic vs conspiratorial methods - but it’s completely divorced from the content of the debate at the time, which was about the composition of a revolutionary coalition capable of accomplishing necessary tasks. You should read Lars Lih’s work on this topic.

Louis Sobol

if I hear “in a significant way” one more time 😡

Brandon

How the fuck do you spell Dikkenbonzen i cant find anything on it on google ive tried quite a few spellings

Diaga

Very late answer so you might have already found this out on your own but it’s “Dicke Bonzen”, “Bonze” being a derogatory term for bourgeois people/ party elites with a hint of class traitor 🙆🏾‍♀️