A chronology of socialist revolutions.

[Ol' Dirty]

Hi...

Could you guys help me out in finding a timeline and history of all known socialist revolutions?

Thanks.

[Sacha]

Do you REALLY want just revolutions or are you actually looking for socialist resistance movements?

[foreverfaded]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Searc...list+Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Socialist+Revolution)

there is a list of socialist movements/revolutions and anything relevent to them

[Led Zeppelin]

There only were two; the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution.

[Cult of Reason]

Paris
Russian (all three of them)
Mexican
Spanish
Zapatista

That is all I can think of right at this moment

[LoneRed]

Irish uprising

[Severian]

As you can see, there's a certain amount of debate about what constitutes a "socialist revolution." Partly it's a terminological quibble; partly it's different opinions on how to assess different revolutions.

Don't think anyone's already done a timeline of all that in one place.

But here's some of the times working people have taken power and/or smashed capitalism as an economic system:
1871: Paris Commune, first workers government
1917: Russian Revolution; capitalist property nationalized 1918.
1918-1919: Hungarian, Bavarian, and other Soviet Republics, Red Finland, Berlin uprising, etc - all crushed, workers do not hold on to power
1946 or so: Yugoslav, Albanian revolutions. Capitalism smashed a couple years later. North Korean, Vietnamese revolutions; south Vietnam retaken by British & French.
1948: across Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, coalition governments break up and capitalist property is nationalized amid "wave of mass protests and strikes" (BBC) in Czechoslovakia for example.
1949: Chinese revolution.
1950: Korean war begins, capitalist property nationalized in China
1959: Cuban Revolution; capitalist property nationalized during 1960 - actions run ahead of words
1963: Algerian Revoution; workers& farmers government under Ben Bella fails to fully deal with capitalism economically and is overthrown a couple years later.
1976: fall of Saigon; capitalist property nationalized a couple years later. Pathet Lao take power around this time but I don't know anything about the result.
1979: Nicaraguan, Grenadan revolutions. Working people take power; capitalism never smashed economically; revolutions eventually reversed.
Also 1979: Khmer Rouge driven out of Cambodia; workers&farmers government established, but never solidly a socialist revolution economically.
1983-85: revolutionary government in Burkina Faso. No industry to speak of to nationalize; revolutionary-democratic tasks on the order of the day.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for the list Severian, but I think you missed out:

China 1926

Spain 1930's

Possibly France 1936

E Germany 1953

Hungary 1956

Poland 1956

Czechoslovakia, 1968.

Chile, 1972 (??)

Paris 1848

Portugal, 1974.

Iran, 1979.

Poland, 1980. (???)

Palestine, 1987-88. (???)

China, 1989. (?????)

Eastern Europe, 1989-90. (??)

Indonesia, 1998-99.

Serbia, 2000.

Argentina, 2000/2.

Venezuela 2002/6 (???)

Some of these are a bit dubious, I grant you, but it shows how combative the class is getting....

[Severian]

I was aiming for victorious anticapitalist revolutions, not those where the ruling class managed to hold onto power or the revolution was put down.

I did leave out Mongolia, sometime around 1920? And I lumped a number of east European post-WWII overturns together.

But the examples you gave are worth learning from also...they do all involve mass actions by workers seeking to bring down a regime (and sometimes succeeding, though their victory is hijacked.)

[Ol' Dirty]

Thanks, yo. Any more would be greatly apreciated.

[LoneRed]

Ireland 1916

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Severian, apologies, I thought you just wanted revolutions.

You are right, we can learn much from why these revolts failed, and why so many went down.

My work is exactly aimed at that -- looking at the background philosophy of those who led these revolts (or had an important political input), and why they faltered (not that I deny that objective factors were not important; I'd be a fool to think they weren't).

[Janus]

China 1926More like in 1927.


Also

France-1968

Laos-1975

Vietnam-1955

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Janus, thanks for that correction!

When you think about it, there have not been many years in the last 100 when there have been no revolutions, insurrections, mass movements....