Why Revolutionary Opportunities Miss Their Moment: Using Mandel on Germany to Understand Bernie, Podemos & Argentina

DSA peaked at 90,000 members during Bernie's 2020 campaign. Podemos went from street movement to government coalition in just five years. Corbyn's Labour mobilized hundreds of thousands of new activists. Yet none built the lasting revolutionary organization their moments seemed to promise. The pattern repeats across decades and continents - revolutionary opportunities emerge, organizations grow rapidly, then either bureaucratize or collapse just when they should be consolidating power.

The Contemporary Puzzle: Why do these opportunities consistently slip away? And why does the same failure pattern repeat whether we're talking about electoral surges, mass movements, or economic crises that create openings for radical politics?

Historical Template - Germany 1918-1923:

Ernest Mandel's analysis of the German Communist Party provides the clearest template for understanding this dynamic. As Mandel documented, "The secession of the Independent Socialist Party at the Halle Congress of October 1920 brought an enormous mass of workers evolving to the left, revolutionary or semi-revolutionary, into the Unified Communist Party of Germany, which, with this unification, became a mass party of very great scope. Officially, it declared half a million members."

Yet Mandel immediately notes: "And almost immediately a small catastrophe occurred. You see, this was the second or third in the story that would deal a very hard blow to this party, that would throw it very far back and that would make it lose an enormous number of members."

The catastrophe was the March Action of 1921. Mandel explains that "the mass of workers who moved first from the Social Democratic Party to the Independent Social Democratic Party, then to the Communist Party, was a mass of activist workers radicalized by the war and the revolutionary crisis and who wanted to fight on a large scale against the bourgeoisie...and who exerted very heavy pressure on the Communist Party leadership to move to action."

The leadership, under pressure from both their membership and the Communist International, launched an ultra-left adventure that Mandel describes as "an extremely dangerous theory...which believes that the initiative of the revolutionary party is indispensable to increase the combativity of the masses." The result was devastating: "A mass of members left the party [and] the unified party lost half the forces it had gained from the Independent Socialist Party, that is to say it lost them in the space of a few weeks."

Most critically, "The workers' vanguard, the more educated elements, the workers' leaders, notably almost all the militants of the factory councils movement, thus the revolutionary shop stewards—the elite, if you will, of the German working class, who had joined the party in October 1920, this was lost."

The Argentine Test Case:

Luis Meiners' account of Argentina’s 2001 crisis, which led to the Argentinazo uprising, offers a recent and clear example of this same dynamic. Speaking at the Tempest forum on "Building the Revolutionary Left Today," Meiners described how "the revolutionary left which was essentially composed of relatively small groups...were suddenly playing important roles in the class struggle." These small groups "won the leadership of the main student federation in the country...which groups 300,000 students of the biggest university in the country" and won "decisive influence in several unions."

Yet Meiners poses the crucial question: "So the question is from that situation when there was a mass turn to the left, why couldn't we, even when we played a role and even when we managed to have even electoral influence, etcetera... Why couldn't the revolutionary left emerge from that process as a mass-based party, or something, a broad vanguard party, or something that could bring in organization thousands and thousands of people that were radicalizing?"

Meiners identifies the core problem: "in a moment in which we went from the 90s which were extremely hostile for the revolutionary left...to a situation which was an opening for the revolutionary left. We did grow out of that of course but we did not live up to the moment in a certain sense."

The Organizational Trap:

Meiners' analysis directly echoes Mandel's insights about why organizations fail to scale up. He explains that revolutionary groups had developed "a model of revolutionary organization that in certain senses was inherited from Stalinism in many ways...this idea of having to have absolute complete political unity and bureaucratic centralism etcetera in order to build organizations."

This created what Meiners calls "defensive modes of organization in which any small difference led to a rupture within the organizations and broke the possibility of moving from a small propaganda organization to something that has broader political influence."

The parallel to Mandel's analysis is striking. Mandel had identified the same problem in the German KPD: after the March Action disaster, "the party would remain for years...divided for 8 years into two factions that hate each other to death, that wage war with knives, and that hardly speak to each other anymore."

Mandel's theoretical insight was that revolutionary leadership must avoid what he called "specialists of conquest of the masses and specialists of revolutionary initiative" who "substitute for each other in the leadership and who are characterized by an extremely one-sided approach to revolutionary politics." Instead, "a revolutionary leadership must be able to be characterized by both qualities. It must be capable of doing both."

The Irish Counter-Example:

People Before Profit offers a rare positive counter-example. Rather than the rapid growth-collapse cycle, they've built sustained influence through patient local work, clear class positions, and avoiding both sectarian isolation and reformist adaptation. Their approach suggests alternative pathways exist, though their model remains to be tested by the kind of explosive growth moments that destroyed other organizations.

The 5 Critical Stages Where Organizations Lose Their Moment:

1. Stage 1: "When 200 Becomes 2,000" - The membership explosion stage. Organizations suddenly attract people who don't share their founding political culture. As Meiners notes, "when people radicalize, they're not coming from Trotskyism or from revolutionary Marxism they're coming from very, very different places." Most groups either rigidly maintain old practices (driving out newcomers) or abandon political coherence (becoming liberal). Warning sign: Internal education collapses under pressure of growth.

2. Stage 2: "The Media Moment" - External visibility and influence grow rapidly. Leaders become public figures, the organization gains credibility. The temptation emerges to moderate positions for broader appeal. This is where Mandel's insight about maintaining both "conquest of the masses" and "revolutionary initiative" becomes crucial. Warning sign: Public messaging diverges from internal political education.

3. Stage 3: "Electoral Breakthrough" - Real political power becomes possible through elections or mass influence. Organizations face pressure to professionalize, create hierarchies, focus on short-term gains. Mandel's analysis of Brandler's successful United Front policy from 1921-1922 shows this can be navigated - Brandler applied United Front tactics "in an admirable manner...not in an excessively sectarian manner either, not with insults or foam at the mouth, but in a reasonable manner, taking support on the immediate demands of workers, taking support on economic strikes and gradually raising the question to the political domain." Warning sign: Electoral work begins driving overall political strategy rather than serving broader revolutionary goals.

4. Stage 4: "The Coalition Temptation" - Opportunities emerge for alliances with more established forces. The question becomes whether to maintain independent organization or merge into broader formations. This is where Andreu Coll's experience with Podemos becomes relevant - Anticapitalistas correctly identified when "they couldn't have any political coherence remaining inside Podemos" once it joined the government. Warning sign: Internal debates focus more on tactics for relating to other forces than on developing independent revolutionary capacity.

5. Stage 5: "Bureaucratization or Collapse" - The organization either becomes a stable reformist force integrated into the system, or fragments when contradictions become unsustainable. Mandel posed this question theoretically: "One can ask the question: is a legal mass revolutionary party conceivable? Is it conceivable that there be in an imperialist country hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries, not only in thought, in intentions, but in daily practice and that the bourgeoisie lets it happen?" Warning sign: Leadership selection depends more on administrative capability than revolutionary politics.

The Factional Warfare Problem:

Both Mandel and Meiners identify internal organizational dynamics as crucial to organizational failure. Mandel's analysis remains the most sophisticated treatment of this problem: "The dialectic of internal debate must be a dialectic of overcoming partial positions and in general, the struggle of polarized fractions does exactly the opposite and tends to maintain two pieces of a party on partial positions."

Mandel defended the right to form factions while warning that "fractions are a disease, they are not a good thing. And a party divided into more or less permanent organized fractions is a sick party...because this slows down or prevents the dialectic of internal debate."

The International Dimension:

Meiners makes a crucial point that Mandel would have endorsed: "Today, there is no single current within the revolutionary socialist movement internationally that can claim to have the answers to all of these questions. And probably the answers to some of these questions are going to come from the convergence of different socialist traditions, revolutionary socialist traditions."

This internationalist perspective suggests that overcoming the "missed moment" problem requires learning from diverse experiences rather than applying rigid formulas developed in particular national contexts.

Contemporary Applications:

Each contemporary example fits this pattern:

• DSA has stalled between stages 2-3, unable to transform from electoral auxiliary into independent revolutionary organization

• Podemos completed the full cycle to bureaucratization, exactly as Coll predicted when Anticapitalistas broke away

• Corbyn's movement collapsed at stage 4 when faced with the coalition choice between Labour establishment and independent organization

• Syriza followed the same trajectory as Podemos, from radical opposition to reformist government managing capitalism.

The Mandel-Meiners Convergence:

Both theorists, separated by 50 years, reached the same conclusion: revolutionary organizations must transform their internal culture and practices to match changing external conditions, while maintaining strategic coherence. This requires what Mandel called "the dialectic of overcoming partial positions" - neither rigid sectarianism nor opportunist adaptation, but creative synthesis that preserves revolutionary goals while adapting organizational forms.

Meiners' comment about broadening "the democratic aspects of democratic centralism" to "be able to incorporate these new experiences that were happening" directly parallels Mandel's call for revolutionary leadership capable of both mass work and revolutionary initiative without falling into factional specialization.

Conclusion:

The pattern isn't inevitable. Understanding these stages and their warning signs offers revolutionary organizations tools for navigating growth without losing political coherence. The challenge remains building organizations capable of both patient work in defensive periods and rapid expansion when opportunities emerge. As both Mandel and Meiners understood, this requires international coordination, flexible organizational forms, and above all, the ability to learn from both historical experience and contemporary struggles across different national contexts.

The convergence between Mandel's 1970s analysis and contemporary revolutionary experience suggests that core organizational problems persist across different historical periods, requiring both historical consciousness and contemporary innovation.