Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Sewell, Rob. Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution. 2014 edition. Fortress Books / Wellred, 2014.

In Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Rob Sewell delivers a lucid, politically engaged, and strategically rich retelling of the German revolutionary epoch and its tragic reversal. While the narrative is necessarily compressed, Sewell’s work succeeds in combining accessibility with a radical historiographical thrust: it offers the revolutionary movement essential lessons about leadership, strategy, and betrayal. From a revolutionary communist standpoint, this text is a valuable pedagogical tool, though not without its limits.

Clarity and political orientation

Sewell writes with clarity and urgency, refusing the false neutrality of bourgeois historiography. His orientation is unapologetically Marxist: he frames the German Revolution not merely as a sequence of political events, but as an arena in which the proletariat’s strategic capacities, the degenerations of leadership, and class compromise determined life and death. This makes the book especially useful as an introduction for militants and students who wish to see revolutionary history as an existential terrain, not a dead past.

Emphasis on leadership and mass agency

One of Sewell’s strongest contributions is his insistence on the dialectic between mass agency and leadership. He repeatedly shows that revolutions do not unfold as blind impersonal forces, but through the mediation of concrete revolutionary organizations, tactical choices, and political errors. In his narrative, the failure of the German working class to seize and consolidate power is not a deterministic inevitability but reveals how deficits of leadership, factionalism, and misorientation can tip the balance toward counter-revolution. This emphasis resonates deeply with the strategic current of revolutionary communism, which places the question of a fighting party and cadre development at the center.

Useful for comparative lessons and memory of defeats

By covering the trajectory from 1918 through the rise of Hitler, Sewell offers a compressed but coherent account that underscores critical turning points (e.g. the betrayal of 1919, the Ruhr crisis, the relative inaction around 1923, the defeats of 1929–33). For revolutionaries today, such a “heel-dragging” chronology helps sharpen vigilance: the fact that counter-revolution often succeeds not by grand coups but through slow attrition, demoralization, and political capitulation. Sewell’s narrative is thus a weapon against complacency. As one reviewer puts it, “Serious students of revolutionary history and those who fight for a better world will find this volume invaluable.”  

Accessibility for new cadres

Because of its relatively modest length and direct style, this work is far more approachable than multi-volume academic histories. Sewell’s edition includes new articles linking German lessons to the British situation circa 1919, which helps readers draw connections across national contexts.   For those building Marxist reading curricula within left organizations, Sewell’s book is a solid recommended text — it can be paired with deeper works (e.g. Pierre Broué, Harman’s The Lost Revolution) for supplementary depth.

Limited theoretical depth

While the book is strong on strategic and political narrative, it offers less in the way of theoretical innovation. It does not substantially deepen Marxist theory of counter-revolution, fascism, or state degeneration beyond existing Trotskyist paradigms. Readers thirsty for conceptual retooling must turn elsewhere.

Underdeveloped international milieu

Although Sewell mentions the Russian Revolution’s impact and the Comintern’s role, he devotes less space to situating German events within the broader world revolutionary wave or crises of international capitalism. A more dialectical treatment might have enriched the narrative, showing how external pressures, imperialist dynamics, and cross-border revolutionary expectations influenced choices in Germany.

Overall Evaluation: A Strategic Tool for the Revolutionary movement

From a revolutionary communist standpoint, Rob Sewell’s Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution is not the definitive scholarly monograph on the Weimar crisis—but that is not its function. Its value lies in its strategic framing, its role as an accessible introduction, and its capacity to stimulate militant reflection. For activists and students, Sewell’s text helps bridge the gap between dry academic history and the living urgency of revolutionary theory.

As long as one reads it critically and supplements it with deeper historical and theoretical works, this book can serve as a key pedagogical weapon in Marxist organizing. It reminds us that our defeats are not merely moral lessons, but living signposts: under what conditions did the working class fail, what could have been done differently, and how we must avoid repeating those errors.