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November 4, 2017 - No. 35 100th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution The Greatest
Revolution that
100th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution The Greatest Revolution that Shook the World
The greatest revolution that shook the world and
ushered
in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution took place
one hundred years ago on November 7, 1917. The Communist Party of
Canada (Marxist-Leninist) salutes this revolution with full
conviction that the transition from capitalism to socialism is
inevitable. We are confident that the working and oppressed peoples of
the world will find their emancipation only with a repeat of the Great
October Socialist Revolution. The conditions of imperialism which gave
rise to the Great October Revolution still exist at this time. There is
still the contradiction between imperialism, and the oppressed peoples
and nations; among the imperialist countries and monopoly groups; and
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As long as these
conditions
exist there will be struggle to resolve them. Today the reactionary forces that overthrew the first state in the hands of the working people are in profound crisis. To divert from their crisis and the need for solutions, they continue to use a Cold War portrayal of communism to deprive people of an outlook on the basis of which they can bring about the changes they require. For these reactionary forces, communism is a brutal dictatorship because it deprives them of all their privileges and smashes inhuman relations based on ownership of property. They consider the corrupt and defunct liberal democracy to be the End of History. Attempts are made to divert from the deep crisis in which the bourgeois democracy is mired to make sure the working class does not formulate what can be done to change the direction of the economy and create new arrangements that favour the working class and people. Meanwhile, the liberal democracy has been reduced to its police powers. This requires the criminalization of speech and dissent at home and war and aggression abroad.
The Soviet Union played a crucial role in the defeat of
Nazi-fascism and Japanese militarism. The victories of World War II
were
such that the peoples the world over were marching to the
drumbeat of peace, freedom and democracy, looking towards
communism to affirm their rights and win national liberation.
Following World War II, in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the
Caribbean
as well as the imperialist heartlands, the reputation of
communism was very high. People were making great advances in
their struggles for emancipation and to end colonial and
imperialist domination. To stem this advance, the Anglo-American
imperialists launched the Cold War to snuff out the peoples'
struggle for their rights. Institutions of international
subversion and aggressive military alliances were set into motion
to stop any attempts at progress. A vast international campaign
of lies and distortions was launched to sow doubt about communism
and the Soviet Union which had given great hope and inspiration
to all peoples fighting for national liberation and social
emancipation all over the world. The imperialist agencies
introduced bourgeois politics into the workers' and communist
movement. Based on gossips about personalities and events, the aim
was and continues to be, to deprive the working class of its own
outlook. To this day, the reactionary forces continue to claim
that socialism failed in the Soviet Union because there is some
inherent flaw in it. What that flaw is, they do not say. This
speculation leads some to suggest that scientific socialism is fine in
theory but does not work in practice. How can it be that what is sound
in theory does not work in practice? This is an unsound proposition and
again they do not explain. The
speculators also go to great lengths to convince themselves that
socialist revolution and socialist construction are phenomena of the
past. Socialism and communism, according to them, are finished once and
for all. They suggest that the complete restoration of capitalism in
the Russian Federation and elsewhere is an irreversible trend. Hail the 100th Anniversary of the
Great October Socialist Revolution! Build the Communist Party and Proletarian Front!
The Great October Revolution shook the old world to its roots and brought a new one into being. Its victory signaled the end of the First World War, a terrible war fought between imperialist countries for the re-division of the world. The October Revolution created the first socialist state and the conditions for the development of Soviet power, a nation-building project led by the Proletarian Front. Immediately, the working class and peasantry led by the Communist Party withdrew Russia from World War I and began to settle scores with its own imperialist bourgeoisie and feudal landlord class. The Proletarian Front, with its organized self-defence contingents that eventually became the Red Army, routed the police forces and military of the Russian imperialist bourgeoisie and landlords, which were aided by a military intervention of fourteen countries. The new country began to construct socialism not with empty policy objectives but with deeds that guaranteed the people public education, health care, basic humane living conditions and control over their economic and political affairs. These were all unprecedented achievements. Soon the country was industrialized giving it a material base to meet the needs of the people and to defend itself from imperialist aggression.[1]
The Soviet Union forged an unforgettable position in the annals of the people's history for annihilating the Nazi hordes who stormed into the country in 1941. The Soviet peoples through their heroic struggle led by
the
Communist Party made the greatest sacrifice during World War II
in defeating the Axis Powers of German Nazis, Italian Fascists
and Japanese militarists. The October Revolution galvanized the anti-colonial/national liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and showed the peoples of the world that the imperialist bourgeoisie can be beaten. It can be done, if the road of Lenin and the Proletarian Front are upheld and developed.
Together, Let Us Open Society's Path to Progress
The 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist
Revolution comes 26 years since the collapse of the former Soviet
Union. Humanity can clearly see the profound crisis in which the
U.S. striving for world domination is mired. Also clear to all,
the rule brought into being in Russia and eastern European
countries since capitalism was re-established has not provided
the promised prosperity and security to the peoples. The
bourgeois euphoria has long expired. The Rule of Law established
and re-established in those countries replaced one form of
corruption with another and has now, under the guise of permanent
war on terror become Rule by Exception and governments of
police powers, not of law. Meanwhile, the peoples are
disenfranchised and see no end to the conflicts or worsening
conditions, which even flare up into reactionary bloody civil
wars such as in Ukraine. Today, anarchy and chaos prevail in all spheres of the economy, politics, and social and cultural life. The countries that abandoned the path of the October Revolution are mired in all the ills of the capitalist system: poverty on one pole and fabulous oligarchic riches on the other, and a broad marginalization of people from their economic and political affairs. In the imperialist heartlands, private interests, the anti-social offensive and warmongering are presented as values that uphold the national interest, while any country which does not accept the U.S. as indispensable is targeted for elimination. What the U.S. cannot control, it sets out to destroy. Wars are no longer politics by other means but wars of destruction. Without politics there can be no peace negotiations either.
Besides the damaging reality, the lessons of the October
Revolution and its Leninist principles are not taken seriously. The
persistence in sticking to social democratic prescriptions runs deep,
infecting the working class movement profoundly not only in Europe but
throughout the world. Social democrats confuse governments which come
and go with the state power. They say winning government is necessary
to implement socialist policy objectives. Falling short of gaining
government status, they argue the working class and its allies must
pressure or lobby the existing government power to be pro-social. This
illusion-mongering of a parliamentary road to socialism is embedded
within the imperialist countries. Lenin stood staunchly opposed to it
and led the Russian proletariat and peasants to victory in the October
Revolution, which of course became the scourge of the social democrats
in alliance with the Nazis who did everything to destroy the working
class nation-building project and its positive influence on the world. Within the imperialist countries including the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin, the betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and adoption of one or another variant of pragmatism was profound and widespread. A determined struggle had to be waged to rescue the banner of Marxism-Leninism and its principles. This included upholding the Leninist conclusion that the government is one institution within the state and not the most powerful by any means. The ultimate power of the bourgeois state is the police power which establishes various layers of secret organization comprised of private interests whose instruments include a political police and spy agencies, among others. One of the main tasks entrusted to the police power controlled and led by the ruling imperialist bourgeoisie is to deprive the working class and people and polity of an outlook which is advantageous to themselves. Everything possible is done to smash the people's political movement for empowerment. From revolution to counterrevolution, history has its own twists and turns and our responsibility is to ensure we contribute to opening society's path to progress. On this important occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) expresses its complete confidence that humankind will always look back with admiration and respect to the days of October of the year 1917, when proletarian salvoes were fired marking the dawn of a new world. History will assuredly experience once again revolutions of the calibre of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The Marxist and Leninist classics remain a living guide to turn the successes humankind has achieved to date into lasting victory. Our confidence in the working class and the human factor/social consciousness inspires us to build the Communist Party and Proletarian Front as the necessary subjective condition for revolution.
Long Live the Great October Socialist
Revolution! Long Live
Leninism! Note1. In 1944, the President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eric Johnston, said the Soviet economy was "an unexampled achievement in the industrial history of the whole world." By the end of the first five-year plan in early 1933, the Soviet Union was the second most industrialized nation, with the doubling of industrial workers from 11 to 22 million, coupled with the doubling of industrial output. In the Central Asian Republics and in Kazakhstan the industrial growth rate was fourfold and sixfold. The first five-year plan was a great success as was evident in the production indexes in mining, steel, and chemicals. Factories were being built virtually everywhere with giant dams and railroads also being constructed. By the second five-year plan in 1935, coal miners had doubled production of that of Germany, and by 1936 the Magnitogorsk Steelworks was the largest in Europe, and the Chelyabinsk caterpillar tractor factory the largest in the world. In much of heavy industrial production, such as steel,
cast iron,
aluminum and electric
power, the output of the Soviet Union outstripped that of traditional
capitalist countries. The
Soviet economy comprised 10 per cent of the world's industrial
production.
Between 1924 and
1940, grain crops increased by 11 per cent, coal by 10 per cent, steel
production by
18 per cent, engineering and
metal industries by 150 per cent, and national income by 10 per cent.
Factory and
office workers grew
from less than 8 million to 37 million and between 1913 and 1940 oil
production increased to
35 million tons from 9 million tons with thousands of units of
tractors, harvester combines,
and machine tools also being produced. In early 1930, the number of
tractors in the Soviet Union was 34,900 and by 1938 it had increased by
almost fourteen times to 483,500. In the same period, the number of
combine-harvesters was augmented from 1,700 to 153,500 and the number
of
harvesters alone increased from 4,300 to 130,800. Volume
of
Industrial
Output
(Per
Cent
of
1929)
(Sources: mltheory.wordpress.com; Henri Barbusse. Stalin (New York: The MacMillan Company,1935), pp. 201-205.) Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution
The fourth anniversary of October 25 (November 7) is approaching. The farther that great day recedes from us, the more clearly we see the significance of the proletarian revolution in Russia, and the more deeply we reflect upon the practical experience of our work as a whole. Very briefly and, of course, in very incomplete and rough outline, this significance and experience may be summed up as follows. The direct and immediate object of the revolution in Russia was a bourgeois-democratic one, namely, to destroy the survivals of medievalism and sweep them away completely, to purge Russia of this barbarism, of this shame, and to remove this immense obstacle to all culture and progress in our country.
And we can justifiably pride ourselves on having carried out that purge with greater determination and much more rapidly, boldly and successfully, and, from the point of view of its effect on the masses, much more widely and deeply, than the great French Revolution over one hundred and twenty-five years ago. Both the anarchists and the petty-bourgeois democrats (i.e., the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who are the Russian counterparts of that international social type) have talked and are still talking an incredible lot of nonsense about the relation between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist (that is, proletarian) revolution. The last four years have proved to the hilt that our interpretation of Marxism on this point, and our estimate of the experience of former revolutions were correct. We have consummated the bourgeois-democratic revolution as nobody had done before. We are advancing towards the socialist revolution consciously, firmly and unswervingly, knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeois-democratic revolution by a Chinese Wall, and knowing too that (in the last analysis) struggle alone will determine how far we shall advance, what part of this immense and lofty task we shall accomplish, and to what extent we shall succeed in consolidating our victories. Time will show. But we see even now that a tremendous amount -- tremendous for this ruined, exhausted and backward country -- has already been done towards the socialist transformation of society. Let us, however, finish what we have to say about the bourgeois-democratic content of our revolution. Marxists must understand what that means. To explain, let us take a few striking examples. The bourgeois-democratic content of the revolution means that the social relations (system, institutions) of the country are purged of medievalism, serfdom, feudalism. What were the chief manifestations, survivals, remnants of serfdom in Russia up to 1917? The monarchy, the system of social estates, landed proprietorship and land tenure, the status of women, religion, and national oppression. Take any one of these Augean stables, which, incidentally, were left largely uncleansed by all the more advanced states when they accomplished their bourgeois-democratic revolutions one hundred and twenty-five, two hundred and fifty and more years ago (1649 in England); take any of these Augean stables, and you will see that we have cleansed them thoroughly. In a matter of ten weeks, from October 25 (November 7), 1917 to January 5, 1918, when the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, we accomplished a thousand times more in this respect than was accomplished by the bourgeois democrats and liberals (the Cadets) and by the petty-bourgeois democrats (the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries) during the eight months they were in power. Those poltroons, gas-bags, vainglorious Narcissuses and petty Hamlets brandished their wooden swords -- but did not even destroy the monarchy! We cleansed out all that monarchist muck as nobody had ever done before. We left not a stone, not a brick of that ancient edifice, the social-estate system (even the most advanced countries, such as Britain, France and Germany, have not completely eliminated the survivals of that system to this day!), standing. We tore out the deep-seated roots of the social-estate system, namely, the remnants of feudalism and serfdom in the system of landownership, to the last. "One may argue" (there are plenty of quill-drivers, Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries abroad to indulge in such arguments) as to what "in the long run" will be the outcome of the agrarian reform effected by the Great October Revolution. We have no desire at the moment to waste time on such controversies, for we are deciding this, as well as the mass of accompanying controversies, by struggle. But the fact cannot be denied that the petty-bourgeois democrats "compromised" with the landowners, the custodians of the traditions of serfdom, for eight months, while we completely swept the landowners and all their traditions from Russian soil in a few weeks. Take religion, or the denial of rights to women, or the oppression and inequality of the non-Russian nationalities. These are all problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The vulgar petty-bourgeois democrats talked about them for eight months. In not a single one of the most advanced countries in the world have these questions been completely settled on bourgeois-democratic lines. In our country they have been settled completely by the legislation of the October Revolution. We have fought and are fighting religion in earnest. We have granted all the non-Russian nationalities their own republics or autonomous regions. We in Russia no longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism, which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie and the dull-witted and frightened petty bourgeoisie in every other country in the world without exception. All this goes to make up the content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. One hundred and fifty and 250 years ago the progressive leaders of that revolution (or of those revolutions, if we consider each national variety of the one general type) promised to rid mankind of medieval privileges, of sex inequality, of state privileges for one religion or another (or "religious ideas," "the church" in general), and of national inequality. They promised, but did not keep their promises. They could not keep them, for they were hindered by their "respect" -- for the "sacred right of private property." Our proletarian revolution was not afflicted with this accursed "respect" for this thrice-accursed medievalism and for the "sacred right of private property." But in order to consolidate the achievements of the bourgeois-democratic revolution for the peoples of Russia, we were obliged to go farther; and we did go farther. We solved the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a "by-product" of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities. We have always said that reforms are a by-product of the revolutionary class struggle. We said -- and proved it by deeds -- that bourgeois-democratic reforms are a by-product of the proletarian, i.e., of the socialist revolution. Incidentally, the Kautskys, Hilferdings, Martovs, Chernovs, Hillquits, Longuets, MacDonalds, Turatis and other heroes of "Two-and-a-Half" Marxism were incapable of understanding this relation between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist revolutions. The first develops into the second. The second, in passing, solves the problems of the first. The second consolidates the work of the first. Struggle, and struggle alone, decides how far the second succeeds in outgrowing the first. The Soviet system is one of the most vivid proofs, or manifestations, of how the one revolution develops into the other. The Soviet system provides the maximum of democracy for the workers and peasants; at the same time, it marks a break with bourgeois democracy and the rise of a new, epoch-making type of democracy, namely, proletarian democracy, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Let the curs and swine of the moribund bourgeoisie and of the petty-bourgeois democrats who trail behind them heap imprecations, abuse and derision upon our heads for our reverses and mistakes in the work of building up our Soviet system. We do not forget for a moment that we have committed and are committing numerous mistakes and are suffering numerous reverses. How can reverses and mistakes be avoided in a matter so new in the history of the world as the building of an unprecedented type of state edifice! We shall work steadfastly to set our reverses and mistakes right and to improve our practical application of Soviet principles, which is still very, very far from being perfect. But we have a right to be and are proud that to us has fallen the good fortune to begin the building of a Soviet state, and thereby to usher in a new era in world history, the era of the rule of a new class, a class which is oppressed in every capitalist country, but which everywhere is marching forward towards a new life, towards victory over the bourgeoisie, towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, towards the emancipation of mankind from the yoke of capital and from imperialist wars. The question of imperialist wars, of the international
policy
of finance capital which now dominates the whole world, a policy
that must inevitably engender new imperialist wars, that
must inevitably cause an extreme intensification of national
oppression, pillage, brigandry and the strangulation of weak,
backward and small nationalities by a handful of "advanced"
powers -- that question has been the keystone of all policy in all
the countries of the globe since 1914. It is a question of life
and death for millions upon millions of people. It is a question
of whether 20,000,000 people (as compared with the 10,000,000 who
were killed in the war of 1914-18 and in the supplementary
"minor" wars that are still going on) are to be slaughtered in
the next imperialist war, which the bourgeoisie are preparing,
and which is growing out of capitalism before our very eyes. It
is a question of whether in that future war, which is inevitable
(if capitalism continues to exist), 60,000,000 people are to be
maimed (compared with the 30,000,000 maimed in 1914-18). In this
question, too, our October Revolution marked the beginning of a
new era in world history. The lackeys of the bourgeoisie and its
yes-men -- the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, and the
petty-bourgeois, allegedly "socialist," democrats all over the
world -- derided our slogan "convert the imperialist war into a
civil war." But that slogan proved to be the truth -- it
was the only truth, unpleasant, blunt, naked and brutal, but
nevertheless the truth, as against the host of most
refined jingoist and pacifist lies. Those lies are being
dispelled. The Brest peace has been exposed. And with every
passing day the significance and consequences of a peace that is
even worse than the Brest peace -- the peace of Versailles -- are being
more relentlessly exposed. And the millions who are thinking
about the causes of the recent war and of the approaching future
war are more and more clearly realising the grim and inexorable
truth that it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and
imperialist peace (if the old orthography were still in use, I
would have written the word mir in two ways, to give it
both its meanings) [In Russian, the word mir has two
meanings (world and peace) and had two different spellings in the
old orthography. -- Translator] which inevitably engenders
imperialist war, that it is impossible to escape that inferno, except
by
a
Bolshevik
struggle
and
a
Bolshevik
revolution.
Let the bourgeoisie and the pacifists, the generals and the petty bourgeoisie, the capitalists and the philistines, the pious Christians and the knights of the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals vent their fury against that revolution. No torrents of abuse, calumnies and lies can enable them to conceal the historic fact that for the first time in hundreds and thousands of years the slaves have replied to a war between slave-owners by openly proclaiming the slogan: "Convert this war between slave-owners for the division of their loot into a war of the slaves of all nations against the slave-owners of all nations." For the first time in hundreds and thousands of years that slogan has grown from a vague and helpless waiting into a clear and definite political programme, into an effective struggle waged by millions of oppressed people under the leadership of the proletariat; it has grown into the first victory of the proletariat, the first victory in the struggle to abolish war and to unite the workers of all countries against the united bourgeoisie of different nations, against the bourgeoisie that makes peace and war at the expense of the slaves of capital, the wage-workers, the peasants, the working people. This first victory is not yet the final victory, and it was achieved by our October Revolution at the price of incredible difficulties and hardships, at the price of unprecedented suffering, accompanied by a series of serious reverses and mistakes on our part. How could a single backward people be expected to frustrate the imperialist wars of the most powerful and most developed countries of the world without sustaining reverses and without committing mistakes! We are not afraid to admit our mistakes and shall examine them dispassionately in order to learn how to correct them. But the fact remains that for the first time in hundreds and thousands of years the promise "to reply" to war between the slave-owners by a revolution of the slaves directed against all the slave-owners has been completely fulfilled -- and is being fulfilled despite all difficulties. We have made the start. When, at what date and time, and the proletarians of which nation will complete this process is not important. The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown. Gentlemen, capitalists of all countries, keep up your hypocritical pretence of "defending the fatherland" -- the Japanese fatherland against the American, the American against the Japanese, the French against the British, and so forth! Gentlemen, knights of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals, pacifist petty bourgeoisie and philistines of the entire world, go on "evading" the question of how to combat imperialist wars by issuing new "Basle Manifestos" (on the model of the Basle Manifesto of 1912[1]). The first Bolshevik revolution has wrested the first hundred million people of this earth from the clutches of imperialist war and the imperialist world. Subsequent revolutions will deliver the rest of mankind from such wars and from such a world. Our last, but most important and most difficult task, the one we have done least about, is economic development, the laying of economic foundations for the new, socialist edifice on the site of the demolished feudal edifice and the semi-demolished capitalist edifice. It is in this most important and most difficult task that we have sustained the greatest number of reverses and have made most mistakes. How could anyone expect that a task so new to the world could be begun without reverses and without mistakes! But we have begun it. We shall continue it. At this very moment we are, by our New Economic Policy, correcting a number of our mistakes. We are learning how to continue erecting the socialist edifice in a small-peasant country without committing such mistakes. The difficulties are immense. But we are accustomed to grappling with immense difficulties. Not for nothing do our enemies call us "stone-hard" and exponents of a "firm line policy." But we have also learned, at least to some extent, another art that is essential in revolution, namely, flexibility, the ability to effect swift and sudden changes of tactics if changes in objective conditions demand them, and to choose another path for the achievement of our goal if the former path proves to be inexpedient or impossible at the given moment. Borne along on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm, rousing first the political enthusiasm and then the military enthusiasm of the people, we expected to accomplish economic tasks just as great as the political and military tasks we had accomplished by relying directly on this enthusiasm. We expected -- or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed without having given it adequate consideration -- to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small-peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong. It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary -- state capitalism and socialism -- in order to prepare -- to prepare by many years of effort -- for the transition to communism. Not directly relying on enthusiasm, but aided by the enthusiasm engendered by the great revolution, and on the basis of personal interest, personal incentive and business principles, we must first set to work in this small peasant country to build solid gangways to socialism by way of state capitalism. Otherwise we shall never get to communism, we shall never bring scores of millions of people to communism. That is what experience, the objective course of the development of the revolution, has taught us. And we, who during these three or four years have learned a little to make abrupt changes of front (when abrupt changes of front are needed), have begun zealously, attentively and sedulously (although still not zealously, attentively and sedulously enough) to learn to make a new change of front, namely, the New Economic Policy. The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd "businessman," a punctilious wholesale merchant -- otherwise it will never succeed in putting this small-peasant country economically on its feet. Under existing conditions, living as we are side by side with the capitalist (for the time being capitalist) West, there is no other way of progressing to communism. A wholesale merchant seems to be an economic type as remote from communism as heaven from earth. But that is one of the contradictions which, in actual life, lead from a small-peasant economy via state capitalism to socialism. Personal incentive will step up production; we must increase production first and foremost and at all costs. Wholesale trade economically unites millions of small peasants: it gives them a personal incentive, links them up and leads them to the next step, namely, to various forms of association and alliance in the process of production itself. We have already started the necessary changes in our economic policy and already have some successes to our credit; true, they are small and partial, but nonetheless they are successes. In this new field of "tuition" we are already finishing our preparatory class. By persistent and assiduous study, by making practical experience the test of every step we take, by not fearing to alter over and over again what we have already begun, by correcting our mistakes and most carefully analysing their significance, we shall pass to the higher classes. We shall go through the whole "course," although the present state of world economics and world politics has made that course much longer and much more difficult than we would have liked. No matter at what cost, no matter how severe the hardships of the transition period may be -- despite disaster, famine and ruin -- we shall not flinch; we shall triumphantly carry our cause to its goal.
(October 14, 1921)
Note1. The Extraordinary International Socialist Congress that sat in Basle on November 24-25, 1912, adopted a manifesto on war, which warned the peoples that an imperialist world war was imminent, showed the predatory objectives of that war and called upon the workers of all countries to make a determined stand for peace. It included a point, contributed by Lenin to the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, that if an imperialist war broke out the socialists should utilise the economic and political crisis stemming from it to accelerate the downfall of capitalist class domination and to work for a socialist revolution.
(Source: Lenin's Collected Works, 2nd English Ed., Vol. 33 ( Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1965), pp. 51-59.) Lenin and Leninism The Name and Work of V.I. Lenin Will Always
|
Any serious government
considering socialism as more than a
policy objective has to contend with the police power. The police
power is the centre of power of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The
only force capable of dealing with the police power and
overcoming it is the Proletarian Front led by the Communist
Party. Reluctance to build the Proletarian Front is endemic
within the imperialist countries due to many factors including
importantly the ideological pressure from the ruling elite, in
particular pragmatism, and the abundance of social wealth stolen
from the oppressed countries that can be used to bribe working
class leaders and intellectuals. 
From the beginning, Lenin set his
work along the
theoretical
conclusions of Marxism. In this respect, he had a complete
outlook of scientific socialism, based on the firm belief that
the only road to open the path for the progress of society is the
road of the emancipation of the working class through the
proletarian revolution. This belief of Lenin, far from being
invalidated by the developments in the last decade of the 20th
century and since then, has been fully validated.
Lenin's conclusions about
the state and revolution, the
role
of the working class and its organizations, the role of the
peasantry and other social strata, the role of the Bolshevik
Party to lead in a step-wise manner, the stages in the revolution
and their completion and the building of the unity of all toiling
masses around the working class, the waging of the class
struggle, with the international proletariat playing its role as
the strategic reserve of revolution, and the study of the
objective conditions and strategy and tactics, taken together
constitute a whole; a body of ideas which must be defended and
elaborated. This body of ideas must be developed from the present
conditions with a unique and fresh quality, which means that they
must be based on modern definitions. These ideas have a profound
meaning as they were brought into being in this epoch, the
character of which is still the same. For this reason, these
ideas have great relevance so long as they are not reduced to
dogma.
In Canada, the revolutionary youth confronted
the
importing
of models and exceptionalism. Denouncing exceptionalism as an
attack on science and a return to medievalism, the revolutionary
youth insisted on the necessity to have our own models based on
our own revolutionary practice. This enabled the Canadian
communists and the working class to develop their own work based
on their own conditions and thinking guided by the most advanced
ideology. This led to the affirmation and deepening of Leninism
in the conditions of the last decades of the 20th century
and to the renovation and reaffirmation of Leninist principles on
organization and tactics when the revolution went into retreat by
the turn of the century. The leadership of CPC(M-L) insisted on
contemporary Marxist-Leninist Thought as the basic ideology
guiding our thinking and on the conscious participation of each
and every individual communist and worker in revolutionary
practice to build an alternative, giving rise to the Necessity
for Change analysis from which arose the motto of CPC(M-L), |
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The October Revolution proved that the working class can have its own independent view of how to organize the economy and politics. Not only can it have its own view and practice but that it must have its own view and practice if it is to be successful in opening the door to progress, ensuring peace among nations based on recognizing all nations big and small as equal and with their right to self-determination, and moving the world towards the emancipation of the working class and the elimination of class society.
The October Revolution put the resources of the Russian nation behind solving the problems of hunger and want and providing education and health care for all, and established concrete state mechanisms that were dedicated to solving social problems in practice without hindrance from vested private interests and the theft and draining of added-value by a privileged idle class.
The October Revolution began the process to bring ownership of the socialized economy into the hands of the working class and collective organizations of the peasantry. This meant first the nationalization of the major industries and resources. Owners of capital that gave up opposition to the October Revolution were rewarded with compensation but removed from all positions of authority within the economy. All capitalist inheritance was banned. Those that refused to cooperate with the new working class state had their capital expropriated without compensation and were expected to work for a living.
The October Revolution began the process to harmonize the production of goods and services and the delivery of those goods and services to the people. This entailed removing the parasites from the banking and insurance sectors and eventually from all sectors of circulation of goods and services, especially the wholesale sector in the beginning.
The October Revolution began the process to solve the land question and organize the liberation of the oppressed peasantry in Russia, the Ukraine and other peasant nations and regions of the Soviet Union. This required the most difficult struggle to move farming from petty production to mass industrialized farming without destroying the peasants and forcibly removing them from the land and depopulating the countryside. This meant first expropriating the land and power of the landlords and secondly to organize the poor and landless peasants for an eventual showdown with the kulaks or rich peasants. For the first time in world history a revolution of a social class, the poor and landless peasants, was supported by the state and by the urban working class that went in great numbers to the countryside to assist the peasantry in this epic battle to collectivize and to transform agriculture from petty to mass industrialized production and to bring them machinery and help their peasant Soviets in assuming real effective political power.
The October Revolution began to reform the methods the state used to claim revenue to fund social programs, the government bureaucracy, the Red Army and police. Government claims were established and determined at the centres of production of added-value. Revenue gathered from the wealth produced by the working class and peasants first had to go towards guaranteeing the well-being of the masses in all its forms, especially their social programs and into defending the revolution from imperialist aggression and subversion. The claims of owners of equity and debt (foreign and Russian) on realized added-value were mostly eliminated. This left the claims of the state and the claims of the actual producers as the sole claimants on the added-value produced by the working class and peasants. Russian colonial ownership of land and means of production abroad was repudiated and handed back to the existing authorities in the respective countries.
Leninism and the October Revolution unblocked the movement for enlightenment in Russia. This gave rise to significant advances in the field of rights, especially economic rights, directing the Soviet state to guarantee livelihoods and the well-being of all throughout life. This movement for rights culminated in the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, which was certainly the most advanced at that time and later influenced the deliberations on the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
The October Revolution began the historic transition period of socialism. Socialism is the heroic period of class warfare bridging the gap between the 4,000-year grip on human society by ruling social classes and their exploitation of fellow human beings and the new era of communism, which represents the emancipation of the working class and the total elimination of classes and class society. The period of socialism has to solve the problem of eliminating Bourgeois Right and the arrangements based on it from the thinking and practice of society, just as bourgeois society had to eliminate the thinking and practice based on Absolute Right. Today, bourgeois society faced with the need for profound democratic and constitutional renewal is reverting to arrangements based on Absolute Right, making the recognition of Necessity for Change increasingly urgent. Among other things socialism is a period of unremitting struggle against the remnants of class society in terms of culture, especially in ideological and social forms and for an international transition to a new socially conscious human being and societies without social classes and exploitation of humans by humans.
The October Revolution was the first break in the chain of imperialist states. The imperialist system of states was breached and severely weakened by the removal of such a huge land mass and population from its control. The breach in the imperialist system of states deepened the crisis of capitalism in its constant search for markets to exploit and natural resources to plunder. The October Revolution added a new contradiction to those plaguing the imperialist system of states: the contradiction between the countries within the imperialist system of states led and dominated by the most powerful versus the new liberated homeland of the international proletariat, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
As Lenin predicted: after the working class seizes power the bourgeoisie becomes even more ferocious and determined to regain political and economic power by any means. The history after the October Revolution is one of constant and unremitting class struggle for the working class to retain power in the Soviet Union and resist the attacks of those determined to restore capitalism. The working class under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Stalin fought heroically to defend the nation-building project of the working class from the imperialist system of states and from the intrigue and subversion of the overthrown classes within the liberated homeland of the international proletariat.
The industrialization of
the Soviet Union, spread of
science
and the application of technology to production and distribution,
especially during the 1930s when the imperialist system of states
was gripped by a devastating worldwide depression, was an heroic
feat accomplished without plundering foreign lands for investment
funds, raw materials and markets. This was the first time that
any large country accomplished the transition from petty
production to mass industrial production without foreign plunder
for investment funds and without mass dislocation and devastation
of the peasantry. This showed the world that a socialist
self-reliant economy can be built and that accumulated-value
(investment funds) for social programs and extended reproduction
can come from within the economy, from the hard work of the
working class and peasantry combined with science and modern
technology. However, this is only true when the society is free
from the claims of an idle ruling class, which owns the
socialized economy and directs it for its own narrow aim towards
recurring crises and war. With a self-reliant socialized economy
under the control of the working class and peasantry and freed
from an idle ruling class, the added-value from production can go
to the living conditions of the people, investments in social
programs, the needs of the state and into extended reproduction
of the socialized means of production and distribution.
The socialist transition period to communism in the Soviet Union was sabotaged when those in authority refused to continue the class struggle against the remnants of class society in political, economic, cultural, ideological and social forms. This led to a block in the leadership to resolving in particular the political problem of raising the working class to the position of ruling class in practice. This refusal to lead the socialist transition period to deal with its contradictions opened the floodgates for a return to capitalism; this refusal and capitulation to capitalist restoration was officially announced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. The October Revolution came to an unofficial official end at that time whereupon the Soviet Union was converted into a social-imperialist power competing for world domination with its nemesis, the United States. But the lessons and glorious accomplishments of the October Revolution in all fields of human endeavour will live forever. The rule of the working class lasted far longer than the Paris Commune of 1871 creating an enormous wealth of direct experience to assist the international workers and communist movement and its future nation-building projects.
Socialist society is the most revolutionary and dynamic of all human societies that have hitherto come into being; it must be so in order to mobilize the masses to oppose the remnants of class society especially in political and social form and in culture especially its ideological and social forms.
The key issue is that communists and the revolutionary working class must rise to the occasion of the here and now and the necessity to change the world they face. The working class and communists struggle in the conditions that they have been handed whether as revolutionary communist cadre within the former Soviet Union fighting to advance socialist society, fighting might and main to stop the remnants of the capitalist class from retaking political power or fighting to organize the working class in the imperialist countries for proletarian revolution whether that revolution is in flow or retreat. There is no good time or bad time or worse time or better time for communists and the working class; there is only this time and space, the here and now and the necessity for change. Sometimes communists forget the long difficult days for the Bolsheviks during the period of Stolypin reaction after 1905 following the cruel defeat of what Lenin called the "dress rehearsal for the October Revolution." The situation for the Bolsheviks became even worse still when communist parties, especially in Europe within the Second International, deserted revolution and betrayed the working class by supporting their own capitalist class and its war preparations prior to and during World War I. It must have seemed for Lenin and the Bolsheviks that they stood alone as the only defenders of communism and the international proletariat. But the important and great thing was they persisted, and they led the working class and peasantry to the victory of the October Revolution and the "Ten Days that Shook the World!" Whatever level of development of the productive forces in the era of imperialism and its mature stage of capitalism, the working class and its communist party are confronted with the task of working out their strategy and tactics to open society's path to progress by ensuring the working class constitutes the nation and vests sovereignty in the people. That is what is required, just as Marx pointed out in the 19th century and Lenin achieved in his time and space and others are doing in their conditions.
By elevating the working
class to political power to
begin
its own heroic nation-building project for socialism and the
transition to communism, historic successes will be transformed
into historic victory. As a contingent of the international
proletariat, the working class in all countries whether large or
small, in the midst of changes from petty to mass industrial
production or within a fully developed monopoly capitalist
system, all are charged by history to make a real contribution to
the international struggle for the emancipation of the working
class and the preservation of world peace, and the march forward
to the elimination of classes and class society once and for all.
The Great October Socialist Revolution led by Lenin and Leninism
made such a contribution. Let us mark its anniversary by
upholding modern communism and redoubling our efforts to prepare
conditions for the coming revolutionary storms and to accomplish
our own plans to turn historic successes into historic
victory!
(Based on a manuscript
written in 1994 and edited by the Central Committee of CPC(M-L) on the
occasion of the 90th Anniversary of the Great October Revolution in
2007. Originally published in TML, November 7, 2007.)
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Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca