Celebrate 100 years of freedom in Russia
Socialism and the centenary of the Russian Revolution: 1917-2017 - World Socialist Web Site
1. A specter is haunting world capitalism: the specter of the Russian Revolution.
This year marks the centenary of the world-historical events of 1917, which began with the February Revolution in Russia and culminated in October with “ten days that shook the world”—the overthrow of the capitalist provisional government and conquest of political power by the Bolshevik Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The overthrow of capitalism in a country of 150 million people and establishment of the first socialist workers’ state in history was the most consequential event of the twentieth century. It vindicated, in practice, the historical perspective proclaimed just 70 years earlier, in 1847, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto.
In the course of one year, the uprising of the Russian working class, rallying behind it tens of millions of peasants, not only brought to an end centuries of rule by a semi-feudal autocratic dynasty. The extraordinary leap in Russia from “Tsar to Lenin”—the establishment of a government based on workers’ councils (soviets)—marked the beginning of a world socialist revolution that raised the consciousness of the working class and the masses oppressed by capitalism and imperialism in every part of the planet.
The Russian Revolution—which erupted in the midst of the horrifying carnage of World War I—proved the possibility of a world beyond capitalism, without exploitation and war. The events of 1917 and their aftermath penetrated deep into the consciousness of the international working class and provided the essential political inspiration for the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century that swept across the globe.
2. The Bolshevik Party based its struggle for power in 1917 on an international perspective. It recognized that the objective basis for the socialist revolution in Russia was rooted, in the final analysis, in the international contradictions of the world imperialist system—above all, in the conflict between the archaic national-state system and the highly integrated character of modern world economy. Therefore, the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on the extension of workers’ power beyond the borders of Soviet Russia. As Trotsky explained so clearly:
The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis of bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no longer be reconciled with the framework of the national state. From this follow, on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the utopia of a bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word: it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet. [The Permanent Revolution (London: New Park Publications, 1971), p. 155]
3. The fate of the Bolshevik Party, the Soviet Union and the socialist revolution in the twentieth century hinged on the outcome of the conflict of two irreconcilable perspectives: the revolutionary internationalism championed by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 and during the first years of the existence of the Soviet Union, and the reactionary nationalist program of the Stalinist bureaucracy that usurped political power from the Soviet working class. Stalin’s anti-Marxist perspective of “socialism in one country” underlay the disastrous economic policies within the Soviet Union and the catastrophic international political defeats of the working class that culminated in 1991, after decades of bureaucratic dictatorship and misrule, in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism in Russia.
But the end of the USSR did not invalidate the Russian Revolution or Marxist theory. Indeed, in the course of his struggle against the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution, Leon Trotsky had foreseen the consequences of the national program of “socialism in one country.” The Fourth International, founded under Trotsky’s leadership in 1938, warned that the destruction of the USSR could be prevented only through the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the reestablishment of Soviet democracy, and the renewal of the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of world capitalism.
4. The imperialist leaders and their ideological accomplices greeted the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 with raptures. The fact that virtually none of them had foreseen this event did not prevent them from proclaiming its “inevitability.” Seeing no further than their own noses, they improvised theories that reinterpreted the twentieth century in a manner that suited their collective class arrogance. All the self-deluding nonsense and stupidity of the ruling elites and their academic hirelings found its quintessential expression in Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis. The October Revolution, he argued, was nothing more than an accidental departure from the normal and, therefore, timeless bourgeois-capitalist course of history. In the form of capitalist economics and bourgeois democracy, humanity had arrived at the highest and final stage of development. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there could be no thought of an alternative to capitalism, let alone one based on workers’ power and the socialist reorganization of world economy.
Endorsing Fukuyama’s revelation, historian Eric Hobsbawm, a lifelong Stalinist, dismissed the October Revolution and, for that matter, the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century, as unfortunate accidents. The years between 1914 (which witnessed the outbreak of World War I) and 1991 (the dissolution of the Soviet Union) were a misguided “age of extremes” that comprised the “short twentieth century.” Hobsbawm did not claim to know what the future would bring, or whether the twenty-first century would be short or long. He was certain of only one thing: there would never again be a socialist revolution in any way comparable to the events of 1917.
5. Twenty-five years have passed since Fukuyama proclaimed the “End of History.” Supposedly liberated from the menace of socialist revolution, the ruling class has had an opportunity to demonstrate what capitalism could accomplish if allowed to plunder the world as it pleased. But what is the outcome of its orgies? A short list of achievements would include: the filthy enrichment of an infinitesimal portion of the world’s population, vast social inequality and mass poverty, endless wars of aggression that have cost the lives of millions, the relentless strengthening of the repressive organs of the state and the decay of democratic forms of rule, the institution of murder and torture as basic instruments of imperialist foreign policy, and the general degradation of every aspect of culture.
6. A quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is impossible to deny that the entire world has entered a period of profound economic, political and social crisis. All the unresolved contradictions of the past century are reemerging with explosive force on the surface of world politics. The events of 1917 are acquiring a new and intense contemporary relevance. In countless publications, bourgeois commentators are calling attention nervously to parallels between the world of 2017 and that of 1917.
“Bolshiness is back,” warns the Economist’s Adrian Wooldridge in the magazine’s preview of the New Year. “The similarities to the world that produced the Russian revolution are too close for comfort.” He writes: “This is a period of miserable centenaries. First, in 2014, came that of the outbreak of the first world war, which destroyed the liberal order. Then, in 2016, that of the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest conflicts in military history. In 2017 it will be 100 years since Lenin seized power in Russia.”
None other than Fukuyama now describes the United States, which he once hailed as the apotheosis of bourgeois democracy, as a “failed state.” He writes, “The American political system has become dysfunctional,” and “has undergone decay over recent decades as well-organized elites have made use of vetocracy to protect their interests.” Finally, Fukuyama warns: “[W]e cannot preclude the possibility that we are living through a political disruption that will in time bear comparison with the collapse of Communism a generation ago.”
Socialism and the centenary of the Russian Revolution: 1917-2017 - World Socialist Web Site
