Relevance of the Russian Revolution today

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L 1917 October Revolution in Russia, famously ar­ eon Trotsky, co-leader with Vladimir Lenin of the gued that the “Russian Question” was key to the stand­ ing of every party on earth that claimed allegiance to the heritage of revolutionary socialist politics.

To this day, 100 years after Lenin’s Bolshevik Party led the world’s first socialist revolution, no party has matched its record of social, political, theoretical, organizational, military, cultural, and moral contri­ butions to the advancement of the interests of the working-class masses.

The official name of the Bolshevik Party was the Rus­ sian Social Democratic Labor Party, Majority, with the latter word, “majority”—a translation of the Russian word bolshevik—added to the RSDLP’s name follow­ ing a critical early split in 1903. The minority faction, (the “Mensheviki” in Russian) have their modern-day offspring well-represented in the ranks of “socialist” parties that seek to reform capitalism as opposed to fighting for its abolition.

The Russia of pre-February 1917 was headed by a dullard-type, Tsar Nicolas II, whose self-infatuation and delusions of grandeur included his belief that he was practically descended from God and endowed with a blue-blood purity derived from the ever-inter­ breeding European monarchy. Like the modern-day chauvinist bigot Donald Trump, Nicolas was no man of culture. He ruled virtually unaware of the vast so­ cial forces swirling around him, believing to the end that his incessant decrees would be implemented by the force of his will alone.

Nicolas presided over a partly feudal but capital­ ist Russian Empire. He never tired of giving orders to his generals to advance Russia’s nearly enslaved largely peasant armies to their doom in the course of World War I—an imperialist conflagration to divide and re-divide the world. Among Russia’s prizes was to be the Ottoman Empire’s strategically located and richest city, Constantinople, later re-named Istanbul. By prior agreement, his allies, especially France and Great Britain, were to divide up the Middle East and other continents at a time when a maturing world im­ perialism required free colonized labor and bountiful natural resources.

Tsarist Russia was also allied with the Japanese Empire and the United States. Both had designs on China as well as islands in the Pacific and other places where Germany had established colonial outposts.

Russia itself was often referred to as the “prison house of nationalities” after more than a century of conquering and colonizing its neighbors. Its imperial domain encompassed one-sixth of the earth’s land 6 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2017 surface. Its conquered peoples included oppressed nations speaking some 50 national languages, all of which were officially banned in public institutions by the Tsarist autocracy.

Two revolutions in 1917 There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The first ended Tsarist rule and established a Provision­ al Government of capitalist ministers who largely abandoned the Tsar, preferring its own “democratic rule”—that is, the rule of the one percent of capitalist property owners as opposed to the rule of one. The first revolution was brought on by the terrible depri­ vation imposed on the masses as the Tsar pursued his war effort, using Russia’s peasants and work­ ers as cannon fodder. While his royal court—dukes, grand dukes, princes and associated court bootlick­ ers—reveled in luxury and engaged in all too con­ spicuous gala extravaganzas, starving workers and shell shocked and/or wounded workers and peasant soldiers returning or deserting the front lines roamed the streets in growing anger.

Triggered by a mass strike and the mobilization of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) women garment work­ ers on International Women’s Day, many hundreds of thousands took to the streets to march on Tsarist institutions. This time however, armed Tsarist sol­ diers on horseback in the capital city refused to fire on unarmed workers and let them pass. The ensu­ ing unprecedented nationwide cross fertilization of workers, including those employed in some of the largest factories in the world, combined with land­ less or near-serf peasants and disillusioned soldiers to isolate the Tsar and drive him and his family to his summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo, outside Petrograd— isolated, with no support from any quarter. Centuries of autocratic rule and tradition evaporated overnight.

But the massive mobilizations of Russia’s workers and peasants gave birth to another quasi-governing institution, the soviets, an interlocking system of workers councils that emerged throughout Russia and that were governed by workers, directly elected from their workplaces and subject to immediate re­ call. Peasant and soldier soviets were also spontane­ ously established in a context where the historic and hated repressive state apparatus of the Tsarist Em­ pire had disintegrated.

The soviets and the Provisional Government existed in a state of dual power, with the major working-class parties, the “moderate” Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), using their mass influence to subordinate the soviets, where they were usually the large majority, to the capitalist-led Provisional Gov­ ernment. This was done in the belief that the latter, given Russia’s still extreme backward­ ness in development and its small work­ ing class (only 10 percent of the popula­ tion), was the only form of state author­ ity possible at that moment in history. Limiting the revolutionary process to an interim “capitalist stage,” according to the theory and practice of these “moder­ ate” socialists, was a historic necessity.

Trotsky: Permanent revolution

In sharp contrast, Trotsky, as early as 1905, when he led the short-lived Petro­ grad Soviet, formed after the defeat of Tsarist Russia in the 1903 Russo-Japa­ nese War, rejected a “two-stage”—capi­ talist and then, in an unstated future, socialist—scenario for Russia’s devel­ opment. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution held that the national demo­ cratic tasks of previous bourgeois revo­ lutions—land reform and democratic rights and institutions as opposed to au­ tocratic/monarchial institutions—could only be accomplished in the framework of a socialist revolution, which would abolish capitalist property relations and establish workers’ democratic rule through the agency of nationally and lo­ cally organized soviets.

The critical political convergence on this crucial question of Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 was expressed in their demand, “All Power to the Soviets,” as opposed to the insistence by “moder­ ate socialists” (Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries) on a capitalist Provi­ sional Government to which the nation­ ally-organized Soviets—now represent­ ing the vast numbers of Russia’s workers, peasants, and soldiers—had to be subordinate.

Lenin and Trotsky were far from blind to the Men­ sheviks’ “Marxist” argument that a workers’ state would most likely emerge first in the most advanced capitalist nations—perhaps Germany, France, or the U.S.—where the level of industrial and technological development could immediately provide the material bases for a qualitatively better life for the vast major­ ity. Indeed, the fundamental arguments of Marxists had always been that a socialist society, emerging on the economic foundations of the most advanced capi­ talist states would guarantee a better life. Backward Russia was perhaps the last candidate for socialist revolution, they reasoned. The “first stage” of the revolution in Russia, they concluded, must be aimed at developing the capitalist state and economy itself. For this an empowered and “progressive” capitalist class was required.

Lenin and Trotsky replied in a myriad of real-life de­ bates inside the Bolshevik Party, and especially with the “moderate socialists” outside who constituted the large majority of the soviets, that Russia’s capitalist class was incapable of democratic reform and land distribution, that it viewed any governing role for the soviets as inimical to their capitalist interests, that they would resort to force and violence to advance their interests. They pointed out that the capitalist class would seek the support of the old guard Tsarist military officers to enforce order and that they would look to their “allies” in the imperialist World War to crush the soviets.

In the nine-month interim between the February and October Revolutions the Bolsheviks proved right on all these questions. This was far from an abstract debate over Marxist theory. Further, in response to the argument that Russian backwardness ill-pre­ pared it for socialism, they looked to the white hot radicalization among soldiers and the working class that was sweeping Europe at that time, as mass senti­ ment began to crystalize against workers being used as cannon fodder to advance the imperialist interests of the world’s predatory elite.

Thus permanent revolution, i.e., the abolition of capitalist rule in backward Russia and the establish­ ment of a socialist order, was rooted in the immedi­ ate needs of the Russian masses and in the Bolshe­ vik perspective that Russia’s isolation would soon be mitigated by the spread of socialist revolution in For the Bolsheviks, Marxist theory had to coincide (continued on page 7)

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(continued from page 6) with reality; the highly unstable dual power that they faced, soviets versus a capitalist government, had but one resolution: “All Power to the Soviets!” On Oct. 25, 1917, when the Bolsheviks had won a significant ma­ jority in all the soviets throughout the country, they moved to establish the world’s first workers’ state, headed by a government of the working class and its allies among the vast poor peasantry and soldiery. Which class shall rule society?

This critical issue, “Which class shall rule society— the workers and their allies among the oppressed or the capitalists—remains the central issue in world politics today. Indeed, many socialist groups today support, in one form or another, openly capitalist poli­ ticians and politics. Some are quite open in this sup­ port—including the Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party, which called for a vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Similarly, in the Democratic primaries, Socialist Alternative gave support to Ber­ nie Sanders. The Party of Socialism and Liberation and Workers World called for a Sanders primary vote in New York and California. The latter two parties have a longstanding record of supporting “progres­ sive Democrats” who are Black or Latino, as with their support to Jesse Jackson and others from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

The Green Party, a party of middle-class liberals and radicals, sometimes runs its own candidates in “safe states” while calling for a vote for the Democrats in contested races. self-determination.