On Day One of the Revolution, the Soviets decreed the right of Russia’s conquered peoples to

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In all of the above instances, the Bolshevik credo of working-class independence, or the fight for a gov­ ernment of the working class, is subordinated to vari­ ous “lesser evil” or related electoral schemes, usually taking the form of arguments that the Republicans are more reactionary than the Democrats or that a vote for Democrats is a requirement to stop the “fascist” Barry Goldwater, or Richard Nixon, or George Bush, or Donald Trump Or, as with the Mensheviks of yesteryear, they seek to form multi-class “peoples’ parties” that include “progressive” or “left-wing” Democrats” who, they insist, are more attuned to the needs of the working masses than their capitalist colleagues. Bernie Sand­ ers is a prime example; Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition served the same purpose in decades past.

In point of fact, all political parties are formed to represent the interests of one or another competing class in society—either the vast working-class major­ ity or the capitalist-class one percent or less minority. The latter rule not only through the so-called demo­ cratic trappings of parliamentary government but also, when necessary, through the force and violence imbedded in the very fabric of all capitalist states, in­ cluding the police and army as well as the courts, the prison-industrial complex, the FBI, CIA and the myr­ iad secretive and/or repressive organizations, from the Department of Homeland Security to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Just as in the time of the Tsarist autocracy, when challenged by any significant or potential mass move­ ment, these institutions of the capitalist state all jus­ tify the use of force in the name of “national security,” the term repeatedly adopted, employed and codified in capitalist law to maintain the minority rule of the elite few who make the real decisions in every capital­ ist state.

Relevance of the Bolshevik program today The Bolshevik-program not only focused on the is­ sue of working class political independence from cap­ italist politics and from the capitalist state power but also on a number of related issues that were critical to winning the massive and majority support required to establish and maintain the world’s first experiment in majority rule.

On Day One of the October 1917 Russian Revolu­ tion, the All Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers, Peasant and Soldiers Deputies approved a decree that nationalized all capitalist land in the largest nation on earth. This land was immediately granted to the peas­ ant soviets to distribute in accord with the historic as­ pirations of Russia’s vast poor peasantry. This single measure cemented Russia’s massively oppressed ma­ jority to the revolution.

Aside from revolutionary Cuba, no nation since then has implemented a land reform-distribution of that scope. Indeed, today in Latin America every so-called revolutionary or “popular” regime, from Venezuela to Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay to Nicaragua and Ar­ gentina, has failed to accomplish even a modest land reform. To do so would entail a break with the capital­ ist system of private property that none of the above dared to contemplate.

This fundamental failure to meet the needs of the historically oppressed poor peasants and farmers inevitably cuts deep into the support required to un­ derline the inevitable imperialist efforts to destabilize and overthrow these “popular” governments, all of which are or have recently been dominated by a com­ bination of left-sounding reformers allied with the na­ tion’s bankers and ruling capitalists.

Self-determination of oppressed nations On the same Day One, the Soviets decreed the right of Russia’s conquered peoples, its oppressed nation­ alities, to self-determination—that is, the right to de­ cide to leave the USSR and organize their own sepa­ rate state or to remain. Those who chose to remain were guaranteed their historic rights to language and culture, as opposed to the domination of the previ­ ous colonialist Russian conquerors. The oppressed nations were granted an autonomy that guaranteed their political, economic, and cultural rights as well as their right to change their minds in the future and secede.

With few exceptions the oppressed and now liber­ ated peoples decided to remain, if for no other rea­ son that the revolution had granted them the land as against their landlords and a political and social free­ dom that exceeded any other on earth.

The Russian Revolution’s stance on the national question—that is, the nationalism of the oppressed, not the nationalism of the oppressor—cut deep into the consciousness of revolutionaries everywhere. In discussions with the then revolutionary Social­ ist Workers Party (SWP) in 1939, Trotsky observed, “Ninety-nine per cent of the American workers are chauvinists; in relation to the Negroes they are hang­ men and they are so also toward the Chinese. It is nec­ essary to teach the white American beasts. It is nec­ essary to make them understand that the American state is not their state and that they do not have to be the guardians of this state. Those American workers who say: ‘The Negroes should separate when they so desire and we will defend them against our American police’—those are revolutionists, I have confidence in them.”

Paraphrasing Trotsky elsewhere: “Until the great white racist beast of the American working class real­ izes that he cannot advance his cause on the backs of his Black brothers and sisters, there will be no revolu­ tion in the United States.”

With this in mind, the SWP early on championed Malcolm X, who was pilloried by most socialists and “progressives” at that time as a “racist in reverse,” separatist, and hatemonger. It was no coincidence that the ever-evolving Malcolm X established the closest of relations with the SWP, who published his speeches and organized mass forums to make his revolutionary Black nationalist views known far and wide.

Today’s National Football League players and ath­ letes from an ever-expanding number of sports who have “taken the knee” in solidarity with the example of Collin Kaepernick know full well the pain and suf­ fering inflicted on oppressed people by racist America’s institutional police state of hate, vio­ lence and mass incarceration. The vast num­ bers of today’s Black NLF players, some eighty percent of the sport’s modern day gladiators at the service of white billionaire bosses, hail from poor working-class families, daily deprived of fundamental rights. The great majority, their six-figure salaries notwithstanding, never be­ come vested in NFL pensions, their often bro­ ken and crippled bodies and CTE brains used as justification to cast them off before they have met the required five years of combat to qualify for a pension.

The Bolsheviks taught these lessons on the right of oppressed people and nations to self-determination to working class fighters around the world. No nation today has exceeded their achievements. The world invades the nascent USSR When some 17 nations invaded the nascent USSR with the single objective of restoring the despised capitalist-imperialist-chauvinist ruling-class minor­ ity, they were defeated by the very forces that were central to the 1917 October Revolution—that is, the massive majority who directly benefited from its achievements. From a disintegrating Tsarist and then capitalist-led army of conscripted and abused work­ ers and peasants who had no interest in defending the imperial aims of its oppressors, the 1917 Revolu­ tion produce an armed force unequalled in the entire world—an army of 10 million free people who rose to unprecedented heights to defeat the invasion of the combined forces of both sides of the imperialist war.

Just what were the strategies and tactics of this revo­ lutionary army? Did they reside in military prowess or advanced military technologies? To the contrary. The victory of the Red Army, led by a person with virtually no prior military experience, Leon Trotsky, resided in the political consciousness imbued in the Russian masses that they were fighting to preserve the momentous conquests of the October 1917 Rev­ olution. The Russian masses fought with political weapons above all.

Russian soldiers with Bolshevik commissars (politi­ cal leaders drawn from the ranks of the revolution’s finest young soviet leaders) sought to convince their German and all foreign soldier adversaries that their fight was against their own capitalist classes and not against the Russian workers and peasants who had shown the world that a new world free from capitalist oppression and war was possible.

Massive propaganda campaigns and widespread troop-declared truces aimed at fraternization with opposing front-line troops helped to win soldier workers to understand their own class interests as opposed to their imperialist bosses. This was coupled with Bolshevik leaders’ visits to workers and socialist organizations everywhere to convince them to fight the class war at home and not the imperialist wars of their oppressors.

Nothing outraged the imperialist diplomats sta­ tioned in Russia more than to read Soviet government flyers that were dropped in the millions on the bat­ tlefields proclaiming that thousands of their soldiers had deserted the battlefields to return home to fight for their own interests. This was a form of revolution­ (continued on page 8)

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(continued from page 1: “Capitalists fiddle around while the world burns”)

has lengthened by two and a half months since 1970 due to global warming, with twice the number of acres burned per year as would be expected without it.

Over 10 million acres—an area almost three times the size of Connecticut—burned across the U.S. North­ west and British Columbia this summer. Portland, Ore., residents were shrouded in asthma-inducing smoke from the fires for weeks on end. Health officials told people to stay indoors whenever possible. At one point, satellite photos showed fire smoke wreathing the northern U.S. all the way to Niagara Falls.

If the fires out West are the drought side, the Gulf Coast provides the counterpoint. Hurricane Harvey was the third “500-year flood” event that Houston saw in three years (i.e., the statistical probability of even one of these floods occurring any given year is about 1 in 500). After 40+ inches of rain, places well outside of floodplains shown on federal flood insur­ ance maps were inundated.

But global warming was not the only environmental culprit of Houston’s flooding. The city is built on bot­ tomland with a 2000-mile network of natural bayous.

Native prairie grasses with roots that burrow a dozen feet into the sod can soak up tremendous quantities of rainwater. But the city’s explosive growth has paved over much of the prairie land with impervious build­ ings and concrete, while local officials have simply refused to limit the profits of developers with zoning regulations.

Instead, driven by the irrational logic of capitalist development, the city’s engineers have buried their heads in the sand. A recent piece by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica quotes flood-control officials as call­ ing the conservation-oriented conclusions of their agency’s own flood-management research “absurd”

and dismissing climate science.

Then there was the response to the hurricane—or lack thereof. Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 storm, the same intensity as Hurricane Katrina when it devastated New Orleans in 2005. But preparations were haphazard at best. While the state issued man­ datory evacuations for several coastal counties, Hous­ ton city officials explicitly told residents to stay in the city—largely because they feared huge traffic jams ... Russia (continued from page 7: “Relevance of the Russian Revolution today”) ary political warfare that made the Soviet armies and the Soviet Union an example for the world’s workers. While the Red Army’s combat losses were in truth mas­ sive, as in any world military conflagration, the strength in their fighting machine was the just and revolutionary cause that they exemplified.

For the Bolsheviks, a mass working-class party that grew from several thousand to hundreds of thousands and won the allegiance of Russia’s poor and oppressed from every quarter of society, permanent revolution was not only the political and theoretical expression of the impossibility of capitalist reform but also a re­ jection of the notion that socialism could be built in a single country, isolated from the working classes of the world.

Bolsheviks implement revolutionary program The Bolsheviks seized on that special moment in his­ tory—a generalized crisis of capitalist credibility, an immediate revolutionary crisis wherein their program was in perfect harmony with the immediate aspirations and mobilizations of tens of millions of Russia’s work­ ing masses.

In this context, the actual seizure of power in Petro­ grad on Oct. 25, 1917 was achieved with an estimated loss of some dozen lives. The same scenario was more 8 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2017 (Above) Storm-surge damage after Hurricane Maria hit the island of Dominica.

with cars trapped and inundated as waters rose. Req­ uisitioning buses and trains to speed evacuations and include those without private vehicles was simply not considered as an option.

Residents who have returned to the highly industri­ alized Texas Gulf Coast face cleaning up a toxic mess from flooded oil refineries. In Port Arthur, many of the town’s 15 toxic waste Superfund sites flooded, spread­ ing carcinogenic chemicals around. A fuel storage tank in a Black neighborhood exploded, releasing a million pounds of toxic emissions into the air. Environmental justice activist Hilton Kelley told “Democracy Now!” that neither the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) nor the Red Cross were responding to residents’ pleas for help, and many renters who evacuated were evicted by their landlords. Puerto Rico: Imperialism worsens storm damage But the damage and displacement in Texas pales in comparison to Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria knocked out electricity and water treatment across the entire island. These services are unlikely to be restored for months—not just due to the storm, but also to the cataclysm of financialization and neoliberalism that have destroyed the island’s infrastructure over the past three decades.

Financialization—described thoroughly by Lenin in “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”—is a result of the monopoly-building of corporate capital. Capitalists must increasingly invest in financial capi­ tal, i.e., interest-bearing bank assets, instead of real infrastructure to see a return on their investments. Writes Lenin: “Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enor­ mous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strength­ ens the domination of the financial oligarchy and lev­ ies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists.”

This tribute is exactly what has been extracted from Puerto Rico before and during its ongoing debt crisis. The June 2016 Act of Congress relegating the U.S. is­ land territory back to pure colonial status was named PROMESA, Spanish for “promise.” The promise was to reorient the territory’s budget toward paying the in­ vestors who own its massive debt.

or less repeated in the following days across Russia.

The decrees that shortly followed the Bolshevik-led seizure of power astonished the world. They published and repudiated all the secret treaties that Tsarism had imposed on conquered nations. They renounced Rus­ sian territorial acquisitions and financial concessions forced on conquered peoples.

They opened the borders of revolutionary Russia to revolutionary fighters from around the world and led in establishing the Third or Communist International, based on a repudiation of imperialist war, on solidar­ ity with the oppressed people and nations, and on the premise of constructing disciplined, democratic revo­ lutionary parties on the Bolshevik model everywhere with the objective of organizing for social revolution.

The Soviet government abolished all discriminatory laws against women, against gender discrimination, and against racism in all its manifestations. These were not just empty decrees but were implemented in prac­ tice via newly established Soviet organs led by the best fighters in all these critical fields of human endeavor.

The Soviet government established a system of free education and health care. It opened its doors to artists, writers, musicians, and scientists to share every form of social, cultural and scientific expression of human­ ity’s future. It encouraged the formation of Communist Parties dedicated to humanity’s future everywhere on earth.

All this was accomplished in the context of the con­ certed efforts of world imperialism to shut down and cut off the wonders achieved by the free people of the Signed into law by Obama, the act created an un­ elected seven-member “fiscal control board” (nonironically nicknamed the junta) to seize the island’s finances, effectively voiding the territory’s constitu­ tion. Draconian cuts to health care, pensions, and edu­ cation followed. Even before the latest round of aus­ terity, the territorial government was spending more on debt service than any of these human services.

The failed PR spectacle of U.S. President Donald Trump throwing paper towels to onlookers in one of the least-damaged parts of the island made a mockery of the real human needs of residents, most of whom still lack food, fuel, or clean drinking water weeks after the hurricane. Meanwhile, more than 10,000 shipping containers filled with food and supplies sat untouched in the Port of San Juan for over a week, the victim of a disorganized and underfunded disaster re­ sponse effort.

The island’s electrical infrastructure is in shambles. The electrical utility, PREPA, was chronically under­ funded before the hurricane and racked up billions of dollars’ worth of deferred maintenance. Even Trump admitted that rebuilding the island’s infrastructure to meet human needs will require forgiving the debt— comments which other Trump administration offi­ cials have already backpedaled on.

While the U.S. preparation and response to this sea­ son’s hurricanes has been dismal, Hurricane Irma’s impact on Cuba provides a major contrast. That storm hit Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane and did extreme damage to the island’s central and western provinc­ es, causing major flooding in Havana. It garnered the highest death toll of any storm since 2005: 10. The low number is a testament to Cuba’s comprehensive disaster preparation and response system, one that’s admired as the best in the world.

Cuba has a state-of-the-art storm tracking sys­ tem that allows the country to issue weather alerts 72 hours before landfall. The National Civil Defense agency inspects and stocks shelters and coordinates evacuations. TV and radio broadcast instructions. Neighborhood-level Committees for the Defense of the Revolution go door-to-door checking on or evacu­ ating pregnant women, the elderly, and the infirm.

If beleaguered Cuba can take care of everyone’s needs during disaster, the wealthiest nation on Earth also should be able to. Working people in the United States must demand more from the government, starting with a nationwide organized effort to antici­ pate and plan for more frequent future storms and fires. FEMA should be reorganized and given a huge boost in funding along with new protocols along the lines of the Cuban model.

Puerto Rico’s debt must be forgiven now! Infrastruc­ ture in Puerto Rico must be rebuilt by the government under democratic control, funded by the federal gov­ ernment through higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. At the same time, Puerto Rico must be granted self-determination to forge its own economic and political future.

The U.S. government and all states must mobilize a Marshall Plan-like just transition to renewable en­ ergy—particularly wind and solar—hiring displaced workers at union wages. Ultimately, the way to ad­ dress growing climate catastrophe is by replacing the system that created the crisis with a socialist system that puts people and the planet first. n Soviet Union.

In the U.S. the 1919 Palmer Raids, led by U.S. Attor­ ney General Mitchell Palmer, rounded up and arrested thousands of communists in the notorious “Red Scare,” wherein the government feared the spread of the ide­ als of the Russian Revolution. Similar mass arrests and persecution of communists were implemented by al­ most all capitalist European governments.

These were combined with ferocious invasions of the Russian workers’ state by countries on both sides of the imperialist war aimed at stamping out the physical existence of the vibrant revolutionary state headed by the Bolshevik-led multi-party soviets (which included representatives of the Left Menshevik Internationalists and Left Socialist Revolutionaries). The U.S. itself sent in troops to Siberia in this imperialist effort.

Still, all these efforts failed to reverse or defeat the his­ toric achievements of the Soviet masses. But the brutal invasions and accompanying devastation took a great toll. Indeed, they laid the material basis for the future rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Contrary to bourgeois historians and to many among today’s “moderate socialists,” however, counter-revolu­ tionary Stalinism had no “roots” in the program or prac­ tice of the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin and Trotsky. To the contrary, the rise of Stalin can only be attributed to the terrible conditions of deprivation and devastation imposed by the world imperialist invasion and subse­ quent embargo aimed at wiping out all vestiges of the Great Russian Revolution. But this is the subject of Part Two of this article. n

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SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2017 7 ... World burns