The revolution capitalists still fear
By Allen Myers
"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism", wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The same spectre continues to haunt the entire capitalist world today, despite the final disintegration of the Soviet Union eight years ago.
The Russian Revolution, born 82 years ago this week, is dead, but capitalists and their governments hate and fear it almost as much as they did when it was thriving.
Much the same thing happened with the Paris Commune of 1871 — the world's first seizure of power by a working class. In both cases, the capitalists were alarmed not only by the loss of the particular area (Paris, Russia) but also and even more so by the prospect that the example would be imitated by workers in ever widening circles in other countries and continents. Every battle they lose foreshadows for the capitalists a "domino effect" and the loss of everything.
The Commune lasted only two months before it was overthrown in a civil war in which the French ruling class was assisted by its German "enemy". The Russian Revolution lasted seven decades before it succumbed to war, imperialist encirclement, Russia's initial backwardness and the bureaucratic layer which took control in those conditions. There is every reason for the capitalists to fear that the next great revolutionary upsurge will be considerably more enduring.
Both the Commune and the Russian Revolution proved what had previously been only a hope: that revolution is possible. The Commune did not have time to demonstrate what could be achieved when the working people set about reordering society in the interests of the majority, but the Russian workers and peasants provided examples that continue to inspire.
Continued inspiration
The new government created by the revolution was able to extract Russia from the world war — something which the capitalist provisional government had talked about for months but been totally unwilling and unable to achieve. The revolutionary government thus demonstrated in practice that working people, unlike the capitalists, have no interest in seizing markets or colonies, and therefore no interest in fighting over them.
The right of nations to self-determination, long a principle of the Bolshevik party's politics, became a reality in revolutionary Russia. Formerly oppressed nations like the Finns were allowed peacefully to secede.
In the countryside, the revolution abolished private ownership of large estates.
The Bolshevik program favoured state ownership of the land, which would be leased to agricultural cooperatives, but a big majority of peasants wanted to own their own land. The government, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin declared, was obligated to give the people what they demanded; the land seized from the big landlords was given to poor peasants.
An eight-hour working day was introduced. Workers' committees were elected in factories to oversee production; the aim was to gain the experience necessary to run things properly when ownership was taken from the capitalists.
For the first time in Russian history, women gained complete legal equality with men — at a time when women still did not have the right to vote in most countries. Abortion became legal and free. Marriage became a simple registration process and divorce was granted upon the request of either party.
The policy of the Bolsheviks, now called the Communist Party, in 1919 was: "Not confining itself to formal equality of women, the party strives to liberate them from the material burdens of obsolete household work by replacing it with communal houses, public eating places, central laundries".
Despite an invasion by imperialist forces attempting to crush the revolution in alliance with the armies of Russian reaction, the budget for public education, which was 195 million roubles in 1916, was increased to 2.9 billion in 1918 and 10 billion by 1919. The number of primary schools was increased from 38,387 in 1917 to 62,238 in 1919.
This emphasis on education for all has been a feature of all real revolutions in underdeveloped countries, because the working people cannot really be in charge unless they have the knowledge and skills to take control of society. A nationwide literacy program was carried out very early in the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, for example, and Cuba today has a higher literacy rate than many developed capitalist countries.
The Russian Revolution created a new type of state, based upon soviets, which were democratically elected organs of the workers and peasants. The soviets were both legislative and executive bodies, so that the working people could directly oversee the implementation of their decisions, rather than leaving them to be undermined by a separate "branch" of government or a bureaucracy.
Delegates to the soviets could be recalled and replaced at any time by those who elected them.
The democratic spirit of the new state is captured in this remark by Lenin: "At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the rich or those gone through the school of the rich are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society".
Stalinism
In the latter part of the 1920s and the 1930s, the bureaucratic layer headed by Joseph Stalin was able to undermine and then destroy the revolution's democratic gains, establishing a brutal dictatorship.
The Stalinist system of torture, concentration camps, executions and mass deportations is today well known.
Capitalist propaganda attempts to convince us that Stalinism and the revolution were one and the same thing. But, properly understood, the viciousness of the Stalinist reaction is a testimony to the strength of the Russian Revolution: no lesser measures would have been able to suppress the revolution's traditions of social and political democracy.
Moreover, Stalinism was not able to destroy the revolution with a single blow; it strangled the revolution over half a century. During that time, despite all the waste and distortion inflicted by the bureaucracy, and despite horrendous destruction during World War II, the absence of capitalist economic relations allowed the Soviet Union to make enormous material gains — gains not consistently matched by any capitalist country, and which contrast sharply with Russia's present poverty and squalor.
So it is not surprising that the Russian Revolution was, and remains, an example and inspiration to people all over the world. The removal of the illusion that Stalinism represents revolution makes it possible for new generations to be inspired.
The people of Cuba resisting the US blockade, the guerillas defending Colombian villagers against army attack, the students and urban poor demonstrating in the streets of Jakarta, working people anywhere fighting for a better life: all are acting on the single most important lesson of the Russian Revolution, which lives on and will never be destroyed.
Working people, together, can change the world.