An anti-imperialist breakthrough

US troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises, programs, and engagements per year, an average of nearly 10 missions per day, on the African continent, according to the US military’s top commander for Africa, General Thomas Waldhauser.

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As we in the United States try to imagine a revolutionary opposition to the US imperialist system a great appreciation of the achievements of the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union is a critical part of our revolutionary future.

The Russian revolution created the Soviet Union – the first “workers state” and the first successful revolution that survived the world imperialist counterrevolution. The Bolshevik Party (the first communist party) was part of a united front of parties that seized power from the reactionary feudal Tsar in the February revolution of 1917. Then in October 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew the forces of capitalism and seized state power from the social democratic Kerensky government. The Russian revolution came to power as an anti-war movement against the forces in Russia that     wanted to continue World War I – one of the greatest imperialist bloodbaths of all time in which more than 18 million        “workers of the world” were sent to their deaths by the capitalist governments of Europe with strong support from their “socialist” parties.

The Bolshevik Party and Soviet State built its own military and police, defended themselves against external and internal capitalist attack, and survived in a hostile world for 72 years – a true miracle against all odds. From the perspective of the world’s exploited and oppressed people this was a profound achievement in human history and offered them an optimistic vision of their own future.

The day before the successful October revolution the entire world was ruled by the US and European colonial and imperialist powers. But the day after the Russian Revolution the communists created a new political momentum and material balance of forces that captured the imagination of workers and anti-colonial movements all over the world. This was reflected in the Indian independence victory of 1947, the Chinese revolution of 1949, the Cuban revolution of 1959, African independence movements in Ghana, the Congo, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, and Tanzania, the Vietnamese revolution from 1945 until its victory in 1975, and the South African independence movement against apartheid culminating in the victory of 1994.

Those of us in the United States who participated in the great revolutions of the Two Decades of the Sixties (1955-1975) were all pro-communist and with our own concerns and even criticisms, pro-Soviet. I was blessed to work as a field secretary with the Congress of Racial Equality and work closely with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Later, I was an organizer with the Newark Community Union Project and Students for a Democratic Society and worked closely with the Black Panther Party.

At that time in history we had a sense of history. We saw the United States as what Dr. King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and saw the peoples and revolutions of the Third World and the socialist and communist nations as our allies in a world united front against our own government. We supported the Cuban revolution and appreciated Soviet support for Cuba and hated the US government and the CIA for working to overthrow the Cuban revolution. We supported the Vietnamese revolution and thanked both the Soviets and Chinese for trying to stop our own government’s genocide against the people of Vietnam and contributing to the Vietnamese victory as we tried to stop US genocide against Indigenous and Black people inside the US borders as well.

The Russian revolution was the first revolution that seized state power, built its own military and police, beat back the capitalists, and was able to sustain its own revolutionary advances against the most reactionary and brutal attacks to overthrow it.        It was a “workers state” that was born in the caldron of a world dominated by US and European imperialism – a world capitalist system that was exercising a brutal world colonial dictatorship over the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and Black, Indigenous, and other colonial peoples inside its borders. The Russian revolution came out of the womb needing to defend its very existence from a world imperialist system that carried out counter-revolutionary infanticide as a central tenet of its strategy and existence.

The Bolshevik revolution came to power in struggle not just against European capitalism and imperialism but European social democracy – especially the          German Social Democratic party led by Karl Kautsky that played a role in provoking World War I.     As such, the Russian revolution was not an extension of European “socialism” but its negation.

The Russian revolution was based on Lenin’s analysis of   Imperialism: the Highest State of Capitalism          written in 1917. Lenin explained that capitalism in its monopoly stage – the merger of industrial and finance capital – went beyond the exploitation of the European proletariat to the oppression of whole nations and peoples of the colonies. As such, Lenin argued a world revolutionary strategy should change from “workers of the world unite” to “workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite.”   More than that, Lenin argued that significant sectors of the US and European working class benefited from “the super-profits of imperialism” and, without aggressive anti-imperialist socialist/communist parties, would support their own ruling classes in inter-imperialist wars.     He argued that the responsibility of workers in “oppressor nations” – England, Germany, France, the United States, Russia, and all those whose capitalist system benefitted from the oppression of whole nations and peoples – was to side with the colonies’ struggle for self-determination and independence against their own governments. Otherwise, the socialist parties of the West would become “opportunists and scoundrels.”

But as World War I approached, the European Social Democrats (who were at the time, the only form of socialists even with many tendencies among them) not just supported but actively participated in their own nation’s division of the world and one of the most bloody and disgraceful world wars–18 million deaths and 23 million wounded. As the winds of war began swirling in Europe, Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and other left socialists aggressively opposed the war and urged workers of the world to build an anti-war movement. But Karl Kautsky, the father of German Social Democracy supported a world war initiated by Germany as did the vast majority of French, Italian, English, Austrian socialists who all capitulated to oppressor nation aspirations and supported their own capitalist classes against each other and agreed to their division of the world – including the colonies. What had happened to “workers of the world unite?” This was a devastating blow to the theory of socialism. So, the Russian revolution also overthrew the hegemony of racist, genocidal, European socialism.

The Russian Revolution came to power by opposing World War I and building the first anti-imperialist socialist movement in Europe. The Bolshevik-led revolution challenged its own nation state and rejected imperialist patriotism with the slogan “Bread, Peace, and Land.” Bread, for the starving industrial proletariat, Land for the starving peasants, and Peace – the most revolutionary demand of all.   Russian peasants and workers in the Tsarist Army mutinied in the midst of a bloody World War and, organized and encouraged by Bolshevik cadre, refused to fight the Germans and deserted the front where they were freezing, starving, and dying.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘The 100th Anniversary of the October Revolution: the Great Breakthrough in Anti-Imperialist Socialism’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org