100th anniversary of Great October Revolution

Throughout November, celebrations around the world will mark the centenary of the outstanding political event of the 20th century: the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917. By overthrowing the Russian capitalists, landowners and aristocrats, the workers, peasants and soldiers of the Tsarist empire opened the door to a new society in which humanity’s dreams of peace, equality and democracy began to become reality. The storming of the Winter Palace, signaled by the guns of the Aurora cruiser, began the historical epoch of the transition towards a socialist society, based on cooperation and social justice, not the  exploitation and oppression inherent in the profit-driven capitalist system.

The October Revolution was far more than a change in government. It was a fundamental social upheaval, a sharp break with thousands of years of class-divided societies. For the first time, the working class took lasting political power, shattering the myth that only the owners of wealth can rule.

Under the slogan “Peace, Land, Bread” and with the support of the overwhelming majority of the working class and poor peasants, the Bolsheviks (the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was then called) began the long and complex effort to build a new “system of civilized cooperators,” as the great revolutionary Vladimir Lenin described the essence of socialism.

The new Soviet government immediately issued its famous “decree on peace”, taking Russia out of the imperialist slaughter by the leading capitalist countries for the re-division of wealth and colonial possession they had plundered from the world’s peoples. Land was transferred to millions of impoverished peasants, and industrial, financial and other capitalist companies were nationalized. Workers were guaranteed employment. Education and health care became universal and free. Nations oppressed under the Tsarist heel were guaranteed equality and self-determination, including the right to secession. Patriarchal laws were replaced by the full legal and social emancipation of women.

The imperialist countries, including Canada, sent armies to crush the young Soviet state while the “baby was still in its cradle”, as Winston Churchill said. Surrounded by counter-revolutionary forces and invading imperialist armies, the Soviet government and the Red Army triumphed, with the support of workers around the world acting under the slogan “Hands off Russia!” The heroic example of Soviet Russia inspired working class struggles and insurrections throughout the world, including the Winnipeg General Strike and the formation of the Communist Party of Canada in this country.

The Soviet revolution shook imperialism as never before. Yet it stood on the shoulders of more than one hundred years of working class and national liberation struggles. Millions of workers had supported the First and Second Internationals, whose goal was world peace and socialism, in sharp contrast to the imperialist strivings of the leading capitalist countries.

The Internationals were inspired by the slogan “Workers of all lands, unite!” and by revolutionaries such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who declared that the working class was the agent of socialist revolution. The working class movement was steeled by persecutions, and educated by the bloody vengeance of the French and Prussian capitalists in 1871 against the Paris Commune – the world’s first working class state. When opportunist leaders of the Second International backed their own imperialist governments during the First World War, the revolutionary sections of the working class movement, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks, courageously struggled against imperialist war. Nearly fifty years after the Commune, the October Revolution gave a new impetus, content, and energy to the world revolutionary movement.

Great October holds a unique and honoured place in history, as the first socialist revolution to achieve and retain political power, withstanding both internal counter-revolution and foreign intervention. It dramatically changed world politics, breaking the hegemony of imperialism, and establishing a new and fundamentally different approach to relations between peoples, nations and states.

The October Revolution proved that socialism could become more than a utopian ideal. The working class and its allies could move beyond sporadic resistance to challenge the capitalist system as a whole, and achieve social emancipation. The exploited and oppressed, through conscious and united struggle, could shape their own destiny. It was this truth about the Russian Revolution that filled the privileged classes with a fear and hatred of socialism, from the earliest days of the Soviet state.

Despite unremitting imperialist hostility and subversion, the Soviet Union endured for over seven decades, scoring many great achievements, overcoming unemployment, illiteracy, and social deprivation. Socialism in the Soviet Union transformed an economically and culturally “backward” country into one of the world’s leading powers, and made great advances in culture and science.

It was the Soviet Union which led the heroic military struggle to defeat Hitler fascism on the battlefield, creating the conditions for the emergence of other socialist states in Europe. The Soviet Union championed the cause of anti-racism and decolonization, gave crucial material and political support to liberation movements, and provided vital assistance to the former colonies as they won their independence. The changing international balance of forces was a key factor in helping the peoples of China, Korea, Vietnam and Cuba to carry out their own socialist transformations. The USSR’s peace policy also restricted – though it could not entirely suppress – imperialism’s tendency to military aggression.

The gains achieved by workers under socialism inspired the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, compelling the ruling class to concede reforms around labour rights, the 40-hour work week, unemployment insurance, health care, public education, and pensions. The progress toward economic and social equality by women in the USSR was a powerful stimulus to the struggles of women in the capitalist countries for pay and employment equity, and for child care and other social programs which would weaken the patriarchal double burden of capitalist exploitation and unpaid domestic labour.

Ultimately, however, the first workers’ state was overturned and capitalism restored, due to a combination of interrelated internal and external circumstances and contradictions which culminated in the temporary victory of counter-revolution.

The defeat of socialism in the USSR became a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of monopoly capitalism. We categorically reject the bourgeois contention that the causes of the crisis and defeat of the Soviet Union were rooted in the intrinsic nature of socialism. Rather, that historic setback resulted from the extremely difficult conditions under which socialism was built, especially the destructive impact of decades of imperialist pressures and subversion, and from distortions and departures from Marxist-Leninist theory and practice.

Whatever the failures and mistakes which occurred during that first great experiment in building a new, higher form of society, these do not detract from the enduring significance of Great October. Socialism’s historical balance-sheet was overwhelmingly positive, not only for the people of the Soviet Union but indeed for all humanity. The misery and impoverishment which have befallen millions of people in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the early 1990s (especially women whose equality gains were rolled back), and the massive profiteering by those who took advantage of the restoration of capitalism, is painful evidence of what happens when counter-revolution succeeds.

Despite its so-called victory, capitalism itself remains in profound systemic crisis. The widening gap between rich and poor, the endless wars and conflicts spawned by imperialism, and the environmental crisis which threatens human civilization, all show that the private profit system, driven by personal and corporate greed, cannot meet the fundamental needs and interests of the people and the global environment.

As capitalism generates war, austerity, and catastrophic climate change, people everywhere are yearning for freedom. Struggles against imperialist globalization have grown sharper, and in many countries, the working class is mounting fierce resistance against the corporate drive for higher profits. The powerful example of Cuba’s socialist revolution continues to inspire workers, youth and oppressed peoples around the world.

Imperialism is responding with growing reaction, militarism and war. In the US, Canada, Europe, India and other regions, far-right, racist and neo-Nazi forces aim to divide and weaken the working class movement, and to roll back the equality gains achieved by trade unions, women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants. But the forces of imperialism and reaction cannot hold back the irresistible power and attraction of socialist ideas, the growth of the international working class, and the striving of the vast majority of humanity for social progress, a sustainable environment, and peace.

Not least, the Great October Socialist Revolution proved the importance of creating the “revolutionary party of a new type” – solidly grounded in the working class, and based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and the principles of democratic centralism. At a time when working people increasingly reject both the old-line capitalist parties and social democratic opportunism, it is more critical than ever to strengthen the revolutionary political parties which can win the working class for a genuine socialist alternative.

Nothing can erase the accomplishments of Great October. The Communist Party of Canada will celebrate Great October for its great achievements, for its historic lessons and for the unequaled inspiration it has created for the future of humanity – a socialist future!

Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada
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Revolutionary vs Reactionary Hatred: An Important Distinction

"Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we must use to crush the enemy."

-          Mao Zedong

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency.  To forgive them is cruelty.”

-          Maxmilien Robespierre

“How can you fight an enemy so filled with hate that they do not fear death? Even their children spit at our soldiers!”

-          General Fedor von Bock, remarking on Soviet resistance to the Nazi invasion, 1943

                Good and evil do not exist organically within nature.  Animals have no need of right and wrong; they simply fulfill their role within the ecosystems they inhabit.  Human beings are the only creatures on this planet with a need for good and evil because we have developed as a species beyond the confines of any ecosystem and have developed capabilities that grant us power over nature and each other.  This material reality gives rise to the necessity of moral responsibility.  When it first became thinkable for one human being to sacrifice the well-being of his or her fellow human beings in order to selfishly advance themselves in some way, this is when morality became necessary for the first time.  The presence of parasites and exploiters makes morality an essential feature of human life and survival, one that has become more and more essential as class society has advanced from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism.  Hatred, moral censure, indignation, and punishment are logical responses to the parasite that exploits the labor of others for its own gain.[1]

Just as Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton stressed the difference in his writings between revolutionary suicide (sacrificing one’s life for the greater liberation of the proletariat and humanity) and reactionary suicide (taking one’s own life in despair) there is also an extreme difference between revolutionary hatred and reactionary hatred.[2]  Revolutionary hatred is hatred shown toward the true enemies of humankind: the capitalist class and its defenders, whose crimes are enormous and whose threat to the survival and well-being of the human race is clear and well documented.[3]  Revolutionary hatred is hatred based on knowledge and class consciousness; a hatred that fuels the progressive struggle for working class emancipation and the revolutionary overthrow of class exploitation and alienation in all its forms.  Reactionary hatred is very different.  Reactionary hatred is based not on knowledge but on fear, scapegoats, bigotry and ruling class lies meant to keep working people divided, alienated, and blind to the nature of their true oppressors.[4]

Reactionary hatred is the tool that has been used again and again from the beginning of civilization by ruling class circles to divide and conquer the people they exploit.  Radio Liberty and other pro-capitalist propaganda sources worked hard to aggravate national separatism in the USSR for this very reason, using quasi-fascists recruited from non-Russian Soviet republics to encourage the breakup of the country.  By 1990 a full-scale sectarian war had broken out in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and sectarian strife between Armenians and Azeris had taken dozens of lives.  The USSR as a whole was well on its way toward dissolution and capitalist restoration, with reactionaries fueling the process at every stage.[5]

It is the monstrous nature of reactionary hatred, so well publicized especially with regard to racism and xenophobia, that causes so many people on the left today to renounce hatred altogether and argue that only love and unconditional non-violence will make the world a better place.  But this is a perspective we cannot afford to take.  Without revolutionary hatred all the love in the world will be useless in the face of ruling class power and the bigoted forces of reaction.  History is very clear that you cannot love your way to revolution, you must fight your way to revolution.  This was captured perfectly in the eulogy given to assassinated Mozambican revolutionary leader Eduardo Mondlane by his comrades in the FRELIMO movement fighting against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa:

And we honor him because he taught us to hate, for he taught us whom to hate and why to hate.  Son of a freedom fighter, descendant of freedom fighters and a leader of freedom fighters, he knew the importance of the right target for hatred, what a formidable weapon it could be if directed correctly: “Yes, our men must kill...but not fight against the color of the enemy, fight against the things he fights for, systems of economic and social control”.  All his efforts to provide all possible support to the armed struggle reflected a bitter and serious understanding of the power of the enemy, a clear understanding of who the enemy is.  We now add to all this our knowledge of the brutal way in which he was murdered.[6]

Without revolutionary hatred toward our real enemies, the true monsters of the world, there can be no victory in the class struggle and their criminal systemic exploitation of the earth and its peoples will continue unabated.  In spite of the often deeply hypocritical Christian rantings to the contrary, the hard truth remains that we must hate our enemies if we want to overcome them.[7]

                It wasn’t love that shut down the murder factory at Auschwitz.  It was not love that stormed the Reichstag and brought Hitler’s monstrous empire to its knees.  It was not love that turned the tide of World War Two so decisively at Stalingrad.  It was hatred that did these things.  All around the world, from America to the Soviet Union to China, people rallied against the reactionary monstrosity of fascism and the horror it was unleashing on the world.  They saw its crimes with their own eyes and they despised it.  They knew that fascism had to be destroyed, that this rapacious, murderous, warmongering force for reactionary imperialism needed to be stopped.  In the Soviet Union’s monumental struggle against Nazi Germany, the Red Army’s commissars cultivated a “sacred hate” for their fascist enemy among the troops, focusing on the terrible atrocities committed against the peoples of the USSR, the horrific tortures inflicted on men and women participating in the partisan struggle who had been captured by the enemy, the wholesale destruction inflicted on the Russian land, and the need for vengeance against the reactionary perpetrators of these crimes.[8]  Thus they displayed revolutionary hatred, they fought against the real enemy, and together they won.

                To abandon hate, even if that were possible, would mean abandoning one of our greatest weapons in the class war and in the universal struggle for human liberation.  When confronted with something as monstrous as capitalism and class exploitation, fascism itself being an extreme version of it, hatred is the only legitimately moral emotion to feel.  To feel love in the face of such blatant monstrosity would mean collaboration, corruption, and moral degradation.  When the Zionist state of Israel imprisons the Palestinian people in ghettoes, keeps them under constant surveillance, constant harassment, constant persecution, and constant brutalization, in the same manner as many European states did to the Jewish people for centuries, then those human beings subjected to such inhumanity have as much right to revolt as the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto did and with just as much moral righteousness.[9]  Hatred has a time and place, as does love, and we must have the proper judgement to know when either emotion is appropriate.

Ultimately human morality cannot be sustained without the hatred and persecution of what is immoral.  This is why Ernesto “Che” Guevara insisted so strongly that “a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy”. 

                Moral degradation is the only way to describe how large sections of the left in Europe and North America have been co-opted in recent decades as stooges for imperialism under the guise of “humanitarian intervention” because they have been trained to uncritically (and lovingly) believe the stories of anyone who claims to be oppressed without actually analyzing the material conditions involved.  The Bosnian and Croatian fascists, Kosovo-Albanian drug cartels, racist Libyan Islamic terrorists, and foreign-backed death squads in Syria, as well as their paymasters in Western intelligence agencies, have all exploited this pathology masterfully to manipulate Western public opinion, even Western leftists who claim to be staunch anti-imperialists, into going to war and invading foreign lands as proxies of the imperialist superpower.[10]   The damage that this inflicts is catastrophic, transforming radicals into apologists for imperialist wars, mass murder, and capitalist expansion imposed on entire populations by armed force and violence.  Thus we see how naive ideas about love and non-violence can mesh with reactionary hatred and ruling class agendas.  A racist glorification of the supposed “meekness” of people in the Third World has convinced many supposed progressives in positions of privilege in the First World that it is their duty to “save” the wretched of the earth, even if it means bombing their countries back into the Stone Age.[11]  This is the nature of liberalism: good natured fools or self-enriching tricksters who try to humanize that which can never be humanized.

---

[1] For an excellent summary of the evolution of morality as a function of maintaining group solidarity against parasitism and abuse, see Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires.  Plume, 2007.

[2] Newton’s brilliant writings on building revolutionary working class consciousness among African-Americans should be required reading for First World communists in particular.  See Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide.  New York: Penguin, 2009.

[3] See, for example, Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium.  London: Verso, 2008; Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.  New York University Press, 2014; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World.  London: Verso, 2002.

[4] Reactionary hatred is fundamentally based on false consciousness.  See Michael Parenti, “False Consciousness,” in Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader.  San Francisco: City Lights, 2007, pp 181-186.

[5] Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union.  New York: iUniverse Books, 2010, pg 208.

[6] Cited in Eduardo Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique.  London: Zed Books, 1983, pg 224.

[7] For an excellent criticism of pacifism from a radical perspective see Laurent Moeri, “Why pacifism is morally indefensible,” January 21, 2014.  http://antidotezine.com/2014/01/21/why-pacifism-is-morally-indefensible/

[8] Albert Axell, Russia’s Heroes 1941-1945: True stories of the Soviet patriots who defied Hitler.  London: Magpie Books, 2010, pg 145.

[9] In 2002 the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising aroused the ire of the Israeli state when he threw his support behind the struggle for Palestinian liberation.  John Rose, “Marek Edelman: Last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis,” The Independent, October 7, 2009.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/marek-edelman-last-surviving-leader-of-the-1943-warsaw-ghetto-uprising-against-the-nazis-1798644.html

[10] The “humanitarian intervention” strategy that the West first employed in Yugoslavia in the 1990s has been repeated again and again since.  See Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia.  London: Verso, 2000.

[11] For an examination of this ideology, which is so rampant among NGOs and mainstream social-democratic politics, see Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.

Show Transcript: The Vietnam War and Why it Still Matters

Opening Theme

(John Pilger - “Heroes” (ATV 1981) clip “The Grunt is taking no more bullshit”) (Buffy Saint-Marie “The Universal Soldier”)

(Matt Jones – “Hell no, I ain’t gonna go!”) (Album: “Relevant”)

Hello brothers and sisters, comrades and friends.  You’re listening to Back in the USSR here on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried, and first of all I want to apologize for the lack of a show last week.  Well, I want to apologize, but not really.  There were some circumstances beyond my control, so I ended up having to play a talk by Michael Parenti for the full two hours, but I know those of you who still tuned in weren’t overly disappointed because listening to any talk by him is time well spent.

Now, this week I’m going to do what I was going to do last week.  Me and a very special guest are going to talk about the Vietnam War (mention the songs from the intro).  Why? Because here at Back in the USSR we are very sensitive to the distortion and re-writing of history, and that’s exactly what’s been going on with how the Vietnam War has been portrayed in Western media.  And while this certainly isn’t new, some very blatant examples have emerged recently, including a PBS documentary series which we’re going to talk about, that effectively whitewashes the whole thing -   

It was the case back then, and remains the case today, that mainstream commentators on the Vietnam War can be divided into two groups: the people who thought the war could be won, and those who thought it could not be won and concluded it was a mistake.  People who tell the truth that it was a criminal, brutal, racist, imperialist war are still not welcome in the mainstream capitalist press, it was the same with the Iraq War.  And this has allowed history to be distorted in many ways, commonly downplaying the American atrocities there as a “mistake” or even a “good-intentioned mistake”.

Well let’s look a little at this “good-intentioned mistake”.  The follow is an excerpt from an article by Michael Yates in Monthly Review Magazine entitled “Honor theVietnamese, Not those who killed them”.  This section of the article is called “McNamara’s business model of war”: 

(Play The Covered Wagon Musicians “Napalm Sticks to Kids”) (Album: “We say no to your war!”)

Brendan Campisi in Conversation on the Anti-War movement.

(Read The Black Panther, September 13, 1969 “To the Courageous Vietnamese People, Commemorating the Death of Ho Chi Minh”)

(Play Donovan “The Ballad of a Crystal Man”) (Album: “The Ballad of a Crystal Man”)

(Play Ewan MacColl "Ballad of Ho Chi Minh")