Russia 1917

The current year reminds us that history is not the affair of university professors, but a social, class question of vital importance for the proletariat. The main political goal the world bourgeoisie has set itself in 1997 is to impose on the working class its own reactionary, falsified version of the history of the 20th century. To this end it is highlighting the holocaust during World War II, and the October Revolution.

The July Days of 1917 are one of the most important moments, not only in the Russian Revolution, but in the whole history of the workers' movement. In the space of three days, from July 3rd  to July 5th, one of the mightiest ever confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat, despite ending in a defeat for the working class, opened the road to the seizure of power four months later in October 1917.

The "Ten days that shook the world" were seventy years ago. The world media is celebrating the anniversary. Once more they are going to talk about the Russian Revolution. In their fashion that is, of the ruling class, with its lies, its deformations and with its stale old refrains: "the communist revolution can only lead to the Gulag or to suicide".

In International Reviews no 71 and 72 we published the first two articles in this series, in which we demonstrated how the proletarian revolution of October 1917 was the result of the conscious and massive action of the workers, of their political combat against the parties of the bourgeoisie (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries...) who tried to sabotage their struggle and ensnare them in the First World War.

In the first part of this article (International Review 71), we saw how the Russian revolution was not, as the bourgeoisie's propaganda says, a ‘mere coup D'Etat', but constituted the most gigantic and conscious movements of the exploited masses in history - rich in experience, initiative and creativity.

The struggle of the working class and the communist revolution are notions that many today reject as outmoded, disproved by historical experience. The collapse of the state capitalist regimes in the USSR and the whole former eastern bloc into the whirlpool of the world economic crisis has provided all the detractors of the Russian revolution of 1917 with an opportunity to reinforce all the old lies which have been poured out for decades about this historic event.

Nothing enrages an exploiting class more than an uprising of the exploited. The revolts of the slaves under the Roman Empire, of the peasants under feudalism, were always repressed with the most disgusting cruelty. The rebellion of the working class against capitalism, however, is an even greater affront to the ruling class of thus system, since it clearly and rationally holds aloft the banner of a new, communist, society, a society that actually corresponds to historical possibility and necessity.

Originally published in two parts in International Review 12 & 13, 1978