Daily Times

Sometimes decades pass and not much happens. At other times more events take place in days than those that occurred in decades. After the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago we were relentlessly told the great political and economic questions had all been settled and that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to the dustbin of history. The strategists of capital were exultant. The “end of history” was proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama.

The events on a single day on 15th September 2008 were a watershed. The collapse of Lehman Brothers glaringly exposed a voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at the cost of grotesque inequality, exploitation, wars and colonial occupations; it has now come down crashing. The baleful twins of neo-conservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction. The Arab revolutions in 2011 not only engrossed one country after another in the Middle East but gave rise to more convulsive events around the globe than in the preceding two decades.

The intensity and ferocity of these events was such that it sent shivers down the spines of the ruling elites across the world. Innumerable comparisons were drawn of these revolutions with the revolutions of the 19th and 20th century yet the single greatest event of the 20th century, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was conspicuously missing from the analysis and reports of the media. And this is neither an accident nor a coincidence. It was by design which reflects the fears that even the name of this revolution instil in the hearts of the ruling classes the world over. And this is in spite of the relentless din of the voracious chorus that ‘socialism’, Marxism’, ‘communism’ are dead.

Of all the parodies of popular representation in which history is so rich, Pakistan’s political elite is perhaps the most absurd. On the one hand they reverberate the cliché that ‘socialism is dead’, while at the same time mostly the right wing politicians are frighteningly warning about a bloody revolution. Awkwardly some present the French revolution as a solution to the crisis without even knowing which one. From 1789 till 1968 there were five bourgeois revolutions and two proletarian revolutions in France. The victorious Paris Commune of 1871 was the first revolution in history in which the working classes took power and held it for more than seventy days while the May 1968 upheaval in France was even larger in comparison to the Russian revolution of 1917 but was defeated by the betrayals of the leaders of the traditional workers parties in France. But such is the deafening silence on the Bolshevik Revolution as if it never even happened. If one dares to mention it the abrupt reply of the political overlords and their intellectual geniuses of today is “Oh! That failed in Russia.” The relative weight of slander in a political struggle in society still awaits its sociologist.

The Russian revolution of October 1917 changed the course of history. The American journalist and socialist who witnessed the events of the revolution at first hand wrote in his epic book, Ten days that shook the world, “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is an undeniable fact that the Russian revolution is one of the greatest events in human history, and the rule of the Bolsheviki is a phenomenon of worldwide importance.” According to the Russian orthodox calendar, the revolutionary insurrection and the capture of power by the Bolsheviks took place on the night of October 26, which falls on November 7 in the modern Christian calendar.

This revolutionary victory appropriated rulership from one oppressor class in a tiny minority and transferred it to the vast majority of the working classes in society. The process of the overthrow of the bourgeois state and capture of power by the leading party of the proletariat had a massive conscious involvement and participation of the vast majority of toilers. It is the only revolution hitherto that took place on classical Marxist lines. Lenin explained what real change this revolution ought to bring. He wrote in December 1917, “One of the most important tasks of today, is to develop [the] independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and the exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and distinguishing prejudice that only the so-called upper classes, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society.”

The most distinguishing feature of the Bolshevik party was that they subordinated the subjective goal, the guarding of the interests of the toiling people, to the dynamics of the revolution as an objectively hardened course. The party’s strategy was based on the scientific discovery of the laws that govern mass movements and upheavals. The muzhiks (poor peasants) had not read Lenin, but Lenin knew how to read the minds of the muzhiks. The oppressed and exploited masses are guided in their struggle not only by their demands, their desires, their needs but above all the experiences of their lives. The Bolsheviks were never under any snobbish prejudice or held any patrician derision for the independent experience of the people in struggle. Conversely they took it as their starting point and built upon it. Where the reformists and the pseudo-revolutionaries moaned and groaned about the hardships, obstacles and difficulties, the Bolsheviks took them head on. Trotsky defines them in his epic work, History of the Russian Revolution: “The Bolsheviks were revolutionaries of deed and not gesture, of the essence and not the form. Their policy was determined by the real grouping of forces, and not by sympathies and antipathies…Bolshevism created the type of authentic revolutionist who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgements. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept up in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability, whose inspirer was Lenin. Lenin never tired of working with his lancet, cutting off those bonds which a petty bourgeois environment creates between the party and official social opinion. At the same time Lenin taught the party to create its own social opinion, resting upon the thoughts and feelings of the rising class. Thus by a process of selection and education and in continual struggle, the Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it. Only this permitted the Bolsheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action the courageous determination without which the October victory would have been impossible.”

(To be continued)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com