November 1 - 15, 2006

Communists must lead the Working Class to become the Ruling Class

November 7, 2006 marks the 89th anniversary of the triumph of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. It was the first successful attempt of the working class to become the ruling class and reorganise society to get rid of class exploitation. This revolution shook the world by giving birth to a new kind of state power. It established Soviet power, which was the dictatorship of the proletariat – that is, the power of those who work over those who seek to exploit them.

The bourgeoisie would like the working class and all oppressed nations and peoples to forget about this world historic revolution as if it were a bad dream. They present this proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat as an aberration, not the next logical and inevitable step for the liberation of humankind. Their aim, of course, is to promote bourgeois democracy as the most advanced system of rule, even though war and fascism are the order of the day in the most advanced bourgeois democratic states today.

The 73 years of existence of the Soviet Union are actually made up of two periods, of roughly equal length. There was the first period when it made tremendous strides and showed the world a system superior to capitalism in all respects – in terms of democracy and fulfillment of rights, solution of the national question, and raising the economic and cultural level of the entire population. Then there was a second period when the working class lost power, socialism degenerated, a hybrid form of capitalism emerged, and the people’s rights were curtailed. This retrogressive process culminated in the dismantling of the Soviet state structure and breaking up of the Union. This brought to an end the first round of proletarian revolution.

The dangerous situation being created by the imperialist powers today points to the urgent need for another round of proletarian revolution. This requires that modern communist parties, and all enlightened people, seriously study and draw the lessons of the experience of the Great October Revolution, of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union and of its subsequent decay and demise.

World Historic Achievements

The Communist Party of Soviet Union (Bolshevik) led the working class to establish a new state power in alliance with the oppressed peasantry. Soviet power was based on the consciousness and organisation of the working people. It was an instrument to deprive exploiters of their power to live off the labour of others. It enabled the working people to ensure that their claims on the social product were fulfilled.

The working class used this power to socialize the ownership of the means of production, creating a state socialist industry. A cooperative farm sector was created through the voluntary pooling together of land by the peasants, with generous state support. In place of the crisis-ridden capitalist system, a vibrant socio-economic order emerged, without any capitalists or landlords.

Elimination of medieval remnants and the power to exploit paved the way for the extension of people’s rights to an unprecedented level. Women enjoyed and exercised equal rights as men, for the first time in any part of the world, including equal right to elect and be elected. Women also enjoyed special rights on account of being women, such as maternity leave at work, also for the first time anywhere. The different nations that had been oppressed by Czarist Russia enjoyed equal rights as nations, including equal status for their languages. They enjoyed full right to self-determination, including secession.

All villages were electrified and the urban-rural divide began to narrow. Universal public health and education served to raise the material and cultural level of the entire population. Living standards of the broad masses of people rose rapidly and steadily, with every passing year, without any interruption or crisis.

The application of the principle of democratic centralism allowed for the existence of centralized organs of power over which the people exercised democratic control. The Constitution of the Soviet Union, adopted in 1936 after the exploiting classes had been eliminated, was based on the most advanced political theory of our time. It provided the basis for a political mechanism by which working people could select and elect their representatives and recall them at any time. Executive power was subordinated to the legislative power, which in turn was subordinated to the people of the country.

All the achievements in the first period, from 1917 until the 1950s, were the result of the fact that the CPSU(B) had dared to lead the working class to become the ruling class, and to continue the class struggle in Soviet society, to place the working people at the centre of socialist construction. It had done so in the face of all attempts of pseudo-Marxists of that time to block such a course, by arguing that such a thing was not possible in backward Russia.

Restoration of Capitalism

Following the victory of the October Revolution, the imperialist bourgeoisie of the leading capitalist countries joined forces to destroy the Soviet Union, which they viewed as their death knell. They tried to destroy it by force, immediately after the revolution, and again during the Second World War by egging on Hitler to do the dirty job. Both these attempts ended in failure.

What they did not accomplish through brute force, the imperialists achieved through internal subversion in the 1950s. They were able to destroy the Soviet power from within by weakening the leadership of the working class, and then exploiting this weakness to change the nature of the political power and the course being followed. They nurtured and promoted, within the CPSU(B), those who spoke in the name of Marxism and Leninism but pursued a bourgeois imperialist agenda. They revised the theoretical principles of Marxism-Leninism to justify the betrayal of the revolution.

Instead of providing leadership to solve the problems of the day, the ‘modern revisionists’, led by Khrushchev, initiated a campaign of vilifying the name of Stalin. The reactionary bourgeois method of character assassination, that too of a person after his death, was used to cover up their own treachery.

The modern revisionists declared that the Soviet Union was a ‘state of the whole people’, no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat. They called for ‘peaceful coexistence’ and ‘peaceful competition’ with capitalism. They declared that the class struggle is over, both within the Soviet Union and on the world scale. It was a line that lulled the communists to sleep, while the revisionist leadership of the party worked to expand the space for capitalism, for the accumulation of private wealth in a few hands and for the arms race with the United States.

The situation in the 1950s was demanding further enhancement of the role of the working people in decision making, in line with the advance in their economic and cultural level. This included key economic decisions including the setting of prices and the remuneration for labour. The CPSU(B), headed by Khrushchev, failed to address the problems of enhancing the role of the human factor in a society based on socialism.

Instead of advancing on the solid foundations of the 1936 Constitution, to enhance the role of the people in directly governing the country, the CPSU(B) entrenched itself in the state and political process. A party dictatorship, in place of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was imposed. Democratic centralism was replaced by bureaucratic centralism. Supreme power was held by the Party, the KGB, the Ministry of Defence and internal security. As a result, discontent began to spread among the people whose rights were trampled in the mud.

With the working people no longer in control, the social surplus began to get concentrated in the hands of a privileged minority. All the ills of capitalism, including unemployment, began to resurface in Soviet society. With the growth of a parasitic military-bureaucratic apparatus, the Soviet Union became a social-imperialist power, oppressing nations within the Union, dominating other countries in the socialist camp, contending and colluding with US imperialism for world hegemony.

The discontent of the working people with the hybrid society, which was capitalist in content and socialist in form, was manipulated by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, to get rid of socialism even in form. Classical bourgeois democracy replaced the Soviet form of power and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke up into independent capitalist republics.

Conclusion

The first important lesson from the Great October Revolution is that in this epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution, communists must dare to lead the working class to become the ruling class. They must reject the false arguments of those who argue that the “time is not yet ripe” for the working class to go for power.

A second important lesson is that the working class must create new instruments for empowering itself and all the oppressed classes and strata, as the Russian working class led by the Bolshevik Party created the Soviets in their time. The communist and workers’ movement cannot rely on bourgeois democracy to achieve its goal.

The criterion for judging whether a political process is democratic, in modern times, is not whether there is one party or many parties, as the bourgeoisie makes out. The key criterion is whether political parties operate to enable the majority of people to rule, or whether they operate to keep themselves in power and exclude the majority of people from the decision making process.

The most important lesson from the decay and fall of the Soviet Union is that a Communist Party cannot and must not seek power in its own hands. It must ensure that political power is in the hands of the working class. The task of the Communist Party is to continually enhance the role of the working people in governing the country.