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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 20, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Bolshevism turned defeat into victory

The following is adapted from a speech by Brian Becker at a Workers World Party forum commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

In the days following the Russian Revolution the New York Times ran a lead editorial cautioning the capitalists not to be overly concerned about the events in Russia.

Why shouldn’t the super-rich owners of private capital be worried about workers seizing factories and hungry peasants sacking the estates of the landed gentry? Because the revolutionary government would last only weeks or a few months, the Times confidently predicted. It would be remembered as a fluke, a passing historical curiosity.

On this 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution our enemies in the bourgeois media are, as they have since 1917, proclaiming that socialism has no future and that this prognosis is confirmed by the overthrow of the Soviet government in 1991.

We believe, however, that the 20th century will be remembered not as the century when communism died but when it was born. The Soviet Union, with all its flaws, showed the remarkable progress that can be achieved by freeing society from the necessity of maximizing profits for the capitalists.

What is possible

Instead of the profits going to the 1 percent of the population that owns the means of production, the wealth of society can provide every worker with basic rights: a job, inexpensive housing, free medical care, education, child care, early well-paid retirement, and leisure time.

In 1917, the Soviet Union was an impoverished, illiterate and backward country. Yet within several decades it provided these rights to every worker. It did this in spite of being devastated twice—first in the civil war after the revolution and again by the Nazi invasion of World War II.

A few weeks ago Workers World Party attended a world conference on the prospects for socialism, held in Havana, Cuba. It was attended by delegates from more than 100 Marxist and socialist parties. The conference adopted no resolutions nor did it adopt a unified political program. Instead, it was an attempt to begin to regenerate the communist movement.

Spreading the revolutionary message

It would be worthwhile to compare this conference with other world gatherings that took place earlier in this century. Right after the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks summoned a Congress in Moscow that launched the Communist International (Comintern). The purpose of that Congress and ones that followed was to unite the most revolutionary forces for the purpose of launching the worldwide proletarian revolution that would overthrow capitalism. The parties affiliated with the Comintern embraced a shared revolutionary program and revolutionary discipline.

It was the energy generated by the victory of the Russian Revolution that made the formation of the Comintern possible. In turn it brought the message of revolutionary Marxism to China, Vietnam, Korea, India, South Africa and all the way back to Europe and throughout the Americas. Those conferences of the Comintern were the result of a great victory for the working class.

This was far different from the 1912 conference held in Basel, Switzerland. All the truly great socialist parties of that time met to discuss the looming inter-imperialist war that became known as World War I. All these socialist parties inscribed on their banners the famous slogan from the Communist Manifesto: "Workers of the World Unite!"

At the conference they all signed the Basel Manifesto, pledging that should a war break out between the capitalist countries, they would resolutely oppose it. They pledged that the workers of each country would refuse to shoot each other. That they would instead turn their guns around and transform the imperialist war into a civil war for the liberation of the working class.

In spite of their solemn oath to oppose the war, almost every major socialist party capitulated before the avalanche of patriotism and hysteria when the war actually came in August 1914.

When Lenin, then in exile, read that the German Socialist Party was supporting the war effort he didn’t believe it. He told his comrades that this report was a lie spread by the capitalist media to confuse people. But the next day he learned that the news was true.

I’m raising this because the action of the major socialist parties was such a betrayal, such a catastrophic blow toward the movement of that time. It seemed to render the principal ideas of Marxism, namely that the workers of the world would unite for revolution, into a complete fraud. It seemed to make the world socialist conference in Basel just so much hot air.

Holdouts for international worker solidarity

It was only the Bolsheviks, plus Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and a small party in Serbia, that stood true to the internationalist principles of the Basel conference. Their representatives were exiled, imprisoned or executed for standing up against the war effort. The prospects for socialism, which must have seemed so bright just a few years earlier, seemed suddenly dim if not extinguished altogether.

But the capitalist war changed everything. Twenty million dead, vast destruction, famine and poverty finally led to the renewed struggle of the masses. The Russian Revolution that we are remembering tonight was the greatest anti-war demonstration in history. Because it was only the Bolshevik revolution that lived up to the Basel Manifesto and turned the imperialist war into a civil war.

The recent conference of Marxists, aimed at restarting the socialist movement, took place in Havana last month because Fidel and the Cuban Communist Party have remained steadfast and loyal to their internationalist and socialist principles, as others have abandoned them. This is the tradition of Lenin, who preferred temporary isolation to the sacrifice of basic principles.

The Havana conference asserted that prospects for socialism are excellent because capitalism belongs to prehistory—where capitalist markets rather than people reign supreme. Capitalism means hunger for hundreds of millions, constant unemployment, devastating recessions and depressions, national and sexual oppression, and war.

The road to socialism cannot be without setbacks and defeats along the way. But the key ingredient to eventual success is that the advocates of socialism retain the revolutionary conceptions of Marxism and Leninism. They are the indispensable weapon of the masses when the class struggle breaks through the period of reaction with its next inevitable surge forward.

As Jose Ramon Balaguer of the Cuban Communist Party’s Politburo told the conference, "Whenever you struggle, there exists the possibility of victory. When you surrender, you forfeit this inherent possibility."

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