What do we mean by socialism? October 1917

Submitted by Janine on 15 April, 2003 - 9:12

“Marxism found its highest historical expression in Bolshevism. Under the banner of Bolshevism the first victory of the proletariat was achieved and the first workers’ state established.” so said Leon Trotsky in 1937, speaking about the revolution that took place in in Russia in October 1917.

The degeneration of the Russian Revolution, by the end of the 1920s, into a repressive regime, presided over the Joseph Stalin, is seen by many as a sure sign that it was not a real revolution, but perhaps a coup d’etat. Or if it were a real revolution, then all revolutions are doomed to failure. Much of the left have spent their time either excusing or denouncing the Bolsheviks, rather than trying to understand how such a huge popular revolution of the working class and oppressed could descend into dictatorship so rapidly.

Without the disciplined, activist Bolshevik Party, the revolution would not have happened. The Bolsheviks were able to grasp the opportunities at decisive moments in the course of the revolutionary crisis in Russia which started in February 1917. For instance, after April 1917 they called for the soviets — democratically organised bodies of workers’ and soldiers’ — to take power in Russia. In August they mobilised the revolutionary movement to stop a right-wing coup led by General Kornilov. Finally in October the Bolshevik-led soviets launched an insurrection once it was clear that this rising would have majority support among the working class.

The Bolsheviks were democrats. They based themselves on the soviets, the spontaneously created committees of workers and soldiers. Their goal was working class democracy. One of the immediate actions of the revolutionary government was to abolish the 600 laws against the Jews and to free the oppressed nationalities in the Russian “prison house of nations”.

And the Bolsheviks never believed that they could make socialism in Russia — because Russia was a very under-developed capitalist country. A socialist society cannot be made in one country alone and it can only be created and sustained on the basis of a well-developed economy. The Bolsheviks thought that the Russian working class could take power in Russia but that the workers in the more developed European countries would also shortly take power — in Germany and elsewhere.

The crisis conditions created by the First World War meant that many things were possible in 1917 Europe. However, the socialist leaders in Western Europe left the Russian workers in the lurch, many of them supported the war and made peace with their own ruling classes. The world’s first workers’ state was left isolated and impoverished. At least fourteen armies of the surrounding hostile bourgeois states invaded Russia. The youthful workers’ state was forced to mobilise every resource it had to defeat those armies. The soviets withered under the pressure. In this context a counter-revolution led by a section of the Bolshevik party, under the wing of Joseph Stalin, took place. Stalin ruled in the name of socialism, but the Stalinist USSR was not socialism!

Stalinism arose out of the defeat of a working class revolution. The experience of Stalinism doesn’t prove that only a free market economy can give a secure basis for democracy. People who want genuine socialism do not want any sort of bureaucratic state. We want to get rid of the bureaucratic state everywhere, including that in countries like the USA or Britain, where a bureaucratic state works in tandem with the bourgeoisie.

We want to see a society organised along the lines the Bolsheviks set out: democratic from the ground up.

The Russian Revolution does not prove that socialism cannot work. All it proves is that socialism cannot succeed where the working class is in a small minority and isolated from the rest of the world.

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