100 years since the October Revolution
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
Excellent piece!
" If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." Lenin, 1916
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
1917 October Revolution: The Single Most Important Event in World History
By Ian Patrick Beddowes*.
Source: "Vanguard", Organ of the NST of the Zimbabwe Communist Party, Vol. 2, No.3, 4th November 2017.
This year we celebrate the centenary of the Great October Socialist Revolution which took place in Russia on 25th October 1917 (Old Style) 7th November 1917 (New Style). To all those familiar with historical materialism, this is the single most important event in human history.
Why?
Because it represents the not only the first major step in the movement away from capitalism and the dawn of socialism, it was also the first step away from class society towards non-class society.
Human beings of the species Homo Sapiens have been in existence for ± 250,000 years. For most of that time we have been living in various stages of primitive communism, of non-class society. The emergence of class society emerged only about 10,000 years ago concurrent with the rise of civilisation. Even then, for most of the subsequent period, those living within a class society were a minority of the world’s population.
The young Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) said famously:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) MECW Vol.6 p.482
to which the mature Engels, in a later footnote to a later edition, added
“That is, all written history...”
Frederick Engels, Footnote to English Edition of Manifesto of the Communist Party (1888) MECW Vol.6 p.482.
Engels and Stalin talk about 5 main modes of production, italicising the word ‘main’: these are: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism and socialism; to these categories is often added the Asiatic mode of production used in ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq and Eastern Turkey) which is described by Marx. Only the first and the last are categories of non-class society.
When these writers talk about “main modes of production” they are recognising that within these main modes there have been variations — quite considerable ones — and that between these main modes there have been transitional forms. If we read Engels and if we study real history, we see that class struggle produces both revolution and counter-revolution, we see also that although one mode of production becomes dominant, that older modes still continue and also that new modes start to take shape, to emerge from the bosom of the old. Or as Lenin says in a number of places: “History does not move in a straight line: it zig-zags.”
We hear from some uneducated people that “Communism was tried and failed”. What a wealth of ignorance there is in that brief statement!
Firstly: COMMUNISM HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED. This is not because people do not want to try communism but because the social and economic conditions for the advance to communism do not yet exist. Since the time of Marx and Engels, communists have always been clear that there will be two stages, the first stage, which we now refer to as ‘Socialism’ will be “stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) MECW Vol.24 p.85.
‘Communism’ is the second stage which can only emerge after the worldwide defeat of capitalism in its imperialist stage and after the socialist mode of production becomes predominant in most countries. The process will inevitably stretch across an entire historical epoch. The alternative, of course, is for the majority to accept increasing impoverishment while a tiny élite basks in luxury and conspicuous consumption.
Thus we talk about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (not ‘Communist Republics’) because as communists our analysis is not based on idealistic fantasy but on material reality. In fact, the concrete experience of the organising economies following the political independence of former colonies from the imperialist centre has shown us that, prior to even the building of socialism, it is, in most cases, necessary to build national democratic economies autonomous from imperialist control as an intermediate stage.
Secondly: Socialism in the USSR was immensely successful! It did not fail. In a few years a country the size of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa — a country in which the majority of people were peasants just as primitive in their production methods and as superstitious in their ideas as their African counterparts — was, under Communist leadership, propelled from the middle-ages into the 20th century. Even before the Civil War (1917-1922) was over, Lenin and the Communist technician Gleb Krzhizhanovsky (1872-1959) launched a plan for the electrification of the whole country; starting in 1920, it was completed in 1932. Industrial growth rates during the 1930s averaged 16% per annum and electrical generation more than doubled from the 1932 level. The living standards of the people advanced with the growth of production.
Then in 1941, came the German Nazi invasion which had the explicit intention of exterminating a large section of the Soviet people and enslaving others to make way for German settlement. By the time of the invasion the Soviet Union was building bigger and better tanks than Germany. These tanks were wholly designed and built by the Soviet people to Soviet designs using Soviet steel smelted with Soviet coal. This war is known to us as the Second World War or World War II and to the Soviet people as the Great Patriotic War. Although other nations participated in the Second World War, it was the Red Army of the Soviet Union which engaged 70% of the German Army and defeated it, most spectacularly at Stalingrad in 1942, the biggest battle in human history and again at Kursk in 1943, the biggest tank battle in human history. It was the Red Army which took Berlin on 2nd May 1945, forcing Hitler to commit suicide.
Despite the devastation of such a huge swathe of Soviet territory and the loss of at least 20 million citizens, the Soviet Union rapidly reconstructed only to be faced with the Cold War — the isolation of the Soviet Union and its allies by the USA and its satellites. After the Chinese Communist victory of 1949, the Soviets gave immense assistance to help China industrialise. In 1959 the USSR backed the Cuban revolution against US aggression and began giving massive aid to the African liberation movements without asking for anything in return.
True, by 1991 counter-revolutionary forces both internal and external as well as errors by the Soviet leadership created the conditions for the overthrow of Soviet power.
But did that lead to an improvement of the living conditions of the people of the former Soviet Republics?
No it did not.
Has this led to an improvement of the living standards and the reduction of war globally?
No it has not.
The conquest if state power by the working-class in Russia in 1917 not only immensely improved the living standards of the people who had previously lived in the backward Russian Empire but created the basis for successful socialist and national liberation struggles elsewhere, including Africa, including Zimbabwe. Soviet socialism was immensely successful.
Thirdly: the socialism of the Soviet Union was not produced from some kind of one-size-fits-all utopian ideal but had of necessity to fit the time and place. Anyone who has read the article Land Reform in the USSR in the August 2017 issue of Vanguard will realise that the land reform was a response to the conditions of the time and that in carrying it out, the traditional Russian co-operative known as the ‘artel’ gave it a form understood by the people.
Neither socialism nor capitalism can be built according to rigid formulas — in fact one of the disturbing features of the current era is the idealisation of the ‘Free Market’ which has pervaded the thinking of Western ‘economists’ since the 1980s and has led to the introduction of devastating ‘economic structural adjustment programmes’ now rejected even by such prominent bourgeois economists as Joseph Stiglitz, former head of the World Bank and former Harvard Business School lecturer David C. Korten.
It should be further noted that the ‘Free Market’ ideal has not been rejected by any of our leading Zimbabwean politicians, either in the ruling party or the or the ‘opposition’. As the great African writer, Frantz Fanon noted in his famous book The Wretched of the Earth in 1961:
“This economy has always developed outside the limits of their knowledge. They have nothing more than an approximate, bookish acquaintance with the actual and potential resources of their country’s soil and mineral deposits; and therefore they can only speak of these resources on a general and abstract plane.”
In terms of the socialism of the 20th century: we value and defend the pioneering work of the Soviet Union in which socialism was successfully built under the most appallingly difficult conditions. But although we have to learn from both the successes and the failures of our heroic predecessors, we have no intention of trying to mechanically reproduce the socialism of the USSR which began 100 years ago in 21st century Zimbabwe!
It is under the conditions of economic collapse that the Zimbabwe Communist Party calls for a National Dialogue for economic reconstruction.
In Zimbabwe, the ZCP has picked up the mantle of Marxism-Leninism hastily dropped by the bourgeois nationalist political leadership soon after they achieved National Independence and is simultaneously the Zimbabwean section of the worldwide communist movement started by Marx and Engels in 1848 and which launched itself as a serious world force in Petrograd in 1917.
A Luta Continua!
Without Revolutionary Theory there can be No Revolutionary Movement!
Viva Socialism! Viva!
iSando le Sikele!
Sando ne Sikere!
* Editor of the "Vanguard".
https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/11 ... .html#more
By Ian Patrick Beddowes*.
Source: "Vanguard", Organ of the NST of the Zimbabwe Communist Party, Vol. 2, No.3, 4th November 2017.
This year we celebrate the centenary of the Great October Socialist Revolution which took place in Russia on 25th October 1917 (Old Style) 7th November 1917 (New Style). To all those familiar with historical materialism, this is the single most important event in human history.
Why?
Because it represents the not only the first major step in the movement away from capitalism and the dawn of socialism, it was also the first step away from class society towards non-class society.
Human beings of the species Homo Sapiens have been in existence for ± 250,000 years. For most of that time we have been living in various stages of primitive communism, of non-class society. The emergence of class society emerged only about 10,000 years ago concurrent with the rise of civilisation. Even then, for most of the subsequent period, those living within a class society were a minority of the world’s population.
The young Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) said famously:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) MECW Vol.6 p.482
to which the mature Engels, in a later footnote to a later edition, added
“That is, all written history...”
Frederick Engels, Footnote to English Edition of Manifesto of the Communist Party (1888) MECW Vol.6 p.482.
Engels and Stalin talk about 5 main modes of production, italicising the word ‘main’: these are: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism and socialism; to these categories is often added the Asiatic mode of production used in ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq and Eastern Turkey) which is described by Marx. Only the first and the last are categories of non-class society.
When these writers talk about “main modes of production” they are recognising that within these main modes there have been variations — quite considerable ones — and that between these main modes there have been transitional forms. If we read Engels and if we study real history, we see that class struggle produces both revolution and counter-revolution, we see also that although one mode of production becomes dominant, that older modes still continue and also that new modes start to take shape, to emerge from the bosom of the old. Or as Lenin says in a number of places: “History does not move in a straight line: it zig-zags.”
We hear from some uneducated people that “Communism was tried and failed”. What a wealth of ignorance there is in that brief statement!
Firstly: COMMUNISM HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED. This is not because people do not want to try communism but because the social and economic conditions for the advance to communism do not yet exist. Since the time of Marx and Engels, communists have always been clear that there will be two stages, the first stage, which we now refer to as ‘Socialism’ will be “stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) MECW Vol.24 p.85.
‘Communism’ is the second stage which can only emerge after the worldwide defeat of capitalism in its imperialist stage and after the socialist mode of production becomes predominant in most countries. The process will inevitably stretch across an entire historical epoch. The alternative, of course, is for the majority to accept increasing impoverishment while a tiny élite basks in luxury and conspicuous consumption.
Thus we talk about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (not ‘Communist Republics’) because as communists our analysis is not based on idealistic fantasy but on material reality. In fact, the concrete experience of the organising economies following the political independence of former colonies from the imperialist centre has shown us that, prior to even the building of socialism, it is, in most cases, necessary to build national democratic economies autonomous from imperialist control as an intermediate stage.
Secondly: Socialism in the USSR was immensely successful! It did not fail. In a few years a country the size of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa — a country in which the majority of people were peasants just as primitive in their production methods and as superstitious in their ideas as their African counterparts — was, under Communist leadership, propelled from the middle-ages into the 20th century. Even before the Civil War (1917-1922) was over, Lenin and the Communist technician Gleb Krzhizhanovsky (1872-1959) launched a plan for the electrification of the whole country; starting in 1920, it was completed in 1932. Industrial growth rates during the 1930s averaged 16% per annum and electrical generation more than doubled from the 1932 level. The living standards of the people advanced with the growth of production.
Then in 1941, came the German Nazi invasion which had the explicit intention of exterminating a large section of the Soviet people and enslaving others to make way for German settlement. By the time of the invasion the Soviet Union was building bigger and better tanks than Germany. These tanks were wholly designed and built by the Soviet people to Soviet designs using Soviet steel smelted with Soviet coal. This war is known to us as the Second World War or World War II and to the Soviet people as the Great Patriotic War. Although other nations participated in the Second World War, it was the Red Army of the Soviet Union which engaged 70% of the German Army and defeated it, most spectacularly at Stalingrad in 1942, the biggest battle in human history and again at Kursk in 1943, the biggest tank battle in human history. It was the Red Army which took Berlin on 2nd May 1945, forcing Hitler to commit suicide.
Despite the devastation of such a huge swathe of Soviet territory and the loss of at least 20 million citizens, the Soviet Union rapidly reconstructed only to be faced with the Cold War — the isolation of the Soviet Union and its allies by the USA and its satellites. After the Chinese Communist victory of 1949, the Soviets gave immense assistance to help China industrialise. In 1959 the USSR backed the Cuban revolution against US aggression and began giving massive aid to the African liberation movements without asking for anything in return.
True, by 1991 counter-revolutionary forces both internal and external as well as errors by the Soviet leadership created the conditions for the overthrow of Soviet power.
But did that lead to an improvement of the living conditions of the people of the former Soviet Republics?
No it did not.
Has this led to an improvement of the living standards and the reduction of war globally?
No it has not.
The conquest if state power by the working-class in Russia in 1917 not only immensely improved the living standards of the people who had previously lived in the backward Russian Empire but created the basis for successful socialist and national liberation struggles elsewhere, including Africa, including Zimbabwe. Soviet socialism was immensely successful.
Thirdly: the socialism of the Soviet Union was not produced from some kind of one-size-fits-all utopian ideal but had of necessity to fit the time and place. Anyone who has read the article Land Reform in the USSR in the August 2017 issue of Vanguard will realise that the land reform was a response to the conditions of the time and that in carrying it out, the traditional Russian co-operative known as the ‘artel’ gave it a form understood by the people.
Neither socialism nor capitalism can be built according to rigid formulas — in fact one of the disturbing features of the current era is the idealisation of the ‘Free Market’ which has pervaded the thinking of Western ‘economists’ since the 1980s and has led to the introduction of devastating ‘economic structural adjustment programmes’ now rejected even by such prominent bourgeois economists as Joseph Stiglitz, former head of the World Bank and former Harvard Business School lecturer David C. Korten.
It should be further noted that the ‘Free Market’ ideal has not been rejected by any of our leading Zimbabwean politicians, either in the ruling party or the or the ‘opposition’. As the great African writer, Frantz Fanon noted in his famous book The Wretched of the Earth in 1961:
“This economy has always developed outside the limits of their knowledge. They have nothing more than an approximate, bookish acquaintance with the actual and potential resources of their country’s soil and mineral deposits; and therefore they can only speak of these resources on a general and abstract plane.”
In terms of the socialism of the 20th century: we value and defend the pioneering work of the Soviet Union in which socialism was successfully built under the most appallingly difficult conditions. But although we have to learn from both the successes and the failures of our heroic predecessors, we have no intention of trying to mechanically reproduce the socialism of the USSR which began 100 years ago in 21st century Zimbabwe!
It is under the conditions of economic collapse that the Zimbabwe Communist Party calls for a National Dialogue for economic reconstruction.
In Zimbabwe, the ZCP has picked up the mantle of Marxism-Leninism hastily dropped by the bourgeois nationalist political leadership soon after they achieved National Independence and is simultaneously the Zimbabwean section of the worldwide communist movement started by Marx and Engels in 1848 and which launched itself as a serious world force in Petrograd in 1917.
A Luta Continua!
Without Revolutionary Theory there can be No Revolutionary Movement!
Viva Socialism! Viva!
iSando le Sikele!
Sando ne Sikere!
* Editor of the "Vanguard".
https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/11 ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
Good piece. Some of our twitter friends should read and try to understand these things.When these writers talk about “main modes of production” they are recognising that within these main modes there have been variations — quite considerable ones — and that between these main modes there have been transitional forms. If we read Engels and if we study real history, we see that class struggle produces both revolution and counter-revolution, we see also that although one mode of production becomes dominant, that older modes still continue and also that new modes start to take shape, to emerge from the bosom of the old. Or as Lenin says in a number of places: “History does not move in a straight line: it zig-zags.”
We hear from some uneducated people that “Communism was tried and failed”. What a wealth of ignorance there is in that brief statement!
" If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." Lenin, 1916
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
listened to the first 5 minutes of this, seems pretty good, tho the narrator should speak up.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
100 years on: How the Russian Revolution inspired India
The values that inspired the movement remain relevant.
A hundred years ago, American journalist John Reed witnessed the momentous events of 1917 in Russia, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, backed by soldiers and working-class people, seized power to end centuries of czarist rule in Russia. Reed describes the scene in Moscow’s Red Square in his book Ten Days That Shook The World:
“This was the day of the People, the rumour of whose coming was thunderous as surf…
“We forced our way through the dense mass packed near the Kremlin wall, and stood upon one of the dirt-mountains. Already several men were there, among them Muranov, the soldier, who was elected Commandant of Moscow – a tall, simple-looking, beared man with a gentle face.
“… A military band came up marching up, playing the Internationale, and spontaneously the song caught and spread like wind-ripples on a sea, slow and solemn. From top of the Kremlin’s wall a gigantic banner unrolled… saying Long Live Brotherhood of Workers of the World.”
News of the Russian Revolution spread through the world and it touched the lives of the poorest people. They saw the possibility of political justice and economic prosperity, and it strengthened their resolve to continue their own struggles.
As Jawaharlal Nehru noted later: “The Soviet Revolution has advanced human society by a great leap and has lit a bright flame which could not be smothered, and it has laid the foundation for that new civilisation towards which the world could advance.”
Adivasi and workers’ movements in India
It didn’t take long for the Russian Revolution to inspire Indian workers to fight against their horrific working conditions. It led to an upsurge in workers’ movements in 1918 and 1919. There were strikes in almost all the textile mills in Bombay, the heart of Indian industry at that time. In the first six months of 1921, over 1.5 million workers were involved in a series of strikes against the 1919 Rowlatt Act, which allowed indefinite detention and incarceration without trial.
Dozens of small trade unions sprang up across India. On October 20, 1920, three years after the Russian Revolution, the All-India Trade Union Congress was born.
In 1945, in a village in Thane deep in the forests of the Western Ghats, a small group of Adivasis of the Warli community gathered around Godavari Parulekar, a communist who was working with them, to pose a question that had been troubling them for some time. They lit their bidis and finally asked in a confidential tone, “Tell us frankly the truth, Bai, who is Russia? Does he give you money?”
The Adivasis told Parulekar that their landlords had told them that the “red flag isn’t ours, it is Russia’s. The Bai gets money from Russia.”
So, Parulekar told them about Russia, about how peasants and workers like themselves had formed a government and an army. She went on to lead the Adivasi community in their own struggle against the wealthy landlords who had pushed them into forced labour.
A manifesto for Kashmir
Also in the 1940s, in a small village of 150 families called Hafroo in the Kashmir Valley, a young man from a poor family walked 25 km to Srinagar to reach his college. Ghulam Qader could not afford to take the tonga. In Srinagar, he came across a magazine called Soviet Desh.
He was so excited to read the magazine that he immediately subscribed to it. To his delight, the subscription was free.
Qader attended a study circle run by communists, where he heard of MN Roy, one of the founders of the Communist Party of India who had known Lenin. Qader later became a teacher and immersed himself in the activities of the trade union for teachers. He was also an active member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and remained one even when he was close to 80 years old.
There were others like him in Kashmir who were inspired by the Russian Revolution. Sheikh Abdullah, called the lion of Kashmir, was so moved by it that he asked Indian communists to write a manifesto for a Naya Kashmir. The manifesto had separate charters on the rights of peasants, workers and women.
In the introduction to the 1944 Naya Kashmir programme, Abdullah, who would go on to be chief minister of the state, said: “Soviet Russia has demonstrated before our eyes not merely theoretically but in her actual day to day life and development, that real freedom takes birth from economic emancipation.”
In 1948, he renamed Srinagar Chowk as Lal Chowk after Moscow’s Red Square.
Russia and Raj Kapoor
It was not a one-sided love. The Russian people loved Indians, India and Hindi films. A record 63.7 million Soviet citizens watched Raj Kapoor’s 1951 hit Awara – it was the largest audience of the decade for a single film.
The script of the film was written by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas (1914-1987). He was born in Panipat in the home of celebrated Urdu poet Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali, a student of Mirza Ghalib. His grandfather, Khwaja Gulam Abbas, was among the main players of the 1857 Rebellion – an unsuccessful civilian uprising against British rule that began with a mutiny by Indian soldiers in Meerut – and the first rebel from Panipat to be shot from the mouth of a cannon.
Khwaja Ahmed Abbas had been active in the Indian People Theatre Association, the cultural front of the Communist Party of India that had more than 12,000 members.
Still relevant after a century
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag with its hammer and sickle was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin and the Russian tri-colour was raised.
And now it is a hundred years since the Russian Revolution took place. It is a hundred years since the workers and peasants sang the Internationale. The Soviet Union has disappeared from the map but the song is still sung by millions of workers in their own languages.
Play
In Russia, the government is not sure how it should commemorate 100 years of the revolution. Many of the older generation remember their country and despite the terrible tragedies they witnessed and the losses they suffered, they still love the idea of the Soviet Union. They see with horror the death of old values and they ask, “What kind of values can the Pepsi generation have?”
One member of the Soviet Communist Party declared:
“Socialism isn’t just labour camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright world: everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. They say to me that you couldn’t buy a car – so then no one had a car. No one wore Versace suits or bought houses in Miami. My God! The leaders of the USSR lived like mid-level businessmen, they were nothing like today’s oligarchs. Not a bit! They weren’t building themselves yatchs with champagne showers. Can you imagine! Right now, there is a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for? Gilded doorknobs… Is this freedom?”
The ideas and values that inspired the Russian Revolution are even more relevant if we look at the world today. The century since the revolution has seen more wars, violence and inequality. It has seen the deliberate crushing of dreams and visions for alternative politics.
It may be easier to understand the dimensions of injustice and inequality today with the help of some statistics. If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:
The village would have 61 Asians, 13 Africans, 12 Europeans, nine Latin Americans, and five from the United States and Canada.
50 would be male, 50 would be female.
75 would be non-white, 25 white.
80 would live in substandard housing.
16 would be unable to read or write.
50 would be malnourished and one would be dying of starvation.
33 would be without access to safe water supply.
39 would lack access to improved sanitation.
24 would not have any electricity (and of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night).
Eight people would have access to the internet.
One would have a college education.
One would have HIV.
Two would be near birth, one near death.
Five would control 32% of the world’s wealth, and all five would be citizens of the United States.
48 would live on less than $2 a day.
20 would live on less than $1 a day.
If we look at these statistics, we know why so many millions of people around the world still sing the Interntionale and celebrate the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer, teacher, activist and writer
https://scroll.in/article/855423/100-ye ... -struggles
The values that inspired the movement remain relevant.
A hundred years ago, American journalist John Reed witnessed the momentous events of 1917 in Russia, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, backed by soldiers and working-class people, seized power to end centuries of czarist rule in Russia. Reed describes the scene in Moscow’s Red Square in his book Ten Days That Shook The World:
“This was the day of the People, the rumour of whose coming was thunderous as surf…
“We forced our way through the dense mass packed near the Kremlin wall, and stood upon one of the dirt-mountains. Already several men were there, among them Muranov, the soldier, who was elected Commandant of Moscow – a tall, simple-looking, beared man with a gentle face.
“… A military band came up marching up, playing the Internationale, and spontaneously the song caught and spread like wind-ripples on a sea, slow and solemn. From top of the Kremlin’s wall a gigantic banner unrolled… saying Long Live Brotherhood of Workers of the World.”
News of the Russian Revolution spread through the world and it touched the lives of the poorest people. They saw the possibility of political justice and economic prosperity, and it strengthened their resolve to continue their own struggles.
As Jawaharlal Nehru noted later: “The Soviet Revolution has advanced human society by a great leap and has lit a bright flame which could not be smothered, and it has laid the foundation for that new civilisation towards which the world could advance.”
Adivasi and workers’ movements in India
It didn’t take long for the Russian Revolution to inspire Indian workers to fight against their horrific working conditions. It led to an upsurge in workers’ movements in 1918 and 1919. There were strikes in almost all the textile mills in Bombay, the heart of Indian industry at that time. In the first six months of 1921, over 1.5 million workers were involved in a series of strikes against the 1919 Rowlatt Act, which allowed indefinite detention and incarceration without trial.
Dozens of small trade unions sprang up across India. On October 20, 1920, three years after the Russian Revolution, the All-India Trade Union Congress was born.
In 1945, in a village in Thane deep in the forests of the Western Ghats, a small group of Adivasis of the Warli community gathered around Godavari Parulekar, a communist who was working with them, to pose a question that had been troubling them for some time. They lit their bidis and finally asked in a confidential tone, “Tell us frankly the truth, Bai, who is Russia? Does he give you money?”
The Adivasis told Parulekar that their landlords had told them that the “red flag isn’t ours, it is Russia’s. The Bai gets money from Russia.”
So, Parulekar told them about Russia, about how peasants and workers like themselves had formed a government and an army. She went on to lead the Adivasi community in their own struggle against the wealthy landlords who had pushed them into forced labour.
A manifesto for Kashmir
Also in the 1940s, in a small village of 150 families called Hafroo in the Kashmir Valley, a young man from a poor family walked 25 km to Srinagar to reach his college. Ghulam Qader could not afford to take the tonga. In Srinagar, he came across a magazine called Soviet Desh.
He was so excited to read the magazine that he immediately subscribed to it. To his delight, the subscription was free.
Qader attended a study circle run by communists, where he heard of MN Roy, one of the founders of the Communist Party of India who had known Lenin. Qader later became a teacher and immersed himself in the activities of the trade union for teachers. He was also an active member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and remained one even when he was close to 80 years old.
There were others like him in Kashmir who were inspired by the Russian Revolution. Sheikh Abdullah, called the lion of Kashmir, was so moved by it that he asked Indian communists to write a manifesto for a Naya Kashmir. The manifesto had separate charters on the rights of peasants, workers and women.
In the introduction to the 1944 Naya Kashmir programme, Abdullah, who would go on to be chief minister of the state, said: “Soviet Russia has demonstrated before our eyes not merely theoretically but in her actual day to day life and development, that real freedom takes birth from economic emancipation.”
In 1948, he renamed Srinagar Chowk as Lal Chowk after Moscow’s Red Square.
Russia and Raj Kapoor
It was not a one-sided love. The Russian people loved Indians, India and Hindi films. A record 63.7 million Soviet citizens watched Raj Kapoor’s 1951 hit Awara – it was the largest audience of the decade for a single film.
The script of the film was written by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas (1914-1987). He was born in Panipat in the home of celebrated Urdu poet Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali, a student of Mirza Ghalib. His grandfather, Khwaja Gulam Abbas, was among the main players of the 1857 Rebellion – an unsuccessful civilian uprising against British rule that began with a mutiny by Indian soldiers in Meerut – and the first rebel from Panipat to be shot from the mouth of a cannon.
Khwaja Ahmed Abbas had been active in the Indian People Theatre Association, the cultural front of the Communist Party of India that had more than 12,000 members.
Still relevant after a century
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag with its hammer and sickle was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin and the Russian tri-colour was raised.
And now it is a hundred years since the Russian Revolution took place. It is a hundred years since the workers and peasants sang the Internationale. The Soviet Union has disappeared from the map but the song is still sung by millions of workers in their own languages.
Play
In Russia, the government is not sure how it should commemorate 100 years of the revolution. Many of the older generation remember their country and despite the terrible tragedies they witnessed and the losses they suffered, they still love the idea of the Soviet Union. They see with horror the death of old values and they ask, “What kind of values can the Pepsi generation have?”
One member of the Soviet Communist Party declared:
“Socialism isn’t just labour camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright world: everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. They say to me that you couldn’t buy a car – so then no one had a car. No one wore Versace suits or bought houses in Miami. My God! The leaders of the USSR lived like mid-level businessmen, they were nothing like today’s oligarchs. Not a bit! They weren’t building themselves yatchs with champagne showers. Can you imagine! Right now, there is a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for? Gilded doorknobs… Is this freedom?”
The ideas and values that inspired the Russian Revolution are even more relevant if we look at the world today. The century since the revolution has seen more wars, violence and inequality. It has seen the deliberate crushing of dreams and visions for alternative politics.
It may be easier to understand the dimensions of injustice and inequality today with the help of some statistics. If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:
The village would have 61 Asians, 13 Africans, 12 Europeans, nine Latin Americans, and five from the United States and Canada.
50 would be male, 50 would be female.
75 would be non-white, 25 white.
80 would live in substandard housing.
16 would be unable to read or write.
50 would be malnourished and one would be dying of starvation.
33 would be without access to safe water supply.
39 would lack access to improved sanitation.
24 would not have any electricity (and of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night).
Eight people would have access to the internet.
One would have a college education.
One would have HIV.
Two would be near birth, one near death.
Five would control 32% of the world’s wealth, and all five would be citizens of the United States.
48 would live on less than $2 a day.
20 would live on less than $1 a day.
If we look at these statistics, we know why so many millions of people around the world still sing the Interntionale and celebrate the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer, teacher, activist and writer
https://scroll.in/article/855423/100-ye ... -struggles
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
Good video.
" If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." Lenin, 1916
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
The Russian Revolution, Africa and the Diaspora
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 7, 2017
This article is part of Black Perspective’s forum, “Black October,” on the Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora.
Hakim Adi
From the time of the Great October Revolution in 1917, Africans and those of African heritage around the world gravitated towards the revolutionary events in Russia and Communism, seeing in them a path to their own liberation. Perhaps not surprisingly then, many of the main black political figures of the twentieth century, in Africa and elsewhere, have been Communists, or at least inspired and influenced by the international communist movement. These include such diverse figures as André Aliker, Aimé Césaire, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, W.E.B Du Bois, Elma Francois, Hubert Harrison, Claudia Jones, Alex la Guma, Audley Moore, Josie Mpama, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Paul Robeson, Jacques Romain, Thomas Sankara, Ousmane Sembène and Lamine Senghor.
African Americans and those in the African diaspora were impressed by the prospect that the Revolution might spread globally and signal the end of the capital-centered system and all that went with it including racist oppression. The Jamaican poet and writer Claude McKay therefore referred to the October Revolution as “the greatest event in the history of humanity,” and Bolshevism as “the greatest and most scientific idea in the world today.”1 Another Jamaican, Wilfred Domingo wondered, “will Bolshevism accomplish the full freedom of Africa, colonies in which Negroes are the majority, and promote human tolerance and happiness in the United States?”2 There was thus an early admiration for the Revolution from the perspective that it heralded the possibility of an alternative to the capital-centered system which would be to the advantage of those who were oppressed in the United States and the Caribbean, as well as in Africa. These were the perspectives of those early twentieth century organizations, which were inspired by the October Revolution such as the African Blood Brotherhood in the United States, which subsequently included many leading black communists such as Otto Huiswoud, Cyril Biggs, Harry Haywood and Grace Campbell.
Singer and actor Paul Robeson during his tour in Moscow in August 1958. Credit: Anatoliy Garanin/Sputnik, via Associated Press
Once the new Soviet Union was more firmly established in the 1920s, several prominent figures traveled to see at first hand the construction of socialism and remarked on the absence of racism and national oppression. Indeed, this was a common theme in the eye-witness accounts of visitors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. As early as 1926, on his return from the Soviet Union, the prominent African American scholar-activist Du Bois publicly acknowledged, “I stand in astonishment at the revelation of Russia that has come to me…If I what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.” Even the famous Pan-Africanist George Padmore, a former communist from Trinidad who had parted company with the communist movement, wrote a major book in 1945, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire, over a decade after his expulsion. Padmore still felt compelled to publish what was, in effect, a celebration of the revolutionary transformation of 1917 and the elimination of national oppression which in the author’s view was a consequence of it.
The significance of the October Revolution was not just in the event itself, but the fact that it gave rise to the construction of a new political and economic system in the Soviet Union and to a new international communist movement organized from 1919 in the Third (Communist) International, or Comintern. The aim of the Comintern was to create the conditions for revolutionary transformation outside the Soviet Union and from its inception it took a very keen interest in Africa and other colonies, as well as in what came to be called the ‘Negro Question’–the question of how Africans and those of African heritage could liberate themselves and put an end to all forms of racist oppression. In fact, there was no other international organization that took such a stand, that was openly opposed to both colonialism and racism and attempted to organize all people of African descent for their own liberation.
The fact that the Comintern grappled with the ‘Negro Question,’ included in its ranks Communists of all nationalities and took a strong stand in opposition to colonialism and racism endeared it to many in Africa and beyond, even when there was some dissatisfaction with the communist parties in Britain, France, the United States and South Africa. To some, these parties appeared to be dragging their feet over the important Negro Question. There was a widespread view that the Comintern was more revolutionary, the custodian of the legacy of the October Revolution and therefore more concerned about such matters than some of its constituent parties. This certainly seemed to be the case when the Comintern demanded that the Communist Party in South Africa should be a party of the masses of the people of that country, led by Africans, and that it should first champion the rule of the majority in what was considered a colony of a special type, even if many of the leaders of that party had a contrary view. The decisions of the Comintern were similarly firm and controversial in relation to the orientation to be adopted for the African American struggle for self-determination in the so-called ‘Black Belt’ in the United States. Whatever may be said of the Comintern’s policy, it undoubtedly raised the profile, significance and centrality of that struggle and, as recent historical accounts have shown, laid many of the foundations for the later struggles for civil rights and Black Power. What is more, the Comintern’s position had an impact outside of the United States, influencing communist parties in Cuba and other Latin American countries. Eventually, Black Communists took a lead in demanding the creation of a specialized organization–the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW).
The importance of the ITUCNW, its organ Negro Worker, as well as other publications, was that the revolutionary politics and impact of the October Revolution and of the Comintern were spread throughout the world– particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s. As part of the work of the ITUCNW workers and others were recruited from the British colonies in West Africa, as well as from South Africa and in time, students were sent from many parts of Africa to the Soviet Union. Others traveled to see the consequences of the October Revolution from the Caribbean and from the United States. In the period between the wars, hundreds made this journey including leading anti-colonial figures such as Isaac Wallace-Johnson from Sierra Leone, Jomo Kenyatta, future prime minister of Kenya, and Albert Nzula, the first black general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
Black Communists in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
Perhaps the most important legacy of the October Revolution was the theory that emerged from it and the experience of building a new social system while surrounded by a capital-centered world. What was demonstrated was that another world was possible and that those who were the producers of value could be their own liberators and could construct this new world themselves. This alternative and the prospect of liberation continued to inspire individuals and organizations in Africa and the diaspora throughout the inter-war period and particularly during the Second World War thereafter–when the Soviet Union led the defeat of fascism and created the possibility of national liberation and the restoration of sovereignty in those countries that languished under colonial rule.
For some, this theory was embodied in the personality and work of V.I Lenin, who continued to inspire many. In 1970, during a visit to Kazakhstan, Amilcar Cabral–the famous leader of the national liberation struggle in what was then Portuguese Guinea–is reported to have said, “How is it that we, a people deprived of everything, living in dire straits, manage to wage our struggle and win successes? Our answer is: this is because Lenin existed, because he fulfilled his duty as a man, a revolutionary and a patriot. Lenin was and continues to be, the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples.” Cabral was far from alone in voicing his admiration from Lenin’s work and contribution. Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader from Burkina Faso, not only expressed his admiration for Lenin’s writing, which he claimed to have read in its entirety, but was rather more specific in his praise of the ‘great revolution of October 1917 [that] transformed the world, brought victory to the proletariat, shook the foundations of capitalism and made possible the Paris Commune’s dreams of justice.”3 In 1984, he concluded, “the revolution of 1917 teaches us many things.”4
The world has changed considerably since 1917. The Soviet Union and the construction of socialism in some other countries have been terminated. Communism – the doctrine of the conditions for the liberation of the wealth producers has not and cannot be terminated, although clearly there is a need for a modern Communism providing solutions for modern problems. The October Revolution demonstrated that another world is possible, that this alternative is not a utopia, and that we can all be the agents of change and the makers of history.
Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013), 12. ↩
Ibid., 13. ↩
Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987 (London: Pathfinder, 2015), 165. ↩
Ibid., 135. ↩
Hakim Adi is the author of “Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939,” and a contributor to Black Perspectives
Black October Reading List: The Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora
Jennifer Wilson and Jennifer Suchland
Otto Huiswoud (left) and Claude McKay (right) at the Fourth Congress of the Third International in Moscow in 1933. Photo: Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The Black October reading list is an invitation to think about the centennial of the Russian Revolution through the rich and expansive entanglements between the Black diaspora, Bolshevik Russia, and the Soviet Union. The readings below ground and expand upon the Black October online forum, which draws upon the expertise of scholars working in the fields of Black history and Soviet cultural studies. This reading list retains that interdisciplinarity, offering readings both on how Black intellectuals and activists responded to the Russian Revolution and on how Bolshevik Russia (and later the Soviet Union) imagined an international Black proletariat. Other topics include Afro-Asian solidarities (and the de-centering of Soviet Russia within global Marxism), Black Marxist feminist interpretations of the Russian Revolution (and its consequences), the impact of the Cold War on African independence movements, and the conceptualization of race (as distinct from national identity) in Russia and the Soviet Union. This list is not meant to be exhaustive but offers an introduction to the topic for readers interested in learning more. Feel free to add additional suggestions in the comments section.
The Russian Revolution in the Black Radical Imaginary
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Colonialism and the Russian Revolution” New World Review 24:10 (1956) 18-21.
McKay, Claude. “Soviet Russia and the Negro.”
James, C.L.R.. World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International.
Kelley, Robin D.G. “The Negro Question: Red Dreams of Black Liberation” in
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
Rodney, Walter. 1917.
Russell, Shana. “‘I Wanted to See for Myself the First Land of Socialism’: Black American Women and the Russian Revolution.”
Imagining the Black Diaspora in Revolutionary Russia
Blakely, Allison. Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought.
Bogdanov, Konstantin. “‘Negroes’ in the USSR. The Ethnography of an Imaginary Diaspora,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 11 (2015) 97-134.
Clark, Katerina. “The Representation of the African American as Colonial Oppressed in Texts of the Soviet Interwar Years, The Russian Review 75:3 (July 2016) 368-385.
Forsdick, Charles and Christian Høgsbjerg. “Sergei Eisenstein and the Haitian Revolution: ‘The Confrontation Between Black and White Explodes Into Red,” History Workshop Journal 78:1 (October 2014) 157–185.
Kiaer, Christina. “African Americans in Soviet Socialist Realism: The Case of Aleksandr Deineka,” The Russian Review 75:3 (July 2016) 402-433.
Matusevich, Maxim. “An exotic subversive: Africa, Africans and the Soviet everyday,” Race & Class 49:57 (2008) 57-81.
McKay, John. True Songs of Freedom: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture and Society.
Eds. Nepomnyashchy, Svobodny, Trigos. Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness.
Black Writers, Artists, and Cultural Sojourners to the USSR
Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963.
Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise.
Lee, Steven. The Ethnic Avant Garde.
Matusevich, Maxim. “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society,” African Diaspora 1:1 (2008) 53-85.
Mukherji, S. Ani., “‘Like Another Planet to the Darker Americans’: Black Cultural Work in 1930s Moscow” in Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century.
The Soviet Afterlives of Black Sojourners
Ismailov, Hamid. The Underground [Novel].
Johnson-Artur, Liz. “Black in the USSR: the Children of Soviet Africa Search for their Own Identity,” The Calvert Journal (June 6, 2014).
Khanga, Yelena. Soul to Soul: A Black Russian Jewish Woman’s Search for Her Roots.
Salys, Rigmaila. “The Pattersons: Expatriate and Native Son,” The Russian Review 75:3 (July 2016) 434-456.
African American Communists and the Red Scare
Horne, Gerald. Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party.
McDuffie, Erik. “The March of Young Southern Black Women: Esther Cooper Jackson, Black Left Feminism, and the Personal and Political Costs of Cold War Repression” in Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: Another Side of the Story.
Woods, Jeff. Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968.
Zeigler, James. Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism.
Black Feminists and the Soviet Union
Davies, Carole Boyce. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
Gilyard, Keith. Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice.
Gore, Dayo. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War.
Harris, Lashawn. “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party in the Great Depression” Journal of African American History 94:1 (Winter 2009) 21-43.
Lorde, Audre, ”Notes from a Trip to Russia,” in Sister/Outsider.
McDuffie, Erik. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of the Black Left.
Umoren, Imaobong. “Anti-Fascism and the Development of Global Race Women, 1928-1945” Callaloo 39:1 (Winter 2016) 151-165.
African Independence During the Cold War
Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939.
Namikas, Lise. Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo 1960-1965.
Popescu, Monica, Cedric Tolliver and Julie Tolliver (eds). Alternative Solidarities: Black Diasporas and Cultural Alliances during the Cold War.
Popescu, Monica. “On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola, the Second World, and the Cold War.” Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (Fall 2014) 91-109.
Sissako, Abderrahmane. “Rostov-Luanda.” [Film]
Afro-Asian Communist Ties
Djagalov, Rossen and Masha Salazkina. “Tashkent ‘68” Tashkent ‘68: A Cinematic Contact Zone,” Slavic Review 75:2 (Summer 2016) 279-298.
Frazier, Taj Robeson. The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination.
Ho, Fred and Bill V. Mullen (eds). Afro-Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African-American and Asian-Americans.
Etsch, Betsy and Robin D.G. Kelley. “Black Like Mao, red China and black revolution,” Souls 1:4 (1999) 6-41.
Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939.
Moore, David Chioni. “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’ Relevance, 1933-2002,” Callaloo 25:4 (2002) 1115:1135.
Wilson, Jennifer. “Queer Harlem, Queer Tashkent: Langston Hughes’s ‘Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan,” Slavic Review 76:3 (Fall 2017) 637-646.
Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference.
The Concept of Race in Russia
Cvetkovski, Roland and Alexis Hofmeister. An Empire of Others: Making Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia.
Law, Ian. Red Racisms: Racism and Communist and Post-Communist Contexts.
Slavic Review 61: 1 (Spring 2002) (special issue on race).
Zakharov, Nikolay. Race and Racism in Russia: Mapping Global Racisms.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/11/ ... -diaspora/
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 7, 2017
This article is part of Black Perspective’s forum, “Black October,” on the Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora.
Hakim Adi
From the time of the Great October Revolution in 1917, Africans and those of African heritage around the world gravitated towards the revolutionary events in Russia and Communism, seeing in them a path to their own liberation. Perhaps not surprisingly then, many of the main black political figures of the twentieth century, in Africa and elsewhere, have been Communists, or at least inspired and influenced by the international communist movement. These include such diverse figures as André Aliker, Aimé Césaire, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, W.E.B Du Bois, Elma Francois, Hubert Harrison, Claudia Jones, Alex la Guma, Audley Moore, Josie Mpama, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Paul Robeson, Jacques Romain, Thomas Sankara, Ousmane Sembène and Lamine Senghor.
African Americans and those in the African diaspora were impressed by the prospect that the Revolution might spread globally and signal the end of the capital-centered system and all that went with it including racist oppression. The Jamaican poet and writer Claude McKay therefore referred to the October Revolution as “the greatest event in the history of humanity,” and Bolshevism as “the greatest and most scientific idea in the world today.”1 Another Jamaican, Wilfred Domingo wondered, “will Bolshevism accomplish the full freedom of Africa, colonies in which Negroes are the majority, and promote human tolerance and happiness in the United States?”2 There was thus an early admiration for the Revolution from the perspective that it heralded the possibility of an alternative to the capital-centered system which would be to the advantage of those who were oppressed in the United States and the Caribbean, as well as in Africa. These were the perspectives of those early twentieth century organizations, which were inspired by the October Revolution such as the African Blood Brotherhood in the United States, which subsequently included many leading black communists such as Otto Huiswoud, Cyril Biggs, Harry Haywood and Grace Campbell.
Singer and actor Paul Robeson during his tour in Moscow in August 1958. Credit: Anatoliy Garanin/Sputnik, via Associated Press
Once the new Soviet Union was more firmly established in the 1920s, several prominent figures traveled to see at first hand the construction of socialism and remarked on the absence of racism and national oppression. Indeed, this was a common theme in the eye-witness accounts of visitors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. As early as 1926, on his return from the Soviet Union, the prominent African American scholar-activist Du Bois publicly acknowledged, “I stand in astonishment at the revelation of Russia that has come to me…If I what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.” Even the famous Pan-Africanist George Padmore, a former communist from Trinidad who had parted company with the communist movement, wrote a major book in 1945, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire, over a decade after his expulsion. Padmore still felt compelled to publish what was, in effect, a celebration of the revolutionary transformation of 1917 and the elimination of national oppression which in the author’s view was a consequence of it.
The significance of the October Revolution was not just in the event itself, but the fact that it gave rise to the construction of a new political and economic system in the Soviet Union and to a new international communist movement organized from 1919 in the Third (Communist) International, or Comintern. The aim of the Comintern was to create the conditions for revolutionary transformation outside the Soviet Union and from its inception it took a very keen interest in Africa and other colonies, as well as in what came to be called the ‘Negro Question’–the question of how Africans and those of African heritage could liberate themselves and put an end to all forms of racist oppression. In fact, there was no other international organization that took such a stand, that was openly opposed to both colonialism and racism and attempted to organize all people of African descent for their own liberation.
The fact that the Comintern grappled with the ‘Negro Question,’ included in its ranks Communists of all nationalities and took a strong stand in opposition to colonialism and racism endeared it to many in Africa and beyond, even when there was some dissatisfaction with the communist parties in Britain, France, the United States and South Africa. To some, these parties appeared to be dragging their feet over the important Negro Question. There was a widespread view that the Comintern was more revolutionary, the custodian of the legacy of the October Revolution and therefore more concerned about such matters than some of its constituent parties. This certainly seemed to be the case when the Comintern demanded that the Communist Party in South Africa should be a party of the masses of the people of that country, led by Africans, and that it should first champion the rule of the majority in what was considered a colony of a special type, even if many of the leaders of that party had a contrary view. The decisions of the Comintern were similarly firm and controversial in relation to the orientation to be adopted for the African American struggle for self-determination in the so-called ‘Black Belt’ in the United States. Whatever may be said of the Comintern’s policy, it undoubtedly raised the profile, significance and centrality of that struggle and, as recent historical accounts have shown, laid many of the foundations for the later struggles for civil rights and Black Power. What is more, the Comintern’s position had an impact outside of the United States, influencing communist parties in Cuba and other Latin American countries. Eventually, Black Communists took a lead in demanding the creation of a specialized organization–the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW).
The importance of the ITUCNW, its organ Negro Worker, as well as other publications, was that the revolutionary politics and impact of the October Revolution and of the Comintern were spread throughout the world– particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s. As part of the work of the ITUCNW workers and others were recruited from the British colonies in West Africa, as well as from South Africa and in time, students were sent from many parts of Africa to the Soviet Union. Others traveled to see the consequences of the October Revolution from the Caribbean and from the United States. In the period between the wars, hundreds made this journey including leading anti-colonial figures such as Isaac Wallace-Johnson from Sierra Leone, Jomo Kenyatta, future prime minister of Kenya, and Albert Nzula, the first black general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
Black Communists in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
Perhaps the most important legacy of the October Revolution was the theory that emerged from it and the experience of building a new social system while surrounded by a capital-centered world. What was demonstrated was that another world was possible and that those who were the producers of value could be their own liberators and could construct this new world themselves. This alternative and the prospect of liberation continued to inspire individuals and organizations in Africa and the diaspora throughout the inter-war period and particularly during the Second World War thereafter–when the Soviet Union led the defeat of fascism and created the possibility of national liberation and the restoration of sovereignty in those countries that languished under colonial rule.
For some, this theory was embodied in the personality and work of V.I Lenin, who continued to inspire many. In 1970, during a visit to Kazakhstan, Amilcar Cabral–the famous leader of the national liberation struggle in what was then Portuguese Guinea–is reported to have said, “How is it that we, a people deprived of everything, living in dire straits, manage to wage our struggle and win successes? Our answer is: this is because Lenin existed, because he fulfilled his duty as a man, a revolutionary and a patriot. Lenin was and continues to be, the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples.” Cabral was far from alone in voicing his admiration from Lenin’s work and contribution. Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader from Burkina Faso, not only expressed his admiration for Lenin’s writing, which he claimed to have read in its entirety, but was rather more specific in his praise of the ‘great revolution of October 1917 [that] transformed the world, brought victory to the proletariat, shook the foundations of capitalism and made possible the Paris Commune’s dreams of justice.”3 In 1984, he concluded, “the revolution of 1917 teaches us many things.”4
The world has changed considerably since 1917. The Soviet Union and the construction of socialism in some other countries have been terminated. Communism – the doctrine of the conditions for the liberation of the wealth producers has not and cannot be terminated, although clearly there is a need for a modern Communism providing solutions for modern problems. The October Revolution demonstrated that another world is possible, that this alternative is not a utopia, and that we can all be the agents of change and the makers of history.
Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013), 12. ↩
Ibid., 13. ↩
Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987 (London: Pathfinder, 2015), 165. ↩
Ibid., 135. ↩
Hakim Adi is the author of “Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939,” and a contributor to Black Perspectives
Black October Reading List: The Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora
Jennifer Wilson and Jennifer Suchland
Otto Huiswoud (left) and Claude McKay (right) at the Fourth Congress of the Third International in Moscow in 1933. Photo: Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The Black October reading list is an invitation to think about the centennial of the Russian Revolution through the rich and expansive entanglements between the Black diaspora, Bolshevik Russia, and the Soviet Union. The readings below ground and expand upon the Black October online forum, which draws upon the expertise of scholars working in the fields of Black history and Soviet cultural studies. This reading list retains that interdisciplinarity, offering readings both on how Black intellectuals and activists responded to the Russian Revolution and on how Bolshevik Russia (and later the Soviet Union) imagined an international Black proletariat. Other topics include Afro-Asian solidarities (and the de-centering of Soviet Russia within global Marxism), Black Marxist feminist interpretations of the Russian Revolution (and its consequences), the impact of the Cold War on African independence movements, and the conceptualization of race (as distinct from national identity) in Russia and the Soviet Union. This list is not meant to be exhaustive but offers an introduction to the topic for readers interested in learning more. Feel free to add additional suggestions in the comments section.
The Russian Revolution in the Black Radical Imaginary
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Colonialism and the Russian Revolution” New World Review 24:10 (1956) 18-21.
McKay, Claude. “Soviet Russia and the Negro.”
James, C.L.R.. World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International.
Kelley, Robin D.G. “The Negro Question: Red Dreams of Black Liberation” in
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
Rodney, Walter. 1917.
Russell, Shana. “‘I Wanted to See for Myself the First Land of Socialism’: Black American Women and the Russian Revolution.”
Imagining the Black Diaspora in Revolutionary Russia
Blakely, Allison. Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought.
Bogdanov, Konstantin. “‘Negroes’ in the USSR. The Ethnography of an Imaginary Diaspora,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 11 (2015) 97-134.
Clark, Katerina. “The Representation of the African American as Colonial Oppressed in Texts of the Soviet Interwar Years, The Russian Review 75:3 (July 2016) 368-385.
Forsdick, Charles and Christian Høgsbjerg. “Sergei Eisenstein and the Haitian Revolution: ‘The Confrontation Between Black and White Explodes Into Red,” History Workshop Journal 78:1 (October 2014) 157–185.
Kiaer, Christina. “African Americans in Soviet Socialist Realism: The Case of Aleksandr Deineka,” The Russian Review 75:3 (July 2016) 402-433.
Matusevich, Maxim. “An exotic subversive: Africa, Africans and the Soviet everyday,” Race & Class 49:57 (2008) 57-81.
McKay, John. True Songs of Freedom: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture and Society.
Eds. Nepomnyashchy, Svobodny, Trigos. Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness.
Black Writers, Artists, and Cultural Sojourners to the USSR
Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963.
Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise.
Lee, Steven. The Ethnic Avant Garde.
Matusevich, Maxim. “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society,” African Diaspora 1:1 (2008) 53-85.
Mukherji, S. Ani., “‘Like Another Planet to the Darker Americans’: Black Cultural Work in 1930s Moscow” in Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century.
The Soviet Afterlives of Black Sojourners
Ismailov, Hamid. The Underground [Novel].
Johnson-Artur, Liz. “Black in the USSR: the Children of Soviet Africa Search for their Own Identity,” The Calvert Journal (June 6, 2014).
Khanga, Yelena. Soul to Soul: A Black Russian Jewish Woman’s Search for Her Roots.
Salys, Rigmaila. “The Pattersons: Expatriate and Native Son,” The Russian Review 75:3 (July 2016) 434-456.
African American Communists and the Red Scare
Horne, Gerald. Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party.
McDuffie, Erik. “The March of Young Southern Black Women: Esther Cooper Jackson, Black Left Feminism, and the Personal and Political Costs of Cold War Repression” in Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: Another Side of the Story.
Woods, Jeff. Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968.
Zeigler, James. Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism.
Black Feminists and the Soviet Union
Davies, Carole Boyce. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
Gilyard, Keith. Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice.
Gore, Dayo. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War.
Harris, Lashawn. “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party in the Great Depression” Journal of African American History 94:1 (Winter 2009) 21-43.
Lorde, Audre, ”Notes from a Trip to Russia,” in Sister/Outsider.
McDuffie, Erik. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of the Black Left.
Umoren, Imaobong. “Anti-Fascism and the Development of Global Race Women, 1928-1945” Callaloo 39:1 (Winter 2016) 151-165.
African Independence During the Cold War
Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939.
Namikas, Lise. Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo 1960-1965.
Popescu, Monica, Cedric Tolliver and Julie Tolliver (eds). Alternative Solidarities: Black Diasporas and Cultural Alliances during the Cold War.
Popescu, Monica. “On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola, the Second World, and the Cold War.” Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (Fall 2014) 91-109.
Sissako, Abderrahmane. “Rostov-Luanda.” [Film]
Afro-Asian Communist Ties
Djagalov, Rossen and Masha Salazkina. “Tashkent ‘68” Tashkent ‘68: A Cinematic Contact Zone,” Slavic Review 75:2 (Summer 2016) 279-298.
Frazier, Taj Robeson. The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination.
Ho, Fred and Bill V. Mullen (eds). Afro-Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African-American and Asian-Americans.
Etsch, Betsy and Robin D.G. Kelley. “Black Like Mao, red China and black revolution,” Souls 1:4 (1999) 6-41.
Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939.
Moore, David Chioni. “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’ Relevance, 1933-2002,” Callaloo 25:4 (2002) 1115:1135.
Wilson, Jennifer. “Queer Harlem, Queer Tashkent: Langston Hughes’s ‘Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan,” Slavic Review 76:3 (Fall 2017) 637-646.
Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference.
The Concept of Race in Russia
Cvetkovski, Roland and Alexis Hofmeister. An Empire of Others: Making Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia.
Law, Ian. Red Racisms: Racism and Communist and Post-Communist Contexts.
Slavic Review 61: 1 (Spring 2002) (special issue on race).
Zakharov, Nikolay. Race and Racism in Russia: Mapping Global Racisms.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/11/ ... -diaspora/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
The Bolshevik Revolution’s Pioneering Gains for Women
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 7, 2017
Urooba Jamal
The first worker’s state in the world would never have materialized without the steely, militant determination of women.
“Bread!” was the first call to order. “Down with the tsar!” the next. Soon, cries of “Down with the war!” drowned the streets.
The women workers of Petrograd — then the capital of Russia — roamed through town on the cold morning of Feb. 23, 1917, throwing sticks, stones and snowballs at factory windows, urging their male counterparts to join their clamor. By the end of the day, 100,000 people were out in the streets on strike.
On the sixth International Working Women’s Day, women workers set the course of history: the strike in the juggernaut of the Russian empire would go on to topple the tsar forever, sparking the revolutions that would eventually give rise to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The socialist October Revolution — also known as the Bolshevik Revolution — that would follow February’s fervor set in motion by the demands of working women, would, in turn, bring about massive gains for a society steeped in patriarchy and a semi-feudal order.
Women in Tsarist Russia
In Tsarist Russia — one of the largest empires in human history that spanned nearly two centuries — women were little more than the property of men.
The Russian Orthodox church had a hold in the country, preserving a culture of staunch conservatism. Men were legally allowed to beat their wives. Women also had no right to unrestricted movement, obliged to follow their husbands wherever they went.
They were allowed to work only with their husband’s consent. Education was massively restricted, with only about 13.1 percent of Russian women being literate in 1897.
Divorce, granted in only exceptional cases, put women through a humiliating interrogation process by police and judges and was essentially restricted to wealthy women.
Abortion was banned, and women were not allowed to vote or hold public office.
As capitalism developed in Russia between 1896 and 1899, it spurred women out of the home for the first time — but also increased their workload. Girls as young as 12 years old, or even younger, toiled away in factories, working 18 hour days for meager pay. At home, they were expected to help with household chores.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote about this contradication, observing that “it is indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories of the working population in particularly hard conditions, and that for them it is particularly necessary to regulate and shorten the working day, to guarantee hygienic conditions of labor, etc.
But endeavors completely to ban the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchal manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary and utopian.”
The textile and metal industries soon saw masses of women workers join, who quickly formed the majority of workers in these factories. This was to have a profound impact on how the revolution unfolded.
The Bolsheviks counter petty-bourgeois feminists
The women’s struggle emerged in 1889, through the social democratic movement. Study circles were set up by Mikhail Ivanovich Brusnyev, that at its roots were based on Marxist ideas and had the goal of a socialist revolution. By 1890, these circles were teeming with women workers, with some 20 existing across Russia.
Five years later, the various social democratic circles merged to form the Union of Struggle, the forerunner to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Among its 17 founding members were four women, including Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, Lenin’s partner.
While the “woman question” was on the program of all Russian opposition parties by that point, it was the Bolsheviks that would take on uniting the working class not only on national divisions, but the gender divide as well. It was the Bolsheviks too that would immediately implement all demands from working women after taking power in 1917.
The turn of the century saw mass unrest in Tsarist Russia, which ultimately transpired into the 1905 Russian Revolution, where women participated in great numbers. That year, more than 50 Soviets — effectively, regional people’s councils, made up of peasants, workers and soldiers — sprang up, with women revolutionaries assigned some of the most dangerous tasks.
One cotton weaving factory, Kashintsev, elected more women than men to the Soviet: 7 out of 8 members.
After the 1905 Revolution, the Bolsheviks worked to win women and organize them within the ranks of their party. Their efforts prevailed: at the Social Democratic Labor Party’s Fifth Congress in 1907, the Bolsheviks had five women delegates for every woman Menshevik delegate, which was the other, more moderate faction of the party.
Despite this, the Bolsheviks came under attack by petty-bourgeois feminists for failing to care about women’s issues. Well outside the labor movement, the primary concern of this group was women’s right to education — meaning, they were only addressing a tiny group of women in Russia at the time.
As the Bolsheviks rejected the petty-bourgeois feminists’ claims that women’s liberation could be fought without socialism, Lenin reiterated the importance of abolishing class oppression alongside the struggle for democratic demands.
“Marxists know that democracy does not abolish class oppression, but only makes the class struggle clearer, broader, more open and sharper; and this is what we want. The more complete freedom of divorce is, the clearer will it be to the woman that the source of her ‘domestic slavery’ is not the lack of rights, but capitalism,” he wrote in 1916. “The more democratic the system of government is, the clearer it will be to the workers that the root of the evil is not the lack of rights, but capitalism.”
Clara Zetkin, the German Marxist that first called for International Working Women’s Day, also spoke out firmly against “bourgeois feminism.”
“The proletarian woman ends up in the proletarian camp, the bourgeois woman in the bourgeois camp. We must not let ourselves be fooled by Socialist trends in the bourgeois women’s movement which last only as long as bourgeois women feel oppressed,” she warned.
These warnings rang true: the lack of class perspective within the petty-bourgeois feminist movement led them to support World War I, believing that once men were off to fight, women could play a greater role in society.
It was the Bolsheviks who opposed the war, calling it a war by imperialists and capitalists at the expense of the working masses. It was also women Bolsheviks who rallied and persuaded the soldiers stationed in Petrograd to join the movement. Many soon left their posts and joined the Bolshevik ranks.
A 1923 edition of the Soviet women’s Bolshevik magazine Rabotnitsa. | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In 1914 the Bolsheviks began a journal aimed at working women, called “Rabotnitsa,” or “Women Workers.” With the first edition published on International Working Women’s Day of that year, seven more were issued before the Tsarist government clamped down on the publication.
Women and revolution
After the February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government came to power, toppling Tsar Nicholas II and ending the Russian empire
As time passed and the people’s demands for “Peace, Bread and Land” were not met, the Bolsheviks grew in popularity, as they called for the overthrow of the bourgeois Provisional Government.
More organizing was needed, and women workers were a key element of this process. They not only participated in strikes and demonstrations but also were a part of the armed defense of the revolution, dying alongside men of the Red Guards, the armed wing of the Bolsheviks.
Bolshevik women, in the months leading up to the October Revolution, took part in all activities: speaking at public meetings, distributing leaflets, transporting weapons, and providing care for the wounded.
In this fervor, the Bolsheviks began publishing “Rabotnitsa” again, with Krupskaya and many other women workers from Petrograd on the editorial board.
Lenin, during this time, wrote many articles about the importance of calling women workers to fight for socialism.
The pioneering advances for women under the Bolsheviks
Finally, on Oct. 25, 1917, the armed masses belonging to the Petrograd Soviet, which had been won over to socialist revolution by the Bolsheviks, occupied all public buildings, stormed the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government members.
The Bolsheviks immediately set out ensuring equality between men and women. Just four days after taking power, they introduced the 8-hour working day, advancing possibilities for women, especially working-class women, to take part in politics.
Soon, the restriction on women’s freedom was removed. Women were given equal right to own land.
The church and state were also separated, marking one of the most profound shifts in women’s right: women were given free access to abortion, making Russia the first country in the world to grant this legal right.
Marriage also now took place with equal consent, and divorce was made as easy as possible for both parties.
The concept of illegitimate children was abolished, allowing all children to be treated equally. Paid maternity leave was granted both before and after birth, while night work for pregnant women and women who had just given birth was prohibited. In addition, special maternity wards were set up.
Long before women would be granted the right to vote in capitalist countries such as the U.K., the United States, Sweden or France, women in Russia could vote by 1917.
Aleksandra Kollontai also became the world’s first woman minister when she was appointed People’s Commissar of Social Welfare shortly after the October Revolution.
The advances in women’s rights and equality ushered in by the Bolshevik Revolution also came part in parcel with advances in rights for other oppressed groups as well. In 1918, a decree was passed abolishing all pre-revolutionary Tsarist laws. The 1922 Criminal Code, for example, decriminalized homosexuality.
“The present sexual legislation in the Soviet Union is the work of the October Revolution,” the Bolshevik Grigorii Batkis, Director of the Institute for Social Hygiene, said at the time.
In November 1918, a series of small women’s conferences culminated in the first All-Russian Congress of Working Women.
During the conference, many new women joined the Bolshevik Party, as well as the women militias, “The Red Sisters,” to actively fight the counter-revolutionary forces known as the White Army, who had the backing of foreign governments.
The women’s department of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, who had since changed their name to the Russian Communist Party, organized women in the factories and villages into the party.
The Zhenotdel, as the women’s department was known, soon launched a magazine, “Komitska,” with Krupskaya as editor. By 1927, over 18 different women’s magazines were published with a circulation of 386,000, focused on women’s liberation and socialism.
Thanks to the Zhenotdel, women’s membership in the party doubled by 1932, with women making up 15.9 percent, compared to just 8 percent a decade earlier.
”No party or revolution in the world has ever dreamed of striking so deep at the roots of the oppression and inequality of women as the Soviet, Bolshevik revolution is doing,” Lenin observed in 1921. “Over here, in Soviet Russia, no trace is left of any inequality between men and women under the law. The Soviet power has eliminated all there was of the especially disgusting, base and hypocritical inequality in the laws on marriage and the family and inequality in respect of children.”
“This is only the first step in the liberation of woman. But none of the bourgeois republics, including the most democratic, has dared to take even this first step,” he added.
In 1922, with the creation of the USSR, the Soviet government sought to socialize housework. This was done by creating things such as public nurseries, kindergartens, kitchens and public laundries. The idea was to reduce household labor to a minimum, allowing women the freedom to pursue waged work, education and enjoy leisure time on par with men.
Long after the Bolshevik Revolution, the difference in women’s conditions was staggering. Compared to Tsarist times, life expectancy doubled by the 1970s, from 30 to nearly 74. Infant mortality was also reduced by 90 percent in that time period. Women soared in education, with only 10 percent enrolled in secondary school in 1926 to 97 percent by 1958.
From the first study circles at the turn of the century to the women-led uprising that incited the February Revolution, to the thousands of Bolshevik women who fought on behalf of the working class, the first worker’s state in the world would never have become a reality without the steely, militant determination of women.
Bolshevik Women’s Battalion stands guard after the Winter Palace was seized.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/11/ ... for-women/
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 7, 2017
Urooba Jamal
The first worker’s state in the world would never have materialized without the steely, militant determination of women.
“Bread!” was the first call to order. “Down with the tsar!” the next. Soon, cries of “Down with the war!” drowned the streets.
The women workers of Petrograd — then the capital of Russia — roamed through town on the cold morning of Feb. 23, 1917, throwing sticks, stones and snowballs at factory windows, urging their male counterparts to join their clamor. By the end of the day, 100,000 people were out in the streets on strike.
On the sixth International Working Women’s Day, women workers set the course of history: the strike in the juggernaut of the Russian empire would go on to topple the tsar forever, sparking the revolutions that would eventually give rise to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The socialist October Revolution — also known as the Bolshevik Revolution — that would follow February’s fervor set in motion by the demands of working women, would, in turn, bring about massive gains for a society steeped in patriarchy and a semi-feudal order.
Women in Tsarist Russia
In Tsarist Russia — one of the largest empires in human history that spanned nearly two centuries — women were little more than the property of men.
The Russian Orthodox church had a hold in the country, preserving a culture of staunch conservatism. Men were legally allowed to beat their wives. Women also had no right to unrestricted movement, obliged to follow their husbands wherever they went.
They were allowed to work only with their husband’s consent. Education was massively restricted, with only about 13.1 percent of Russian women being literate in 1897.
Divorce, granted in only exceptional cases, put women through a humiliating interrogation process by police and judges and was essentially restricted to wealthy women.
Abortion was banned, and women were not allowed to vote or hold public office.
As capitalism developed in Russia between 1896 and 1899, it spurred women out of the home for the first time — but also increased their workload. Girls as young as 12 years old, or even younger, toiled away in factories, working 18 hour days for meager pay. At home, they were expected to help with household chores.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote about this contradication, observing that “it is indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories of the working population in particularly hard conditions, and that for them it is particularly necessary to regulate and shorten the working day, to guarantee hygienic conditions of labor, etc.
But endeavors completely to ban the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchal manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary and utopian.”
The textile and metal industries soon saw masses of women workers join, who quickly formed the majority of workers in these factories. This was to have a profound impact on how the revolution unfolded.
The Bolsheviks counter petty-bourgeois feminists
The women’s struggle emerged in 1889, through the social democratic movement. Study circles were set up by Mikhail Ivanovich Brusnyev, that at its roots were based on Marxist ideas and had the goal of a socialist revolution. By 1890, these circles were teeming with women workers, with some 20 existing across Russia.
Five years later, the various social democratic circles merged to form the Union of Struggle, the forerunner to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Among its 17 founding members were four women, including Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, Lenin’s partner.
While the “woman question” was on the program of all Russian opposition parties by that point, it was the Bolsheviks that would take on uniting the working class not only on national divisions, but the gender divide as well. It was the Bolsheviks too that would immediately implement all demands from working women after taking power in 1917.
The turn of the century saw mass unrest in Tsarist Russia, which ultimately transpired into the 1905 Russian Revolution, where women participated in great numbers. That year, more than 50 Soviets — effectively, regional people’s councils, made up of peasants, workers and soldiers — sprang up, with women revolutionaries assigned some of the most dangerous tasks.
One cotton weaving factory, Kashintsev, elected more women than men to the Soviet: 7 out of 8 members.
After the 1905 Revolution, the Bolsheviks worked to win women and organize them within the ranks of their party. Their efforts prevailed: at the Social Democratic Labor Party’s Fifth Congress in 1907, the Bolsheviks had five women delegates for every woman Menshevik delegate, which was the other, more moderate faction of the party.
Despite this, the Bolsheviks came under attack by petty-bourgeois feminists for failing to care about women’s issues. Well outside the labor movement, the primary concern of this group was women’s right to education — meaning, they were only addressing a tiny group of women in Russia at the time.
As the Bolsheviks rejected the petty-bourgeois feminists’ claims that women’s liberation could be fought without socialism, Lenin reiterated the importance of abolishing class oppression alongside the struggle for democratic demands.
“Marxists know that democracy does not abolish class oppression, but only makes the class struggle clearer, broader, more open and sharper; and this is what we want. The more complete freedom of divorce is, the clearer will it be to the woman that the source of her ‘domestic slavery’ is not the lack of rights, but capitalism,” he wrote in 1916. “The more democratic the system of government is, the clearer it will be to the workers that the root of the evil is not the lack of rights, but capitalism.”
Clara Zetkin, the German Marxist that first called for International Working Women’s Day, also spoke out firmly against “bourgeois feminism.”
“The proletarian woman ends up in the proletarian camp, the bourgeois woman in the bourgeois camp. We must not let ourselves be fooled by Socialist trends in the bourgeois women’s movement which last only as long as bourgeois women feel oppressed,” she warned.
These warnings rang true: the lack of class perspective within the petty-bourgeois feminist movement led them to support World War I, believing that once men were off to fight, women could play a greater role in society.
It was the Bolsheviks who opposed the war, calling it a war by imperialists and capitalists at the expense of the working masses. It was also women Bolsheviks who rallied and persuaded the soldiers stationed in Petrograd to join the movement. Many soon left their posts and joined the Bolshevik ranks.
A 1923 edition of the Soviet women’s Bolshevik magazine Rabotnitsa. | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In 1914 the Bolsheviks began a journal aimed at working women, called “Rabotnitsa,” or “Women Workers.” With the first edition published on International Working Women’s Day of that year, seven more were issued before the Tsarist government clamped down on the publication.
Women and revolution
After the February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government came to power, toppling Tsar Nicholas II and ending the Russian empire
As time passed and the people’s demands for “Peace, Bread and Land” were not met, the Bolsheviks grew in popularity, as they called for the overthrow of the bourgeois Provisional Government.
More organizing was needed, and women workers were a key element of this process. They not only participated in strikes and demonstrations but also were a part of the armed defense of the revolution, dying alongside men of the Red Guards, the armed wing of the Bolsheviks.
Bolshevik women, in the months leading up to the October Revolution, took part in all activities: speaking at public meetings, distributing leaflets, transporting weapons, and providing care for the wounded.
In this fervor, the Bolsheviks began publishing “Rabotnitsa” again, with Krupskaya and many other women workers from Petrograd on the editorial board.
Lenin, during this time, wrote many articles about the importance of calling women workers to fight for socialism.
The pioneering advances for women under the Bolsheviks
Finally, on Oct. 25, 1917, the armed masses belonging to the Petrograd Soviet, which had been won over to socialist revolution by the Bolsheviks, occupied all public buildings, stormed the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government members.
The Bolsheviks immediately set out ensuring equality between men and women. Just four days after taking power, they introduced the 8-hour working day, advancing possibilities for women, especially working-class women, to take part in politics.
Soon, the restriction on women’s freedom was removed. Women were given equal right to own land.
The church and state were also separated, marking one of the most profound shifts in women’s right: women were given free access to abortion, making Russia the first country in the world to grant this legal right.
Marriage also now took place with equal consent, and divorce was made as easy as possible for both parties.
The concept of illegitimate children was abolished, allowing all children to be treated equally. Paid maternity leave was granted both before and after birth, while night work for pregnant women and women who had just given birth was prohibited. In addition, special maternity wards were set up.
Long before women would be granted the right to vote in capitalist countries such as the U.K., the United States, Sweden or France, women in Russia could vote by 1917.
Aleksandra Kollontai also became the world’s first woman minister when she was appointed People’s Commissar of Social Welfare shortly after the October Revolution.
The advances in women’s rights and equality ushered in by the Bolshevik Revolution also came part in parcel with advances in rights for other oppressed groups as well. In 1918, a decree was passed abolishing all pre-revolutionary Tsarist laws. The 1922 Criminal Code, for example, decriminalized homosexuality.
“The present sexual legislation in the Soviet Union is the work of the October Revolution,” the Bolshevik Grigorii Batkis, Director of the Institute for Social Hygiene, said at the time.
In November 1918, a series of small women’s conferences culminated in the first All-Russian Congress of Working Women.
During the conference, many new women joined the Bolshevik Party, as well as the women militias, “The Red Sisters,” to actively fight the counter-revolutionary forces known as the White Army, who had the backing of foreign governments.
The women’s department of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, who had since changed their name to the Russian Communist Party, organized women in the factories and villages into the party.
The Zhenotdel, as the women’s department was known, soon launched a magazine, “Komitska,” with Krupskaya as editor. By 1927, over 18 different women’s magazines were published with a circulation of 386,000, focused on women’s liberation and socialism.
Thanks to the Zhenotdel, women’s membership in the party doubled by 1932, with women making up 15.9 percent, compared to just 8 percent a decade earlier.
”No party or revolution in the world has ever dreamed of striking so deep at the roots of the oppression and inequality of women as the Soviet, Bolshevik revolution is doing,” Lenin observed in 1921. “Over here, in Soviet Russia, no trace is left of any inequality between men and women under the law. The Soviet power has eliminated all there was of the especially disgusting, base and hypocritical inequality in the laws on marriage and the family and inequality in respect of children.”
“This is only the first step in the liberation of woman. But none of the bourgeois republics, including the most democratic, has dared to take even this first step,” he added.
In 1922, with the creation of the USSR, the Soviet government sought to socialize housework. This was done by creating things such as public nurseries, kindergartens, kitchens and public laundries. The idea was to reduce household labor to a minimum, allowing women the freedom to pursue waged work, education and enjoy leisure time on par with men.
Long after the Bolshevik Revolution, the difference in women’s conditions was staggering. Compared to Tsarist times, life expectancy doubled by the 1970s, from 30 to nearly 74. Infant mortality was also reduced by 90 percent in that time period. Women soared in education, with only 10 percent enrolled in secondary school in 1926 to 97 percent by 1958.
From the first study circles at the turn of the century to the women-led uprising that incited the February Revolution, to the thousands of Bolshevik women who fought on behalf of the working class, the first worker’s state in the world would never have become a reality without the steely, militant determination of women.
Bolshevik Women’s Battalion stands guard after the Winter Palace was seized.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/11/ ... for-women/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
October Revolution 100 - Why does it matter?
Proletarian TV
Published on Nov 7, 2017
Joti Brar, Editor of the CPGB-ML's paper Proletarian, speaks to a packed meeting held in Southall's dominion centre to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution!
She points out that we do not celebrate this anniversary simply as a historical curiosity, but because "the October Revolution marked the beginning of the era in which imperialism will be replaced by socialism; it shaped our world and put the ruling class on notice that capitalism’s days are numbered"
"Lenin summed up the first mighty step that Russian workers had taken on behalf of workers everywhere in 1918, when the revolution was barely half a year old:
“We are entitled to be proud and to consider ourselves fortunate that it has come to our lot to be the first to fell in one part of the globe that wild beast, capitalism, which has drenched the earth in blood, which has reduced humanity to starvation and demoralisation, and which will assuredly perish soon, no matter how monstrous and savage its frenzy in the face of death.”
Read her full speech in the London Worker here: http://www.londonworker.org/
Proletarian TV
Published on Nov 7, 2017
Joti Brar, Editor of the CPGB-ML's paper Proletarian, speaks to a packed meeting held in Southall's dominion centre to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution!
She points out that we do not celebrate this anniversary simply as a historical curiosity, but because "the October Revolution marked the beginning of the era in which imperialism will be replaced by socialism; it shaped our world and put the ruling class on notice that capitalism’s days are numbered"
"Lenin summed up the first mighty step that Russian workers had taken on behalf of workers everywhere in 1918, when the revolution was barely half a year old:
“We are entitled to be proud and to consider ourselves fortunate that it has come to our lot to be the first to fell in one part of the globe that wild beast, capitalism, which has drenched the earth in blood, which has reduced humanity to starvation and demoralisation, and which will assuredly perish soon, no matter how monstrous and savage its frenzy in the face of death.”
Read her full speech in the London Worker here: http://www.londonworker.org/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: 100 years since the October Revolution
The Berlin Wall and the bourgeois lies 
By Nikos Mottas*.
The 9th of November consists a milestone for those who have turned anticommunist propaganda into profession. It is the day when, in 1989, the destruction of the so-called “Berlin Wall” began.
Since then, every year, we observe smaller or larger fiestas about the "fall of the Wall" and the restoration of Capitalism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In these fiestas, the winners of the Cold War employ their anticommunist imagination in order to celebrate the “big event”- for example, in 2014, during the 25th anniversary, among the official guests in Berlin was the miserable puppet of international imperialism called Mikhail Gorbachev.
For more than 26 years, within the framework of slanders against the actual existed Socialism, the bourgeois historiography, the bourgeois media as well as various opportunists engage in a war of distortions regarding the history of the Berlin Wall. They deliberately vilify the German Democratic Republic and the achievements of the socialist construction while they attempt to manipulate the European and international public opinion with the known, anti-scientific and anti-historical equation between Communism and Fascism.
However, the reality is quite different from the version that international imperialism tries to serve to the people.
They claim that the Berlin Wall was erected in order to stop the- supposedly- increasing fleeing of East Germans to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany. This is a classic false argument of the bourgeois propaganda. The creation of the Wall was actually imposed by the imperialist interventionism and the continuous attempts- by West Germany and their imperialist allies- to undermine and sabotage the socialist construction in the GDR.
If we want to answer the question “why the Berlin Wall was built”, we must go far before 1961 (the year of the wall's construction), during the period which following the end of WWII. The post-war future of Germany was determined by the decisions of the so-called Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945) between the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain. The conference's purpose was to create the conditions for a single, demilitarized, denazified, democratically organised German state. Until the implementation of the agreement, the country was under the adminstration of the armed forces of the three countries in two major parts- the western part under the adminstration of the alliance between U.S- Britain-France and the eastern one under the Soviet administration.
The imperialist aspirations of the western allies against the USSR consisted an obstacle to the implementation of the Potsdam Conference's agreement. Here are some major points:
a) In the sector in which the western allies had the administration (West Germany), a number of the measures agreed in Potsdam were not implemented (e.g. complete dissolution of the Nazi forces, total demolition of the Third Reich's remains in the state, arrest and imprisonment of all Nazi criminals, prevention of any Nazi-affiliated activity). It is clear that a part of Hitler's state apparatus was useful for the imperialists in their attempt to provoke the Soviet Union and the socialist camp.
b) The division of Berlin into “western” and “eastern” was a result of the disruptive political initiatives taken by the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats of West Germany. These political powers- having the support of the “allies”- created a separate state in 1948, introduced a new currency and abandonded the Berlin town hall, thus choosing to settle their “Municipality of West Berlin” in Schöneberg district. In fact, the forces of imperialism created their own state (West Berlin) in the heart of the- controlled by the USSR- East Germany (Geographically, Berlin belonged entirely to the eastern part of the country).
c) After the foundation of the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (1949) there was an intensive and methodical effort to undermine the eastern part. West Berlin was for years the advanced outpost of the imperialist aggression against the Soviet Union. This agression was expressed in many ways, including psychological warfare against the East Germans, as well as multiple sabotages against East Berlin's public infrastructure.
During the same period, when the socialist construction in the German Democratic Republic was underway, the NATO forces, having the West German state as their base, were investing in provocations and threats against GDR. We must remind that West Germany became a NATO member in the middle of 1950s, the United States began the installation of modern weapons systems while the government of West Berlin was armed to the teeth demonstrating its military force (notice: all these were taking place against the 1945 agreements). It seems that the above consist negligible “details” for the “champions” of the anti-communist propaganda.
On the eve of the 13th August 1961, following a decision by the Parliament of the German Democratic Republic the borders closed. This act was in fact a measure of defense against the offensive policy of West Germany and an effort to ensure the security of the socialist GDR.
The “Wall of shame” or, perhaps, the shame of the imperialists?
The construction of the Berlin Wall came as a result of the escalating imperialist aggression. The major target of this aggression was Socialism; the socialist construction in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, including of course the German Democratic Republic. It is characteristic that the imperialist propaganda gave West Berlin the name “showcase of the free world”, as opposed to the supposedly “oppresive and repressive regime” of the German Democratic Republic.
The “showcase of the free world”- West Berlin- was the source of multiple organised illegal activities against the German Democratic Republic; from ideological war to sabotages, the counter-revolution never stopped to undermine the socialist construction in East Germany.
The bourgeois historiography also hides what followed the Berlin Wall's destruction in 1989. Behind the hypocritical celebrations of the imperialists about the supposed “victory of Democracy, victory of the free world, etc”, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of an unprecedented “loot” of GDR's public property: numerous privatizations, armies of millions of unemployed Germans, privatization of public hospitals, extended corruption between west German political parties and German multinational corporations etc.
Today, 27 years since the demolition of the “Wall of shame”, is quite clear who actually benefited from the victory of the counter-revolution in East Germany. Those who were benefited were certainly the monopoly groups and the capitalists and definitely not the working class of the country. The bourgeois “fanfare” about the “reunification of Germany” cannot hide the barbarity of capitalist exploitation.
In 2010, approximately 7.3 million working Germans (1/5 of the working population) had a monthly wage of 400 euros. It is characteristic that between 2004 and 2011, the actual average salary has been decreased by 2.9%, while 14% of the German pensioners live on the poverty line. On the same time, since the mid-1990s, the income of the 5,000 richest German households has increased by 50%!
Today, 27 years later, the barbarity of Capitalism builds new walls in every corner of Europe. In Munich, a new wall- higher than the Berlin Wall- is being erected, in order to... protect locals from refugees! In Hungary, the far-right, anti-immigration government of Viktor Orban builds a second wall across the borders with Serbia and Croatia. In the United Kingdom, a new four-metre high wall will be built in Calais, in order to prevent refugees from entering the country and in the United States, the President-elect Donald Trump is known for his desire to build a “huge wall” on the US-Mexican borders.
Today, 27 years since the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the actual threat for humanity is the wall of capitalist exploitation and imperialist barbarity. It is in the hands of the people, of the working masses in every corner of the world to demolish the capitalist wall of exploitation and to engrave their own way towards a better future, towards Socialism-Communism. History did not end in 1989.
Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of 'In Defense of Communism', a PhD candidate in Political Science, International Relations and Political History.
https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2016/11 ... -lies.html
By Nikos Mottas*.
The 9th of November consists a milestone for those who have turned anticommunist propaganda into profession. It is the day when, in 1989, the destruction of the so-called “Berlin Wall” began.
Since then, every year, we observe smaller or larger fiestas about the "fall of the Wall" and the restoration of Capitalism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In these fiestas, the winners of the Cold War employ their anticommunist imagination in order to celebrate the “big event”- for example, in 2014, during the 25th anniversary, among the official guests in Berlin was the miserable puppet of international imperialism called Mikhail Gorbachev.
For more than 26 years, within the framework of slanders against the actual existed Socialism, the bourgeois historiography, the bourgeois media as well as various opportunists engage in a war of distortions regarding the history of the Berlin Wall. They deliberately vilify the German Democratic Republic and the achievements of the socialist construction while they attempt to manipulate the European and international public opinion with the known, anti-scientific and anti-historical equation between Communism and Fascism.
However, the reality is quite different from the version that international imperialism tries to serve to the people.
They claim that the Berlin Wall was erected in order to stop the- supposedly- increasing fleeing of East Germans to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany. This is a classic false argument of the bourgeois propaganda. The creation of the Wall was actually imposed by the imperialist interventionism and the continuous attempts- by West Germany and their imperialist allies- to undermine and sabotage the socialist construction in the GDR.
If we want to answer the question “why the Berlin Wall was built”, we must go far before 1961 (the year of the wall's construction), during the period which following the end of WWII. The post-war future of Germany was determined by the decisions of the so-called Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945) between the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain. The conference's purpose was to create the conditions for a single, demilitarized, denazified, democratically organised German state. Until the implementation of the agreement, the country was under the adminstration of the armed forces of the three countries in two major parts- the western part under the adminstration of the alliance between U.S- Britain-France and the eastern one under the Soviet administration.
The imperialist aspirations of the western allies against the USSR consisted an obstacle to the implementation of the Potsdam Conference's agreement. Here are some major points:
a) In the sector in which the western allies had the administration (West Germany), a number of the measures agreed in Potsdam were not implemented (e.g. complete dissolution of the Nazi forces, total demolition of the Third Reich's remains in the state, arrest and imprisonment of all Nazi criminals, prevention of any Nazi-affiliated activity). It is clear that a part of Hitler's state apparatus was useful for the imperialists in their attempt to provoke the Soviet Union and the socialist camp.
b) The division of Berlin into “western” and “eastern” was a result of the disruptive political initiatives taken by the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats of West Germany. These political powers- having the support of the “allies”- created a separate state in 1948, introduced a new currency and abandonded the Berlin town hall, thus choosing to settle their “Municipality of West Berlin” in Schöneberg district. In fact, the forces of imperialism created their own state (West Berlin) in the heart of the- controlled by the USSR- East Germany (Geographically, Berlin belonged entirely to the eastern part of the country).
c) After the foundation of the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (1949) there was an intensive and methodical effort to undermine the eastern part. West Berlin was for years the advanced outpost of the imperialist aggression against the Soviet Union. This agression was expressed in many ways, including psychological warfare against the East Germans, as well as multiple sabotages against East Berlin's public infrastructure.
During the same period, when the socialist construction in the German Democratic Republic was underway, the NATO forces, having the West German state as their base, were investing in provocations and threats against GDR. We must remind that West Germany became a NATO member in the middle of 1950s, the United States began the installation of modern weapons systems while the government of West Berlin was armed to the teeth demonstrating its military force (notice: all these were taking place against the 1945 agreements). It seems that the above consist negligible “details” for the “champions” of the anti-communist propaganda.
On the eve of the 13th August 1961, following a decision by the Parliament of the German Democratic Republic the borders closed. This act was in fact a measure of defense against the offensive policy of West Germany and an effort to ensure the security of the socialist GDR.
The “Wall of shame” or, perhaps, the shame of the imperialists?
The construction of the Berlin Wall came as a result of the escalating imperialist aggression. The major target of this aggression was Socialism; the socialist construction in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, including of course the German Democratic Republic. It is characteristic that the imperialist propaganda gave West Berlin the name “showcase of the free world”, as opposed to the supposedly “oppresive and repressive regime” of the German Democratic Republic.
The “showcase of the free world”- West Berlin- was the source of multiple organised illegal activities against the German Democratic Republic; from ideological war to sabotages, the counter-revolution never stopped to undermine the socialist construction in East Germany.
The bourgeois historiography also hides what followed the Berlin Wall's destruction in 1989. Behind the hypocritical celebrations of the imperialists about the supposed “victory of Democracy, victory of the free world, etc”, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of an unprecedented “loot” of GDR's public property: numerous privatizations, armies of millions of unemployed Germans, privatization of public hospitals, extended corruption between west German political parties and German multinational corporations etc.
Today, 27 years since the demolition of the “Wall of shame”, is quite clear who actually benefited from the victory of the counter-revolution in East Germany. Those who were benefited were certainly the monopoly groups and the capitalists and definitely not the working class of the country. The bourgeois “fanfare” about the “reunification of Germany” cannot hide the barbarity of capitalist exploitation.
In 2010, approximately 7.3 million working Germans (1/5 of the working population) had a monthly wage of 400 euros. It is characteristic that between 2004 and 2011, the actual average salary has been decreased by 2.9%, while 14% of the German pensioners live on the poverty line. On the same time, since the mid-1990s, the income of the 5,000 richest German households has increased by 50%!
Today, 27 years later, the barbarity of Capitalism builds new walls in every corner of Europe. In Munich, a new wall- higher than the Berlin Wall- is being erected, in order to... protect locals from refugees! In Hungary, the far-right, anti-immigration government of Viktor Orban builds a second wall across the borders with Serbia and Croatia. In the United Kingdom, a new four-metre high wall will be built in Calais, in order to prevent refugees from entering the country and in the United States, the President-elect Donald Trump is known for his desire to build a “huge wall” on the US-Mexican borders.
Today, 27 years since the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the actual threat for humanity is the wall of capitalist exploitation and imperialist barbarity. It is in the hands of the people, of the working masses in every corner of the world to demolish the capitalist wall of exploitation and to engrave their own way towards a better future, towards Socialism-Communism. History did not end in 1989.
Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of 'In Defense of Communism', a PhD candidate in Political Science, International Relations and Political History.
https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2016/11 ... -lies.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."