Comrades! Let us look back on the lessons of the October Revolution on its anniversary!
Why is the October Revolution more important than other communist revolutions?
Because it is, next to the Paris Commune, the only communist revolution whose revolutionary subject was the industrial proletariat. This fact alone makes the October Revolution—its tactics, theory, and organization—more interesting and more important to us than any other. It was the first communist revolution led by the industrial proletariat that also held on to state power and defeated the bourgeois counterrevolution. It signaled that imperialism—the last stage of capitalism—was obsolete as a mode of production and ripe to be replaced by socialist organization.
Contrary to what both Soviet/socialist and American/bourgeois historians claim, the most important distinction between Leninism and what we may call German Social Democracy (the SPD)—that is, the Second International and official Marxism—is not that Leninism was a “deviation” based on Narodnik or Blanquist conspiratorial principles. These historians claim that Leninism insisted the revolution must be led by a professional, highly organized vanguard—that it meant conspiracy rather than open democratic struggle through parliamentary interpellation and mass agitation or propaganda via the large and complex press system perfected by the German SPD.
This claim arises from a one-sided, forced reading of one of Lenin’s writings, namely What Is to Be Done? It is wrongly treated as the (or even the) central Leninist “credo,” according to which the proletariat is supposedly incapable of leading the revolution or fulfilling the slogan “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.” Thus, Lenin is falsely accused of introducing the “professional revolutionary” who performs the socialist revolution on behalf of the working class.
Yet if we look at Lenin’s writings before WITBD, his constant reference point was the Erfurt Programme, the gold standard of Marxist strategy at the turn of the century. Lenin wanted the merger of the existing embryonic workers’ movement with Social Democracy—so that it might reach maturity as quickly and with as few birth pangs as possible. The SPD had a highly centralized apparatus that could rapidly publish agitation pamphlets, newspapers, or books exposing scandals from bourgeois political life and injustices from workers’ everyday condition
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