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 conditions. The German workers’ movement and German Social Democracy were merged into a coherent whole, despite the obvious contradictions between them. Lenin wanted to emulate this in Russia—but what was lacking was political freedom.
Recall what you will about Tsarist autocracy, but I hope I don’t have to convince you there was no political freedom in Russia. Lenin’s, that is, Iskra’s, call to battle was for political freedom—which to the proletariat is like air and sunshine.
Lenin wanted to build the conditions so that once political freedom was attained (meaning the abolition of the Tsarist autocracy), Russian Social Democrats would be ready to lead the emerging workers’ movement to full maturity. Once political freedom arrived, the workers’ movement could become the most powerful social force—ready to carry out a two-phase revolution, moving from a bourgeois republic to socialism (an idea, mind you, also accepted in some form by the Mensheviks). The autocracy might collapse “tomorrow,” and if “we, the Social Democrats,” did not get our act together right now, this inevitable transition to socialism could become “so much worse for the working class.”
So how did the Russian socialist intellectual movement build its grand narrative for the project of Russian Social Democracy? Lenin was an Erfurtian: he upheld the Erfurt Programme and sought to build the preconditions for the working class to orient its actions along those lines. To do this, the good news of the inevitable fall of the autocracy had to be spread everywhere; the revolutionary position of the working class had to be explained constantly; worker propaganda and agitation had to be continuous so that the movement could grow.
At the same time, every injustice committed against every class had to be exposed—and, in exposing them, it had to be shown that the only way to abolish them was by accepting the socialist revolution with the working class at its helm, now imbued with Social Democratic mass action. This could take the form of a newspaper, correspondence, or any kind of illegal workers’ organization, which were sprouting like mushrooms after rain during the 1900s. As industrialization deepened, so too did injustice. Russian Social Democrats united all these singular injustices into one: the overarching injustice of the autocracy itself—and they proclaimed that only one class could abolish it, the proletariat.
What does this mean for us now?
To revive Lenin’s spirit of political agitation means constructing our own tribunes of the people: disciplined, collective, tireless networks that link every workplace and neighborhood grievance to the total system of exploitation. It means restoring the moral grandeur of socialist politics—showing that we fight not just for wages, but for the soul of the whole people.
Lenin’s wager, as Lih shows, was on the intelligence of the masses. He believed that once the worker was given the full map of oppression, they would act more rationally and courageously than any intellectual could imagine. That is the opposite of conspiracy.
So, comrades—hopefully, I don’t have to spell it out further what it means for us now, espescially those living in the rotting belly of the imperialist beast.