Samir Amin - October 1917 Revolution: A Century Later

Great revolutions make history. Conservative resistance and counter-revolutions only delay its progress. The French revolution invented modern politics and democracy, the Russian revolution paved the way for the socialist transition, while the Chinese revolution connected the emancipation of peoples oppressed by imperialism with the path to socialism.

These revolutions are great precisely because they are bearers of undertakings that are far ahead of the immediate demands of their time. And that is why they are confronted by the resistance of their times, the origin of the setbacks, thermidors and restorations. The ambitions of the great revolutions expressed in the formulas of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity), the October Revolution (workers of the world unite), Maoism (workers of the world and all oppressed peoples unite) do not find resonance in todays reality. But they remain the beacons that illuminate the still unfinished struggles of the peoples for the realization of these goals. It is therefore impossible to understand the contemporary world without understanding these great revolutions.

To commemorate these revolutions, one needs both to assess their ambitions (the utopia of today will be the reality of tomorrow), and to understand the reasons for their temporary setbacks. Conservative and reactionary minds refuse to do sothey wish us to believe that great revolutions have been nothing more than unfortunate accidents, that the peoples who have made them were carried away by deluded enthusiasm, pursuing dead ends that were diversions from the normal current of history. Already on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the clergy of the mediaat the service of reactionary powershave been deployed to denigrate the French revolution. This year this same media clergy have sought every means to vilify the October revolution. The heirs of the Communism of the Third International are invited to regret the error of their revolutionary convictions of yesteryear. Many in Europe will.

Chapter 1 of this book focuses on the dramatic consequences of the isolation of the October Revolution. I then discuss in Chapter Two the distinction between reading Marxs Capital and the development of the historical realities of the nations of modern capitalism. The former provides the key to understanding capitalism to enable us to comprehend the extent of the break that it represented from all previous societies. The latter allows us precisely to situate, over the long run, these various formations of the contemporary world and thus to assess their unequal capacities to advance along the long road to socialism. Chapter Three offers a reading of how the societies of the contemporary imperialist centre were formed. This can help to explain the grip of the ideology of the conservative order over their peoples, the major obstacle to the release of a creative revolutionary imagination. Chapter Four extends Maos analysis of the global system from the perspectives of regions in its peripheries. To this end, the chapter presents a strategy of stages of national liberation with possible advances though sovereign and popular national projects. Finally, chapter five returns to the agrarian question, which is at the heart of the challenge facing future advances towards socialism.

This is how I propose to commemorate October 1917, by situating the event in a current context, a context that represents the triumph of the liberal counter-revolution in appearance only, since this system is already advanced on a road of its chaotic decomposition, opening the way to the possible crystallization of a new revolutionary situation.

Samir Amin
Dakar
August 2017

The text of the following chapters first appeared as:

Chapter 1: The October 1917 Revolution started off the transformation of the World International Critical Thought (Beijing), vol 7, (2), July 2017,

Chapter 2: Reading Capital, reading historical capitalisms. Monthly Review, Vol 68 (3), July-August 2016

Chapter 3: Revolutions and counter revolutions from 1917 to 2017; Monthly Review, vol 69, (3), July-Aug 2017

Chapter 4: The sovereign popular project, the alternative to liberal globalization Journal of Labor and Society; vol 20, (1), March 2017 .

The aim of this chapter, written especially for the 100th anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution, is certainly not to denigrate this first gigantic socialist project that echoed the glorious Paris Commune (1871), both of them being parties to the storming of the skies. Humanity owes an enormous debt to the Soviet Union that resulted from this revolution as it was the Red Army, and it alone, that put the Nazi hordes to rout. The model of the Soviet Union, which was a plurinational state based on the support of those both the more and the less destitute, continues to be unequal even today. The support of the Soviet Union to the national liberation struggles of the peoples of Asia and Africa at that time forced the imperialist powers to retreat and to accept a polycentric globalization that was less unequal and more respectful of the sovereignty of nations and of their cultures.

However, neither is the objective of this study to be a nostalgic looking back on this historic event. On the contrary I shall try to identify the mistakes and weaknesses of the original construction and then describe the drift away from it that led to efforts for its reform. And I show how, when these failed and led to the brutal restoration of capitalism, an end was put to this first great wave of humanitys progress towards socialism.

Lenin, along with the Bolshevik leaders within the old Russian Workers Social Democratic Party, then Stalin, shaped the history of the October revolution followed by the construction of the USSR. In the following period Khrushchev, Brezhnev and finally Gorbachev and Yeltsin accompanied the decline of that system until its fall. As leaders of revolutionary communist parties and then later as leaders of revolutionary states, the builders were confronted with the problems faced by a triumphant revolution in countries of peripheral capitalism and forced to revise (I deliberately use this term, considered sacrilegious by many) the theses inherited from the historical Marxism of the Second International. Lenin and Bukharin went much further than Hobson and Hilferding in their analyses of monopoly capitalism and imperialism and drew this major political conclusion: the imperialist war of 1914-1918 (they were among the few, if not the only ones, to anticipate it) made necessary and possible a revolution led by the proletariat.