18.12.1997

The Russian Revolution and ourselves

From 'The Call', paper of the British Socialist Party, December 20 1917

Nothing has brought out so clearly the devastation caused by the war on minds and hearts of the international socialist movement than the reception accorded to the Revolution, the proletarian Revolution, in Russia.

Year in, year out, before the war, we socialists used, the world over, to celebrate in March the glorious memory of the Commune of Paris, the harbinger of the social revolution to come ...

What we then anticipated has come. In Russia the working class and the labouring masses of peasantry in and out of military uniform, under the leadership of revolutionary social democracy, have attained to power and are carrying through a number of measures drastically altering the capitalist order of society and tending to establish the reign of socialism.

All production has been placed under the control of workers’ committees acting as organs of the state, and private banking is to be abolished. All the old courts of law, as embodying a system of justice administered on behalf of capitalist interests, have been superseded by new working class tribunals with elected judges. In the army too, hitherto the institution of class domination, the capitalist order has been abolished. No external or internal distinction is henceforth to exist between privates and officers, and the latter, from the highest to the lowest, are to be elected and controlled by soldiers’ committees.

All these and other measures current there in the space of six weeks form collectively those steps towards the establishment of a socialist order of society which Karl Kautsky so well described many years ago in his beautiful booklet On the morrow of the revolution.

The bourgeois world scent the new position with a true instinct and, so far as Russia herself is concerned, it meets with the violent, but wholly impotent opposition on the part of the propertied classes and their hangers-on, the professional classes and the ‘intellectuals’, as represented by the various radical and opportunist socialist parties.

But the working class outside Russia and its socialist leaders are deaf and dumb. Not a word to express the enthusiasm at the marvellous spectacle of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and of the initiation of measures, with courage and intelligence, ushering in the long yearned for socialist order of society! What we witness is only doubts and speculation as to whether the Bolshevik regime is going to last, and whether new Russia is going to make separate peace with Germany! Is that how the Commune of Paris was greeted by the British socialists and radicals of the day?

... Truly our socialism was skin-deep, and whatever socialist veneer we still brought with us into the war has been entirely worn off in these three years of chauvinist orgies and nationalist hatreds. You who are still socialists, why do you not come out, with dance and song, to greet the new, the glorious, the ever memorable days we are now living through? Where are your meetings? Where are your demonstrations? Where are your oaths that you too would strike a blow against the capitalist society for the triumph of socialism?

Was it all empty words that you spoke at the annual celebrations of the Paris Commune? Here you have a ‘commune’ on an incomparably larger scale - you have the triumph of the entire working class of an immense country, leading with rapid strikes to a complete social revolution.

Does your heart not beat higher? Does not the blood course quicker in your veins? Where are you then? Reply!