Chicago meeting: 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution

Revolution have been turned into a fable of a straight line from Lenin to Stalin. The fable’s moral is that revolution must fail, that any attempt to overthrow capitalism necessarily ends in tyranny, that a class dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily turns into the dictatorship of one party against the working masses.

“So we need to understand that the February revolution was made solely by the historic initiative of the masses, first of all by the women workers on International Women’s Day, and that the October revolution was spearheaded by a party but made possible by the self-activity of the masses, supported by the masses, participated in by masses, and carried out with the explicit aim of transferring power to the soviets spontaneously created by and controlled by the masses….

“We need to understand that, nevertheless, the way was paved for the success of the October revolution by Lenin’s return to Hegel’s dialectic and his break with the Second International, the international grouping of socialists, not only politically but philosophically….

“What is needed is to recover that legacy as ground for revolution today—as ground for revolution succeeding as a fundamental transformation of all social relations, establishing new relations between the sexes, breaking down racism, sexism, and heterosexism, and putting the working class in power so as to begin breaking down all class divisions, and immediately beginning to break down the division between mental and manual labor, between thinking and decision-making by part of society and doing by another part. But also as ground for what happens after revolution so that it is not transformed into opposite with a new bureaucracy taking power out of the hands of the masses and reinforcing the division between mental and manual labor…”

Speaker: Franklin Dmitryev, co-editor of Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution: Selected writings by Raya Dunayevskaya

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