The historical circle of October has not been closed yet

By Savas Michael-Matsas

Speech on the 90th anniversary of the 1917 October Socialist Revolution, Moscow- Leningrad-Athens November 2007

1. After October 1917 nothing in the world can be the same again.

Even if the first victorious result of the revolutionary upheaval that shook the world, the Soviet Union, has collapsed 16 years ago, it is impossible to return to the pre-1917 world conditions. This great Event is not merely a chapter of Russian history; it interrupted the course of human History and initiated a new epoch of transition full of zigzags, leaps forward, regression, epic battles and bitter tragedies.

This epoch is, as Trotsky had said, "our fatherland in time" [1]. It did not disappear suddenly in 1991, with the inglorious lowering of the red flag from Kremlin by a disintegrating restorationist bureaucratic regime headed by one Boris Yeltsin. Those who rushed to hail the end not only of an epoch of wars and revolutions but of History itself very soon they became victims of History and the laughing stock for all.

The victorious socialist revolution in Russia in October 1917 was a world event, not merely a Russian one. Its world dimensions are not exhausted to its international repercussions; it has a world genesis, a world dynamics, an original specific development determined, at the last instance, by the dominant tendencies of the world historic process.

To put it in other terms: without the establishment of a world division of labour and a world market, without the entry of capitalism in its last stage of imperialist decline, without the conflict between the world character of modern productive forces with the capitalist production relations and the Nation- State culminating on a world-wide war conflagration, the October Revolution is unthinkable.

The October Revolution gave a victorious expression to the deepest needs of world historical development colliding with the limits reached by the declining capitalist system. It opened a new epoch and proved in the class battlefield that it is an epoch of transition from the last antagonistic class society to a classless society, world communism. To call this major historical upheaval involving hundreds of millions and the fate of humanity a "Bolshevik coup" or a "conspiracy", as many apologists of Capitalism and old Cold Warriors repeat ad nauseam on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, demonstrates only the bankruptcy of bourgeois thought, its total inability today to comprehend historical processes, its fear before the verdict of History against the system it defends. You do not denigrate ghosts if you are not panicking that they are still alive.

In a negative way, the anti-communist, anti-historical campaign in 2007 in Russia and internationally confirms that the Red October does not belong only to the past and to Russia alone but to the future and to humanity.

2. Emphasizing the determining role of the world factor for the Event of 1917 is methodologically necessary and politically vital to comprehend the contradictory historical course up to today. It does not eliminate the historical specificity of Russia. National peculiarities arise out of a non linear uneven and combined historic development and cannot be dissolved into an abstract universality. In the case of Russia, its specific peculiarities made it the most vulnerable "link in the international chain of imperialism", to use Lenin's famous terms. But, in 1917, as the great Bolshevik leader again said, it was not only a national link that it has been broken but the international chain itself.

The "breaking of the chain" has not the meaning of an automatic break down and dissolution of the entire interconnected system of world capitalism. It means that there were world conditions that determined the local overthrow of capitalism; the global determines the local, the universal is primary to the particular. In reverse, the systemic change in the part, the genesis of a new mode of production, which can achieve maturity and fulfillment only on world scale, introduces changes in the whole. There is a complex dialectic of interconnections and interactions between world tendencies and the course of the land of October.

The Russian revolution, in the first place, was not an isolated case. An international revolutionary tide in Europe and internationally followed the war, from Russia to Hungary, Bavaria, Germany, and Italy up to the oppressed colonies of the imperialist powers.

The historic objective and subjective specificities of Russia made it the scene of the first victorious act of the world socialist revolution. The defeats of the world revolution that followed isolated it with tragic consequences both for Russia and the world.

The internationalist vanguard of the Revolution, the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky in those memorable times that have shaken the world, never had subscribed to the reactionary "theory of socialism in a single country", a "theory" first formulated by the right wing German Social Democrat Vollmar and later, in 1924, adopted by Bukharin and Stalin as the central dogma of a conservative bureaucratic elite rising and consolidating its privileged position on the top of the isolated first workers state, a predominantly agrarian Soviet Russia devastated after the imperialist war and the civil war. This dogma was mobilized against the initial international perspectives of the October revolution identified with Trotsky's Permanent Revolution and it became the theoretical cornerstone of Stalinism and of its apologetics, old and new.

The first post-revolutionary, pre-Stalin period 1917-1924 was not flawless. There is no need of idealizations, and Lenin was the last person to lack critical stand and to not to accept, as he said himself that "all possible errors were made". There were terrible, desperate times. But desperate measures for survival never were presented in an idealizing apologetic manner. And despair was acting initially also as a driving force for a revolutionary concrete Utopia, as we can see it in texts by Trotsky, Mayakovsky or Platonov. In our days, in a recent essay by the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek, this particular point has been stressed [2]. Zizek draws the demarcation line separating Lenin from Stalin: "The shift from Lenin to Stalinism is here clear and easy to determine: Lenin perceived the situation as desperate, unexpected, but as such the one which has to be creatively exploited for new political choices; with the notion of "Socialism in one country", Stalin re-normalized the situation into a new narrative of linear development in 'stages' [.] in Lenin's times, terror was openly admitted[.] while in Stalin's times, the symbolic status of the terror thoroughly changed- terror turned into the publicly non -acknowledged obscene shadowy supplement of the public official discourse". The Great Purges came after was adopted the "most democratic Constitution in the world" in 1936 declaring the "final and complete victory of Socialism", in a single country of course.

Only from the vantage point of the primacy of world developments, of the universal, from the standpoint of the Permanent Revolution, we can comprehend, without demonizations or idealistic- apologetic myths on "the cult of personality", the contradictions in which were entangled the October Revolution and the land of the Soviets, their non resolution and exacerbation and the course via many zigzags, regressions, leaps forward, epic victories, tragedies, new hopes and disappointments, flights to Cosmos and fall to stagnation, and, finally, implosion and disintegration.

The starting point is the fundamental contradiction between the world character of modern productive forces and the national character of socialist construction [3].

As the process of transition was blocked by imperialist encirclement and pressure, defeats of the international revolutionary movement and isolation, growth of bureaucracy and bureaucratic blunders at home and abroad, all the derivative contradictions were sharpened: the contradiction a) between the high form of the productive relations founded by the October Revolution and the inadequate, low level of the productive forces in a backward agrarian country; b) between the non capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois norms of distribution; c) between production and exchange or between the Plan and the money-commodity relations; d) between production and consumption [4].

3. Usually an investigation of the specific contradictions and of their specific logic is avoided and it is substituted with static formulas mostly centered on the legal form of property relations. For the former "orthodox" pro-Soviet view among Stalinist-trained by the old Soviet textbooks but also among many Trotskyists, State property was conflated with Socialism. For other, anti-Soviet "orthodoxies", State property was considered as the basis of State Capitalism. By ignoring the logic of contradictions, both they ignore transition, including its crisis, its increasing blocking in Soviet and Soviet type- societies. Therefore, the result is not only the deadlock in previous ideological confrontations but also the utter confusion that reigns after the collapse of "actually existing Socialism" or "State Capitalism" or of the deformed workers' states in 1989-91.

A return to the dialectical materialist method that Marx developed in the successive elaborations of his incomplete magnum opus, Das Kapital, is more than ever needed and timely. It is necessary to start not from legal expressions of social relations but from their basis in the production process itself, where the "innermost secret" of the relation between rulers and ruled is hidden: "The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship off rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers- a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity- which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short the corresponding specific form of the state. "[5]

Soviet workers' power emerging from the October Revolution made decisive inroads in capitalist property relations and by introducing nationalized property relations, planning methods, State monopoly of trade set the bases of a new non capitalist mode of production in transition into Socialism and Communism. In this way the specific economic form of the surplus as surplus value was abolished as there was no more a real subsumption of labour by capital, by value form. While the law of value did not functioned as the regulative principle of Soviet economy, the latter it was not insulated from the world wide function of the law of value and the presence of commodity-money relations. Both they cannot abolished in a single country outside of the world division of labour still under the domination of capital relation. The powerful development of Soviet economy transforming the country from a former backward agrarian country into the second industrial superpower of the world did not made it more independent from world economy; on the contrary more developed Soviet economy became more it needed access to world resources and high technology still under capitalist domination.

The growth of bureaucracy came out of a Thermidorian reaction that attempted to consolidate the social bases set by the Revolution by abolishing workers' democracy and concentrating the political monopoly of power to the hands of party-State bureaucratic elite. The Stalinist bureaucracy was a specific social group, not merely as brutal method of political rule or of administrative mismanagement or a super-structural phenomenon. Under conditions of retreat of the world revolution, bureaucracy, as a product of imperialist pressure and isolation after the defeats of the international movement, became in turn a factor for new defeats (China 1927, Germany 1933, Spain 1936-39 etc.), strengthening isolation as well as the State apparatus, which became more and more alienated from the working population, raised as a Bonapartist state power over society.

The clearest indicator of the progress to Socialism is the withering way of the State itself. The monstrous growth of the state machine under Stalinism, in spite the claims for the contrary by the former Menshevik and now Attorney General in the Moscow Trials Vishinsky, demonstrated the growing distance of a blocked transition from its goal. Soviets had emerged as organs of workers' self-organization, organs of struggle for and of workers' power, of the class dictatorship of the proletariat, a workers State of the Commune type, a quasi-State, which starts to wither away, a self-abolishing power and not a self-perpetuating domination by autocratic elite.

Nevertheless, bureaucracy, lacking independent foundations in production, never could either have an individual appropriation of the surplus product (giving to it the form of surplus value) or a full control of it and of the labour process. Control was exercised through a centralized apparatus, where every bureaucrat had an instable, insecure position, never acquiring the homogeneity or stability of a class with a definite position in production relations. Bureaucratic control over the surplus and its distribution used, under different conjunctures direct force( under Stalin), administrative methods( under Khrushchev) or negotiations( under Brezhnev) between the center and the units or between managers and the workforce, which partially controlled the labour process.[6] The workers were alienated from this bureaucratic apparatus of State control over the surplus but they did not sell their labour power as a commodity. There were not a labour market or a capital market and living labour was not subjugated to dead, abstract labour, the value relation. In this sense there was no capitalist exploitation.

The Soviet factory cannot be identified with the Fordist -Tailorist paradigm. The initial calls, even by Lenin, to introduce Taylorist methods to raise industrial production should be interpreted in their context of despair. But a really Fordist-Taylorist organization of industry to be effective needs a reserve army of unemployed and money as invective and form of social control; both they were absent in Soviet development. [7]

Nevertheless conditions of possibility of a transition are not identical with its actuality. Transition to Socialism/ Communism demands not solely the abolition of the specific economic form of surplus value but furthermore the transcendence of the division between necessary and surplus labour, the reversal of the entire relation and the transformation of the surplus into a necessary product as Marx points out in Grundrisse (Manuscript of 1857-1858) [8]. The transition to Communism is not exhausted to the abolition of the "theft of alien labour time" in the form of surplus value as the basis of social wealth, as in Capitalism; it demands a society where "the surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind. As a result, production based on exchange value collapses, and the immediate material production process itself is stripped of its form of indigence and antagonism. Free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time in order to posit surplus labour, but in general the reduction of necessary labour of society to a minimum, to which then corresponds the artistic, scientific, etc. development of individuals, made possible by the time thus set free and the means produced for all of them." [9]

While elements of anticipation of such a future could be found in Soviet society, even in its dark moments, even in a distorted form, transition to that future was blocked. First, isolation from world resources to achieve the necessary high level of productive forces prevented it; second, bureaucracy functioned more and more as a breaking mechanism. Proper planning cannot be made without feedback and involvement of the workers themselves in management and control in all levels. Soviet workers' democracy was not a liberal fantasy but a dire necessity to grasp and deal with real contradictions in economic and social life. The growing contradiction between socialization of production and alienation of direct producers from the main means of control, from the centralized State apparatus of management, from all institutionalized forms of social life, led, despite initial and partial successes, productivity and efficiency to constantly fall. As the extensive stage of industrialization was already behind, an intensive stage of economic development needed methods that the bureaucracy feared and opposed: the use, as Trotsky had said, both of a "long level" on an international scale based on internationalism and of a "short level" at home based on workers democracy and workers active participation, were both eliminated by national State bureaucratic rule.

Internationally, the Kremlin bureaucracy collaborated with imperialism in the name of "peaceful co-existence" and, helped him to defuse revolutionary crises coming back to Europe, particularly in France, Italy, Portugal etc. in the period of 1968-1977.This revolutionary upheaval, sacrificed on the altar of the Yalta division of Europe, was also the last chance to break the isolation of the Soviet Union and regenerate the entire so-called "socialist camp", which was shaken by the crises in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

At home, a return to mass repression as in the 1930s was impossible; administrative methods and bureaucratic negotiations were inefficient; Breznievite stagnation became unbearable and destructive; so, the bureaucracy, under the combined pressures both from the changing international environment and from the threat of workers unrest, tended more and more, to find a way out to the opening to the market forces. The tendency was always there: it can be found in the "Economic Problems of Socialism" by Stalin, in Beria's proposals immediately after the death of Stalin, to Khrushchev's, Lieberman's and Kosygin reforms up to Gorbachev's fin de régime. As no revolutionary solution was given from below by an atomized working class, the opening to the market precipitated disintegration leading to the implosion of 1991 and the open turn to capitalist restoration.

4. Thus, has the historic drama reached its (un)happy end? Has the circle opened by the October Revolution been closed?

The answer of the overwhelming majority- from capitalists to Stalinists that believed that a 'complete and final victory of Socialism' was achieved in 1936 but some CIA agents later conspired and succeeded to overthrow up to Social democracy and most of the anti-Stalinist left, including the majority of Trotskyists- is "yes". We will argue, together with our comrades in the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI), for an uncompromising "NO".

First, of all, a question must be raised: for decades after 1917, world capitalism has based its expectations to solve its historic problems, to overcome its decline and open a new period of historic ascent on a perspective and a strategy of re-conquest of the vast spaces from Prague to Vladivostok where the capital was expropriated; now that its dreams appear to materialize, why, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the incorporation of most of the eastern Europe in the European Union and China's wild gallop on capitalist lines, why capitalist globalization is in a such a crisis, raising the specter of a financial catastrophe like the 1930s, at the same time as the "only remaining superpower in the world", U.S. imperialism, faces the specter of a new Vietnam in Iraq's quagmire? Why the collapse of the historical enemy did not re-invigorated capitalism to achieve at least re-stabilization and expansion?

Humanity as a whole surely paid a high price so far from the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the non-stop wars launched by imperialism demonstrate, but nevertheless these disasters did not give to capitalism the elixir of youth to overcome its senility. The circle of October has not been closed, first of all, because the epoch of capitalist decline that it made it possible and, which October revealed its nature as a transitional epoch to world Communism, is still there. We are still in a protracted historic transition full of convulsions and the future, as the American Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman had said [10], is both open and necessary.

Finance Globalization, whilst its greatest achievement was to accelerate the demise of the USSR, succeeded to globalize all the unresolved contradictions of world capitalism provoking successive financial shocks up to the recent international turmoil after the US sub-prime mortgage market debacle. World developments and tendencies of declining Capitalism over-determine the capitalist restoration process, accelerating it or complicating it or obstructing and paralyzing it. We are, one more time, at square one: the global determines the local, including post-Soviet Russia.

"Do not give a finished definition to an unfinished process" had warned Trotsky [11] all Marxists, including his own followers. This was true then, when everybody rushed to hail the Soviet Union as a "socialist state" or to condemn it as a "bourgeois", "State-capitalist", "bureaucratic collectivist", "totalitarian", "social-imperialist" State; it is no less true now.

The first stage of transition, or rather of regression back to capitalism, started with the "shock therapy" in 1992 and continued by subsequent waves of mass theft of public property covered up with the cosmetic name "privatizations"; but it finished badly with Russia's default in August 1998 in the wake of the international financial hurricane that followed the crash in the Asian- Pacific region in 1997. It was again an international shock that proved how fragile and vulnerable are the results of the restoration process. Out of this failure of the restoration process under the impulse of a world capitalist crisis, a new realignment of the ruling elite around Putin came to power.

In spite of the growth of the State and Statism after 2000, the new laws introduced by the regime under Putin, particularly the Labour Code, the "monetarization" of pensions that provoked the mass mobilization in January 2005, the dismantlement of the subsidized social services etc. are important steps towards the main target of capitalist restoration: the re-commodification of the labour capacity of the former Soviet workforce. In a negative way, the need of such laws shows that the surplus has not yet acquired the specific form of surplus value. With the existing fragmentation of salaries and wages along the regions of this vast country, no homogenized abstract labour has become yet the dominant value relation shaping all other relations in production and circulation.

The CRFI, in a recent Statement [12] on the world situation, analyses the current changes in the following way:

"Putin's regime was obliged to partially re-nationalize the strategic sectors of the economy, particularly the energy sector, and revitalize some industries; it benefited enormously from the astronomic rise of the oil prices in the 2000-2006 period to create a Stabilization Fund to pay back the external debt of the country, pay the arrears for pensions and accumulate provisions for future financial shocks. The enormous growth of the State under the supervision of the former KGB, now FSB is the product of the external pressures of international financial capital and the internal pressures from the disintegration of social economic life. But state-ization of strategic sectors of the economy combined with blows to some oligarchs does not mean return back in the pre-1991 Soviet period, even if Soviet Stalinist forms of governance, including the all powerful secret services, are used for other purposes: to stabilize the economy and make it to work on capitalist lines. No significant part from the Stabilization Fund was used to renew neither the infrastructure nor the social services for the people; the main concern was to pay the world bankers and co-op with the demanding global financial capitalist environment. To combine an economy of extraction of oil and raw materials with a strong link with international finance capital is not a road to Socialism, not even to national sovereignty as Putin pretends. Inequalities between the regions have grown and only an elite, particularly in the Central Region of the Federation around Moscow, has benefited from the economic recovery. Putin's authoritarian regime remains the enemy of the people to be fought and defeated by the masses. But this fight has nothing in common with the goals and conspiracies of the oligarchs or of the pro-capitalist liberals around Kasparov, Yavlinsky et al. The dividing line is not between pro-Putin and anti-Putin camps but the class line for or against capitalist restoration. The salvation of the workers' and popular masses from the devastation of capitalist restoration and from the transformation of the country into a semi-colony, source of raw materials for the West and subservient to international finance capital is in the road of organization and mobilization of the working class, the youth and all the oppressed to defeat the restorationist forces by revolutionary means on the basis of a genuine socialist program and an internationalist perspective. The future of Russia and all the former Soviet bloc countries (including China) will be settled in struggle in the international arena."

The historic circle opened 90 years ago in Russia has not been closed neither for the world at large nor for the land of October itself. The continuing epoch of wars and revolutions, and a new wave of popular rebellions and social struggles internationally from Latin America to the Middle East, and to Europe itself manifest the truth that the rulers of the world try to hide: not only the historic circle of October has not been closed but a new spiral is opening towards a world October!

25 October 2007

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[1] Lev Trotsky, Moya Zhizn (My Life), Irkutsk 1991 p.

[2] Slavoj Zizek, Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism, or, Despair and Utopia in the turbulent year of 1920

[3] Leon Trotsky, Towards Socialism or Capitalism? New Park Publications p. 87

[4] Savas Michael, Perestroika and Economy, Allagi( in Greek) 1988 p.53

[5] K. Marx, Capital vol. III, Progress Publishers, Moscow1977 p.791

[6] See Hillel H. Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the USSR- Essays on the political economy of a disintegrating system, M. E. Sharpe Inc., New York 1992

[7] Op. cit. p. 85

[8] Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858(First Version of Capital). [Grundrisse] in K. Marx-F. Engels Collected Works( MECW), Progress Publishers -Moscow 1986, vol. 28 p.531

[9] K. Marx op. cit. in MECW vol. 29 p.91

[10] Bertell Ollman, Dialectical Investigations, Rutledge 1993

[11] Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, New Park Publications.

[12] From a world in turmoil to world revolution-Political Statement by the International Secretariat of the CRFI, Istanbul, June 28, 2007 See CRFI

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