Presented at the Working Class Studies
Association annual conference, June 1, 2017, Indiana University,
(A revised version was printed in Duncan
McFarland ed. The Russian Revolution and
the Soviet Union: Seeds of 21st Century Socialism, Changemaker
Publications. http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/chsngemaker)
Harry Targ, Professor Emeritus, Department of
Political Science, Purdue University
Understanding
Revolutions: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations
The phenomena of revolution has long been a subject of
interest to scholars and activists. The original curiosity about revolution has
its roots in histories and analyses of “the great revolutions,” the English
Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian
Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution. Subsequent to early studies of the
great revolutions scholars and activists have conceptualized historical
transformations in Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, Iran and other cases as possible
candidates for studies of revolution.
Perhaps undergirding the study of societal changes in
the twentieth century, interest and concern about the Russian Revolution stands
out as a motivation for such research and speculation. A substantial hidden
motivation for this concern has been an implicit bias against the consequences
of the Russian Revolution for other societies: for order and stability, for “civilization,”
for the future of humankind. This bias includes various defenders of
traditional regimes and cultures and sectors
of left opposition to them who have been as vociferous opponents of the Russian
Revolution and its consequences as the avowed enemies of revolution.
This essay briefly surveys the social science study of
revolution, identifies key moments in the history of the former Soviet Union
(which was officially constituted in 1922, five years after the revolution)
from the vantage point of the anti-Soviet left, and proposes ways in which the
Russian Revolution and its aftermath has contributed to social change in the
twentieth century and continues to make contributions for the building of a
twenty-first century socialism. This is a difficult and controversial subject,
but one that needs to be confronted if a socialist agenda for the twenty-first
century is to be meaningful.
The
Social Scientific Study of Revolution
The subject of revolution has intrigued modern social
science research and theory. Jack Goldstone (“Toward a Fourth Generation of
Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of
Political Science, 2001:4, 139-187) provides a wide-ranging survey of the
twentieth century literature on the subject. He addresses the definitions of
revolution; types of revolutions: the causes of revolution; the role of states,
elites, ideology, mobilizations for and against revolution, foreign influences
and factors such as leadership and gender shaping revolutions. Each of these
sets of factors have generated research, discussion, and debate about this
thing called revolution.
The literature surveyed has several interesting
general features that characterize the way the phenomena has been studied. First, the concept of revolution, which
was first derived from interest in a handful of cases has expanded to include
all kinds of transfers of power; including Nicaragua, Iran, Afghanistan, and as
some data sets suggest hundreds of cases of the transfer of power. Second, as
Goldstone suggests, scholars have identified many “types” of revolutions: elite
led power shifts, grassroots mobilizations, worker-led versus peasant-led
forms, and unplanned disintegrations of political institutions. Third, the
literature, Goldstone indicates, addresses the causes of revolutions. Here too
there are a myriad of explanations from foreign intervention, the declining
legitimacy of elites, intra-elite factionalism, crises in the distribution of
resources among the population, unsustainable population growth, and stagnating
economies.
An additional designation of revolution addresses
various processes that generate the transformation that is
being described. Some research on revolution concentrates on the formation of
oppositional groups from unions to political parties, networking among
opponents of regimes, leadership skills,
the building of identities, and ideologies. In addition, some
perspectives include a discussion of culture, from value systems to popular
manifestations of protest. Also attention is paid to leadership skills and
style. In recent years, studies have addressed the role of gender in
revolutionary processes. Further, “rational choice” models assess the individual and group costs and benefits of
participating in some effort at systemic transformation of the political and/or
economic system.
As to the consequences of revolution, Goldstone
suggests the research is sparser. “The outcomes of revolutions have generated
far less scholarly inquiry than the causes, with the possible exception of
outcomes regarding gender. This may be because the outcomes of revolutions are
assumed to follow straightforwardly if the revolutionaries succeed. However,
such research as we have on outcomes contradicts this assumption: revolutionary
outcomes take unexpected twists and turns” (Goldstone, 167). The research that
has been done, he said, shows little long-term economic development or
democratization after revolutionary occurrences. While China and the Soviet
Union experienced short-term industrialization neither “has succeeded in
generating the broad-based economic innovation and entrepreneurship required to
generate sustained rapid economic advance.” He refers to an edited collection by D.Chirot,
(The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline
of the Left: the Revolutions of 1989, 1991, University of Washington Press)
on this point.
After summarizing the myriad of studies of revolution,
Goldstone does say that despite their failures to achieve sustained economic
development and democratization revolutions have been “remarkably successful in
mobilizing populations and utilizing the mobilization for political and
military power.” And these results, he claims, are attributable to strong
leadership. In terms of international relations, revolutions have had
consequences: stimulating others to revolt, causing threatened states to engage
in conflict with the new regimes, and stimulating new states to engage in
aggressiveness (for example the warlike behavior resulting from the Nazi “revolution”).
This survey of the social scientific study of
revolution suggests many weaknesses. First, what is called “revolution”
is defined in so many ways that all different transfers of power from Russia,
China, Germany, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, to Cuba are all contenders
irrespective of their radically different aims and bases of support.
Second, the lack of
definition affords social scientists the opportunity to disaggregate every
conceivable variable that might be part of the phenomena such that the
historical and dialectical character of the revolutionary process is totally
excluded from the analysis. Mindless empiricism replaces subtle
historically-grounded judgement.
Third, and as a result
of the second, leadership, organization, ideology, class, economic and
political context, the cultural backdrop, and the international dimensions are
all disassembled in such a way as to mask the reality behind the process.
Fourth, the analyses
tend to be “presentist,” that is the history that led up to the transfer of
power and the long-term domestic and international impacts of the revolution
are eliminated from the analysis. And to the contrary, commentators and
activists who have been part of revolutionary struggles provide a lens on the
process that is usually deeply embedded in the country’s history, the long-term
prospects for organizing aggrieved groups, and a vision of a “better future”
that takes account of various setbacks, patterns of resistance, and regime
errors. Social scientists have little or no sensitivity to revolution as an
historic project.
And it is for these reasons that assessments of the
Russian Revolution, 100 years later, requires an historical and dialectical
assessment that goes beyond conventional scholarship.
Historical
Materialists Analyses of the Post-1917 Post Soviet Experience:
Left critics of the former Soviet Union (and by
implication often the Russian Revolution) have historicized the revolutionary
process as they have assessed its impacts. If there is an historical narrative
it is “declension,” or a step-by-step set of decisions that led to a betrayal
of the vision of the revolution. The categorization of experiences of decline
include the bureaucratization of the state, the centralization of power,
Stalinism, and the transition from socialism to Soviet Social Imperialism. Each
of these critiques is the result of political disputes between key political
actors and/or nation-states as they engage with or confront the former Soviet
Union. For some, the emerging conflicts have their roots in the Russian
Revolution itself, particularly after the death of Lenin.
Looking at critical historical junctures, left critics
of the Russian Revolution identify at least six moments in the declension. First,
the Soviet leadership debated the direction of economic planning in the
post-Civil War period shifting from “war communism” to the New Economic Policy.
The latter reflected the need to slow down the process of moving from a
capitalist to a socialist economy, recognizing the ongoing role of markets, and
protecting private property, central to the outlook of the peasantry. For some,
the NEP adopted by Lenin, constituted a shift away from the socialist project.
Pragmatism replaced principle.
Second, with the death
of Lenin, Stalin emerged as the new leader of the Soviet Union. He moved to
collectivize agriculture, shifted more in the direction of a command economy,
isolated his enemies, and escalated repression of dissent. What became known as
Stalinism was a metaphor for totalitarianism. Totalitarian societies, critics
suggested, were those in which the minds and behaviors of its members were
controlled by a top-down administrative apparatus.
Third, the Soviet/Nazi
Pact of 1938 is presented as proof that the similarities between fascism and
Soviet-style communism outweighed any differences that were claimed by each. It
showed, the critics said, that Stalin was willing to make a pact with any
regime to maintain himself in power. At the state level the construction of
socialism was replaced by traditional conceptions of national interest.
Fourth, the consequences
of Stalinism were proclaimed in Nikita Khrushchev’s famous Twentieth Party
Congress speech in 1956. It condemned the loss of life during the collectivization
of agriculture, the trial and execution of Stalin’s enemies in the late 1930s,
and criticized Stalin’s efforts to
control the political life of allies in Eastern Europe.
Fifth, the Soviet Union
practiced “great power chauvinism,” intervening in other countries when the
latter seemed to be pursuing an independent path of economic and political
development. This was most visible as Soviet troops crushed rebellions in
Budapest in 1956 and Prague Spring in 1968. In both cases, workers and students
sought more political autonomy within the Socialist camp.
And finally, many Communists around the world
embraced the Chinese evaluation of the Soviet Union as a case of Soviet Social
Imperialism, that is socialist in name but capitalist and imperialist in
reality. And the Chinese embraced Mao’s “theory of three worlds.” One of the
world’s poles, consisted of the United States and the Soviet Union. This pole
represented the pursuit of global hegemony at the expense of most countries in
the international system. The vast majority of countries were from the “Third
World.” European countries, east and west, constituted a Second World.
Consequently, with China in the lead, the countries and peoples of the Third World
needed to band together to challenge the domination of the two imperial powers
and their client states.
The theorists who articulated one or many of these six
moments came from the Communist or Socialist left. Contrary to the social
scientists, these analysts derived their positions from historical analyses.
Several of the theoretical positions on the Russian Revolution in decline came
from the prioritizing of these historical moments; whether embracing the NEP,
the rise of Stalinism, the Soviet-Nazi Pact, the revelations of Khrushchev, the
invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or the Sino/Soviet split. But while
these analyses use history to make their case against the historic project of
the Russian Revolution they do so in a one-sided and ultimately ahistorical
way. Whereas the social scientists atomize their subject, the left critical
theorists derive simplistic historical lessons from their analyses.
Contextualizing
the Russian Revolutionary Project
In 1916, Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party that
would seize power in 1917 and establish a state commonly referred to as Communist,
wrote an essay: “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In it he
described the latest stage of capitalist development as consisting of an economic
system in each developed country of industrial and financial monopolies
increasingly pursuing investment and trade opportunities in other countries.
Sometimes powerful capitalist countries cooperated with each other, accepting
spheres of influence where each would dominate. Other times powerful capitalist
states would compete with each other for access to land, labor, resources, and
investment opportunities. These last circumstances could lead to war. And, for
Lenin, World War One was a direct result of capitalist competition and
conflict.
One year after Lenin published his essay Lenin’s
political party seized state power in Russia and created the new Soviet Union,
the first state generally defined as Communist. President Wilson of the United
States and his Secretary of State began to speak of the new danger of Communism
to the prospects for creating democracies and market-oriented economies across
the globe. The animosity to the new regime in Russia was manifested in several
ways. Armies from at least fifteen countries sent troops to support a
counter-revolutionary campaign against the new Soviet government. The
counter-revolution supported by the United States continued until 1933 as it
refused to diplomatically recognize the Soviet regime. When President Franklin Roosevelt assumed
office in 1933, the Soviet Union was finally recognized.
During the 1930s, fascist movements gained power in
Germany, Italy, Japan, and across central Europe. The Soviet Union, now led by
Joseph Stalin, engaged in programs of rapid industrialization in part out of
fear of the rise of German fascism. With the emergence of a fascist assault on
democracy in Spain, relative isolationist policies in the United States, and
acquiescence to fascism among European powers, the Soviet Union signed a
controversial peace pact with Nazi Germany. The Germans also signed an
agreement at Munich with Great Britain, France, and Italy promising
non-aggression. This promise was short lived as their army invaded Poland in
1939. In 1941 they rescinded the Soviet/German agreement by invading the Soviet
Union. The United States began to supply western nations fighting Germany with
war material and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States
declared war on Japan and Germany. World War Two ensued.
During the war an “unnatural” but necessary alliance
was formed between the United States and Great Britain, the new capitalist
giant and the declining capitalist colonial power, and the Soviet Union, the
center of the Communist political and ideological universe. After four years of
devastating war in which 27 million Soviet citizens died and the Red army
confronted 90 percent of Germany’s armies, the Nazi war machine was defeated in
Europe. United States and British forces defeated Japanese militarism in Asia.
The leaders of the wartime anti-fascist alliance, President Roosevelt, Winston
Churchill of Great Britain, and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union met at Yalta
on the Crimean Sea in February, 1945 and reached agreements on the
establishment of a post-war world order. Just before the war ended in Europe,
April, 1945, the new United Nations held its first meeting in San Francisco.
The “spirit of Yalta” was short-lived as escalating
tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union developed over a
variety of issues as when to hold Polish elections, Soviet support of a
separatist movement in Iran, and the Greek Civil War, where an anti-communist
government was trying to repress the former Greek resistance dominated by Greek
Communists. The struggle was over what kind of post-war government should be
created. The British, who had supported a repressive Greek government, urged
the United States to step in, help the faltering Greek government, and save
Greece from Communism. In a meeting held in February, 1947 to develop a
recommendation for President Harry Truman, key diplomats and politicians
endorsed the idea of United States financial and military support for the
beleaguered Greek government. The Republican chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, advised President Truman that he better “scare
hell out of the American people” if the President would want to build support
for a global policy of opposition to the Soviet Union.
Taking Vandenberg’s advice, President Truman spoke to
the Congress and the nation on March 13, 1947 announcing his famous Truman
Doctrine. He declared that the United States was going to be involved in a long
war against a diabolical enemy, the Soviet Union. He said it must be the role
of the United States to defend free peoples everywhere against the spread of
International Communism. With that speech, warning of the Communist threat and
need of the U.S. to resist it, the
general features of United States foreign policy for the next forty years were
proclaimed.
"The
Free World” Battles “International Communism”
Over the 45 years between the end of World War Two and
the beginnings of the collapse of Soviet bloc Communist states, tensions,
threats of war, proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union
ensued. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and Southern Africa
involved super power troops and/or military assistance to support their side in
the Cold War. Historians have debated the root causes of United States foreign
policy toward the Soviet Union. Some claim, as President Truman articulated, that
the spread of International Communism, primarily through Soviet expansion,
required a bold aggressive U.S. foreign policy. Others argued that the
U.S./Soviet conflict was not too dissimilar from most big power conflicts in
world history. Finally, the historical revisionists developed the most compelling case claiming
that U.S. foreign policy was about the interests of global capital. The spread
of Communism ever since the initiation of the Russian Revolution was seen as a
threat to the pursuit of investment, trade, cheap labor, access to natural
resources and, in total, corporate profits.
Irrespective of the root causes of U.S. and allied
foreign policies, they were explained in terms of the Communist threat. Pundits
referred in a simplistic way to writings of Marx or Lenin or Mao Zedong to
prove that Communist regimes sought to expand their power and control. This
theme exacerbated political conflicts within the United States as the Communist
issue was used to promote conservative politicians and public policies. The
decade of the 1950s is often identified with the Wisconsin Senator Joseph
McCarthy who claimed that the successes of Communist regimes such as the Soviet
Union and China occurred because of subversive Communist individuals and groups
in or close to the United States government who were committed to weakening
American institutions including government, popular culture, the education
system, and even the military. While anti-communism had been deeply embedded in
the American political culture ever since the rise of the labor movement in the
19th century, it grew in 1917, and flourished after World War Two.
Being a Communist became associated with liberal domestic policies and supporting
peaceful relations with Communist states.
Soviet fear of the west had its roots in the
interventions of western and Japanese armies on the side of counter-revolutionaries
during the Russian civil war. Statements from U.S. presidents from Woodrow
Wilson to Ronald Reagan about the threat the Soviet Union represented
exacerbated Soviet fears. And paralleling Truman’s warning of the danger of
International Communism to Ronald Reagan’s conceptualization of the Soviet
Union as the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union consolidated its control of
Eastern Europe, sought to keep up with the west in the arms race, and supported
allies in the Global South who were challenging the rule of pro-western
governments. The concept of Communism in
the west and capitalist imperialism in the east fueled an escalating arms race,
the profusion of nuclear weapons, and periodic crises that brought the two big
powers into direct conflict. From the Berlin Blockade to the Korean and
Vietnamese Wars to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the building of the Berlin War,
the Cold War always had within it the danger of escalating to hot war, maybe
even nuclear war. The impacts of this ideological contestation led to wasted
military expenditures on both sides, wars in the name of fighting Communism in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America; domestic repression in both the Western and
Soviet orbit, and always the fear of nuclear war lurking in the
background.
Conflicts
Within the Communist World
Key foreign policy decision-makers in the United States
and many spokespersons for Communist countries and movements portrayed the Communist
world as one based on solidarity and harmony. For the West, ironically, this
perceived unity was the basis of the threat Communism meant for the so-called
free world. However, while many states, and parties outside the Communist
orbit, shared in a general Marxist/Leninist outlook, geopolitical conflicts
diminished the harmony that simplistic outsiders believed existed among Communists.
The most significant and long-standing geopolitical
and violent conflict among Communist nations involved the two largest, most
powerful, and most engaged Communist countries; the Soviet Union and China. The
so-called Sino-Soviet split which became visible to the world in the late 1960s
had its roots in troubled relations between Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union
and Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party going back as far as the 1920s.
Soviet/Chinese diplomatic tensions intensified in the late 1950s when Soviet
and Chinese policy-makers disagreed about the appropriate development model the
latter should adopt, whether the Soviets should provide the Chinese with
nuclear weapons, and whether the Soviet Union should be negotiating with the
capitalist enemy, the United States.
By the 1960s, Mao Zedong was declaring that the
Peoples Republic of China, not the Soviet Union, represented the hub of an
International Communist movement of poor countries. Mao declared that the
Soviet Union was a state capitalist, and therefore imperialist, power and as
much a threat to most of the world as the United States. The Nixon
Administration, for the first time recognizing the Sino/Soviet split, began to
play one Communist giant off against another. The president reopened relations
with and visited China and signed trade and arms agreements with the Soviet
Union. This increased the fears the Soviets and the Chinese had of each other,
making them more cooperative with the traditional enemy, the United States.
The growing conflict between the Soviet Union and
China reverberated around the world. On the Indochinese peninsula, the Soviet
Union supported the newly unified Vietnamese government in its disputes with a
new regime in Cambodia. The Chinese supported the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia
and invaded Vietnam in 1978. The Soviets and the Chinese supported different
political groups in the long civil war in Angola. And in general, Communist
regimes and parties felt compelled to side with one Communist giant against
another.
These internecine conflicts weakened the Communist
world and the Communist movement as a force in world history. The Sino/Soviet
split was vital to understanding the collapse of the Soviet bloc between 1989
and 1991 and the shift of the post-Cold War international system to one based
on globalization. What is clear is that the role of the vision, the ideology,
and the practice of Communism was made more complicated and ultimately was
contradicted by geopolitics in international relations.
Assessing
the Russian Revolutionary Project in the Twentieth Century
Social scientists have contributed to the discussion
of revolutionary processes by studying political organizations, leadership,
ideology, mass-based support, regime types, and external interventions. Left
critics of the Russian Revolution and the former Soviet Union, provide useful
analyses of weaknesses in efforts to build socialism in the former Soviet
Union. At the same time there is a danger in these intellectual traditions in
that they underestimate the extraordinary contributions the Russian Revolution
and the Soviet Union made to the advance of socialism as a world historic
project. And by marginalizing this history, millennial activists lack the tools
to learn from the twentieth century about theory and practice, finding
themselves groping for an understanding of where modern exploitation and
oppression have come from and thinking about ways to challenge them.
First, the Russian
Revolution was the singular event in modern history where a radical overthrow
of a reactionary regime occurred, in which the new leadership represented the
interests and perspectives of the working class. Its leaders embraced an
anti-capitalist agenda and articulated a vision of building socialism, in both
Russia and the entire international system.
Second, for oppressed
people around the world (Lenin estimated that 1/7 of the world’s population
lived under colonialism) the Russian Revolution stood for the overthrow of rule
by the small number of capitalist powers. Within a decade of the solidification
of the Revolution, anti-colonial activists from every continent began to
dialogue about developing a common struggle against the great colonial empires
of the first half of the twentieth century. And Third World revolutionary and anti-colonial
activists, such as Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, looked to the Russian experience
as a guide and source of support for their struggles.
Third, the experience
of the Russian workers, paralleled by workers movements in the United States and
other countries, gave impetus and inspiration to class struggles. Leaders of
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for example and many Debsian
Socialists saw the Russian Revolution as a stepping-stone for the overthrow of
capitalist exploitation of the working class in the United States.
Fourth, the Bolshevik
Revolution stimulated new currents in struggles of people of color,
particularly in the United States. Black Nationalist leaders of the African
Blood Brotherhood and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance began to see a
connection between racism and capitalist exploitation. Cyril Briggs, Harry
Haywood, and others of the ABB were early founders of the Communist Party USA.
Many saw in the evolving Soviet experience a commitment to oppose all forms of
national oppression, including anti-Semitism, and over the decades prominent
artists, intellectuals, and activists such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois
spoke to the connections between capitalist exploitation, national oppression
and colonialism, racism, and war. In each
of these cases the image of the Russian Revolution, if not the reality,
contributed mightily to global struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and
racism.
Fifth, International
Women’s Day was first celebrated by the newly created Russian government on
March 8, 1917, and it became a national holiday in the Soviet Union after the
Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917. As in reference to marginalized
people, workers, people of color, ethnic minorities, the Russian Revolution
sent a message that human liberation for all was possible. In the case of
women, the new regime declared its commitment to women at a time when struggles
for women’s suffrage were occurring in Great Britain and the United States.
Sixth, the first decade of the Russian Revolution
was a time of experimentation in the arts and culture. Poster art, literature,
music, alternative theories of pedagogy were stimulated by the revolutionary
atmosphere. The support for cultural experimentation was stifled in the 1930s
with the rise of the fascist threat and Stalinism at home but the linking of
political revolution and cultural liberation became etched in the consciousness
of revolutionaries everywhere. The literacy campaigns in Cuba and Nicaragua
many years later may have been inspired by cultural dimensions of revolution
inspired by the Russian Revolution.
Seventh, the rise of
fascism in Europe and Asia created the necessity of anti-fascist states
mobilizing for war. The Soviet Union assumed a major burden and thus became a
leader in the anti-fascist struggles that engulfed the world by the late 1930s.
Sensing impending German aggression, the creativity of the revolution was
transformed into a mass mobilization of workers to rapid industrialization in
preparation for German aggression. Germany invaded Poland in 1938 and the
former Soviet Union in 1941. From the onset of World War II until its end, vast
stretches of the Soviet homeland were laid waste and over 27 million Russians
died in war. Without the Soviet sacrifice, fascism would have engulfed Europe.
Eighth, in the Cold War
period, the Soviet Union and its allies were confronted with an anti-Soviet,
anti-communist coalition of nations committed to the “rollback” of
International Communism. What began as the first step down the path to
socialism became a great power battle between the east and the west. And despite
the enormity of resources the Soviets committed to their side of the arms race,
they still supported virtually every anti-colonial, anti-imperial campaign
around the world; from Asia, to Africa, to the Middle East, and Latin America.
They gave Vietnam and Cuba a lifeline; they supported the African National
Congress and South African Communist Party; the MPLA in Angola; and they
supported nationalists leaders such as Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt.
Ninth, until the
Sino/Soviet split rent asunder the socialist camp, the Soviet Union provided a
check on the unbridled advances of western capitalism. After the split in
international communism in the 1960s, Soviet influence in the world began to
decline. This split had much to do with the dramatic weakening of socialism as
a world force in the 1990s. One can only
speculate what the twenty-first century would have looked like if the Soviet
Union had survived? Would the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq have occurred? Would
the Libyan regime have been overthrown? Would the countries of the Global South
have had larger political space in world politics inside and outside the United
Nations?
Lessons
Learned
It is important, one hundred years after the Russian
Revolution, to think about its contribution to human history, (and for many of
us to twenty-first century socialism). First, it is important to
conceptualize revolution as a multi-dimensional historical process, a process
which sets off numerous collateral responses, positive and negative. This means
that all the variables articulated by social scientists are part of an explanation
of what revolution means. Also the history of shortcomings and the historical
contexts are part of this process.
Second, when we revisit
the Russian Revolution (and the Soviet Union which has to be seen as an
extension of the revolutionary project) several features, often ignored, need
to be stressed. The Russian Revolution planted the seeds for workers struggles
everywhere. The Russian Revolution inspired anti-racist campaigns, particularly
developing the links between class and race. The Russian Revolution provided a
modest dimension to the historic process of women’s liberation. And putting all
this together the Russian Revolution, and the material support of the former
Soviet Union, gave impetus to the anti-colonial movements of the last half of the
twentieth century. And we must remember that virtually all these dimensions
were actively opposed by western imperialism, particularly the United States.
Having recognized all this, and other contributions as
well, twenty-first century advocates of socialism need to revisit the history
of socialism, of revolution, to find the roots of today’s struggles. The
intellectual formulations of today, as well as debates about them, go back at
least one hundred years. The intellectual connections revolutionaries today
make with their past can be liberating in that they suggest continuity with
common historic struggles. And they provide an opportunity to relive, study,
critique, embrace or reject, ideas, strategies, tactics, and organizational
forms of the past.
As a former leader of the Chinese Communist movement,
Zhou Enlai is alleged to have said in response to a journalist’s request for an
evaluation of the French Revolution, Zhou said, “it’s too early to say.”
