In the historical conditions when the revolutionary wave in the world drew back and the revolutionary proletarian power in Russia was left alone, the construction of socialism in one country became an unpostponable must and a genuine defense strategy of the revolution that Bolsheviks confronted. Even though this one country was actually a sum of a dozen of little republics with rich resources, the construction of socialism in Soviet Union had been bearing the inevitable restrictions raising from remaining within the borders of one country. Because ultimately, socialism's getting over capitalism was possible only if the international integration of the productive forces of socialism were actualized in a much more progressive level than of the capital.
After all, since the capital was still carrying its ability to carry out its historical function, which expressed itself in the development of the productive forces of labor, the imperialist bourgeoisie managed to prevent October Revolution's quake from destroying the European and American capitalism, as well as from the socialist revolutions to reach victories in some particular capitalist metropolises. Today in the capitalist society, which drags on an existential crisis due to the loss of that ability of the capital, along with the growing and sharpening contradictions between world monopolies and states, other contradictions such as capital-labor, state-people, oppressor-oppressed, became more violent and global than they have never been before. Today, the world's picture is not like it used to be, as where the imperialist bourgeoisie is able to curb the working class of the western metropolises with portioning the incredible surpluses obtained from the colonial plunder and so the revolution would not only come out from where the productive forces are underdeveloped. In the capitalist world caught to an existential crisis, the capacity of the bourgeoisie to smoothen the contradictions through concessions and maneuvers are weakening to the utmost. While the path to move forward with reforms is congested, the revolution emerges as the only way. Thus, each country today is the potential weak link.
Unlike 100 years ago, today's capitalism is a social formation dominant over the whole world. The level of unification of the world market and of internationalization of the productive forces have created the world factory and the world worker. Even the farthest corners of the world are connected tightly with the progress of transportation and communication techniques. It was not possible even to imagine such fast organizing international action days mobilizing millions of people at the same time and with the same demands.
The imperialist globalization stage, which undermines the basis of concrete social conditions of bourgeois states to exist separately, is making the world revolution and a global construction of socialism more possible. Indeed, the socialist revolutions will one by one burst out in each country and follow an unequal development, but the unified character of it will be stronger and hence will not be so easy to prevent a revolution standing against the dominance of capital from triggering others in different countries. This means that, when compared to 100 years ago, the social material conditions get extremely strengthened for the establishment of regional democratic and socialist federations as a product of the accumulated objective conditions of possible regional revolutions, and for the socialist construction which will progress through unified regional forms.
The Construction Of Socialism
As a concrete and current incident, the October Revolution was an attempt to actualize workers' and peasants' demands of peace, land and 8-hours-workday through overthrowing the existing power. But as a social and historical incident, it was carrying the perspective of collectivization of the private property, abolishment of the exploitation of the laborers and gradually extinguishment of the class distinctions by ending the capital relations. In that sense, the October was the proletariat's attack to the socialist construction.
For the proletarian power, the socialist industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture were not only a question of a general socialist principle, but as Stalin put forward, these were matters of do or die. The possibility for the Soviet Union to survive and develop against the imperialist siege was depended on this fact. In this context, from the mid 20's until mid 30's, the Soviet Union had managed a huge social transformation in 10 years. By means of the solidarity and deep sacrifices of the working class, the economy had reached to an industrialized basis which depends on the collective property. Against various difficulties and sufferings, the partial form of the petty production in agriculture, had been reached to a centralized form, through the collective and governmental farms; the kolkhozes and sovkhozes. In 1920, 80 percent of the population was consisted of peasants and craftsmen, whereas in 1938, the rate of the waged and salaried laborers in the population increased from one-to-tenth up to one-to-third. Between 1926-1939, rural population decreased 5 percent, whereas the cities doubled.
Unemployment was abolished. The rights of free education and free health-care together with social insurance and cheap accommodation for each laborers settled. Those introverted communities living in the steppes of Middle Asia or icecaps of North-east under primitive conditions, gained a modern feature in 10 years by benefiting from all these rights. With a true cultural revolution, the society, which had an 80 percent of illiteracy before, was transformed into an entirely literate society which is also closely interested in art, literature and politics. All of these developments were the historical and revolutionary achievements of the October Revolution.
Millions of people living in USA and West Europe, which were suffering from the mass unemployment and poverty due to the general crisis in 1929, were admiring Soviet Union which had secured the employment, education, health, accommodation, and food. The success of the proletarian power was in fact quite simple: production for peoples' needs not for the surplus, economical growth; for the social wealth, not for the accumulation of capital; collective and centralized economy instead of a competitive market economy.
The October Revolution had shown the world that the bourgeoisie is just unnecessary. It proved that the economy can be organized without the capital relations, the organized forces of a centralized planning can overcome the blind forces of the market, and laborers that are dragged into poverty by the private property can share the wealthiness of collective property. The October was the construction of a free and honorable life for the laborer humanity. Those facts which seems that the revolutionary government of the October Revolution couldn't manage to extinguish the market entirely or bring the centralized planning to perfection and develop the productivity of labor up to a level supplying the needs of all people or transform the labor into joy, were all because it had been left alone with its own limited forces of production under the siege of imperialist capitalism. Nevertheless, actualizing that kind of a massive social transformation was the unique success of October Revolution marked in the history.
Lenin said :"no socialist would refuse to admit the obvious truth that between socialism and capitalism there lies a long, more or less difficult transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the forms this period will take will be determined to a large extent by whether small or big ownership, small- or large-scale farming, predominates". Thus, it is for sure that today's socialist construction would have different forms than it used to have 100 years ago. When it is considered in a global extent, we see that in an aspect, the market is being abolished by the monopolized capitalism itself. The productive forces which are being choked under the suppression of the capital, are in fact well developed enough to realize a production to supply the basic needs of everyone. Each world monopoly within themselves, is planning and organizing an economy which is equal to those of intermediate countries. This fact allows us to see that the capital itself is strengthening the social basis that needed for socialism, the lower phase of communism. Technological developments happening in the fields of computer, informatics or the robotics are preparing the concrete conditions of a more developed mode of production, that is, transferring the productive power of labor entirely to the machines.
In that sense, to unite and collectivize the partial and micro production of peasantry and small artisans for the socialist construction will not need to follow that much painful and crinkled process today, where the monopolized capitalism itself actualizes this socialization under the sovereignty of capital in a destructive form of expropriation. A revolution wave seizing the capital of 500 world monopolies having a total annual return of close to the half of gross world product, would automatically collectivize the major part of the market and the private property together with restricting the realm of meta production and market relations
That is to say, todays world of imperialist globalization where the chronic extreme capital surplus does not meet with the extreme labor-power surplus, where the gap between poverty and richness deepens in a most cruel way, where the capital keeps on plundering the nature in an extent to destroy the planet, the need of humanity for socialism stands as an objective reality more than before, independent from whether the subjects of socialism have reached to a general consciousness or not.
Proletarian Dictatorship and The Soviets
The political power of the October revolution was the proletarian dictatorship. Revolutionary proletariat applied its power, its dictatorship on the exploiters and the parasites of the past society which it ended. Because the only way to transform the product of the labor into the common wealth of the society, thus by collectivizing the ownership of the production tools, the only way to get rid of the relationship in which humans exploit one another was to forcefully suppress the resistance of the capital owner exploiting minority and their counterrevolutionary henchmen.
The proletarian dictatorship founded after the October became the revolutionary tool of the harsh class struggles between proletariat and bourgeoisie, socialist way and capitalist way, uninterruptedness of the revolution and defeatism of the counterrevolution. Revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat was identified with removal of the remnant laws of bourgeoisie or tsardom, equality of the workers and the oppressed, overpowering the counterrevolution laying eyes on its freedom and the civil war's reaching to victory, collectivizing the private property and giving an end to the class existence of exploiters.
State organs of the proletarian dictatorship were the soviets which had been born during the 1905 revolution in Russia and taking the stage again in 1917. The proletariat, headed not to take over the bourgeoisie's old state apparatus and use it, but rather to destroy it and establish a new state apparatus. The October was the worker and soldier soviets' taking over the political power. Having the dictionary meaning of council or assembly in Russian, the soviet was not only a Russian event. Because the councils featured as the rebellion and power organs of the workers, popped out in all the countries where the revolutionary fire set on during the same years, from Germany to Italy, from Hungary to Austria and to Finland. As a revolutionary power organ, the soviet was taking the basic organizational principles of the commune, which made the first trial of the proletarian power in Paris a half century before, as its guide: disabling the chosen political representatives' earnings being more than the average wage of a worker and being able to recall them at any time.
Soviet power became the realization form of proletarian democracy. Unlike the bourgeois democracy providing a formal equality of the political rights, but in reality equaling the riches politically, the proletarian democracy made the workers and laborers the real owners of the new style state. Lenin was not talking about the armed workers taking place of capitalists and their officers for no reason. There, since the first days of the revolution, hundreds of thousands of workers and poor started to undertake the central works of the power and the local administrative tasks. Covering throughout the country like a web, and reaching the number of 60 thousand in the end, the soviets were also including the decentralized style in the political administration on local level. Soviet power gave life to a real democracy for the vast majority of the society, secured the freedom of belief, supplied the complete equality of rights of the nations.
Soviet system was carrying the nucleus of the termination of the governing-governed conflict. Because this model, had the skill of luring all the laborers to the state administration, thus putting the basis where the state diminishes down. However, the erosion of the functioning of soviets as the real power organs with time, their kind of transformation into side wings of the party which collected the governing power in its hands progressively and became identical with the state, these facts may be the compensation of overcoming the extreme challenges which the revolution faced. Weakening of the consistency of the revolution also found its response in narrowing of the field of argument and criticism freedom, which was the primary support of the masses' coming to power, and proletarian democracy's being deformed. Soviets' this historical adventure proved that the proletarian dictatorship also had to be active in creating the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class with the socialist democracy mechanisms as much as when it played such an active role in liquidating the exploiting classes with its revolutionary force quality.
Organization of revolutionary power constituted of assemblies on each level today is still the political model to conclude the social emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. Besides today, maturation of transportation and communication techniques this much, increase of the working class' not only quantity but also intellectual capacity incomparable to 100 years ago, far better possibility to strikingly reduce the workday time and save time for worker to join the politics bring the result that widest sections of the laborers now become more inclined and willing to take up the political management functions in the assemblies. In the situation where alternatives to the understanding of representative democracy are being produced along with the the crisis of the parliamentary bourgeois democracy, organizing revolutionary power reflects the political will of the working class in more direct forms. Concreted in the soviets but also carrying the direct democracy seeds within, the representative worker democracy this time have the chance to turn into the direct democracy of the working class. The possibilities of less bureaucracy and more people contribution, achieving the slogan of "less state more society" has never been more aggregated. Under this same conditions, the level of centralization of capital and creation of world monopolies with the imperialist globalization is objectively contractionary for the proletarian dictatorship's movement area to use force, but it will as much as a shortener for it.
Working Class and The Oppressed
The October revolution, with the shortest definition, was the victorious move supplying the working class to take the political power. Condensed in the factories established in the capitalist islands in the middle of a immense sea of peasantry, gaining the experiences of tough class struggles in its short history and increasingly meeting with the Bolshevik's unique leadership ability of foresight, the Russian proletariat did not only spearhead the February bourgeois democratic revolution, but also achieved to move on to the socialist revolution.
Constituting of only 10 percent of the population of the Tsarist Russia, the proletariat, in a way, owed the October victory to its alliance with the poor peasantry. And the proletarian power, as a first job, tended to guarantee the freedoms and equal rights of oppressed class and strata, oppressed nations and religious communities, oppressed genders and sexual orientations. The proletariat, thus, was defining the content of the mission of the emancipation of all oppressed in its own action.
Still, the proletarian power in Soviet Union had to live through and stand to the dramatic ups and downs, deep pains, tragic sufferings of the existence in a country of petty bourgeoisies. The difficulty and tension of collectivizing and centralizing the small and scattered peasantry production just to feed the cities, the revolutionary struggle waged for this was intense. The activity of the market based on the petty production of commodity, at the same time, was the source of the dominant color of the petty bourgeois person typology. Telephone central officers, industrial facility technicians, even middle school teachers were the members of an intermediate strata being an extension of the bourgeois class with their privileges compared to an averaged worker. It was possible to trail the conflicts between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie all along the revolutionary social transformation process.
Today the capitalism is sovereign all over the world and the workers are the most crowded class. The population of the cities has left behind the rural population worldwide. Imperialist globalization has given rise to direct consequences like broadening of the ranks of the working class to the utmost, narrowing of the angle difference between the physical labor and the mental labor, transformation of the yesterday's self-employed freelances into waged workers. The working class of the imperialist countries, whose composition has changed by the immigration and whose internationalist character has strengthened and which has been losing its rights one by one after the neoliberalism razing the "welfare state" into the ground, has also objectively dissociated with the imperialist oppressor nation. In the beginning of the 21st century, there is a much more stronger working class in the world.
In the stage of imperialist globalization, the sovereignty of the world monopolies, the production and internationalization of the circulation of the capital have left the petty property owners in all countries face to face with the reality of fast dispossession and impoverishment. Middle classes have tended to dissolve, small tradesmen have dragged to extinction, peasantry have quickly liquidated and pushed to the ranks of the proletariat. Student youth have been deprived of the opportunity to move up the social ladder via education. While there is no wide petty bourgeoisie left behind unlike a century before, there has been no chance left for the petty bourgeois strata which is trying to survive currently to create itself a living space under the monopolist capital relationships. Imperialist globalization, has pushed the other oppressed classes and strata having contradictions with the order of world monopoly and bourgeois state, to share a common fate with the working class. Thus, the working class' gathering other oppressed class divisions which also lost its capacity to apply its independent class program as it has got weakened, around the program of socialism has been grown as never seen before.
Marx and Engels' motto of "workers of the all world, unite!", with the transition of capitalism to the imperialism stage and its bringing the uprisings of the oppressed nations into question, had been changed to "workers and oppressed peoples of the all world, unite!" with Lenin's foresight. This motto, was the summary of the October in a sense. Today, the motto of the imperialist globalization world has become "workers and oppressed of the all world, unite!".
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