The October revolution, recognized the right to vote and stand for election to the women, which was recognized in France 150 years after the 1789 revolution, since day one. While it immediately removed women-men inequality and all the laws giving men privileges, gender equality secured in the legal structure. Equal pay for equal work has been brought, marriage-divorce law remade.
Proletarian power's each step towards collectivization of the property was carrying the feature of attacking the historical basis of women's enslaving. Millions ow women's attracting to the waged working and literacy campaign, relieving them from the religious pressure which was pushing them out of social life, were among the significant blows of socialist revolution against the male dominance. In 1955, half of the university students were women. Socialist construction process was including founding and spreading crèches, launderettes, eating houses, created the social basis for women to get out of the household chores' press. Lenin was saying "every women cook can get on with the job of state administration". On one hand, bourgeois feminist movement's demands based on gender equality were included, on the other hand, women's liberation was perceived as the main component of the social liberation. Whereat the October became both the fruitful soil where sexual revolution's theoretical views sprout, and the historical passage for the practice field.
Accepting women's equal rights in every field, even ending the capital relations and exploitation did not mean yet achieving the women's liberation completely. Ultimate solution of the social gender contradiction requires both changing all the social culture filled with male dominance and wiping away all types of social labor division between men and women, and all types of family structure. The entrance of October to the sexual revolution, could not prevent the settlement with the serious limitation of the women's taking decisive positions in the politics, gearing back from the freedom approach in the start towards lgbti's or sanctification of the family which it undermined in the first place, with a "socialist" mark on it, to sum up, it could not prevent the male dominant understanding's slowly raising its head up again in the socialist construction. Still, with the vanguard ranks it created in women's liberation, the October revolution paved the steps of changing the patriarchal face of the world.
With the struggles they waged so far and the right they gained, the women, of course, have reached to a position way ahead of the their place 100 years ago. However women, no matter how much it split apart from the personal dependence to men at home or at work, on social level, have become an object for the dominant manhood, their body has become a commodity being a topic of capital investment.
Today when women's gender identity is binded as the object of manhood on social base, when all the womanhood is commodified and presented to the plunder of the capital, for his reason, when the feminist program standing on the line of capital relations are expired, women's liberation struggle against the male sovereignty and the proletarian liberation struggle against the capital sovereignty have never been more integrated than before. As reaching to the limits of women's liberation in the order of capital, twofold character of the social revolution, meaning the unity of the proletarian revolution and the women's revolution, has crystallized. Now, a socialist women enlightenment and a women revolution aspect are on the stage which is internalizing the revolutionary acquisitions of the October, but criticizing and surpassing it.
This means, in the 21st century, socialist revolution's developing also as a women revolution and the social basis' being realized by women's taking the vanguard in the socialist salvation which will wipe away the gender inequality and oppression together with all of their roots, have ripened enough.
The Solution of National Question
The October revolution managed to transform Tsarist Russia's lands, a prison of nations, into a garden of freedom for the oppressed nations. The revolutionary power created by the October was not only the actualization of the common socialist perspective that links national liberation to the social liberation, but also bringing the genuine model of colonial nations' liberation into being.
For the communists, the principle of the right of self-determination of nations was meaning the recognition of the right of the colonial nations' founding their own independent states. In a land where there were more than 60 nations and national communities and where 130 languages were spoken, the Soviet Union had become a federation of the 16 union republics with equal status and the right to secede. Along with these federal republics, the political system, formed as 20 autonomous republics, 8 autonomous regions and 13 national regions, enabled the autonomy and the democratic self-governance of all national communities. The freedom of all languages and the education in mother tongue were secured, and the opportunities for each language to flourish were provided. This sovietic voluntary unity based on full equality of nations had shown the true path of liberation, the practical example of the most advanced attainment of national freedom to the other oppressed and colonial nations.
The rule of the revolutionary proletariat adopted it as a principle to support the struggles of the oppressed and the colonial nations in every corner of the world. By describing these struggles against imperialism as the main ally of the proletarian world revolution, Lenin was saying: "workers and oppressed peoples of all world, unite!". The national independence struggles, which were influenced by the solution of the October for the national question and even were directly supported by the revolutionary power of the October, turned into a wave of national revolutions and independences of colonies that buried the imperialist colonialism in history. While capitalist imperialism had to recognize the transformation of former colonies into independent states, it found the way to render them again economically and politically dependent in neo-colonialism. It was no coincidence that some of the new states of the nations that gained their independence were clustered around the Soviet Bloc, or they maintained at least friendly relations with Soviet Union even during the Cold War.
In the stage of imperialist globalization on the other hand, which conditions all capitalist countries to be fully integrated in the same world market and world monopolies to become internalized into the economical-social structure of each capitalist country; anti-imperialist struggle is joint with the anti-capitalist struggle and objectively intertwined with it. Thus, while the extent of the national question is getting mainly confined to a small number of countries which are still under the colonial yoke or imperialist occupation, the path of the national capitalist development based on independent bourgeois state-formation is historically closed.
Today, national liberation for colonial countries can only succeed in remaining independent from imperialism if it is bounded to the social liberation and becomes part of the socialist world revolution. The eroded social material basis of different nations' separate political-governmental existence makes the equal and voluntary political unity of nations much more necessary than ever. The Soviet Union's socialist solution model for the national question now symbolizes the only tested and valid way for the oppressed and colonized nations' liberation.
And The Party
The October revolution was the action of Bolshevik Party's willpower. It was the Bolshevik Party that did its theory, established its political plan, and carried out its practice.
According to the outdated leaders of the II. International, the development level of the productive forces in Tsarist Russia was not sufficiently matured for the socialist revolution, furthermore it was impossible to start socialist construction in backward Russia without the direct assistance of the advanced European proletariat. And when the revolt erupted in European countries with its matured productive forces, these leaders were all in a race to stop the masses of revolutionary workers, and even worse, to suppress them. As well as the October revolution broke the European social democracy leaders' frame of Marxism, like Kautsky's, it became the trigger of new types of revolutionary parties of the proletariat to emerge on the stage of history.
Determination to seek and actualize the means of the revolutionary act and socialist construction even in the most unfavorable conditions was immanent to Leninism and to the Bolshevik Party. The party did not have the chance to choose the conditions of making history, thus it attacked the given conditions. In a sense, the October was the embodied form of this consciousness and spirit of attack. A party whose ideological-political line was crooked by opportunism and whose organizational structure turned into a mess of fractions, who got stuck to dogmatism in the theory, could not be able to lead such a historical event that shook the world like the October revolution. More precisely, the October revolution would not have been actualized by such a party. Because, as being a common feature of all socialist revolutions, the October itself was the action of the vanguard will identified with the party to organize an extraordinary moment of rupture in the ordinary flow of history.
Lenin's party was the communist party of Bolsheviks whom were devoted to the revolutionary action of the working class, the vanguard agents carrying the revolutionary consciousness to the class from outside. Carrying the consciousness from outside was not something only characterized with the intellectual duty of the professional party cadres by spreading the class consciousness among workers, but more importantly, it was defining the duty that is outside the economical struggle, meaning outside the spontaneous consciousness field based on the worker-boss conflict, duty of carrying the political consciousness of all social-political struggles to the workers. The party was a tool primarily for this duty. And following the October, it was the political crucible of revolutionary action of the workers mobilized for the socialist construction.
Since the party is that much decisive, it was also the critical ring for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The appliance of the proletarian dictatorship, the construction and the defense of socialism took place under tough conditions characterized by civil war, imperialist siege, Hitler's attack and second imperialist re-division war, Cold War and extreme sacrifices of the Soviet peoples. Under these tough conditions, the party could not manage to avoid being dragged into a self-aiming existence. Hence, the breakage of the will to create a revolutionary way in 1950's and domination of the modern revisionist aberration symbolized with Khrushchev brought the result of drifting apart from the October's socialist route. Bureaucratic degeneration in the party and the state was thereby flooded out. In the end, the party line embracing reforms instead of revolution, making historical concession instead of surpassing capitalism, and preferring marketing instead of planning, conditioned that great country's completely falling in the claws of capitalism through the loss of the last remnants of the October and its tragic collapse of '89-91.
Today, while the ideological hegemony of bourgeois is cleared in the air, the party is the revolutionary response to the depression of consciousness that the working class and the oppressed are passing through. It is again the party which will carry the consciousness of the alternative to capitalism "from outside". The answer to the international or the local mass movements' seeking for "another world" growing against imperialism and capitalism is new Octobers, and the key for this answer is communist parties. For revolution and socialism in the 21st century, the need for the party has not diminished, but rather increased.
Party is the vanguard force, that will lead all struggles to unite with the goal of social revolution against chaining of the oppressed with slavery yoke, against the cruel exploitation of labor by the capital with its endless appetite, against its furiously dragging the nature into extinction and against the plunder of women identity which is commodified on social level. Historical experience has put forth that a communist party in power should be organized in differentiating forms than a communist party struggling to take the power; otherwise the party would not be able to protect the communist route which would ultimately cease the proletarian state together with the party itself. Easier to say than do, as it has been 100 years, the first and the deepest link binding the party to the October and the past to the future is the comprehension of the actuality of the revolution. In the 21st century when the phase of imperialist globalization is calling the world revolution onto the stage of history, the party destined to discover brand new routes for the aim of new Octobers, will march forward to the victory of revolution and socialism by equipping with the October's lessons, successes and congestions, with the notion of its surges and breaks.