Quote of the issue

We are the party of the Russian Revolution!

This 7 November (25 October by the old Russian calendar) marks the 100th anniversary of the workers revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik party of VI Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The October Revolution showed for the first time how the proletariat can seize power and sweep away capitalism. We print below excerpts from an article by James P Cannon, a founder of American Communism, and then Trotskyism, marking the eleventh anniversary of the revolution. The International Communist League upholds the revolutionary continuity of Lenin, Trotsky and Cannon as we struggle to bring about new October Revolutions to open the road to a worldwide communist future.

Eleven years have gone by since the Russian workers took the hammer of revolution in their hands and broke the chain of world imperialism at its weakest link. The history of the whole intervening period represents on the one hand the efforts of the imperialists to forge that chain together again and bind it tighter around the enslaved masses and, on the other hand, the struggle of the proletariat to tear it apart from the whole of humanity.

The Russian revolution was not merely a national event — it was the beginning of and signal for the international proletarian revolution. Herein lies its true meaning, its great historic significance. From this standpoint the revolutionary workers of the world hail the cause of Soviet Russia as their cause on the eleventh anniversary of her October….

The Russian revolution revivified the revolutionary movement of the world and inspired the proletarian masses with new confidence and hope. It lifted up the banner of socialism, trampled in the mud of social patriotism by the traitor leaders of the Socialist parties, and made it again synonymous with internationalism. Lenin, the leader of the Russian revolution, was also the leader of the Communist International, which arose out of the ruins brought about by social treason in the war. Eleven years of the dictatorship of the proletariat has confirmed everything that Lenin taught about the international significance of the revolution and the indissoluble bonds between it and the world proletariat.

— James P Cannon, “Fortress of the world revolution” (Militant, 15 November 1928), reprinted in The Left Opposition in the U.S. 1928-31