For New October Revolutions!

(Quote of the Week)

November 7 (October 25 by the old Russian calendar) marks the 90th anniversary of the workers revolution led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92 by Boris Yeltsin’s imperialist-backed forces, the October Revolution was the international proletariat’s greatest conquest. As historic American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon stressed in 1939, it shows the way forward in the struggle to sweep away the capitalist-imperialist system.

The Russian question has been and remains the question of the revolution. The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality.

It was said once of a book—I think it was Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”—“who touches this book, touches a man.” In the same sense it can also be said, “Who touches the Russian question, touches a revolution.” Therefore, be serious about it. Don’t play with it.

The October revolution put socialism on the order of the day throughout the world. It revived and shaped and developed the revolutionary labor movement of the world out of the bloody chaos of the war. The Russian revolution showed in practice, by example, how the workers’ revolution is to be made. It revealed in life the role of the party. It showed in life what kind of a party the workers must have. By its victory, and its reorganization of the social system, the Russian revolution has proved for all time the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property, and planless competition and anarchy in production.

—James P. Cannon, “Speech on the Russian Question” (October 1939),
printed in Struggle for a Proletarian Party (1943)