BY JAMES VASSILOPOULOS
What do revolutions look like? Many people have a stereotyped picture of what a revolution is: a revolution is an event in which people with guns take over a city or a country. This image confuses a revolution with an insurrection. An insurrection is usually just the first act of a revolution. Revolution is much more.
The Russian revolutionary Lenin described them as "festivals of the oppressed". Millions of people enter into political activity, often for the first time; they demonstrate; they organise; they debate the key political issues of the time deep into the night.
Nadezhda Krupskaya, a leading Russian revolutionary, described the St Petersburg street scene during the Russian Revolution: "The house in which we lived overlooked a courtyard, and even here, if you opened the window at night, you could hear a heated dispute. A soldier would be sitting there, and he always had an audience — usually some of the cooks or housemaids from next door, or some young people.
"An hour after midnight you could catch snatches of talk — 'Bolsheviks, Mensheviks ...'. At three in the morning: 'Milyukov, Bolsheviks ...' At five, still the same street-corner talk."
Anti-capitalist revolutions are about the majority of the people acting together to take political power in order to organise the economy to meet social needs rather being run for the maximisation of corporate profits.
Is such a revolution needed in Australia? It is a simple question to answer. The living standards of the majority of the population are not rising, the public education and health systems are being slashed, racism and sexism are rampant.
On a world scale, poverty is climbing by the minute. War is ever-present. An unimaginable 16 million children die of hunger and curable diseases each year — that's a World War II against children every four years.
These point to the compelling need for a new, humane social system based on planning for social need, rather than commodity production, private profit and greed.
How ruling class rules
In Australia, perhaps 5000 people make up most of the ruling class. The vast majority of Australians are employed, unemployed or retired workers or are dependents of workers. The working class, due to its numbers and its essential role in production, has a great deal of potential social power. Workers can bring capitalist society to a halt because it is workers who run everything.
But why isn't this power used? Why don't we remove the 5000 or so Kerry Packers who run the show? There are a number of reasons.
Firstly, millions of working have illusions that the capitalist system is the only system that works. They believe that it is "natural" that there is a class of super-rich people and that if they are rich they must have done something to deserve it. Even if many people are disgruntled with the system, they cannot see an alternative.
Secondly, there are divisions within working class that help the ruling class stay in power. A layer of workers have relative privileges over others — relatively secure, well-paying jobs because they are Australian-born, white and male — which encourage them to identify their personal interests with the preservation of the existing system.
Thirdly, ruling class institutions such as the mass media, universities, schools, churches and the family system justify and reproduce capitalist ideas.
How can illusions in the capitalist system be broken? In short, socialists do this by participating in and leading struggles for reforms, educating workers about socialist ideas, and combatting the capitalist propaganda of the media moguls and capitalist institutions.
Many working class struggles are defensive fights, in response to attacks by the ruling class and its political parties. Sometimes, the government can choose the wrong thing to attack. It can overestimate the apathy that exists.
This can happen when people see that a change for the worse is taking place, when something working people consider good — like public health care, free education or essential services — is under threat of being taken away.
But what really needs to occur for masses of people to loss their illusions in the capitalist system is for there to be big events that shock millions of people into realising that their aspirations and interests and the needs of the system are incompatible. Historically, such events have been big economic crises and wars.
Many anti-capitalist revolutions have flowed from wars, since these are often the products of a major crisis in the system.
In such big crisis, large numbers of people will spontaneously be impelled to engage in extra-parliamentary action — protest rallies and marches, strikes and workplace occupations. As they do so, their sense of powerlessness drops. People involved in mass political activity can understand that they have the potential to change society themselves.
Things do not necessarily have to get desperately worse for there to be a fight back. What triggers such fight backs, whether the movement's demand will be won, whether the struggle will peter out or escalate to the point of taking state power, cannot be predicted. As Lenin said, quoting Napoleon: "We shall enter the battle then we shall see."
Large numbers of people will not become convinced of socialism by simply reading a leaflet, but through repeated exposure to both socialist arguments in the course of a whole series of experiences that expose the contradiction between their expectations of how society should function and how it actually does.
For example, mandatory sentencing legislation in Western Australia and the North Territory, which automatically puts adults and children in jail for property offences, is disproportionally applied to Aborigines. It is therefore correctly seen by large numbers of people as racist and unjust. There has been a vigorous campaign against these laws. Rallies have attracted sizable turnouts.
People attend protest actions, public meetings and start to think about other racist policies and actions that governments carry out, like the detention of refugees and the refusal of Prime Minister John Howard's government to acknowledge the existence of the stolen generations, let alone say sorry or pay compensation. Some people conclude — with the help of socialist publications like Green Left Weekly — that the whole capitalist system is racist.
There is a big gap between such day-to-day struggles and a pre-revolutionary situation, but sometimes the bridge between them can be short. Obviously, Australia is not yet in a revolutionary situation. But throughout the 20th century, there have been tens of these situations. Here are some examples:
Russian Revolution
In Russia before 1917, there was a struggle for democracy against the autocratic rule of the Tsar Nicholas II. Life was miserable for most peasants and workers: only 12.5% of the population had access to safe drinking water; in Moscow in 1912, an average of 8.7 people lived in each apartment; in Moscow's textile factories 134 of every 1000 workers suffered from tuberculosis.
The First World War — a war fought between the major European powers for the redivision of the colonial empires in Africa and Asia — enabled to capitalists to enrich themselves through war profits while the workers and peasants became even more impoverished.
In February 1917 women workers and housewives protested the shortage of bread. Their protest led to a revolt among the soldiers (most of whom were conscripted peasants), forcing the Tsar to abdicate in favour of a capitalist-dominated government. But this government was incapable of solving Russia's fundamental problems.
Three key demands of the Bolshevik Party were: end Russia's participation in the war; give the peasants land; and feed the hungry.
Imagine you were a peasant soldier on the front line. There was a good chance that you would die in this war. So when you read the Bolsheviks' pamphlets that explain that the war is for the rich nations to redivide their colonial possessions, that it is a war about the rich making more money, you ask why should you give your life for such a cause? The Bolsheviks — the revolutionary socialists — were calling for an immediate end to the war. Opposition to the war became the engine of the unfolding revolution.
By October 1917, the Bolsheviks — with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, a peasant party — had a majority in the soviets (councils) of workers' and soldiers' delegates, new democratic structures created by the masses themselves. An armed insurrection organised by the Petrograd soviet replaced rule by unelected, pro-capitalist Provisional Government with rule by the workers and peasants through the soviets.
France 1968
In France during the 1960s, there was a massive increase in the number of university students, many from working-class backgrounds. The facilities were inadequate and overcrowded. In a period of student radicalisation fuelled by the French colonial war in Algeria in the early 1960s and then the atrocities of US imperialism in Vietnam, large numbers of students felt that the universities did not allow them to think for themselves, that universities are like factories.
Students in Paris organised protests about campus conditions. Riot police violently attacked the protesters. Students then demonstrated against the repression and campuses across France were occupied. A mass student movement developed rapidly.
Meanwhile, in the factories, even though real wages had been increasing since the end of World War II, workers were disgruntled. The bosses were demanding speedups of production. Work was becoming more alienating.
The workers, repulsed by the police clubbing of students, demonstrated in solidarity with the students. They saw that the students were fighting for a better system and emulated their example. Many factories were occupied.
Barricades were set up in parts of Paris. One student leader described the scene: "Suddenly, spontaneously, barricades where thrown up in the streets. People were releasing all their repressed feelings, expressing them in a festive spirit. Thousands felt the need to communicate with each other, to love another."
Ten million workers went on strike, one million marched in Paris expressing a multitude of grievances against the bosses and the government.
The potential of this mass revolt to develop in a revolutionary direction was certainly there. But the party and trade union leaderships that still held the allegiance of the mass of French workers — the Socialists and Communists — just like their ALP counterparts here, were more interested in securing a few more cushy positions in parliament.
With the French and world capitalist economies still booming the bosses and the government were able to make a range of economic concessions to the workers which defused the strike wave and left the student revolt isolated.
Political leadership
To make a revolution you need more than a big social crisis and a mass revolt against the existing order. You also need a revolutionary political party that has the support and trust of the majority of working people. Its role is to organise the working people's discontent with the system, to turn individual struggles into mass campaigns, and to provide leadership to revolts and rebellions so as to turn them into coordinated struggle to replace the existing governmental institutions with new ones that are based on the political organisation of the working people.
The capitalist families have the military and police, money and institutions and the mass media on their side. Working people have only the weapons of collective organisation and action.
The ruling class tries to divide workers with racism, sexism and making us compete against each other. A revolutionary party unites working people in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
Working class activists need a party of their own to combat the ruling class's ideology and lies, and to win workers and students away from the capitalist parties.
Some argue that a revolutionary party restricts activists' freedom of thought and action. But in capitalist society, with the hegemony of the ideology of rich, most people do not have freedom of thought.
Collective discussion by those who reject capitalism gives them more chance of developing freedom of thought and action. Collective thought and action is richer, deeper and achieves far more than what any individual can.
Some radical young people do not like parties because they think all parties must be like the ALP or the Liberal Party. This is understandable. However, a revolutionary party is a different type of party — it supports the interests of workers, students and the unemployed, it is democratic, its ranks run the party and keep the leadership accountable.
A good example of a revolutionary party was the Russian Bolshevik Party. Between January and September 1917, the Bolsheviks increased its membership from 20,000 to 220,000. The persistently explained their ideas through speeches at mass demonstrations, through leaflets, pamphlets and through the daily paper Pravda.
In April, when there was dual power between an unelected Provisional Government and the soviets, the Bolsheviks carried out propagandistic explanations of the need for the soviets to take all the power into their hands. In July, when General Kornilov attempted a coup against the Provisional Government and the soviets, the Bolsheviks were key to leading he defeat of Kornilov's military coup. In October, once the Bolsheviks had won majority support in the soviets, the party was instrumental in organising the insurrection that placed the workers and peasants in power in Russia.
When Lenin was asked by a European writer why he was so extreme and militant, he replied: "We're as radical as reality". He was right: it's the reality of capitalism that makes us radical.
We are still living in an epoch of wars and revolutions. It has been 21 years since the last revolution, in Nicaragua. But 21 years is a short space of time in human history. The Russian revolution occurred 46 years after the Paris Commune, the first time artisans and workers took power for themselves.
Since the "end of history" and the permanent rule of capitalism proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama in 1991, there have been a number of uprisings and rebellions. In 1994, there was the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, in France in 1995 there was the "hot winter of discontent" when millions of workers stuck for months, and in 1998 millions of Indonesians revolted and overthrew the Suharto dictatorship.
Last year there was the indigenous uprising in Ecuador, and general strikes in Bolivia, Nigeria, South Africa and other countries. There have been militant mass protests in the belly of the US imperialist beast: in November 1999 in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation; and April in Washington, DC, against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It is clear such mass protests and revolts will continue. With the right leadership — and the necessary political conditions — some may turn into revolutions.
What we do today shapes the future. It's up to us to organise together to make the most of the political opportunities when struggles erupt, and to bring the future a few steps closer.
[James Vassilopoulos is Canberra branch secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party.