More than 100 people gathered at Granville Town Hall in Sydney's western suburbs on November 10 to celebrate the 83rd anniversary of the Russian October 1917 Revolution. The event was organised by the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and the Australian organisations of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and the Worker-Communist Party of Iran.
The following is abridged from the address by the DSP's Sydney district secretary, LISA MACDONALD.
If we took the hype of the capitalist media seriously, we would all be at home tonight glued to our TV sets eagerly awaiting the outcome of the United States' presidential election. Will it be the rich white man from Texas, George W. Bush, or will it be the rich white man from Tennessee, Al Gore?
The world media is beating up a frenzy about the supposed historic importance of the neck-and-neck race between the Republicans and Democrats. Not just hourly, but by-the-minute reports on the latest count give the impression that the outcome is of earth-shattering importance to all humanity. Yet the media is not reporting the most interesting and important aspect of this election; that more than half of those US citizens eligible to vote didn't bother to do so.
The low turnout does reflects the deep-going depoliticisation of the US population. But it also reflects an equally deep-going understanding among US working people that whether a Democrat or a Republican wins the presidency will make very little difference to their daily lives. As US Greens candidate Ralph Nader put it: a lesser evil is still an evil.
At an event to mark the October Revolution — the greatest act of democracy in the history of humanity — the farce of capitalist democracy (epitomised in US elections) stands as a glaring contrast.
For the overwhelming majority of people in the US today, and in Australia, the October Revolution seems irrelevant. We socialists celebrate it each November, but for most people, for most of the year, it is forgotten, or remembered only as one interesting historical event among many.
Of course, that perspective is actively encouraged by capitalism. The Great October Revolution is trivialised and grossly distorted in school syllabuses, official histories, the media and even the marketplace, where it is now used to sell everything from vodka to mobile phones. In doing so, they hope to nullify the profound challenge that the Russian workers' and peasants' revolution posed to capitalism worldwide, the enormous inspiration, confidence and rebelliousness it generated among masses of people around the world.
With the collapse of the Soviet and eastern European Stalinist states, the capitalists' ideologues tried to hammer in the final nail, declaring socialism dead and the "end of history". A decade later, those words are returning to haunt them.
Capitalism today
Without the supposed Soviet threat to blame, without the red bogey to focus people's anger and frustrations on, the horrendous brutality, destructive wastefulness and utter irrationality of the capitalist system is becoming clearer to more and more people. For the majority of people, in both North and South, the world capitalist market is not an opportunity, but a pirate ship robbing them blind. And the more freedom it gets, the worse its behaviour.
With the Cold War over, there are more wars going on today than ever. As the world's poor get poorer, women are getting poorer still in relation to men. The ecological crisis is biting, even in the relatively protected rich North, and racism is rearing its ugly head again across the world.
The conclusion that socialists draw is the need for revolution: the urgent need to overthrow this rotten system and replace it with a new social system that meets working people's needs. But this conclusion is not reached spontaneously by all those suffering under capitalism: the ruling class is still strong and has powerful propaganda tools with which to generate mass illusions (that things will get better or that there is no alternative). It can still use part of its massive wealth to create divisions in the working class, between women and men, black and white, secure workers and the unemployed.
Nevertheless, cracks are beginning to show: people are beginning to mobilise against the oppression and lies.
Most notable of late has been the Palestinian people's struggle. After eight years of patiently waiting for the "peace process" to deliver a justice it was never intended for, the people are again taking to the streets armed with nothing but courage and a commitment to winning back their country and their freedom.
Likewise, in East Timor last year, after 24 years of struggle, the people defied horrific violence to mobilise in the referendum to express their desire for national independence. In Indonesia, in 1998, students and workers took to the streets and ousted dictator Suharto. In Serbia last month, mass mobilisations forced Slobodan Milosevic to abide by the result of the presidential election and leave government.
Now, after decades of acquiescence, students, environmentalists, feminists, socialists, human rights activists and trade unionists in the imperialist countries are beginning to organise and mobilise against corporate tyranny: from Seattle to Washington, Melbourne to Prague, the anti-corporate globalisation movement is gaining momentum and confidence as it begins to recognise the huge potential of "people power" when it goes up against its own ruling class.
These movements are not necessarily revolutionary; they are variously inexperienced, leaderless and not always clear about the next steps. But they are causing the capitalist class huge worry, principally because each mobilisation and each victory keeps revolution on the agenda.
With each victory, the capitalists' solutions are further exposed as fake and the impossibility of reforming a system which is inherently unjust becomes clearer to more people. And with each mobilisation, people gain experience and confidence in self-organisation. They start to see that masses of people, not politicians, make fundamental change.
Need for Marxist party
The October Revolution remains the the strongest example of mass mobilisation for fundamental social change. It succeeded where so many have failed because it was organised and led by the most efficient and effective form of organisation of working people and the oppressed: a Marxist party, which concentrates and generalises the lessons of history and struggle.
The Bolshevik party didn't substitute for mass struggle; it intervened in politics to transform people's anger, disillusionment and spontaneous rebellion into a force that could topple their brutal ruling class and build an alternative society.
Today, such parties are no less necessary. Indeed, confronted by the most powerful ruling class in history, even as it falls deeper into crisis, such parties are more necessary than ever. Certainly, the Cuban Revolution, which has been permanently under siege from US imperialism, could not have survived and grown without the leadership of a Marxist party.
In many countries in our region — Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, for example — such parties are being rebuilt, free of the shackles of the Stalinised Communist parties and in conditions which throw them into daily struggle and will help forge strong, experienced, revolutionary leaderships.
In Australia, things are much quieter and a mass revolutionary party is some way off. In particular, a lot more mass mobilisation and struggle will be needed before the grip of the Labor Party on working people and the progressive movements is decisively broken and politically independent campaigns, alliances and workers' organisations can be built.
But the path to building such a party is opening up and we in the Democratic Socialist Party are pushing hard towards that goal. It is why DSP members are involved in every major movement against injustice, from the campaign for refugee rights to building rank-and-file groups in the trade unions, to international solidarity with East Timor, Palestine, the Iraqi socialists and many others.
We can proudly say that the DSP is playing a crucial role in building the movements and winning some, even if modest, victories against Australia's capitalist class, whether in the Melbourne blockade against the World Economic Forum on September 11, or in the movement to force the Coalition government to use Australian troops to end the massacre in East Timor last year.
Any activist who is serious about eradicating war, poverty, inequality and injustice really has no choice today but to join the revolutionary struggle, and the most effective way to participate in that struggle in Australia is to join the DSP. That is the best possible way to celebrate the October Revolution and ensure that the profoundly humane and democratic legacy of that greatest of people's movements can be generalised to the benefit all of the world's people.
Viva revolution! Viva democratic socialism!