Kathy Newnam and Marina Carman
November 7 is the anniversary of the victory of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin combined practical leadership of that revolution with important theoretical contributions to socialists' understanding of the world and how to change it.
Two of his most important theoretical contributions were his analyses of imperialism and of revolutionary strategy in the underdeveloped countries exploited by imperialism.
Imperialism
The world is still dominated by a system that divides it into rich and poor, exploiter and exploited — not only between nations, but also within them. Those who are compelled to work for a living (the working class or proletariat) are under the control of those who own all the key industries (the ruling class or bourgeoisie). The ruling classes of different nations compete for a bigger and bigger share of the exploitation of others for profit. The nature of this system — imperialism — was analysed by Lenin in 1916.
A defining event in the development of Lenin's theory was World War I, which Marxists understood to be a struggle between the ruling classes of the advanced capitalist countries for control over the rest of the world and its resources. Many wars have taken place this century because of the same struggle for greater markets to sell products and greater control over natural resources and exploitable labour.
One factor that defines an imperialist country is that the ruling class of that country makes enough profit to be able to "invest" in other countries; that is, to buy the resources and labour located in other countries to extract profits from them.
The imperialist nations initially dominated the Third World through direct colonial control. Now their control mostly takes the form of economic domination. The massive debt to the rich First World banks that Third World nations are forced to build up in order to "develop" is in turn used to force Third World countries to allow the corporations based in the imperialist countries to massively exploit the Third World's resources and labour.
Imperialism's division of the world provides a permanent pool of super-exploitable workers for the imperialist ruling class. Nike, for example, pays as little as 25 cents a day to factory workers in Indonesia, but sells the shoes for hundreds of dollars in the First World countries.
Imperialism confines the Third World — more than four-fifths of the world's population — to abject poverty, systematically denying it the technology and no-strings-attached financial aid it needs to develop.
Keeping order
The super-profits generated for the ruling class in imperialist countries by this system enables the exploiters to buy a degree of social peace in the First World by providing a relatively privileged standard of living, which convinces many workers that their interests lie in safeguarding the private profit system. Lenin called this layer the "labour aristocracy". First World that their interests lie in safeguarding
As well, the ruling class uses nationalism (in "Australia's interest", for example) to break down any solidarity that workers in imperialist countries might feel for workers in the Third World, which could result in successful struggles against imperialist exploitation. Racism is also used to keep the First and Third World working classes divided.
In the oppressed countries, the system is enforced in a much more brutal way — dictatorship, military rule and repression.
Strategy
Lenin used his experiences in building the revolutionary movement in Russia to formulate his theory of revolutionary strategy in underdeveloped countries.
The task of winning the conscious support of the majority of people, and their active involvement in making the revolution, was a huge one in tsarist Russia. Most Russians were not workers, but peasants engaged in subsistence pre-industrial production, and even limited democratic rights were denied by the repressive tsarist regime.
Russia had had no bourgeois revolution like those that occurred in western Europe, in which the rule of the monarchy was replaced by the rule of an elected parliament. These parliaments reflected in politics the growing economic power of the bourgeoisie, who became the new ruling class. The Russian bourgeoisie was too economically weak, and politically scared to appeal to the Russian workers and peasants to join with them to make a bourgeois revolution.
According to the theory of "uninterrupted" revolution that Lenin developed, the first stage involved the working class and all the peasants in overthrowing the Tsar and creating a democratic republic. The second, socialist stage involved the workers uniting with the poor peasants against the rich peasants.
To lead and implement the first stage, Lenin's Bolshevik party argued for a system of government based on councils (soviets) of workers and peasants elected by the people. This system of government was entrenched in the 1917 revolution.
Thoroughgoing land reform passed control of the land from the big landowners to the peasants who worked the land. However, Lenin believed that the poor peasants would not immediately see that their interests were counterposed to those of the rich peasants and therefore would not, initially, support socialist measures such as collectivisation of land.
In the second stage, political power is used by the workers to take direct control of the economy and assist in putting control of the land into the hands of the poor peasants.
In 1918 Lenin wrote: "Things have turned out as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means to distort Marxism dreadfully, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its place."
International revolution
While Karl Marx and Frederick Engels predicted that socialist revolutions would break out first in the advanced capitalist countries, this was not how history proceeded. They had not foreseen the impact of imperialist super-profits and the labour aristocracy on the working class in those countries.
The victory of the Russian Revolution showed that capitalism was most likely to break at its weakest link. Since then, this has been borne out again and again, from Cuba to Nicaragua, and Vietnam to Grenada.
But these revolutions were and are vulnerable. Imperialism will go to enormous lengths to regain its control and domination over nations that break the chains. In 1918, the imperialist countries intervened militarily in support of capitalist counter-revolution in Russia. The United States has conducted a 40-year economic blockade against Cuba, but the revolution survives.
Lenin said in 1922, "We have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism — that joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism".
In underdeveloped countries, socialist governments still rely on a small number of skilled administrators and managers to run the economy. In Russia, a bureaucracy basing itself on this social layer took political power, led by Joseph Stalin. Stalin destroyed the Bolsheviks' ideas of social organisation, party democracy and internationalism.
Unfortunately, many still identify this with socialism. Stalin's false theory of "building socialism in one country" was used to sacrifice struggles for socialism that began in many countries in the name of defending the immediate interests of the Soviet Union. This was not Lenin's legacy.
Because imperialism is an international system of oppression, an international struggle against it is needed. Revolutionary internationalism means supporting the struggles of all the oppressed and exploited, and building the movement against our own capitalist governments.
In this struggle, Lenin's development of our understanding of how imperialism works and the lessons from his leadership of the first socialist revolution in history are more relevant than ever.