100 Years Later: Some Lessons of the Great Bolshevik Revolution
Enthusiasm for revolutionary change that can bring down capitalism and
replace it with socialism is energizing a new generation in the United States.
Looking back 100 years
It’s now exactly 100 years since that revolution, and that is a long time for individuals. A whole new generation has grown up just since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This new generation needs to know what was achieved despite all the obstacles, as well as what brought the USSR down.
This series of articles will focus not so much on the subjective problems of leadership. Those problems were very intense and affected the world communist movement very deeply, particularly after the death of the acknowledged leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, V.I. Lenin.
READ MORERather, the series intends to examine the Russian Revolution within the framework of the Marxist view of social evolution. It will also look at some of the theoretical contributions made by Lenin, who analyzed the profound impact on the working-class movement that came with the transformation of capitalism into its highest and final stage, imperialism. This transformation deeply affected the consciousness of the workers in both oppressor and oppressed countries, but in opposite ways.
Lenin, it should be remembered, wrote his classic work on imperialism during World War I. It was published just one year before the Bolshevik Revolution. It was key to understanding why in underdeveloped Russia, where so many could not even read, the workers and peasants of many different nationalities would become the most revolutionary fighters against class oppression.
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