TONY BENN is standing for the Shadow Cabinet. The announcement was quietly made, in the small the National Executive Committee pulverised the left, by a well-known friand of his Norman Buchan, His decision to stand WILE HERESCILL , by the Tribune group ol a state or l who will fight for Shadow cabinet places. Bernites and Kinnockites will jostle shoulders, somewhat uneasily, in this allegediy Heft plattorm.
A lot of sacrifices have been made to achieve this semblance of unily. 'hard left" grOuP. of MPs, who at one time an nounced Pom the fribane group split are to meet now only in private, holding TOLTER spiratorial discussions one at a time with the various Broad Left groups. original idea that the should hel organise a united exand parliamentary at both grass roots and national level, has been shelved. Benn has cepted many policy sacrifices.
The concessions are all from the left. Not one inch has the right conceded John Golding, the Labour Party's answer to Norman Tebbit, is pressing ahead with his purge.
And this is the crucial Socialist Challenge 5 November 1982 problem. What is wron Benn's approach Not the decision to stand, nor the decision that the main soup shride main: the Tribune gro the error is that in order to maintain a tictitious unity, which the of prescring not ch and which will result a Labour defeat if it continues, the cut 15 makins concession after concession, instead of organising, fighting to defend socialist policies, and taking the battle into the unions to make the block vote accountable at the next Labour conference.
Tony Benn has to answer a straightforward question, as do backers. Is he standing for the Shadow Cabinet to cement a reranonsnip with Michael Foot and the right wing, or to cement a relaionship with the rank anc Mile? Is campaign ne conducts going to appease let Will he conne are or orcanise ind and lead the battle now being organised against the witch-hunt, and take that battle into the Shadow Cabinet, making it plain that a vote for him is a vote against expulsions will he float above the bat tle, making vague general TRIBUNE The rest of the Tribune left understand very Guy Barnet's vise him lo vote for the whole Tribune slate chiding Tony Benn made it quite clear that his vote would depend whether or not the princi pic of collective shadow cabinet responsibility" was applied.
In other words, if Tony Benn accepts the which Michael Foot WIRE prepared for him The 300 delegates a Saturday's against the witch-hunt have made their position clear! they aren't accepting any tight. They're going the TaTT every CLP has to put to their MP is this: are you Joinine the tight. are vot against the fight his you, like Tony Benn, abstaining?
urged Sparkhill CLP to Pino workers association, Sparkhill.
He has been charged Grievous or Harm by Sparkhill police secaus he himself when three racist attacked his house on 20 March 1982 they had been on a drink IRE SOREO Rov says there should he a 'police investigation" well into the case, but that Pino does not need a defence Greenwich campaign" which, is simply for the "ultralett"
From Higheate and Nor has he thfields AUEW branches, on ASTMS West Health Services Moseley and Kings Heath CLPs, Sandwell Labour Party Sparkhill YS.
have INNOCENT conference Pino's been at all the court proceedings. Perhaps it was The Labour Party banner. on the picket lines which question Roy sees as ultraleft'.
Pino Khan is innocent.
His only crime is having a black face, - or are cyes of the Sparkhill police makes him ROY HATTERSLEY, the man who s repeal the Race Relations Act, suc disaffiliate Pino Khan Defence Campaign on Tu Khan, a member of the works at Bir Batteries and is in the Sally Oak bran AUEW. He lives in Hattersley's cons The Roy Ha Bodi this world canne on to defend bla defended He can talk ab at 3am after The a front The backing Midlands branch, ing race relatio tion until he go branch the - face. But and comes to the cri Pakistani memi constituency months in prisor nothing but himsell. he friends have racist police on that the left' ar This hunting leads: why Hattersley must be remove leadership movement. which in the donations te elence Comm guilty al a 34 Alcester ingham B/3 SEE.
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Sixty-five years ago the workers, peasants and the oppressed minorities stormed the heavens, lighting a beacon of revolutionary hope and inspiration across in every country in the world the exploited turned their eyes in the direction of Russia and the more conscious and more militant BOB PENNINGTON writing below describes how, and why, the Russian revolution happened and how it was won. He explains that its lessons are just as important today as they were in the winter of 1917. one-sixth of the world's surface.
THE GREAT WAR tore and wrenched apart the old order of capitalist Europe and nowhere were its effects felt more than in Gins, Dackward Mussia The war, a product of inter-Imperialist rivalries, dragged into its wake the advanced countries like the United States, and the backward nations like Russia. But the demands on Russia were just as severe as those made on the most advanced nations, whereas her ability to bear them The war ravaged its aconomy. Its people died by the millions for a cause in which they had no interest. At home, away from the front, cold, misery and starvation were the lot of the masses.
As the war produced one disaster after another, the War Minister Polivanov explained the strategy of the ruling class when he said: place my trust in the impenetrable spaces, impassable mud, and the mercy of Saint Nicholas Mirlikisky, protector of Holy Russia'. A general Ruszky told the ministers of war: "The present day demands of military technique are beyond us. At any rate we can't keep up with the Germans.
As the army fell apart under the German offensives its leaders wasted time on superstitions and witchcraft by discuss. ing whether or not to remove the bones of the saints from Kiev.
In the war the Russian army suffered 40 per cent of the total casualties suffered by the alliance against the Germans. More than two and a half milion of its soldiers died. No nation before had ever suffered such casualties.
Despair and dissatisfaction grew like wildfire at the useless butchery. As the military oligarchy retreated before the Germans, so did their fury grow against their own hapless troops. Flogging became the order of the day for even the most trivial offences.
A soldier Pireiko, quoted by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution, told how: 'And sometimes they flogged tham to arouse their fighting spirit./ The same Piraiko also wrote: everyone, to the last man, was interested in nothing but peace .. Who should win and what kind of peace it would be, that was of small interest to the army. It wanted peace at any cost, for it was weary of war.
By late 1916, the despair of the army was turning into rebellion. In Moscow the Minister of the Interior spoke with alarm at the presence of 30,000 convalescent soldiers saying: In cases of disorder this antire horde will take the side of the mob.
A general Brussilov talking of the Riga district told how soldiers refuse to attack' and how they lifted one company commander on the points of their bayonets'.
At first the revolutionaries in the army had been small and their influence negligible. But as disorder swelled so did their influence begin to grow and when the government sent striking workers to the front as a punish. ment the number of skilled and experienced agitators grew in the fertile soil of the army's discontent.
Socialist Challenge 5 November 1982 page 6 'Can we also do that? If so how do we do it?' At home misery and despair with a war that nobody wanted, that hardly one single person believed could be won, fed the people's hatred for the regime.
cvervone wanted peace as the deaths mounted. Everyone wanted bread as the food queues grew longer and the prices became higher. And every peasant wanted land in a country where 30,000 large landowners owned as much land as 50,000 million peasants had to live off All the ingredients for revolution existed. The old order had become intolerable to the great majority of the masses. Normally the decisions are made by the specialists, be they ministers of state, civil servants or dictators. But as Russia's crisis grew in intensity the masses becan to cross the barriers that normally exclude them from the arena of politics.
Their old representatives no longer seemed adequate old institutions were insufficient. As the confidence and hopes in the old order broke down, so the workers and peasants demanded change and to get that change thay had to take action of a forcible character and begin to take charge of their own destiny.
In the great bourgeois revolutions of the past the bourgeoisie had won the peasantry to its side by breaking the power of the feudal-monarchic system. They had done this by offering the peasants the land. Only the offer of the land can inspire the peasantry to join with the revolution.
But in Russia the bourgeoisie could not do this. In fact they did not dare raise this demand. The peasant insurrections did not drive the capitalists forward against tsarism. Instead it drove them back into the camp of reaction. A numerically weak Russian bourgeoisie which had come too late on the scene to play any progressive role and whose wealth often came out of the great semi-feudal estates, did not dare raise a hand against feudal property.
In 1917 a nobleman Bokorkin wrote to Rodzianko, the chair. man of the last municipal Duma *1 am a landowner and I cannot get it into my head that I must lose my land and for an unbelievable purpose to boot. for the experiment of a socialist docHad the capitalists solved the agrarian question then Russia would have entered into the era of bourgeois democracy. Instead the war of the peasants for land which by the autumn of 1917 affected 482 departments out of 624, had to find its ally in the Russian working class, the natural enemy of the bourgeoisie.
As the peasants set fire to the property of the landowners the flames lit up the insurrection in THE CHES. The two factors necessary for the birth of the Soviet state had come into being - the peasant war that is a characteristic of the development of capitalism and the proletarian insurrection, the move ment that announces the ending of bourgeois rule had combined.
The four million industrial workers were joined by over 100 million peasants. For the first time in history the wrath and land hunger of the peasants was whose historic interests lay along the path of the socialist revolution.
population of 160 million, 90 peoples were subjected to persecution and deprivation of legal rights by the bureaucratic right of self-determination for able to win them over to their side. These too in their overwhelming numbers were peasants.
place in the hell hole that was tsarist Russia came as no surletarian revolution, surprised averyone ourte marxistrevor tionaries. People who had and this included most Russian socialists, had predicted that Russia would first have to go through the experience of the capitalist revolution, before the basis could be laid for the socialist transformation.
Trotsky the fact that the pro. letariat could take the power in was expected. He had in fact as far back as 1905 Prospects he had written: 'In an economically backward country the proletariat can arrive at power earlier than in a capitalistically advanced one.
The Russian revolution creates the conditions under event of a successful revolution must be transferred to the proopportunity of unfolding its talent for governments to its fullest extent.
that in its immediate tasks the Russian revolution was a it had to solve all the problems taken on by the classical bourgeois revolutions like the French revolution of 1793.
But the Russian capitalist class was anti-revolutionary. It could not solve the agrarian and democratic needs of the old capitalist revolution, in fact it was absolutely hostile to them. Only the working class could lead the fight for such demands, of course not stop at getting these demands.
Such aims for the working class could only lead it on towards its own goals and therefore the Russian revolution would not stop at the bourgeois democratic stage but would be permanent in character.
But for Trotsky and the Bolsheviks that was only a part of the theory. The other part rested on the understanding that the productive forces of capitalism have long outgrown their national limits. capitalism has spilled over its national boundaries and entered its imperialist stage, it is utopian to imagine that socialism can be given a lead and direction, not by the capitalist class but by a class restriction.
But the hand of the revolution reached out even further. It raised the banner of the rights of oppressed nationalities. Of Russia's million were 'other races'. These regimes of Moscow. The revolu- western Europe. tionaries, by demanding land for the peasants and supporting the the oppressed nationalities were That a revolution could take prise. But that it should be a prothought about change in Russia, 1917.
Lenin to be precise.
But to marxist thinkers like an historically backward country predicted such a thing happening own parties In his pamphlet Results and which the power can (and in the letariat, even before the policy of bourgeois liberalism receives the What Trotsky explained was bourgeois revolution. This meant advance. However, sufficient.
but a victorious proletariat would In heroic terrorism.
the victories of 1917.
workers. constructed within those national boundaries that even capitalism finds an intolerable The Russian revolution therefore was not an end in and of itself. For the Bolsheviks 'the chain had broken at its weakest link. But for that link to healthily survive, it was dependent on the extension of the revolution on a world scale, particularly to the metropolitan countries of tion Only the revolutionary marxists understood that. Just as they had been the only people to understand that the objective conditions in Russia, like the weakness of the capitalist class; the revolutionary character of the peasant question and the op pressed nations; and the specific social weight of the working class would produce a situation where the workers would have the chance to take power.
These conditions produced the revolutionary situation of They could not, however, on their own guarantee the success of the revolution. That suc cess depended on the existence of a party: the Bolshevik Party of In all previous revolutions new forms of property have developed in the womb of the old society and these new pro perty forms have generated a new class with its own spokespersons, leaders, and its But the working people are in a different position. In no society. except in a workers state does the working class hold the power. Under capitalism it delegates its authority to people who rule on its behalf But they rule in the interests of capitalism, not on behalf of the workers they allegedly repre sent. Unlike the rising bourgeoisie who owned enterprises and businesses under feudalism and therefore ac cumulated power and wealth. the working class does not rule and control its own means of production under capitalism.
For many years the removal of tsarism had been a necessary condition of the Russian economy and cultural life was to the forces for the removal of this outdated feudal-type monarchy were inThe capitalists feared the revolution, dreading the thought of unleashing the anger and wrath of the new proleteriat and the giant mass of the peasantry. The intellectuals had always turned to the peasantry and believed that the 'deed' would inspire the revolt, and as a consequence, the cream of the Russian intellegentsia wasted itself The Bolsheviks began anew They saw that the way to unleash that powerful force in the countryside was through the workers. The 1905 revolution in its defeat had pointed the way to It had demonstrated the power of the young Russian proletariat. It has shown that new forms of power existed called Soviets, which had been spontaneously created by the By combining the struggles of the workers and peasants, and by championing the cause of all the oppressed peoples and minorities, the Bolsheviks by 1917 had become a truly national party in the sense that it represented the overwhelming majority of the population. What is more it, and it alone, understood that victory was only possible if the masses followed the road of proletarian revoluSixty-five years later the main lessons of that first great suc cessful revolution are still there to be learned from. It showed in dramatic from that it is only the masses that make revolutions Only when they are convinced that things cannot carry on in the old way, and they step into the arena of politics can a revolution take place.
The tasks confronting the mass of the people when they go along the paths of revolutionary insurrection and start seeking power are political. But for years they have been precluded from politics and decision-making and therefore cannot have an independent revolutionary theory and revolutionary strategy to achieve their alms.
Yet these are essential for revolutions to be successful. The key to the success of the Rus sian revolution was the understanding that it was not a capitalist democratic revolution but a combination of the bourgeois revolution and the pro letarian revolution, and therefore the revolution had to be permanent in character, both nationally and internationally.
Such a theory is not reached spontaneously. It requires study. discussion and analysis and therefore requires conscious intellectual application by individuals organised in a party.
Once the Bolsheviks were clear about the character of the revolution they took the logical and practical step of construc ting a workers' state based on the soviets, the most democratic political organisations yet created. There is no road to socialism without the existence of democratically run workers' councils (soviets) and these are the only real alternative to the state created by capitalism. The Bolsheviks had learned that by the actions of the masses in the dress-rehearsal of 1905, and the party consciously set out to base the new workers' state on the soviets.
The internationalism of the Bolsheviks is well illustrated by just one of their many actions Anyone arriving in Russia after the revolution had immediate rights to Russian citizenship and the right to vote immediately. To the Bolsheviks, the Russian revolution needed the support of every worker and for every worker nao to De weir interna tional homeland. What a contrast this practical internationalism to the actions of miserable right-wing Labour leaders who introduced immigrations laws.
The lessons of October 1917 are still as relevant today as they were 65 years ago. No revolutionary socialist party can hope to lead a successful struggle for power in the advanced coun tries, unless it has absorbed and understood those lessons.
Above Trotsky, Lenin and Kamenev. Top right the storming of the Winter Palace. Below the masses take to the streets as Russia takes the path to revolution. ПРИГЕТІ КРОН БРОНЕВИН! СТРАЖЬ СВОЕЛЬ ВООРУЖЕНІЕ ИНТ. РНАЦІОНА Socialist Challenge 5 November 1982 page 7