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Bolshevik Revolution Centennial Series: The Great Insurrection OF 1917
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- 27 October 2017 69 hits
This is the part of an extensive series about the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumphs, as well as the defeats, of the world communist movement of the 20th century. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.
The following illustrates the Bolsheviks’ armed uprising in Petrograd on October 27 / November 7, 1917. It is often called “the Russian Revolution.” In fact, uprisings took place in a great many cities and towns.
In 1917, ordinary people took their lives into their own hands and remade their world. It was the most important event of the 20th century; for the first time in world history, workers seized state power and pioneered a worker-run society. The workers, organized in committees and councils, took over the means of production.
This event shook and influenced the whole world. The Soviet Union was an international beacon of hope for workers’ fighting to destroy the capitalists in their parts of the world.
A hundred years later, the capitalists of the world are still haunted by what our class was able to accomplish. And so, they slander the achievements of our communist predecessors every chance they get, in every media outlet they own. Progressive Labor Party reflects on the mass heroism of our class on this centennial celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Uprising
After the overthrow of the monarchy, the Bolsheviks and workers formed the Soviets (meaning “worker councils”) of Workers’ Deputies (Moscow Bolsheviks) and of Soldiers’ Deputies. As in Petrograd, there was sympathy for the moderate socialist parties. But by September 24, the Bolsheviks received an absolute majority of seats in district dumas (359 seats out of 710).
On the night of October 24 to October 25, the Bolshevik uprising began in Petrograd. The Moscow Bolsheviks learned about it at noon on October 25 (November 7 on the today’s international standard calendar). That same day, the Party Combat Center was set up to lead the insurrection. That afternoon, the Combat Center began fighting.
Parts of the Moscow troops were on alert and ready to execute only orders issued by the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC). The MRC were powerful directing bodies of revolt, installing and securing the Soviet power. They stopped the publication of bourgeois newspapers and declared a general strike. Regional MRCs were created, military units that took the side of the Bolsheviks and their allies were put on alert. A provisional revolutionary committee was elected, since the executive committee of the Moscow Soldiers’ Soviet was in the hands of the Bolsheviks’ opponents.
Ten to twelve thousand workers, Red Guards, took to arms. District MRCs sent emissaries to factories and military units. On October 26, the Moscow MRC ordered all units of the Moscow garrison to combat readiness.
However, in Moscow there were perhaps as many as 20,000 Junkers (junior officers), all strongly anti-Bolshevik. The City Duma, headed by the rightwing socialist party, turned into a political center of resistance to the Bolsheviks. It relied mainly on cops and Junkers.
The chief of the Kremlin Arsenal agreed to give weapons to workers. But the Kremlin was blocked by detachments of Junkers. The commander of the Moscow Military District, Ryabtsev, requested loyal front troops while simultaneously entering into negotiations with the MRC.
On October 27, about 300 officers, cadets, and students loyal to the Provisional Government gathered at Moscow University and the Kremlin. The volunteer squad of students was called the “white guards,” the first time this term was used.
At 6 PM, colonel Ryabtsev and the Duma’s anti-revolutionary “Committee of Public Safety” (CPS) learned that troops were being sent from the front. Colonel Ryabtsev declared martial law and ordered the MRC to surrender. They refused. The same day Junkers attacked a detachment of revolutionary soldiers who were trying to break through to the Moscow City Council. Forty-five of the 150 people in the battle were killed or wounded.
Junkers Take the Kremlin
On the morning of October 28, colonel Ryabtsev demanded that the Bolsheviks surrender the Kremlin, claiming that the city was under his control. Not knowing the actual situation, Bolshevik leader Berzin did so. Then two companies of Junkers entered. Surviving soldiers later said that, after the prisoners handed over their weapons, they were shot. The counter-revolutionary forces bayonetted those who tried to flee.
The soldiers fought back. Six cadets and about 200 revolutionary soldiers were killed. Supporters of the CPS gained access to weapons from the Kremlin’s Central Arsenal.
At the call of the Bolshevik Party, the MRC, and city trade unions, a general political strike began. A meeting of soldier committees asked all the military units to support the MRC. By day’s end, the revolutionary forces blocked the city center. From October 28 to October 31, revolutionary soldiers seized the Bryansk railway station and provision warehouses, and stormed the headquarters of the Moscow Military District.
The morning of October 29 (November 11), the red soldiers dug trenches in the streets, built barricades and a stubborn struggle for the center of Moscow began. The Red forces launched an offensive, seizing the city hall. By 9 PM, the revolutionary troops occupied the telephone exchange and began shelling areas occupied by anti-Bolshevik forces, including the Kremlin. A truce was attempted but failed to hold. Anti-Bolshevik forces began to surrender to the forces of the revolutionary MRC.
On October 31 the MRC demanded unconditional surrender from the CPS. The Junkers, along with members of the counter-revolutionary CPS, were forced to move to the Kremlin and the Historical Museum.
On November 2 the shelling of the Kremlin by the Bolsheviks intensified and they occupied the Historical Museum. That night the Junkers left the Kremlin and agreed to disarm. A delegation of the CPS went to the MRC for negotiations. The MRC agreed to free all Junkers, officers and students provided they surrender their weapons.
On November 2, at 5 PM, the counterrevolutionary forces signed a surrender agreement. The MRC ordered a cease-fire, although in some areas the Junkers continued to resist and even attempted an offensive.
Finally, on November 3, the cadets, officers and students left the Kremlin and the building of the Alexander College. Many of them later joined the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer, or “White,” Army. Throughout Moscow, the Junkers were disarmed. A detachment of the Red Guard under the command of Comrade Petrov freed arrested revolutionary soldiers of the 56th regiment, led by the former commandant of the Kremlin’s arsenal, Comrade Berzin. The released prisoners were tortured and hungry. They had been kept without food for five days. Some were sick after all they had experienced as prisoners of the “Whites.” The liberated soldiers immediately grabbed the rifles abandoned by the Junkers and rushed at the colonel who had shot their comrades in the Kremlin, and at the Junkers holding grenades, and shot them on the spot.
On November 3, the manifesto of the MRC proclaimed the power of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. During the uprising, the revolutionary forces suffered between several hundred and 1,000 killed and wounded.
Other Lessons
1. The Mensheviks entered the MRC from a desire “to mitigate the consequences of the insane adventure of the Bolsheviks.” Their participation made the actions of this body less decisive.
2. If the Bolsheviks had not had a very strong and numerous base among the workers and soldiers of Moscow, they could never have beaten the highly motivated military cadets, Junkers, officers, and the regular army soldiers they commanded.
The insurrection in Moscow was a series of hard-fought, bloody battles that took place over a whole week. The armed insurrection in Moscow proves that the Bolsheviks’ support among the workers, peasants, and soldiers, was broad and deep. The Bolsheviks had a strong base, won by years of hard, dedicated work, most of it under difficult, underground conditions.
NEW YORK CITY—More than 100 adjuncts, graduate students and professors of the City University of New York (CUNY) picketed outside Democrat New York State Governor Cuomo’s office today, demanding salaries of $7,000 a course, and a seniority plan for adjuncts. Chanting “What’s Outrageous, Adjunct Wages!”, “Down, Down, With Exploitation, Up, Up, With Education.” We then marched a few blocks to the CUNY headquarters and picketed there.
PSC: Business Unionism As Usual
Although most of demonstrators are members of CUNY faculty and staff’s union, the Professional Staff Congress, the PSC did not endorse the protest. The PSC is hoping the governor will sign a “Maintenance of Effort” bill (MOE) that will give the university more money, and is therefore refraining from saying anything critical about him. This is a mistake because (1) it’s likely that Cuomo will veto the bill anyway, as he did in 2015; and (2) the only way to win adjunct salaries of $7K and seniority provisions for adjuncts is to mobilize support from students and working class supporters in the community. Coddling a governor who has forced concessionary contracts on public unions, pushed through an inferior pension plan for public workers, raised student tuition and collected millions from New York billionaires for his campaigns, is a losing strategy.
For its part, the liberal PSC misleaders claim to fight for adjuncts and grad students, claiming at various times that the deals they’ve made with CUNY are the best the union could’ve realistically gotten. In response, some adjunct professors and graduate students have organized groups around their own needs within the PSC, and view the full-time faculty as CUNY bosses. The PSC has hung the adjuncts out to dry in exchange for concessions from the CUNY bosses- but the pitting of adjuncts against full-timers is a a part of the bosses’ plan to exploit all education workers, which mainly hurts the mostly Black, Latin and immigrant student population of CUNY, and public colleges generally.
‘An Injury to One Is An Injury To All’
All across the country, university administrators, governors, mayors and state legislators are addicted to cheap labor at public colleges. That’s why the majority of college courses at CUNY and nationally are taught by contingent faculty — adjuncts. Decades ago, three-quarters of the faculty were tenure-track, and one-quarter were not. Now the numbers are reversed, and only a quarter are tenure-track. Of those faculty that are full-time, the greatest proportion are white workers. Of those that are adjunct, a greater proportion than ever are Black, Latin, and women, making the bosses’ pitting of adjuncts against full-timers more and more of a racist divide-and-conquer strategy (Inside Higher Ed, 8/22/16).
As the percentage of adjuncts has steadily risen in recent decades, the faculty union misleaders failed to respond to the rise of adjunct labor as racist and sexist attacks to bring down the security of all faculty workers. Unless the special exploitation of adjunct professors is addressed, there will be fewer and fewer full-time jobs, and more and more incentives for the CUNY bosses to rely on contingent faculty. Ultimately, this means fewer and fewer dollars to colleges for education of New York’s working class youth.
The old slogan “An Injury to One is an Injury to All” shows that if bosses are allowed to more severely exploit one group of workers, they would soon spread that extra exploitation. We see that with adjuncts and we see it more broadly: private sector workers have been forced to accept lower wages and benefits; defined-benefit pensions have been replaced with inferior 401-K plans. Now that conditions in the private sector have been lowered, the capitalist ruling class is going after the public sector. The capitalists have attacked public sector unions for decades through both Democrat and Republican administrations, reducing their wages and benefits, and slashing public spending while lowering taxes on corporations and the very wealthy.
For communists in the Progressive Labor Party, these attacks are opportunities to organize and fight back.
Struggles Ahead
The sharpest of these attacks is the Janus case that’s going before the U.S. Supreme Court in a few weeks. This court case aims at eliminating ‘agency fee’ payments, or union dues, which they hope will weaken unions by damaging their treasuries. In the meantime, the union misleaders have buried their heads in the sand by backing liberal Democrat politicians, instead of organizing and building support against these attacks. There are more than 200,000 public workers in NYC who are threatened by this court case, and yet there have been no mass demonstrations.
Unions like the PSC offer only bad solutions. PLP fights for real improvements for adjuncts, full-timers, and students, while organizing for the overthrow of the entire system that makes this exploitation possible. For PL’ers, adjuncts and full-time faculty organizing their 275,000 working-class CUNY students is a primary task. These youth are being prepared by the capitalist class for either precarious, low-paying jobs, or into the military to fight and die for U.S. imperialism. Almost half of college graduates in the U.S. have jobs that don’t require a college education, and also half work in low-wage jobs.
Students, adjunct and full-time faculty, and campus workers are all working class sisters and brothers who have no need for this exploitative system. We need to stand up and fight - and continue building alliances of students, workers and faculty - to build a mass movement to take this struggle all the way to communism.
BAY AREA, October 9—California Pacific Medical Center, the biggest and richest hospital chain in San Francisco, wanted to dump its sickest and most frail long-term patients out of the city, where they frequently die without family support. It’s not profitable for capitalism to provide a healthy future for our class. The bosses’ profits will always come before workers’ needs. In the Progressive Labor Party, we say that a system that won’t guarantee proper care for its most vulnerable workers doesn’t deserve to exist!
CPMC plans to close its Subacute Unit at St. Luke’s Hospital, a community hospital in a poor and Latino neighborhood that CPMC took over and then tried to close. Subacute units give long-term care for very sick or frail patients, typically on ventilators or with tracheotomies, sometimes for decades. Patients are almost always poor and on Medicaid/Medi-CAL, which pays hospitals very little, so hospitals have closed their subacute units, causing a nationwide crisis.
Subacute patients need family members to visit and advocate for them on an almost daily basis, and often die within a year after long-distance transfers. CPMC’s Subacute Unit is the only one in town, and patients were told they would be transferred to other cities, even though CPMC is building two new hospitals in town that could accommodate them.
Workers’ Power
The CPMC patients’ families are tight-knit, seeing each other almost every day on the unit. They are fighting back and have forced CPMC to say they’ll accept current subacute patients at their other facilities in San Francisco. But the families, looking beyond themselves to the future, demand CPMC accept new subacute patients and that the city create new subacute beds. CPMC has begun to spread contradictory information and rumors to confuse and discredit the families and break up their unity, which is making the families even angrier.
But this is not just about how hospitals are willing to kill patients for profit; it’s also about how capitalist culture and ideology debases our humanity. Capitalist culture blasts more individualism and callousness and more acceptance of the bosses’ values. They push the idea that if you’re not generating profits, you’re unproductive and a parasite. The newspaper stories of the subacute patients’ problems have produced comments like, “It’s shocking that younger people don’t revolt against spending so much money on extreme care for 80 year-olds with no means to provide for themselves.”
This lack of empathy is a product of capitalism in crisis. We struggle to hold our heads above water and find the time and energy to develop good values in our families. Hating capitalism and working to overcome it helps keep your sanity. Otherwise, the sight of capitalism’s atrocities numbs you, makes you suicidal, or makes you hate people. Parents struggle to teach their kids sharing and helping each other. Communists struggle to make all society be like that.
Only Communism Will Heal Our Class
For communists, the slogan “To each according to need,” has guided us since the days of Karl Marx. In other words, we don’t rely on the bosses who will never put our needs above their profits. Their system, capitalism, always has been, and always will be a system of profit, greed, racism and sexism. Capitalism is a system where workers only have worth as long as they can labor and produce profit for a boss. Only a system truly based on the needs of workers, communism, will bring us decent health and healthcare. The CPMC Subacute patients’ families are an inspiration.
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Iraqi Kurdish Nationalists: Caught in Three-Way Imperialist Fire
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- 27 October 2017 76 hits
The internal conflict between Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is another example of inter-imperialist conflict between China and United States. The New Silk Road is a part of China’s strategy to protect their oil supply from the U.S. Navy.
The nationalist crisis can be traced back to World War I. After the war, the British and French imperialists carved up the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Kurdish people (spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia) without the statehood they were promised.
Iraqi Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region within Iraq, passed an independence referendum with a 73 percent turnout and 93 percent yes vote. A civil war between the Kurdish and Iraq is heating up. There’s fighting between the KRG’s and Iraq’s armed forces over control of the oil fields around Kirkuk.
At the heart of it are the vast oil fields at the edge of Kirkuk. Its oil reserves are estimated at 45 billion barrels.
Russia, Threat to U.S.
Russia, a major imperialist, did not condemn the independence referendum. Russia has invested in Kurdistan and signed a 20-year deal to buy Kurdistan’s oil and refine it in Germany. In retaliation, the U.S. began to pass new sanctions against Russia, but said that the new sanctions were over Ukraine. These sanctions also affected Germany (see CHALLENGE 8/30).
Russia announced they plan to build a pipeline from the Kurdistan region to the Black Sea region. They would ensure that Turkey would get a piece of the pipeline action running through it to both Europe and Asia. Letting Turkey in on the deal has sent alarm bells to the U.S.-Saudi-NATO struggle to maintain their control of the world’s oil.
Russia’s presence in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East is at a greater level than even during the former Soviet Union. Russia and China are directly challenging the Carter Doctrine that any threat to Middle Eastern oil is a direct threat to the U.S.
China’s Pivot to the Middle East
China’s strategy is clear after looking at a map of the New Silk Road. Taking advantage of U.S. decline and rising racism, China seeks exert greater control in the Middle East.
[U.S.] is moving out of this region and the US President pledged to build walls…to international immigrants and in particular Muslims, [it] has forced these countries to look east…China’s vital energy interests in the region have given it reasons to take a larger interest in regional security…With the Completion of the Gulf Pearl Chain, China can achieve...control of its energy needs and will open a new markets and trade routes for the Gulf Countries (China Daily, 6/5).
China plans to make Northern Iraq an important economic hub. They’ll either do business with Iraq or Kurdistan. They maintained a close economic relationship with the Kurdish oil industry. The conflict? The U.S. has spent billions of dollars in the Iraqi Kurdistan, and won’t allow China to buy oil companies that have already signed deals with Kurdistan. They will try to use their influence in Iraq to ensure it is U.S. imperialism that controls the oil, not China. They will push back against “the secession of Iraqi Kurdistan [that] would allow China to cut lucrative bilateral deals with Kurdish companies” (The Diplomat, 10/5).
As ISIS is a lesser concern for Iraq, they are continuing to occupy Kirkuk and the oil fields around it. Kurdistan’s forces continue to retreat before Iraq and it remains to be seen how China will profit from this new proxy war. It is a strategic necessity for the U.S. to maintain their dominance over the oil in the Middle East.
Regardless of the flag waving and nationalism being spread in Kurdistan (and Catalonia, see page 2) there are no good guys. The working class is being misled by nationalism. The only flag the working class should wave is PLP’s red flag of communism.
CHICAGO—Capitalism is a sick and sick-making system that at best allows the illusion of healthy choices for the working class. The Sweetened Beverage Tax in Chicago is a toxic choice for workers: either pay more for harmful sugary beverages or sacrifice what little health care remains available to you. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been struggling with co-workers, patients, and friends to oppose both unhealthy foods and the choices presented by liberal bosses and politicians, winning our base closer to a communist vision of a truly healthy society.
The Sweetened Beverage Tax (penny-per-ounce) on juice and soda was proposed by liberal Democrat Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle to cover a $200 million dollar shortfall in the county’s budget for 2018 (Chicago Sun Times, 10/5). She was backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who piloted a similar scheme as New York City mayor. He’s contributed some $13 million to push the Chicago version of the tax (Chicago Daily Herald, 10/14).
Illustrating the infighting among competing capitalists, after only a few months the tax is on the verge of repeal, as the beverage bosses and various small business owners oppose it. They exploit the frustrations of the city’s workers, who already pay the nation’s highest sales tax of 10.25% (Fortune, 7/16/15), spinning the tax as a big-government mandate that denies “freedom of choice” – as though there were “freedom of choice” for affordable healthy foods.
Neither of these capitalist factions and their bottom lines can afford to care about workers’ health. Nor do their elected representatives. As one of Preckwinkle’s first acts in 2011, south side Oak Forest Hospital was closed, destroying lives. Meanwhile Bloomberg, crying crocodile tears for children suffering from sugar overload, unleashed the NYPD to “stop and frisk” hundreds of thousands of Black youth and immigrant workers. The beverage bosses only care about the how the tax cuts into their ability to market their profit-making poisons to working-class families.
With the tax’s repeal on December 1st, it’s virtually inevitable that the Cook County Health System of Chicago will resort to another round of layoffs and patient-service cuts to cover the $200 million dollar deficit. As with the Chicago Public Schools’ budget crisis, the workers will suffer the cutbacks while the politicians use billions in workers’ tax revenue to pay for their banking and real estate masters’ bond interest and other services. The pretense of winning working people to healthier lifestyles sinks into a cynical and destructive parody.
Communists in PLP know that only a mass international Party of millions, fighting for revolution to achieve an egalitarian society, can guarantee our optimal health as a class. Fighting for communism means that we abolish the profit motive that drives health care under capitalism, where decent care is available only if you can pay for it. It means replacing profit with comprehensive health care available to any worker who needs it, without cost to the individual, but rather borne by our class as a whole. Fighting for communism means that we struggle long-term with our fellow workers to win them away from unhealthy lifestyle habits that go with living in a divisive and competitive class society. Building the Party brings closer the day that all decisions affecting the masses, from food production to public health to minimizing destruction from natural disasters, will be made collectively, and based on science and our needs as workers.
The capitalist bosses want us to pick our poison: consume their unhealthy food that destroys our bodies, or pay a punishing tax in order to cover their latest budget crisis. PLP organizes with our working-class sisters and brothers to reject both! Join us to fight for a communist world and the health we truly need and deserve.
