From "Programme Communiste" no. 40, October 1967

This is a new translation of the opening passage from our retrospective of the October Revolution, “Bilan d’une revolution”, first published in French for the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising.

“What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” When he wrote these lines at the beginning of the State and the Revolution, Lenin certainly did not think that the same “destiny” would be reserved for “his thought” and, even more so, for this brilliant Red October to which he would soon indissolubly attach his “name”.

It was with the “wildest fury” that the armies of the international bourgeoisie threw themselves upon the communist dictatorship of Russia, the centre of this world proletarian revolution, whose first fortress and torch they proclaimed themselves, and whose fate they would never have thought to separate from their own. For years, the guards of Capital have maintained, all around the Russian powder keg, the cordon sanitaire of military intervention and political counter-attack. There is nothing that the bourgeois counterrevolution has not attempted to prevent the October revolutionary flame from spreading to the citadels of the capitalist West and destroying them in the fire of the Socialist Revolution. Where weapons were not enough (and they were not enough!) the heavy artillery of lies and slander was mobilized; and even so, the servile army of opportunism launched an assault behind the barrage of Capital. And for good reason. The bourgeoisie knew better than any other class than October was a living example, a vivid “lesson”; that it was not a local or national event, that there, in Russia, a ring of the unique chain of its world domination had just been broken. Since then, fifty years have passed, the bourgeoisie of all countries has forgotten its terror of the time and, for it, October has gone down in history; it is a museum piece, a body without a “soul”, a weapon with a blunt edge. Nothing prevents the commemoration anymore: October is dead. At least we believe so.

The heirs and successors of the worst adversaries of the Bolsheviks of those distant years can sing his praises with impunity; the heirs and successors of this Stalinism, which began its career so well by mummifying Lenin’s body and sanctifying his “name” after having distorted the “content” of his doctrine, can commemorate him at their ease, just as the leaders of the classical bourgeois powers, they have put October in the archives. From a crucial moment in the tragic history of the world class struggle, have they not made the birth date of the modern State of all Russia? Have they not made this flag, this torch of world proletarian revolution, the rallying point for strictly national interests? October belonged to the international proletariat: they made it the thing of Capital that accumulates behind the well defended borders of Russia. This fiery teaching to the new generations of the oppressed class, they transformed into a miserable catechism for the “young lions” of one country among many others. For them, October’s origins are Russian, exclusively Russian, and the same goes for its historical results. October is fifty years old: they go to the mausoleum because they have acquired consciousness, they don’t go there to remember and learn. October is dead. May she rest in peace.

In 1918, Lenin exclaimed: “The Russian revolution is only one example, a first step in a series of revolutions.” And in 1919: “In essence, the Russian revolution was a dress rehearsal... of world proletarian revolution.” For the band of mystifiers whose arid “collegial” brain gave birth to their Theses for the fiftieth anniversary of the great October Socialist Revolution, this one is, on the contrary, only an exception to the rule, a unique historical phenomenon that will never be repeated. Also, once its roots, which resided in the global antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, had been cut off, the accountant-archivist on duty could well say, with a “expert” coldness, that October “exercised a very profound influence on the whole successive course of world history” (world history is no longer the history of the classes, but the history of all, priests and henchmen included). It is exactly in the same way that they could say that a rock detached from the mountain has set others in motion, mechanically, by simple force of inertia, without imposing a determined direction on them, leaving them “free” to follow their own national, exclusive, inimitable path towards a goal that they ignore since it is up to the mysterious national genius, the national history with all its traditions and its Pantheon, to define it. With its origins, its nature as the collective heritage of a single class, its international perspectives thus classified in the museum of a false and frozen history, October is dead, and well dead. At least they believe so. But it would only take Lenin’s two sentences above to remind us that this is not how the Marxists fought the gigantic October battle or how they commemorated it year after year, not how the Bolsheviks thought and felt. Marxism would not be a “guide to action”, as is repeated ad nauseum, reversing the meaning of the formula, if it were not a general and complete conception of the movement for the emancipation of the working class (“the proletariat has no country”, let alone a program!), and if it did not seek, in the great periods of upheaval when the classes are grabbing arms for a merciless struggle, to verify its forecasts, drawing from the facts themselves the momentum that will give more prominence to these forecasts, that will endow them with flesh and blood and, thanks to the persuasive force of historical facts, will make them irrevocable. In 1848‑49 and 1871, it was through contact with real class battles that Marx and Engels sharpened the weapons of criticism, battles whose outcome did not concern the French or German proletariat, but the world proletariat. With his gaze fixed on Petrograd, which was not only Petrograd, but London, Berlin or Paris, Lenin returned in The State and the Revolution to these brilliant checks of doctrine and, as in the whole period from 1905 to 1917, he foresaw their translation into the real events of history, not only Russian, but worldwide, to the grandiose sketch drawn in 1850 by the Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League, from which Trotski had borrowed the famous battle cry of “Permanent Revolution”. After a century and a half of assaults from heaven and fallout from hell, which Marxists have exalted and cursed, it is always the definitive confirmation of a universal doctrine and program that we have sought, and what we have drawn from it is a certainty of the future, caring less about commemorating the past than it is about another way to bury it.

Let them all imagine, then, that October is dead, that they killed it. It is up to the revolutionary proletariat to rediscover it and throw it in the face of all our enemies!