On Saturday October 26, the Newport and Gwent Valleys [South Wales] branch of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) organized a very successful fund-raising social to celebrate the anniversary of the 1917 October Socialist Revolution. It was attended by members and supporters of the CPB, the Young Communist League and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), along with other friends from the labour, trade union and progressive movements. The more formal part of the afternoon was chaired and introduced by CPB General Secretary Robert Griffiths. Short videos were shown of the 1945 victory parade in Moscow marking the triumph over Nazi fascism and of the famed African-American artist and revolutionary Paul Robeson singing the Soviet national anthem. Following this, Robert introduced the guest speaker, Keith Bennett from Friends of Socialist China.
We publish below the main body of Keith’s talk.
The October Revolution was a truly great event in world history – one that remains worthy of celebration. The account given by the US communist journalist John Reed has a highly apposite title – ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’.
Indeed, this was a revolution that not only shook but changed the world forever. Even though the Soviet Union itself tragically no longer exists, after the October Revolution nothing was ever the same again or could ever be the same again.
The Soviet Union represented the first sustained attempt by working people to hold and maintain power. Throughout its lifetime there were both great achievements as well as some significant mistakes.
But whatever the mistakes or shortcomings, the Soviet Union was the first country to legislate for the equality of women and men. The first to guarantee universal and free education and health care. The first to ensure full employment and the right to paid annual holidays for all workers and farmers.
Entire nationalities were provided with a written script for the first time. Visiting Soviet Uzbekistan in the 1980s, I learned how that vast republic went from some two percent literacy to universal literacy in barely a couple of decades.
Above all, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the World Anti-Fascist War in Europe, sacrificing the lives of 27 million of its citizens to defeat Nazism.
Support from the Soviet Union played a vital role in the dismantling of the old colonial empires and the victory of the national liberation movements.
And the threat of the Soviet example played a significant role in forcing the ruling class in this and other major capitalist countries to make concessions to the working class in the form of the ‘welfare state’.
Some years ago, when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, the Tories, who, of course had bitterly opposed the creation of the NHS, took to deriding it as “Stalinist”. On first consideration, this might seem to be a risible and ridiculous claim. Nevertheless, it expresses a certain truth that such gains for working people did indeed flow in no small measure from the fear of the ruling class that their populations might follow the Soviet road.
That mistakes were made, and even crimes committed, in the course of building socialism in the USSR is undeniable. But, whilst detailed assessment of these is not possible today, what we really must do is place them in a context where the imperialist ruling class was never reconciled to the existence of the Soviet Union and the threat it posed. Not the military threat claimed by the cold warriors, but the threat of a good example. In that sense, it is reasonable to conclude that, throughout its entire history, the Soviet Union never enjoyed even a single day of true peace.
We were, however, told that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union there would at last be a ‘peace dividend’. No more wars.
Instead, we got the exact opposite. No peace dividend but rather austerity and the rolling back of the welfare state. And above all, we entered a period of constant and endless wars. In former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. Through to today’s appalling genocide in Palestine, and the spiraling conflict throughout the region, as well as NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
And this brings me to the question of China.
The October Revolution was by no means a simple national phenomenon. Rather it inaugurated an entirely new period of world history – that of the long transition (with all its victories and setbacks) from capitalism to socialism on a worldwide scale.
In his last published article, ‘Better Fewer But Better’, Lenin turned to consideration as to whether the Soviet state could survive – a matter about which he was never sanguine. But he concluded on a note of revolutionary optimism that:
“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.”
In a very real sense, therefore, the liberation of China, and the founding of the People’s Republic, whose 75th anniversary we have just celebrated, arose from the October Revolution. In his 1949 article, ‘On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship’, Mao Zedong explained:
“The Russians made the October Revolution and created the world’s first socialist state. Under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, the revolutionary energy of the great proletariat and labouring people of Russia, hitherto latent and unseen by foreigners, suddenly erupted like a volcano, and the Chinese and all humanity began to see the Russians in a new light. Then, and only then, did the Chinese enter an entirely new era in their thinking and their life. They found Marxism-Leninism, the universally applicable truth, and the face of China began to change.
“It was through the Russians that the Chinese found Marxism. Before the October Revolution, the Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin, they did not even know of Marx and Engels. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China, as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation’s destiny and considering anew their own problems. Follow the path of the Russians – that was their conclusion.”
In fact, every socialist revolution is, and must be seen as, a continuation and an extension of the October Revolution. As the Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung, writing in memory of Che Guevara, put it:
“The triumph of the Cuban Revolution is the first victory of the socialist revolution in Latin America and a continuation of the Great October Revolution in Latin America.”
When the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe collapsed, the international bourgeoisie expected that China and the other remaining socialist countries would also follow suit. Standing against this, Deng Xiaoping confidently asserted that so long as socialism did not collapse in China it would always be able to hold its head up in the world.
Today’s Chinese leader Xi Jinping makes a similar point that, without China, socialism might have ceased to be a force in world politics. Borrowing from Marx and Engels, Xi likens its possible fate to that of a haunting spectre, wandering the globe like a ghost.
This is a very correct analysis. Of course, there are some other socialist countries, like Cuba and Vietnam, but, for objective reasons, none of them have the ability to materially impact the global balance of forces in the way that the Soviet Union was able to do in the past and that China is able to do today.
I have been interested in China for more than half a century. Throughout that time, the ruling class has rarely ceased to predict the country’s impending collapse. The ‘Economist’ magazine seems to have quite a specialised line in predicting it every few months.
More seriously, the Cold War has ceased to be history. We are now experiencing a New Cold War, in which much of the same trite and poisonous propaganda that was once directed against the Soviet Union is now directed against China.
Of course, the reality of China is very different. And that itself is precisely a key reason for the New Cold War.
In the last several decades – I have been privileged to witness this since my own first visit in 1981 – we’ve seen the phenomenal, peaceful rise of China. It has become the world’s second largest economy. It has gone from a poor country to a middle-income country. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. China is on course to become the world’s largest economy and a high-income country in the fairly near future. And it is leading in building an ecological civilisation so as to reverse the threat of climate catastrophe.
With its strong domestic foundations, China is progressively reorienting the global economy, through such means as the consolidation and expansion of the BRICS cooperation mechanism and the vast infrastructure developments associated with the Belt and Road Initiative. And in such ways, China is steadily winning more and more friends, among the developing countries in particular.
Like the Soviet Union in the past, China is naturally not without its problems. It is far from a perfect society and doesn’t claim to be. But the most important point is that China is not our enemy.
It is the only major country putting forward serious, realistic and fair proposals for peace in the Middle East and in Ukraine. It is leading the fight against climate change. And many thousands of jobs in this country depend on trade with China and investment from China. It’s worth recalling how, in late 2022, when the government ordered that a Chinese company divest its ownership of Britain’s largest microchip factory, Newport Wafer Fab, just a few miles from here, on dubious ‘national security’ grounds, the workers and their trade union strongly protested, insisting that they liked working for a Chinese company.
We formed Friends of Socialist China a few years ago to refute hostile propaganda and to tell the truth about China. We do so through our website, through meetings and webinars, and through our just published book, ‘People’s China at 75: The Flag Stays Red’, along with the recent special supplement in the ‘Morning Star’.
But by far the best thing, if you possibly can, is to go to China and see for yourself. It’s a long way, but it’s not impossible. In Friends of Socialist China, we’re hoping to facilitate more such visits in the future.