Bolshevika
25th December 2003, 01:10
http://www.workers.org/ww/2003/fred1218.php
The revolution overcame the near-total collapse of the productive forces and raised Russia and its colonies from a semi-feudal region to the second industrial power in the world. The USSR led the world in steel and coal production. In the sphere of science and engineering, the USSR inaugurated the space age, built the largest construction projects in history, and, most importantly, from a class point of view, it did all this while lifting the peasants and workers out of poverty, bringing literacy, medicine, vacations, early retirement, and numerous other social benefits to the people.
The planned economy eliminated economic crises. Not once in its history, save during the Nazi invasion, did it suffer a decline in production. The five-year plans brought a steady growth in the economy while the capitalist world went through boom and bust, including a world depression in the 1930s. Unemployment was abolished. The present horrendous living conditions of the peoples of the former USSR are sufficient testimony to what was lost.
The revolution gave the oppressed nations who were in the tsar's "prison house of nations" the right to self- determination and created the first legislative house of nationalities in history. In its early years the Soviet government exposed the secret treaties of imperialism and called upon the oppressed peoples of the world to overthrow their colonial masters. It supported anti-imperialist governments and liberation struggles around the world and inaugurated a foreign policy of internationalism.
Karl Marx himself never let victorious counterrevolution force him to abandon his scientific view of history, and consequently never lost faith in the struggle. After the revolution of 1848, in which he and Frederick Engels were participants, the workers in Paris were slaughtered and the Prussian and Austrian monarchies, with the aid of the Russian tsar, crushed the revolutions in their realms. Revolutionaries all over Europe were executed, jailed or exiled. By 1852, reaction reigned supreme.
But in the midst of reaction, on March 5, 1852, Marx wrote a letter to a friend in New York, Joseph Wedemeyer, in which he calmly said that "... no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. ... What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of the classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
The revolution overcame the near-total collapse of the productive forces and raised Russia and its colonies from a semi-feudal region to the second industrial power in the world. The USSR led the world in steel and coal production. In the sphere of science and engineering, the USSR inaugurated the space age, built the largest construction projects in history, and, most importantly, from a class point of view, it did all this while lifting the peasants and workers out of poverty, bringing literacy, medicine, vacations, early retirement, and numerous other social benefits to the people.
The planned economy eliminated economic crises. Not once in its history, save during the Nazi invasion, did it suffer a decline in production. The five-year plans brought a steady growth in the economy while the capitalist world went through boom and bust, including a world depression in the 1930s. Unemployment was abolished. The present horrendous living conditions of the peoples of the former USSR are sufficient testimony to what was lost.
The revolution gave the oppressed nations who were in the tsar's "prison house of nations" the right to self- determination and created the first legislative house of nationalities in history. In its early years the Soviet government exposed the secret treaties of imperialism and called upon the oppressed peoples of the world to overthrow their colonial masters. It supported anti-imperialist governments and liberation struggles around the world and inaugurated a foreign policy of internationalism.
Karl Marx himself never let victorious counterrevolution force him to abandon his scientific view of history, and consequently never lost faith in the struggle. After the revolution of 1848, in which he and Frederick Engels were participants, the workers in Paris were slaughtered and the Prussian and Austrian monarchies, with the aid of the Russian tsar, crushed the revolutions in their realms. Revolutionaries all over Europe were executed, jailed or exiled. By 1852, reaction reigned supreme.
But in the midst of reaction, on March 5, 1852, Marx wrote a letter to a friend in New York, Joseph Wedemeyer, in which he calmly said that "... no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. ... What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of the classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."