STATEMENT OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNIST INITIATIVE
On the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution
The Initiative Communist Parties greet the working class, all working people of Europe on the occasion of the centennial of the greatest event of the XX century – the October Revolution!
October 1917 proved in practice the correctness of the Leninist theory stating that the victory of socialism is possible in one single country or a group of countries, as a result of the uneven development of capitalism. The working class of Russia, driven by a revolutionary theory developed by the vanguard of the class – the Communist Party, accomplished the revolution and embodied the dreams of millions of working people for a better life, for a just social economic system, whose criterion is not capitalist profit but the satisfaction of the ever expanding needs of the people.
The world capitalist system moved by its contradictions lead humankind into the First World War which took the lives of many millions of people. The revolutionary uprisings that flared up against this background in Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary and other countries were cruelly suppressed. The imperialist powers actively intervened in the Civil War in Russia, but were defeated. The revolution won! Its victory confirmed the need for international solidarity of the working class against the capitalists, the possibility of building a socialist society only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, the need to end the bourgeois state, nonparticipation in the bourgeois government and the absence of transitional types of power between capitalism and socialism.
For over seven decades after October 1917, the workers in the Soviet Union experienced unprecedented gains. The world’s first socialist state madetremendous leaps in the economy in the interests of the people, in science,in technology and in the fields of society and culture. The working people of the USSR received the right to work, unemployment and discrimination against women were eliminated. The state of workers and peasants introduced free education at all levels and free medical care for the entire people. Soviet power protected the rest of the working people, provided universal access to culture and sports. The Soviets, as the organisational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, involved the working people in managing the affairs of society, raising the political level of the masses to unprecedented heights.
Capital in the capitalist countries under the pressure of socialism and tenacious workers’-people’s struggles was forced to make concessions: an eight-hour working day and universal suffrage rights were introduced, the people acquired the right to pensions, benefits, vacation for the first time. The USSR made an enormous contribution to and played the leading role in the smashing of fascism and the Great Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples. Moreover, the USSR made exceptional contributions through the multifaceted internationalist solidarity that it provided to the peoples in their struggle to overthrow the colonial system.
The defeat of the world’s first socialist state cancelled out the social gains of the working people, both in the socialist countries and in the capitalist countries. It is a temporary setback that does not negate the fact that the era in which we are living in is the era of the transition from capitalism to socialism. We call on the people, the youth to more deeply study the causes, the reality and truth about the dissolution of socialism and to reject the propaganda of the bourgeoisie, the EU, the capitalist governments and their apparatuses, to denounce the falsification of history, and the unacceptable identification of communism with fascism.
Reality proves to us that capitalism is out-dated and can only offer the same thing as 100 years ago — poverty, degradation, wars, cyclical economic crises- and that the only real alternative to this is the invaluable experience of the Great October Socialist Revolution!
We have unshakeable faith and certainty that the working class, the peoples, taking their lead from the ice that was broken and the road that was opened, will carry out more mature, more experienced, more effective and capable socialist revolutions, which this time will be irreversible. In any case, we are living in the era of socialist revolutions which was inaugurated by Great October. The course of history cannot be reversed.