Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletaria (Spain)
In the tumultuous course of the Third World War driven by crisis-ridden imperialism, and following the electoral victory of the Great Patriotic Pole of Venezuela on October 7, the Bolivarian Revolution prepares to fulfill the testamentary mandate of Commander Hugo Chávez Frías: “Independence or nothing, commune or nothing.” Ultimately, the sovereign organization of the working people is the bulwark that guarantees their freedom and prosperity in the face of imperialist aggression. As explained in the Pyongyang Declaration, signed since 1992 by hundreds of workers’ and progressive parties: “The guarantee for the advancement of scientific socialism lies in the popular masses becoming the true masters of society.”
After Chávez’s death, the imperialists launched against Venezuela a barrage of sanctions and aggressions in support of the internal counterrevolution, but they failed thanks to the hard work and wisdom of the organized people, with President Nicolás Maduro Moros at the forefront. Now, as they prepare to intervene with their own armies, they will once again crash against a people who feel themselves to be the rightful owners of their country. Hence the importance and urgency of developing the communal structure—from the bottom up—firmly united with the revolutionary vanguard, which scientifically illuminates the path from above. This dialectic is what all the great revolutionary experiences in world history—particularly the socialist revolutions—have endeavored to construct.
The Venezuelan Revolution has its own particularities, even though it is subject to the same general objective laws that have manifested in the experiences that preceded it. Undoubtedly, one of its differences lies in the relatively parliamentary and peaceful path it has followed up to now. This lower degree of violence against internal and external parasitic forces was achieved because within the armed forces, the patriotic sector led by Commander Chávez prevailed.
In our humble opinion, in the current context of the high internationalization of the productive forces and of the class struggle, every national revolution must rely on its historical international precedents with scientific rigor and class solidarity: it is as wrong to attempt to copy them as it is to caricature them negatively. We must learn from Soviet power with the same spirit with which the Soviets learned from the Paris Commune. Every revolutionary experience is a step on the path toward the emancipation of humanity.
The Paris Commune of 1871, inspired by the insurrectional Commune of 1792–1793 and by the experiments of utopian socialists, was the first experience of popular power led by the workers, and arose from the need to confront the national betrayal of the bourgeois institutions that had delivered France to the Prussian invader.
The Russian soviets, or workers’ councils, likewise emerged as insurrectional organs elected by the working masses to overthrow and replace the power of the Tsarist autocracy. They adopted the characteristics and goals of the Paris Communards, but carried them to completion—beyond what the latter had achieved in their brief revolutionary experience of two months and ten days. They took production into their own hands, implemented measures of social justice, and workers elected their deputies and judges—revocable, bound by imperative mandate, merging legislative and executive functions into a tiered structure from bottom to top, and so on.
However, Soviet power corrected the weaknesses that had contributed to the defeat of the Paris Commune—particularly its excessive leniency toward the exploiters, its lack of an alliance policy with the peasantry, and the absence of a disciplined leading party grounded in the scientific theory of Marxism–Leninism. As a result of this heightened consciousness, and also of the more advanced development of Russian society, they replaced the territorial constituency with the factory constituency, to reinforce the leading role of the working class, which is the most revolutionary class due to its identity with the social character of modern productive forces and its antagonism to all forms of human exploitation and private property.
Because this power was genuinely popular and democratic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics twice defeated foreign intervention (1918–1922 and 1941–1945—not to mention the conspiracies and sabotage in between, and the nuclear blackmail of the “Cold War” thereafter), industrialized, mechanized, and collectivized urban and rural production, planned it centrally, improved the life of the population, eradicated illiteracy, liberated and developed the various national cultures of the country, advanced toward overcoming class, gender, and national antagonisms, and contributed to the progress of the revolution on an international scale.
But these advances could not fail to be contradictory within an imperialist international context characterized by: 1) the centralization of resources in the hands of a handful of monopolists; and 2) the growing inequality of living conditions between workers of the oppressor countries and those of the oppressed countries.
This new reality explains the strength that reformist social democracy and fascist reaction acquired, managing to weaken the social base of the world revolution and, between 1935 and 1947, forcing it into a political compromise with bourgeois parliamentary democracy. This temporary alliance helps explain, along with other factors, why the new 1936 Soviet Constitution replaced the Congresses of Soviets with a Supreme Soviet elected by direct suffrage. Later, the nearly 30 million lives—including over 3 million communists—sacrificed for the Soviet victory over Nazi-fascism contributed to the ideological and political deterioration of the USSR, the anti-Stalin revisionist turn of the 1950s, and the widening separation between the people and the organs of power.
Thus, the soviets were not always the same, but evolved throughout their history according to the correlation of class forces in struggle. The socialist revolutions after World War II (China, Korea, Cuba, etc.) sought ways to continue developing communal forms of power amid the suffocating imperialist encirclement.
Precisely in the course of this struggle against foreign imperialists and their domestic lackeys, one can discern the true commitment to national sovereignty and social progress held by the various classes into which society is divided. The proletariat is the class most faithful to the revolution, and in alliance with other popular classes, it must direct its dictatorship against the traitors—otherwise, society risks returning to slavery and misery for the majority, which is where the restoration of capitalism and neocolonial dependence inevitably lead. Therefore, the question of communal power from below is also the question of strengthening the political leadership of the working class.
It is likewise a contradictory process, shaped by adverse internal conditions—such as the insufficient development of the productive forces inherited from capitalism, and the resulting corrupting influence of monetary-mercantile relations and the social division of labor (particularly between manual and intellectual work), which forms the basis of class division. These adverse conditions cannot be abolished by decree, but only through a long process of entrenching socialist transformations. Meanwhile, it is necessary to learn to master them through the control and vigilance of the organized people under the leadership of the working class.
Today, imperialism is weakened by its own contradictions, which are driving it toward a Third World War. At the same time, the national liberation movement is uniting and growing stronger. The forthcoming defeat of the imperialists thus opens a window of opportunity for the definitive emancipation of the oppressed of the earth. We must seize it to promote the organization of communal popular power and its leadership by the proletariat, the class that is objectively capable of carrying the communist transformation of society to its ultimate conclusion.
