By Krishna Jha
March 8 this year marks the 109th anniversary of the February Revolution, which laid the ground for the great historic event that took place in October, 1917. It could not be a socialist revolution, but had enriched the basics as Lenin wrote in his Two Tactics of Social Democracy. It was a guideline to find the path towards bourgeoisie democratic revolution especially when capitalism was moving over to Imperialism, an example of dialectics. Contradictions within the bourgeoisie led a handful of it towards imperialism, while the rest of this class came into a growing contradiction with it. Monopoly finance capital and imperialism embarked upon an all swallowing ‘progress’.
Dialectics is the basic methodology of Marxism. Lenin showed that the path towards socialist revolution was not without dialectics. It had both unity and contradiction, a fundamental contribution as it helped emerge the theory that made the great October revolution of 1917 possible. It was also getting clearer that the stage to accomplish socialist revolution was not yet in the current agenda.
In the process, capitalism started having trends that promoted concentration and centralization of production and capital. It was yet to get its proper context and it was Lenin who discovered rapid differentiations moving on within the capitalist class.
Capital was stretching over to non-productive areas, industries were getting monopolized and there was merger of industrial and banking capitals. This huge capital emerging thus did not fit in with the traditional capital.
This merger was termed ‘finance capital’ by Lenin, and the new discovery opened new vistas for Marxism. Finance capital became many times more powerful, though without much interest in production. However, some of the biggest giant productive units in history were financed by it. This new trend with its monopoly domination was named imperialism, and Lenin called it the new mode of production. Imperialism was defined and developed as Lenin wrote his famous book, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism.
Imperialism was crucial to democratic revolution, said Lenin, and added that it exploited among others the capitalists and vast sections of small and medium bourgeoisie and rich and middle peasants. Destroyed or thrown out of market or marginalized, these are the forces that ultimately joined democratic revolution.
The theory of bourgeois democratic revolution, a term coined by Lenin himself, is the direct result of imperialism. It was the phase of capitalism when for one section of the bourgeoisie, monopolization was welcome, leading to concentration of wealth. But, for the other, vast section, it was monopoly imperialist exploitation. Thus the non-monopoly sections stood against it. Lenin called such a phenomenon ‘imperialism’. It was this development which needed a bourgeois democratic revolution, to overthrow imperialism.
Imperialism, the new stage in capitalism, was exploiting in collaboration with feudalism all the major classes. A vast opposition was emerging against imperialism, even those classes which stood for private property were interested in fighting imperialism, though not yet interested in socialism.
Soon the need was realized for an intermediate stage of democratic revolution before the society embarked upon socialism. But while Lenin insisted on bourgeois democratic revolution, the Mensheviks refused to see the new development, and kept on harping on a ‘socialist revolution’.
It was a time when First World War (1914-18) was approaching its end. With a combination of feudalism and monopoly imperialism, the Tsarist Russia needed a bourgeois democratic revolution. More than one crore soldiers, mostly common peasants, from Russia had fought on War fronts, and were haunted by an insoluble crisis in 1916-17. A revolutionary situation emerged in Russia.
Russia was characterized as the ‘weakest link in the imperialist chain’, the centre of all the contradictions, and hence was mature for revolution. Russian soldiers deserted the War fronts on increasing scale. Soviets began to be formed in the armies. Demand for the removal and overthrow of the Tsar gathered speed. Workers and peasants rose in repeated revolts, led by the Soviets, with the Bolsheviks as the most active force, demanding an end to the participation in the War.
Britain, France and some other allies withdrew support to the Tsar, finding him unproductive for their War plans. The Tsarist regime was virtually left without support. Workers rose in revolt in 1916-17 in the capital Petrograd (earlier St Petersburg, later Leningrad and now again St Petersburg). Women workers, playing a leading role, walked out first. The movement, beginning in February, reached a crescendo on March 8, the international women’s day, when the entire women work force and all the workers stopped work indefinitely.
In a spontaneous uprising, the Soviets took over all the major centres and forced the Tsar to flee (he abdicated on March 15). A new government was put in place, known as the Provisional Government. Prince Georgy Lvov, an independent social figure, was made the prime minister. Kerensky was the justice minister. The government was joined by the Cadet Party, the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionary Party, Octobrists and some others. The Bolsheviks refused to join.
The Soviets had come into being during the Russian revolution of 1905 as mass organizations of workers and peasants, as peculiar unofficial ‘parliament’ or ‘assembly’ type of organization. During the First World War (WW I) they became Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers.
The Soviets of Petrograd were the most powerful, followed by those in Moscow and other places. They led the anti-Tsarist insurrection in Petrograd, and were the mainstay of the Provisional Government. They were not yet conscious enough to form their own government. Thus, a peculiar situation arose where the power got divided into two: power of bourgeois provisional government and simultaneously that of the Soviets, intertwined, a rare situation in history.
Lenin termed it as ‘dual power’. (IPA Service)
