October revisited: John Eric Marot's 'October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect'

Doug Enaa Greene reviews October revisited: John Eric Marot's 'October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect'.

The following four chapters are a long engagement by Marot with the new social historians who have written on the October Revolution. Here, Marot argues that the social historians have correctly demolished many of the old Cold War myths that the Bolsheviks manipulated the workers or carried out a coup. Rather, Russian workers were fully involved in the events of 1917 — from leading strikes, creating unions and fighting for Soviet power. What Marot does here, and I fully agree, is to say that the Bolsheviks were not foreign to the working-class movement, nor that workers were unconcerned with “high politics”, but that the Russian working class developed and learned throughout 1917, coming to the realisation that the Bolshevik program offered the best way to realise their aspirations.

As Marot says, the Bolsheviks won in 1917 because of their politics, they were “better able to comprehend and predict the course of the class struggle, to politically provide for it and in so far as provided for, to shape is evolution and guide it to a victorious denouement. Through political competition, workers developed their politics and reached a political consensus on the need to seize power” (p. 164). This ironically leads Marot to agree with anti-communist historians such as Richard Pipes, although for differing reasons, that without the Bolshevik Party there would have been no October Revolution.

Emphasis Mine

This is a very important point: the workers were fully involved and were willing to be led by the Bolshevik Party because of the track-record that the Bolsheviks had achieved through the struggles.

The importance of a tested and trusted revolutionary party built on Leninist principles of democratic centralism and strict membership criteria cannot be under-estimated. The party leads the struggle through example and willingness to listen, and decisive action.