On the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Socialist October Revolution

In 2017, all over the world the 100^th anniversary of the Socialist October Revolution will be commemorated, the revolution which not only changed Russia, but the world. For the first time in the history of humankind the working class under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party with its chairman Lenin had conquered state power by overthrowing the backward and brutal tsarism.

The young Soviet power prevailed in a three-year civil war against the internal counterrevolution and against the intervention by 14 imperialist powers.

Subsequent to the October Revolution, on 30 December 1922, the Soviet Union was established. It successfully built up socialism and became the beacon for all humankind. The Soviet peoples faced the difficult task of constructing a backward country with an impoverished people as the legacy of tsarism. They launched the construction of socialism. Collectivization of agriculture, the socialization of production, industrialization and profound transformation in the cultural and scientific spheres, under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat ensured the people bread, jobs, housing, education, health, land and social care. Reduction in working hours (8-hour and even 5-hour workday) went along with the emancipation of women, while illiteracy and unemployment became non-existent.

What a contrast to today's worldwide mass misery and to the structural mass unemployment due to the persisting worldwide capitalist financial and economic crisis!

It was a revolutionary transformation in the history of humankind under the leadership of Stalin and also the basis for the victory in the Great Patriotic War against the Hitlerite barbarians and for the liberation of Europe from fascism.

However, neither the reaction in the civil war, nor the assault of 14 imperialist armies, nor the assault of Hitlerite Germany could defeat the socialist Soviet Union. With the 20th Party Congress in 1956 after Stalin's death, socialism was destroyed from within, by the revisionist seizure of power and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. The dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991 lies mainly in the responsibility of modern revisionism from Khrushchev to Gorbachev.

This is why the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not the defeat of socialism as the reactionaries all over the world maintain, speaking of "the end of history," but the collapse of the revisionist bureaucratic state apparatus.

This collapse however remains a source of anti-Stalinism and anticommunism: denying history, slandering, hysterical and primitive. Imperialism tries to maintain that its crises and wars and its barbarism through the exploitation of humankind and nature are without alternative and to prevent a future fit for humankind to live in.

Today, on the 100^th anniversary of the victory of the October Revolution, we feel obliged to endeavor to make another attempt of the revolutionary struggle for socialism, while taking the previous experience into consideration. The current situation in the world, the deep worldwide capitalist crisis, wars and conflicts instigated by the imperialists, the threat to the foundations of human life by environmental destruction, urge humankind forward towards national and social liberation, to a further emancipation by worldwide socialism.

The ICOR will pay tribute to the Socialist October Revolution in keeping with its universality and its relevance to the present and will organize a joint worldwide campaign on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary, as an international action of class struggle, directed at the persisting worldwide capitalist financial and economic crisis of imperialism. This joint campaign in the spirit of the Socialist October Revolution is addressed to the international working class and the peoples of the world fighting against imperialist barbarism and for a bright future of humankind.

In connection with this campaign the ICOR will organize a seminar on the lessons of the October Revolution for broadening and strengthening the ICOR.

• Long live the Socialist October Revolution!

• Long live socialism!

• Forward with the ICOR!

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