November 7 marks the anniversary of the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. In “ten days that shook the world,” the first ever socialist workers’ state was created. Old forms of governance based on despotic monarchism, “liberal democracy” and a bourgeois society were replaced with proletarian rule. This created a socialist society with full employment, free education, health care and housing for all and no taxes. It provided political equality before the law, full democracy to elect and be elected, no class privileges and no exploiting classes. It affirmed that peace, prosperity, freedom and fraternal unity of the peoples are not merely a utopia, a pipe dream. They are attainable and the necessity of our times.

Today, the dregs of the deposed ruling classes of that time are consumed with a spectre of communism which haunts them every time they engage in their heinous crimes against humanity and the working class. They have attempted to deceive the people with a falsified history and slander of socialism which is a figment of their deranged imaginations, dominated by morbid preoccupation with their own demise. Such is also the case in the defamatory imperialist propaganda against the Communist Party of China or the Russian Federation, which are called authoritarian regimes that must be brought to heel by following the imperialist order espoused in the United States, Britain, Canada, the European Union, and other sub-imperialist collaborators.

The so-called rules-based international order these powers espouse is in fact the paradigm of authoritarian rule. Nonetheless, accusations are hurled against those who are seen to be rivals over control of the sources of cheap resources, labour, markets for the export of capital and zones of influence. All of this is used to divert the attention of the workers and peoples of the world from the brutality and injustice of the current system, and from the struggle to create a system which is able to effectively channel all the human and material resources of their countries to the benefit of all working people. This violent order of global repression based on lies, arrogance and supremacy which the U.S. imperialists and their allies have attempted to impose is already failing.

The more the counterrevolution launched since the fall of the former Soviet Union deepened, the more the significance of the Great October Revolution to human history has increased. It was the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union which led to its collapse in the 1989-91 period. It was not a failure of socialism but of capitalism. Since then, the consequences of the U.S.-led brutal neo-liberal anti-social offensive and the wars it has unleashed to achieve regime change and domination, have caused tremendous damage to the peoples of the world and to the planet itself.

Following the abject conditions of the retreat of revolution, the world is now waking up to take stock of what it means to have a society such as the one which came into being just over one hundred years ago when Soviet Russia was established and Soviet power created a new society where the workers decided all matters in a manner which favoured their interests.

The conditions of the present are forcing all concerned to look at the most important events of the past with the eye of the present, to assist in securing the future. All over the world, the peoples are striving to bring new forms into being, based on sovereignty, freedom from neo-colonialism, and democratic principles which vest economic and political decision-making power in the people in a manner which is consistent with the needs of the 21st century.

The October Revolution brought to power those forces which lay dormant in the bosom of the old society. The workers, peasants and the intelligentsia and other working people established a power which favoured them for the first time in human history. Not only did the October Revolution bring an entirely new class to power — the working class — it also inspired the workers and oppressed of all lands to embark on the same path.

The crisis created out of the First World War was resolved in favour of the people when the October Revolution ended that bloodiest war in history, a war fought between the imperialist powers for the redivision of the world.

This was the first revolution that created an entirely new society. Socialism appeared on the world historical scene, as predicted by Karl Marx. The practice of the proletarian revolution ushered in an entirely new period, the period of ending the exploitation of persons by persons and of creating a society based on the power of the working class building a new society in its own image.