The Great October Revolution was historic in many ways:
1. It was the result of the correct application and realization of the historical materialist theory of Marx and Engels, particularly of history as the result of class struggle, thus the need for revolution to change a decadent and moribund social system. In the current era of imperialism, the need for the working class to struggle against the bourgeoisie, the need for proletarian revolution to crush the state machinery, seize state power, and establish a new state in which the people, led by the proletariat, exercise dictatorship over the bourgeoisie.
2. It disproved Kautsky’s theory of super-imperialism or supra-imperialism or benign imperialism
3. It validated Lenin’s principles in building a Bolshevik party that is ideologically, politically and organizationally consolidated, a party of dedicated and disciplined full-time revolutionaries, in order to serve as the “general staff” of the revolution.
4. It showed how it was possible for the people, led by the working class, to overthrow the bourgeoisie, wipe out the vestiges of feudal reaction, build socialism in a single country, where international capitalism and imperialism has its weakest links
5. It showed how building the Soviets, the people’s organizations and especially the Red Army, paving the way and establishing the solid foundation for the great socialist construction under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
6. It ushered in a new era of socialist revolution and construction, inspiring the peoples of other countries to struggle for national liberation and social emancipation
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines, in its article “In Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution” (November 7, 1992) describes the historical significance of the Great October Revolution in this way:
Under the leadership of the great Lenin, the Bolseviks upheld the revolutionary class leadership of the proletariat and the revolutionary essence of Marxism-Leninism not merely against the broadly despised czarist aristocracy and its military-feudal system of empire but more importantly against the ideological and political currents in the service of the Russian industrial bourgeoisie, against the classical revisionists dominant in the Second International and against the monopoly capitalists that had rapidly expanded their capital in the era of modern imperialism.
By taking the correct line, the proletariat could make the Great October Socialist Revolution. Never before in history has mankind seen on so vast a scale – one sixth of the face of the earth – an exploited class, the proletariat, uniting and leading the entire people of various nationalities, seizing political power and establishing the proletarian class dictatorship, overcoming tremendous odds and achieving great victories in revolutionary mobilization, economic construction, cultural progress and national defense.
The Great October Revolution can never be fully described without considering that it was born out of the crucible of the revolutionary class struggle against the domestic bourgeoisie and other reactionaries as well as against the foreign capitalist powers. To build the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks and the Soviet people had to overcome the conditions of backwardness and the consequences of World War I, the civil war and the foreign interventionist war as well as the constant imperialist threats, domestic subversion, embargoes and all-out fascist aggression
Under the leadership of Stalin, the Soviet proletariat and people further consolidated the proletarian class dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, built a strong socialist industrial base and a collectivized and mechanized agriculture, educated millions upon millions of the
People and reached a high cultural level, defended the Soviet Union and played the main role in destroying the forces of Nazi aggression, rebuilt the Soviet economy from the devastation of war and proceeded to produce the world’ against the monopoly bourgeoisie and fascism; and the oppressed nations and peoples to struggle for national liberation, democracy and socialism against foreign imperialist and the local reactionaries. It paved the way for the emergence of several socialist countries and the national liberation movements on a wide scale in the aftermath of World War II.
Lenin, however, had also repeatedly warned that the transition from socialism to communism is an entire historical epoch, and that the struggle against the bourgeoisie and against revisionism in the Party, the struggle to gradually eliminate bourgeois right which appears in socialist society in many ways, such as in millions of petty bourgeois transactions from day to day, must be resolutely and continuously carried out to the end.
The CPP Central Committee further describes how revisionism gradually gained ground, until it became dominant in the CPSU itself and succeeded in restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union:
…the seed for the destruction of the Soviet Union had been sown in 1936 with the premature declaration that there were no more exploiting classes (correct by sheer socioeconomic definition) and that there was no more class struggle in Soviet society, except the one ever intensifying between the Soviet people and the external enemy (imperialism and its agents). Thus, the tendency of the large mass of the new intelligentsia and bureaucrats to become the petty bourgeoisie was overlooked and allowed to grow. Indeed, the petty bourgeoisie would proliferate within the ruling party and the state and become the social base of bourgeois bureaucratism, repressive measures, self-aggrandizement and anti-proletarian currents.
By 1956, the bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie had arisen from the petty bourgeoisie and had become dominant within the ruling party and the state. While retaining the communist and socialist labels, it overthrew the proletariat and imposed a bourgeois class dictatorship on the proletariat and the people. It propagated modern revisionism, restored capitalism and practised social fascism and social imperialism. One revisionist clique after another carried the line that the proletariat has accomplished its historic mission of class struggle against the bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union, while in fact the new bourgeoisie ruled the Soviet proletariat and the people.
The achievements of socialism up to 1956 had been so gigantic that it would take thirty-five years of betrayal to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The restoration of capitalism was disguised. State monopoly capitalism, increasingly characterized by the collaboration of the corrupt bureaucrats and private entrepreneurs, misrepresented itself as “real socialism”. The superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was also misrepresented as the struggle between capitalism and socialism, especially because at certain times and to some extent this could be used by some countries and peoples fighting for national liberation to their advantage. However, by and large, the cold war and the arms race aggravated the exploitation of the Soviet and other peoples. In fact, several countries came under simultaneous exploitation by both Soviet and Western neocolonialism, as in Eastern Europe and in the third world.
The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,100 islands with a total land area of 300,000 sq. kms (roughly equivalent to the land area of Italy) lying on the eastern edge of the South China Sea and the western rim of the Pacific Ocean. Because of its strategic geographical position and its abundant natural and human resources, the Philippines had been the object of foreign conquest and exploitation. The Filipino people came under centuries of foreign oppression and feudal exploitation with the connivance of a small domestic ruling class – first by the Spanish colonialists from the 16th to the end of the 19th century, and then by US imperialism from the turn of the 20th century to the present.
Like most Third World peoples, the Filipino people (now close to 90 million) valiantly and ferociously resisted foreign oppression and feudal exploitation. Their history is marked by peasant uprisings against the Spanish colonialists, culminating in the 1896 Philippine Revolution, a bourgeois-democratic (i.e., anti-feudal and anti-colonial) revolution that eventually succeeded in defeating the Spanish forces, but whose victory was stolen from them by the invading US imperialists. The Fil-American War resulted in the death of 1/10 of the Filipino population at the time, and the establishment of a colonial regime that lasted till the end of the Second World War.
The Filipino working class, which emerged in the late 18th century, played a significant role in the Filipino people’s struggle against the US colonialists although it was small in relation to the peasantry which until today remains the large majority of the population. Massive demonstrations against US colonial rule were staged at the outset by trade unions and workers’ federations led by patriotic workers who had been strongly influenced by Marxism. But it was not until 1930 that the Communist Party of the Philippine Islands (CPPI) was established, marking the beginning of efforts to apply Marxism-Leninism to the concrete Philippine conditions in order to achieve national liberation and social emancipation. The CPPI was formally launched on 7 Nov 1930, on the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
The formation of the CPPI had become possible with the help of cadres from the Communist Party of the USA, on instructions from the Third International, as well as from the Communist Party of China, which put up a Philippine branch. The CPPI worked for independence from the USA, called for the overthrow of US imperialism from the Philippines and the strengthening of the workers’ movement. But it was unable to grasp the significance of American colonial rule and the semi-feudal and mainly agrarian character of Philippine society and economy as favorable for waging an armed revolution, and to apply the Leninist principle of two-stage revolution. It concentrated its efforts in the workers’ struggles against the comprador-bourgeoisie and US imperialism without paying enough attention to organizing the peasantry as the main force of the revolution, waging armed struggle and building organs of political power in the countryside where state power was weakest.
Before the Second World War, the CPP responded to the Comintern’s call for a Popular Front against Fascism. It merged with the Socialist Party, which had a largely peasant base, to form the Communist Party of the Philippines (Merger of Socialist and Communist Party). While this move instantly increased the CPP’s membership and mass base, it also planted the seeds of its “de-Bolshevization”, with the entry of petty-bourgeois elements who would eventually lead the Party to subjectivist errors and to a series of political errors, and ultimately to the liquidation of the Party in the 1950s and 1960s.
The political and economic crisis of Philippine society continued to fester after the Second World War, and intensified in the 60s along with the intensification of the crisis of the capitalist system on a global scale. People’s protests accelerated and increased.
On December 26, 1968, the Communist Party of the Philippines was reestablished on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The reestablishment is at once an affirmation of the applicability of Marxism-Leninism to Philippine conditions, being the result of a scientific study of the character of Philippine society, a serious critique of the accomplishments and errors of the revolutionary movement, and a resolute commitment to lead the Philippine revolution clamored for by the Filipino people. Further, it unequivocally recognized that Mao Zedong Thought represents a development of Marxism-Leninism and serves as a guiding theory for revolutionary struggle in semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries, and for socialist revolution and construction upon the victory of the national democratic revolution.
The CPP describes its concrete practice over the past four decades as a conscious and creative application to the Philippine Revolution of the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, as validated by the Great October Revolution in particular. It had been able to grow and lead the national democratic revolution of the new type, starting from virtually nothing and overcoming initially adverse conditions such as the imposition of a full-blown fascist dictatorship and of the Philippines coming under a single imperialist power. The CPP has also dealt with difficulties arising from the Philippines’ archipelagic character by exercising self-reliance and carrying out the policy of centralized leadership and decentralized operations.
After twenty years’ hard struggle, the CPP undertook the Second Great Rectification movement in order to rectify its own weaknesses and errors, and correct grave disorientations. The rectification movement reaffirmed the following basic principles:
1. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the theoretical guide to the Philippine Revolution
2. The anti-revisionist line
3. The analysis of Philippine society as semi-feudal and semi-colonial
4. The national democratic revolution of the new type
5. The leadership of the working class through its advanced detachment, the Party
6. The strategy of protracted people’s war, surrounding the cities from the countryside
7. The revolutionary class line in the United Front
8. The organizational principle of democratic centralism
9. The socialist revolution
10. Proletarian internationalism
The Second Great Rectification Movement came at a time when the international communist movement was thrown into confusion and disarray, with the international bourgeoisie launching its ideological and cultural offensive and proclaiming the final victory of capitalism over socialism following the collapse of the East European regimes and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and heralding “globalization” as a new era of world peace, progress and prosperity with the complete integration of the whole world into a single capitalist system.
The CPP Central Committee, in one of its basic rectification documents, “Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism”, clarified that it was revisionism, not socialism, that caused the collapse of the East European regimes and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Socialism had long been defeated by revisionism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but it took the revisionists more than three decades to undo what the Great October Revolution had initiated and socialism had achieved. The CPP reaffirmed the correctness of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, pointing out that “globalization” is nothing more than the intensification of the contradictions and crisis in the world capitalist system. It underscored the contribution of Maoism in clarifying the nature of modern revisionism and defining the line for combating it and preventing capitalist restoration.
Among the major tasks and great challenges for all proletarian parties and revolutionary movements is the continuing scientific and thorough study of the reasons behind the defeat of socialism and the restoration of capitalism in the former socialist states.
The CPP declares that its principal internationalist duty and contribution to the world proletarian revolution is to struggle resolutely for the victory of the national democratic revolution in order to immediately start its socialist revolution and construction in the Philippines. At the same time, it contributes what it can to the efforts in clarifying the international situation and promoting cooperation and unity among fraternal parties and movements.