By 1890, the European Socialist Parties, meeting in the Second International, abandoned the revolutionary illusion and defended the reformist path to integrate into the bourgeois parliaments. They believed that with the elections they would one day come to power, and that there they would begin to transform society. The German, Italian, Spanish and French Socialist Party, which was still called the French Section of the International Labour Party, as well as the British Labour Party, took the path of reform policy. However, they maintained the revolutionary rhetoric of Marxism for the workers to think that their parties were still fighting for a radical transformation.

The contradiction between rhetoric and praxis erupted with the arrival of the Great War of 1914. The Socialist International proclaimed at the congress held in Basel in November 1912: "It is the duty of the working class and its parliamentary representatives (...) to do everything possible not to start the war", and said that, if it were to begin, action would have to be taken to end as soon as possible: “We must use the economic and political crisis that has generated the war to get the people up and down the government of the capitalist class.” Congress expressed satisfaction at “the consensus of all parties and trade unions against war” and called “the workers of all peoples to face the capitalist empire with the solidarity of the international proletariat”.

But on the afternoon of 4 August 1914, for several weeks, the German Socialists fought war on the one hand, and the French on the other, enthusiastically accepted the declaration of war in Parliament and voted for the credits to begin. The German Social Democratic Party took over the social truce and promised not to criticise the government and to ask the workers to abandon strikes during the war. The British Labour also accepted the war, but even more so, they ended up entering the coalition government.

In Russia, things went differently. The Social Democratic Party was divided between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and had no parliamentary representation, while the police were persecuting it. In early 1917, some Bolshevik leaders were abandoned in Siberia, such as Stalin and Kamenev, others were in exile: Lenin was established in Zürich and Trotski in New York.

When the revolution began in Petrograd in February 1917, there were no leaders of the revolutionary parties there, and a double power was imposed: the soviets of workers and soldiers on the one hand, and the Provisional Committee of Parliament on the other. They agreed to set in motion an interim government and to delay political changes, at least until the Constitutional Assembly was established in November, to be elected by universal suffrage.

On 3 March, the interim government approved an amnesty “for all political and religious crimes, including terrorist acts, military uprisings and agricultural crimes.” Stalin and Kamenev returned from Siberia and defended in the Bolshevik daily Pravda their programme of support for the war and the constitution of the Constitutional Assembly, which agreed with most of the Russian political forces.

In early April, Vladimir Lenin returned from Switzerland. The German government, which wanted to see Russia outside the war, allowed it to travel by train from the shores of the Baltic to enter Petrograd through Sweden and Finlandia.Para understand the behavior of the Germans, it should be remembered that in the first
months of 1917 there was a crisis in the United States that led to the declaration of war to Germany on 6 April. The Germans proposed the trip to Lenin, but he placed a number of conditions before accepting it: Throughout Germany, the wagon was going to be driven with some thirty more exiles, so that, for example, they would have the status of extra-territorial fields. Trotski was arrested by the British and came to Petrograd a month later.

Bolchevique, welcoming Lenin on April 3 at Petrograd Finland station, said from the wagon platform: “The people need peace, the people need bread, the people need land. And they give him war, hunger instead of bread, and they give the land to the big landowners. We will fight for the social revolution, we will fight until the end, until we achieve the total victory of the proletariat.” And he still added: “This war between imperialist pirates is only the beginning of a civil war that will spread throughout Europe. One day European capitalism collapses. The Russian revolution you have begun has opened the way to a new era. Long live the socialist revolution of the world!”

The speech was not well received by the Bolsheviks at the station and was rejected when the first votes were held in the internal structures of the party. The idea of supporting the bourgeois democratic revolution was rooted, the first stage of the route to socialism had to be like this, as the European Social Democrat parties said; it seemed to them that wanting to go further was an adventure that was going to defeat.

But what Lenin said was not limited to the slogan “peace, land and bread”, it was not just a program to end the war immediately and at any price and to give the land to the peasants. Basically, the approach was much more radical. According to him, after the progress made since February and once the Soviets became organs of power, it did not make sense to stay with the bourgeois parliamentary republic, but to go directly towards a system that would leave all power in the hands of the Soviets, which would take care of the abolition of the mechanisms of power of the State – police, army, bureaucracy..... This would initiate the disappearance of the State and the disappearance of the division of classes.

Marx questioned Parliament’s path in his criticism of the Gotha program written in 1875, something Lenin repeated. The German Social Democrats kept Marx’s text hidden for many years, in which he rejected the idea that with the “free state” it was possible to move towards socialism, as if it were a kind of transition: “Between capitalist and communist society there is a time of revolutionary transformation from the first to the second. It is also up to that time to make a transition in which the State can be no more than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

How was that transition going to be made? It is difficult to specify, because the socialist parties did not start thinking about what they had to do once in power, it seemed very far away. The only experience was the Paris Commune of 1871, which lasted very little to draw from it some rules of reference.

We can know what Lenin proposed from what was written in the state and revolution. He denounced the lies of the bourgeois parliament’s regime, as everything (voting rules, press controls, etc.) aimed at establishing an “exclusive democracy for the rich”. Lenin therefore anticipated the disappearance of the State in two phases. In the first, the bourgeois state would be replaced by the socialist state with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In a second phase, the State would gradually disappear and turn to Communist society. In this transition the socialists had to maintain strict control over work and consumption, a control that could be achieved through the expropriation of the capitalists, but a bureaucratic state could not be created, since the ultimate goal was precisely
a society “without classes and without state power”. We are not going to start telling here the known story, how the Bolsheviks came to power and how the transition to the new system began to be organised.

What interests me most is to recall that on 7 January 1918 Lenin expected that, after a moment of bourgeois resistance, the victory of the socialist revolution would be a matter of months.
However, the so-called “civil war” in which thirteen different countries participated in supporting the counterparts to the revolution disappointed him. The new State of the Bolsheviks cost 8 million deaths to win the war, as the dead in fighting must be accompanied by hunger and disease. In addition, the economy was completely destroyed. Circumstances led to an indefinite delay in the implementation of the new society.

The moment the civil war was overcome, history changes course. Lloyd George, President of the British Government, was one of the first to realize that it was useless to keep the idea of conquering Soviet Russia to liquidate the revolution. The struggle against the revolution changed its character, moving from the Russian stage to the whole world. It was necessary to oppose at a universal level and for the influence of ideas, as groups and movements around the world had the Soviet revolution as a source of inspiration and model for their struggles.

They began to fight the enemy that was called communism, so it was not just the Soviet state, not even the socialist parties of the Third International, which until the 1930s were no more than small sectarian groups of low incidence. The enemy was disproportionate, indefinite and universal, not born of reality, but of the obsessive fears of politicians: the communism behind any collective strike or protest. For example, on a sit-down strike in the Pacific Coast ports of the United States, Los Angeles Times said it was a “revolution organized by the Communists” to bring down the government; he asked the army to intervene to crush it. They multiplied at very different times and places.

From that point on, the fight against the Communist revolution became a competition for all of us. The second Spanish republic, for example, appeared on the international stage in 1931, and while in most of Europe social unrest was resolved through dictatorships, the governments of the great powers opposed it. The U.S. Ambassador to Madrid sent information to the State Department on 16 April 1931, two days after the proclamation of the Republic: “The Spanish people have a 17th-century mentality: drawn by communist lies, they see nothing but the promised land that does not exist. When despair comes to them, they will blindly bow to everything within their power, and if this weak government lets them through, they can catch the influences of the Bolsheviks, which are widespread.”

The following messages clearly show that the ambassador did not even know who the Republican leaders were. He explained this to Washington about Azaña: "I haven't found your reference at the embassy. The military attaché says Alexander is tied to Lineux. Apparently, he’s a ‘radical Republican’.” I knew nothing about Republicans, but it seemed that things were very clear about the “influence of the Bolsheviks.”

When the military uprising took place in Spain in 1936, the European powers left the Spanish Republic defenseless, while the Germans and Italians would intervene using men, weapons and planes, and all because they feared communism would spread, although that was not possible in 1936.

Meanwhile, the Soviet State, under Stalin's command, lived in fear of an external attack and invested in defensive weapons the resources that would serve to improve the living conditions of the population. But the most terrible consequence of this great fear was that it created a panic over internal conspiracies, to the point of becoming an obsession, because they believed that they prepared the outside attack to crush the state of the revolution. This fear led to the execution of 700 000 people in the USSR between 1936 and 1939. Order 00447, of July 30, 1937, of the NKVD, on “old letters, criminals and anti-Sobétic elements”, mainly persecuted ordinary citizens, peasants and workers, even though they were not involved in any kind of conspiracy nor posed a threat to the State. The descendants of Stalin no longer provoked large-scale terror, but they remained afraid of dissent, which made it extremely difficult for internal democracy to evolve.

They managed to save the Soviet state, but in return they refused to build socialist society. The programme, born to end the tyranny of the State, created an oppressive state.

In any case, outside the Soviet Union, the illusion of the Leninist project in the rest of the world continued for many years to encourage struggles for a new “communism”, forcing the defenders of the established order to seek new opposition formulas.

After the end of the Second World War, the US-led coalition organized a systematic war against communism, as they understand: any obstacle to the development of the capitalist “free enterprise”, even more so as an American.
The campaign now had two sides. On the one hand there was a fiction, that of the cold war, presented as the defense of the “free world” and often composed of dictatorships, which saw the attack of the Soviet Union inevitable. It was all wrong, it is a lie that the Soviets were thinking of a battle to conquer the world, because from the time of Lenin they were very clear that revolution could only be done from within countries. It was also wrong for the Americans to prepare themselves pre-emptively to end the Soviet Union. But those two lies benefited the Americans, both to keep their allies under their discipline and for the Soviets to be occupied in their defense.

“The worst thing that can happen to us in a global war – Eisenhower-said privately – is to win. What would we do if we won with Russia?” Ronald Reagan was surprised when in 1983 he learned that the Russians were actually afraid of a surprise aggression, and told him what he wrote in his schedule: “We should tell them that no one here intends to do so. What the hell do they have what we would like?” He was surprised that they did not discover the fraud before; in 1986, Gorbachev decided to abandon the armed struggle, “no one will attack us, even if we disarm ourselves completely.”

The other side of this project was the global crusade against communism, and the real goal was to prevent the spread of ideas that opposed the development of capitalism. The aim was not to defend democracy, but to defend free enterprise: In Iran they did not bring Mossadeq down because it was a danger to democracy, but because it was of interest to the oil companies; Lumumba was not killed to protect the freedom of the Congolese assassins, but because it was of interest to the companies that exploited the uranium mines of Katanga, from there came the mineral to manufacture the Hiroshima bomb.

And when in general he was struggling to defend certain interests and defend freedom of enterprise, the consequences could be even more deplorable. One of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century was the murder of three million two hundred thousand Vietnamese who were willing to conquer Asia. They did not go to Vietnam to defend democracy, because there was a military dictatorship in South Vietnam.

The founding lie of that war was critically denounced by John Laurence, CBS correspondent in Vietnam between 1965 and 1970: “For five years we have been killing people in favor of Vietnam’s general robbers who have been enriched with our money. That is what we have actually done. Communist threat? Damn it! (...) We got so deep inside that we couldn't even get out, because it would seem like we've lost it. It's crazy. We will not win, that everyone knows. But we will not consent to it and we will not go home, we will continue to kill people, thousands and thousands of people, including ours.”

That is why the words that Obama has recently made, glorifying the men who emigrated to Vietnam, for him, are so illustrative, for the obscure origin of this anti-communist struggle, “advanced in jungles and rice, fighting hot and in the rain as heroes, to protect the ideals that we Americans worship.” What are those ideals?

Nor was there a communist plot in the Central American countries, but the dirty wars of the Cia were shattered. Senate of EE.UU. recognized in 1995 that the subversive assumptions murdered in those places were “trade union organizations, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and teachers, and people linked to activities that would be legal in any democratic country,” in fact. Today, the dirty war continues, because in Honduras, criminal gangs continue to kill people, organized by governments and international companies that want to exploit natural resources. Berta Cáceres, murdered on 3 March 2016 by the Dutch company patrolling the Agua Zarca reservoir, or José Ángel Flores, president of the Unified Peasant Movement of Agüán, died on 18 October 2016.

The silence that spread in the face of all these wars was denounced by Harold Pinter in his speech of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. He said that the United States was involved in the power campaign in the world and that they had managed to disguise their crimes by presenting them as “forces for the good of the world.”

While the United States defended a free enterprise and the countries of “real socialism” failed in their attempt to build a better society in the post-war years, another “communism” created by the diffuse fear of the enemy, which benefited us all globally.

The horror provoked by global communism – not by its military force, but by its inspiration against the abuses of capitalism – and the repression of stopping it was not enough, the Western governments launched reformist projects to achieve social improvements without resorting to revolutionary violence. We owe this terror three decades of happiness after the Second World War: the development of the welfare state and the sharing of productive benefits with a level of equality never achieved between employers and workers.
The problem was that “real socialism” showed the limits of its revolutionary project. When, in 1968, they refused to join the struggles of Paris or asked for the possibility of developing a more humane socialism in Prague, the communists lost a great deal of strength. What Karl Kraus, above all, estimated: “May God keep communism forever, so that this chusma – the capitalists – does not become even more shameless (...) and that at least they have nightmares when they lie down.”

Since the mid-1970s, this crowd has been sleeping peacefully at night, without worrying that its privilege threatens revolutions. And that's why it's been gradually recovering not only those who had surrendered in the cold war era, but also those who had won in the workers' struggles for a century and a half. The result is the world we live in today, inequality is constantly growing with economic paralysis, as if it were collateral damage.

At a time when the anniversary of the 1917 revolution is approaching, we are again hearing the usual citations to discredit those events. Some find these reproaches more necessary than ever when a report of the Victim of Communism Memorial Foundation on 17 October 2016 states that among young Americans between the ages of 16 and 20, the millenials, know nothing about that story. What is more serious: half of the youth would be willing to vote for a socialist, 21% for a communist, because they think that “the economic system is wrong”, and 40% would want a radical change to ensure that whoever wins the most pays the most, depending on their wealth. The Foundation desperately calls for these young people to be taught the evil story of the “collectivist system”.

I think we need another kind of memory, on the one hand, to recover the history of that hope that had gone wrong, with a more global dimension, because our social struggle also conserves it.

And on the other hand, to reflect on the different subjects that the events of 1917 can offer to our current problems. It is interesting to see how a researcher of capitalism such as William Robinson, when referring to the current crisis, draws for himself conclusions that Lenin himself would agree: that reform is not enough – that the old path of social democracy is exhausted – and that one of the obstacles that must be overcome is precisely the power of states to serve exclusively business interests. And he concludes that the only alternative to global capitalism of these times is a transnational country project, which would be the same as the global socialist revolution that Lenin proclaimed in April 1917 when Finland got off the train at the station.

The forces that should build this popular project will probably be very different from the traditional aspects of the past. They will be forces that are being created from below today, fueled by the daily experiences of men and women. For example, like the struggles of South African workers or indigenous Peruvians against the major international mining companies, such as the Zapatistas who claim their rebellion “from the bottom and to the left”, the forces such as the Kurdish who wants to create a stateless democracy, or the Mexican teachers who are demonstrating for public education, such as the peasants who militate in local associations such as the Unified Movement of Aguan instead in parties. These associations are joining others at the state level, such as the Assembly of Indigenous Popular Associations of Honduras led by Berta Cáceres, who in turn work in transnational organizations such as Vía Campesina. These forces are not yet represented, either alone or together, but they are not yet for order that has threatened us, but they announce the possibility of a collective awakening.

They want to escape the future of inequality and poverty that threatens us all, but the path ahead is quite complicated. The failure of the 1917 experience shows us that the difficulties are very great. However, I think he has taught us that we had to try it, and that it might be worth trying it again.