What lessons are to be learnt from those heroic and tragic years, from those fights which decided the fate of the international Revolution that began in Russia in 1917? First of all, that attempt was defeated because the October assault remained isolated, due to the failure of the revo?lution in Germany. The international proletariat, thanks to Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ strategy, had put an end to the industrialised slaughter of the imperialist First World War on the Russian front; without that compass, the international proletariat was consigned to the multiplied massacre of the Second World War without being able to react.
Secondly, a colossal cycle of capitalist development in the old and new areas of the world market followed the new world war and the ignominy of the imperialist division of Yalta. That very development, precisely the irruption of Asia and China, is a dazzling validation of Lenin’s strategy, despite the defeat of the 1920s. On one side two billion salaried workers, on the other a handful of imperialist powers fighting for the sharing out of markets; uneven development leads to the decline of the old powers of the Atlantic order, America and Europe, and causes new contenders to emerge in Asia – China and India. A gigantic development, gigantic contradictions. The imperialist system of states is unable to maintain the global order; crisis and breakdown of the order will be the breach for the strategy of the revolutionary proletariat, as it was a hundred years ago in the October assault and in the epic of the International.
Thirdly, precisely the race against time of that 1919 shows that the strategy-party must be built and rooted before, in the long years of the counter-revolution. Reconstructing internationalist consciousness person by person, setting up a party on the Bolshevik model at the heart of European imperialism: this is the unprecedented task, it is our battle on the agenda. It is the ultimate lesson of the Communist International.
