What Did the October Revolution Give the World?
The Concessions Capital Made Out of Fear, and the Ones It Could Never Take Back
The History of the Eight-Hour Day Runs Through 1917: What Did the October Revolution Give the World?
To Young Comrades on Its 109th Anniversary — What October Changed Outside Russia, the Concessions Capital Made Out of Fear, and the Ones It Could Never Take Back
In Short: What Did October Give the World?
Dear Young Comrades,
On 25 October 1917 by the old Russian calendar, 7 November by the new one, the soviets of workers and soldiers took power in Petrograd. That was 109 years ago.
At school they told you about the October Revolution in three sentences: there was a revolution in Russia, the Soviet Union was founded, then it fell apart. Then they left you a picture made of Cold War films, "totalitarian regime" documentaries and photographs of queues. Something is missing from that picture: what October changed outside Russia. Because the most lasting consequences of this revolution were lived not in Moscow but in London, Berlin, Paris, Delhi, Jakarta, Johannesburg and Ankara.
That is what this piece is about: what October changed in the world. We are going to draw up a balance sheet; humanity's credit column.
First, the summary. The October Revolution and the socialist society built after it changed the following in the world:
- The eight-hour working day stopped being a utopia and within two years became international law. The first convention of the International Labour Organization, founded in 1919, was the eight-hour day. The first country to put it into practice was Soviet Russia, in October 1917.
- Universal suffrage spread across Europe between 1918 and 1920; within a decade women's suffrage had spread from Germany to the United States. Look at the calendar: all of it after October.
- Women's equal citizenship — civil marriage, the right to divorce, paid maternity leave, crèches, the right to abortion — became a state programme for the first time between 1917 and 1920. It took the West fifty years to reach most of these.
- Social insurance — unemployment, sickness, old age, maternity — was written down for the first time in Soviet decrees as a right rather than as charity; in 1948 it entered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- Free education open to all — the principle we defend today in Türkiye against an education system in which the bell does not ring the same for everyone. In 1897 three out of every four people in Russia could not read or write; by 1939 seven out of every eight could. This mobilisation model later became an example from Cuba to Nicaragua and for UNESCO programmes.
- Free healthcare — the world's first fully public, preventive, district-based health system was set up in Soviet Russia in 1918; Britain's NHS (1948) and the World Health Organization's principle of "Health for All" (Alma-Ata, 1978) drew on this model.
- The welfare state in the West — from the Beveridge Report to the French social security system, from the German "social state" to the Marshall Plan, the founding documents of post-1945 Europe give the same reason: so that the workers do not turn to communism. The welfare state is the price October made capital pay.
- The liberation of the colonies — in 1917 most of the world was colonised, and this was considered "civilisation". October put the right of nations to self-determination on the world agenda; the cadres of the first modern independence parties in the colonies passed through schools in Moscow; between 1945 and 1975, 1.5 billion people won their independence.
- The defeat of fascism — three quarters of the German army's losses were on the Eastern Front. The Red Army opened the gates of Auschwitz. The society that stopped Hitler in 1941 was the society October had built.
- Racial equality — the government's brief in the 1954 case that ended racial segregation in US schools stated that discrimination "furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills". October's shadow lay over the unravelling of Jim Crow too.
- Opening science and culture to the people — networks of libraries, museums, concert halls and sports facilities as a public service; the space age opened by the child of a collective-farm family; the montage theory of Soviet cinema teaching even Hollywood.
- The knowledge that it is possible — this most of all: October proved that the propertyless can take power and build a society, and that this society can advance faster than the most developed capitalist countries. That proof can never be erased.
None of this was October's "gift" to the world. The British miner, the German metalworker and the French railwayman won the eight-hour day with their own strikes. Indians freed India; the Vietnamese freed Vietnam. But after 1917 all these struggles leaned on a proof — "it can be done" — and the capital facing them bargained out of a fear — "it could happen here too". October did not replace the struggle; it changed the price of the struggle.
Now for the details.
Part One: What Kind of Place Was the World in 1917?
To understand what October changed, we first need to see what had not yet been changed.
In 1917, in the most developed countries of Europe, a factory worker's day was 10–12 hours; in mining and textiles it could rise to 14. There was no weekend; Sunday was a religious holiday, and unpaid. Paid annual leave did not exist as a concept. Children worked from the age of twelve, in some places earlier. When you lost your job, fell ill or grew old there was nobody to look after you; the church or a charity, perhaps.
The vote? In Britain roughly 40% of adult men — the propertyless — could not vote. Women could not vote in national elections in any major European country. On marrying, a woman passed legally under her husband's guardianship; divorce was either impossible or the man's right alone. A child born outside marriage was "illegitimate" and had no right of inheritance.
The rest of the world? Almost all of Africa, most of Asia and the whole of the Middle East were colonies or semi-colonies. This was considered not something to be ashamed of but something to be proud of: "bringing civilisation". A British viceroy in India, a Belgian company in the Congo, a French settler in Algeria ran the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and world law found this normal.
And the world had been at war for three years. Ten million soldiers and seven million civilians had died, and were still dying. Most socialist parties had voted in 1914 for their own governments' war budgets.
It was in this world, in October 1917, that workers and peasants took power in the largest country on earth. And look at what they did in the first hundred days.
Part Two: The First Hundred Days — Centuries of Order Changed on Paper and in Life
The first two decrees adopted on the night of 26 October, when the Second Congress of Soviets took power, were the decrees on Peace and on Land. The Decree on Peace proposed to all the warring peoples a peace without annexations or indemnities, and it did one more thing: it announced that all of tsarism's secret treaties would be published. Within a few weeks Izvestia published the Sykes–Picot Agreement, showing how Britain, France and Russia had divided the Ottoman lands among themselves. The peoples of the Middle East learned for the first time from Petrograd at which table, and to whom, they had been sold. The Decree on Land abolished private property in land and gave one hundred and fifty million desyatinas of land to the peasants.
More followed in the weeks after. We set the dates side by side with the situation in the West:
| Decree | Soviet Russia | When did the West grant the same right? |
|---|---|---|
| Eight-hour working day | 29 October 1917 | Germany November 1918, France 1919, US 1938 (40 hours) |
| Paid annual leave (two weeks) | 1918 | France 1936, Britain 1938 (one week) |
| Sickness and unemployment insurance | November–December 1917 | Unemployment insurance in the US 1935 |
| Paid maternity leave (16 weeks) | December 1917 | The US still has no federal paid maternity leave |
| Legal equality of women and men, civil marriage, equal right to divorce | December 1917 | Divorce in Italy 1970, in Ireland 1996 |
| Equal rights for children born outside marriage | December 1917 | West Germany 1969, France 1972 |
| Abolition of estates, titles and privileges | November 1917 | Britain's House of Lords is still there |
| Separation of church from state and school | January 1918 | — |
| Abolition of all legal discrimination against Jews and religious minorities | November 1917 | — |
| Right of nations to self-determination, including secession | 2 November 1917 | At the UN only in 1960 |
| Right to abortion | 1920 (first in the world) | Britain 1967, US 1973, France 1975 |
| Free education and free healthcare | 1918 | NHS in Britain 1948 |
Look at this table for a while. Each row shows the birth date of a right we consider "normal" today. And in most of them the first date is Petrograd's.
These decrees were issued under military intervention by fourteen states and in conditions of civil war, under siege. They changed the world from the very first day — because now, somewhere in the world, a state had written that these were rights. And in the 1920s and 1930s that state turned what was on paper into life.
Part Three: Life Changed in Russia — In Numbers
What best shows that a society's fate has changed is not grand words but simple numbers. Look at these:
Literacy. In the 1897 census, 28% of Russia's population aged 9–49 could read and write; among women the figure was 13%. With the literacy campaign launched in 1919 it rose to 57% in 1926 and 87% in 1939. In one generation a country of a hundred and fifty million learned to read and write. And not only in Russian: in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Siberia, alphabets were created for more than fifty peoples without a written language, schools were opened and newspapers printed. Today's written cultures of the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Turkmens were founded in those years.
Health. In 1913 there were 28,000 doctors in Russia; in 1940, 155,000. Life expectancy was 32 years in 1913 and 69 in 1960. Infant mortality fell from 270 per thousand in 1913 to 35 per thousand in 1960. What made this possible was the system set up in 1918 and named after its founder, Nikolai Semashko: a free, fully public district network that put preventive medicine first, with a health unit in every neighbourhood and every village. There was nothing like it anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, as Britain built the NHS, it was looking at this model; it was no accident that the World Health Organization's "Health for All" declaration was signed in 1978 in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.
Work and unemployment. In 1930 the Soviet Union closed its last labour exchange; unemployment no longer existed. The same year unemployment in the US was 9%, and two years later it would reach 25%. While world capitalism floundered in the Great Depression, Soviet industrial output grew four- to fivefold between 1928 and 1940. Magnitogorsk, the Dnieper dam, the Stalingrad tractor plant, the Moscow metro — these were the works of the plan that turned a peasant country into an industrial giant in twelve years. In the early 1930s American engineers went to Magnitogorsk to find work.
Women. Before 1917 women workers were the majority in Russia's textile industry but had no rights at all; in the village they were in effect slaves. The women's department set up in the 1920s brought millions of women into political life; crèches, public canteens and laundries were opened in factories — "liberation from domestic slavery" was a state programme. Female literacy rose to 82% in 1939. In 1950 three quarters of Soviet doctors were women; nowhere else in the world did that figure exceed 10%. The first woman to go into space, in 1963, was a textile worker.
Culture. In 1913 Russia had 14,000 public libraries; in 1970, 360,000. The number of books printed each year became the highest in the world. A club in every factory, a theatre in every city, a sports ground in every neighbourhood — these were not luxuries but part of the plan. Soviet cinema invented montage theory in the 1920s; Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is still the first lesson in the world's film schools. In 1957 the first artificial satellite, and in 1961 the first human, went into space from this country (in The Space Race from Sputnik to Starlink we told the class story of that race); Yuri Gagarin was the son of a collective-farm carpenter's family.
Set the life of a Putilov worker in 1913 beside his life in 1950: the working day, the wage, the housing, his child's school, where he went when he fell ill, the pension he received when he grew old, his library, his holiday. The difference between those two lives tells you what October was — and that difference is not only a difference in the things one has but, in Fromm's language, a difference in the human being one is.
Part Four: The Concessions of Fear — Why Did Western Capital Give Its Own Workers Reforms?
Now we come to the main thesis of this piece. What October did in Russia is impressive; but what changed the world is what October made others do outside Russia.
Let us say it plainly: the Western European "welfare state" was built in two waves — 1918–1920 and 1945–1950. What these two periods have in common is that the prestige of the Soviet example and the fear of revolution in the West were at their peak. This is not an interpretation; it is a confession from the mouths of those who made the reforms.
The first wave: 1918–1920
15 November 1918. In Germany the emperor had fallen, and councils of workers and soldiers had been formed — as in Russia. Hugo Stinnes, the most powerful of the German industrialists, sat down with the trade union leader Carl Legien and in a single day granted everything he had refused for twenty years: the eight-hour working day, recognition of the unions, collective agreements. Stinnes made no secret of why: to prevent a revolution like the one in Russia. This is called the Stinnes–Legien Agreement, and it is the founding document of the German welfare state.
March 1919. The peace conference had gathered in Paris, and the British Prime Minister Lloyd George was writing a memorandum to his allies. In this document, known as the Fontainebleau Memorandum, he said: "The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt among the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other." A few months after writing these sentences, the same man signed the Treaty of Versailles, and Part XIII of that treaty founded the International Labour Organization (ILO). The preamble to the ILO's founding text, which can still be read today, begins: "conditions of labour exist involving such injustice, hardship and privation to large numbers of people as to produce unrest so great that the peace and harmony of the world are imperilled". And the ILO's Convention No. 1, adopted in Washington in 1919, is the eight-hour day and 48-hour week in industry. Soviet Russia had proclaimed this by decree two years earlier, on 29 October 1917.
In the same two years: in Britain, the vote for all adult men and for women over thirty (1918), the "homes fit for heroes" housing programme (1919), the extension of unemployment insurance (1920). In France, the eight-hour law (April 1919). In Italy, the eight-hour day (1919). In Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Netherlands, universal suffrage and the vote for women (1918–1919). In Sweden, Norway and Denmark, the eight-hour day and universal suffrage (1919–1920). In the US, the vote for women (1920). All within two years. All after October. What they had not granted in the forty-seven years from 1870 to 1917, they granted in the three years from 1917 to 1920.
Türkiye was part of this wave too: in 1921, while the War of Independence was still going on, the first labour law passed by the Assembly in Ankara was the Havza-i Fahmiye Law, which brought the eight-hour day and a ban on child labour to the Zonguldak–Ereğli coal basin. There was a workers' movement in the coal basin — and Soviet Russia on the other shore of the Black Sea.
The Depression years: the New Deal in the shadow of the Soviet example
In 1929 world capitalism collapsed. In the US one person in four was unemployed. In the same years the Soviet Union was completing the First Five-Year Plan in four years, abolishing unemployment and opening giant factories. These were the years when Western intellectuals, trade unionists, even industrialists flocked to Moscow. The American labour movement had the greatest upsurge in its history in the 1930s, and a large share of the organisers of that upsurge were communists — the Flint sit-down strike (1936–37) unionised the car industry.
Roosevelt's New Deal is the product of this pressure: the Wagner Act recognising the right to unionise (1935), the Social Security Act (1935), the law bringing in the forty-hour week and the minimum wage (1938). In France, the Popular Front government brought in two weeks' paid leave and the forty-hour week in 1936; French workers saw the sea for the first time in their history. In Sweden, the social democratic "middle way" was built in the same years — openly as "neither Bolshevism nor fascism".
The second wave: 1945–1950 — Europe in the shadow of Stalingrad
When the war ended, communist parties in Europe were winning the highest votes in their history: 28% in France, 31% in Italy, 23% in Finland, 38% in Czechoslovakia. Communists were the backbone of the resistance, and everybody knew it. In France the Communist Party was called "the party of the executed".
All the founding documents of Western Europe were written in these conditions. In Britain the Beveridge Report (1942) declared war on the "five giants" of human need — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness; in 1945 the Labour Party won the greatest victory in its history, and in 1948 it founded the NHS: free, open to all, public healthcare. One of the books read in Beveridge's circle was Henry Sigerist's Socialised Medicine in the Soviet Union, published in 1937. In France the social security system was founded in 1945; the minister who founded it was the communist Ambroise Croizat; Renault was nationalised. Italy's 1948 Constitution opens with "a democratic Republic founded on labour". West Germany wrote the "social state" principle into its constitution and in 1951 gave workers in the coal and steel industries equal representation on company boards — because on the other side of the border stood East Germany, and a shop-window race was under way.
And the Marshall Plan. In 1947 the US poured what would be hundreds of billions of dollars in today's money into Western Europe. Secretary of State Marshall and President Truman wrote down the reason openly: to prevent communist parties from coming to power through elections in Western Europe. The text of the Truman Doctrine can still be read today; the justification for aid to Greece and Türkiye is the same.
In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Read Articles 22–26 of the Declaration: the right to social security, the right to work and to just pay, the right to form trade unions, the right to rest and paid holidays, the right to health and to education. These articles were not in the declaration of 1789; they were in the decrees of 1917. Those who got these articles into the Declaration were the Soviet and people's democracy delegations, together with the Latin American and social democratic delegates.
What is this called?
We call this a "concession", but note: nobody gave anybody a present. Western workers won every right with their strikes, their votes and their resistance. But after 1917 Western workers did not sit down at the bargaining table alone; beside them sat an invisible third party. At that table capital lived the dilemma of "reform or revolution" for the first time as a real choice, and it chose reform. The welfare state is the price October made Western capital pay.
The most conclusive proof of this? What happened after 1991. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the fear lifted and capital began to take back, one by one, what it had given: the retirement age went up, healthcare was opened to the market, universities started charging fees, union density in OECD countries fell from 35% to 16%, and the share of income taken by the richest 1% returned to 1920s levels. Look at Thomas Piketty's famous "U-curve": inequality starts to fall after 1917, hits bottom after 1945, rises after the 1980s and after 1991 returns to pre-1917 levels. The two low points of that curve are the two peaks of the fear of October. The taking back, one by one, of October's concessions is the clearest proof of why those concessions were made.
Part Five: The Wretched of the Earth — October in the Liberation of the Colonies
The greatest historical event of the 20th century is the unravelling of colonialism: between 1945 and 1975, 1.5 billion people, more than half of humanity, won their independence. That event passed along the road October opened — in three ways.
As an idea. In 1917 colonialism was the norm of world law. The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, published in October's first week, proclaimed the right to self-determination including secession, and this right was set out not only for the peoples inside Russia but as a principle for the whole world. Nearly two thousand delegates from every corner of Asia and the Middle East came to the Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in 1920; it was the place where colonised peoples were told for the first time, "you too can be subjects of history". In 1960 this principle entered the United Nations declaration on the ending of colonialism (Resolution 1514) — on a proposal brought to the agenda by the Soviet Union.
As cadres. In 1921 the Communist University of the Toilers of the East opened in Moscow. Look at the list of those who passed through it and its sister schools: Ho Chi Minh, the founder of Vietnam; Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, among the leaders of the Chinese revolution; Indonesia's Tan Malaka; Japan's Sen Katayama; Africa's Pan-Africanist thinkers; and our own Nâzım Hikmet. A large share of the first modern independence parties in the colonies were founded by cadres trained in these schools.
As material support. Egypt's Aswan Dam, India's Bhilai steel plant, the Lumumba University where thousands of African and Asian engineers, doctors and teachers studied, the weapons sent to the independence wars of Vietnam, Algeria and Angola — the existence of the Soviet Union gave colonised peoples the possibility of refusing the West's terms. The "third way" of the Bandung Conference (1955) was possible only in a bipolar world.
And look at it from the other side as well. As Britain withdrew from India, France from Africa and the Netherlands from Indonesia, they wrote the same reason in their own documents: not to "lose" these peoples to communism. Accepting independence was the coloniser's own calculation — and on one side of that calculation stood October.
This influence reached inside the US too. In 1954, as the US Supreme Court handed down its decision ending racial segregation in schools, the government had submitted a brief to the Court; it quoted the Secretary of State that racial discrimination "furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills" and harmed America's standing in the world. The historian Mary Dudziak showed this with documents: one of the invisible forces behind the American civil rights movement was the Soviets' exposure of the US for its racism during the Cold War. The role of the Communist Party and Soviet-trained cadres in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa is part of the same story; so are the people's movements in Latin America stretching from Chile to Nicaragua — as in the piece where we told the story of Víctor Jara.
Part Six: Who Defeated Fascism?
The weightiest proof in this piece is Stalingrad.
Fascism was born as anti-Bolshevism from its very first day. Mussolini and Hitler alike were financed by their own capitalists as "insurance against communism". The Thyssens, the Krupps, IG Farben — they were Hitler's treasury. When the Western democracies handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich in 1938, their calculation was plain: let Hitler turn east and clash with the Soviets.
Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. This was not a war but an extermination plan: the Nazi Generalplan Ost envisaged the destruction of thirty million Slavs through starvation and the enslavement of the rest. The Soviet people lost 27 million lives in this war — fourteen per cent of the population. Leningrad was under siege for 872 days; a million people died of hunger, and the city did not surrender.
And on 2 February 1943 the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad. The fate of the war turned that day. Between seventy-five and eighty per cent of the German army's losses in the Second World War were on the Eastern Front. When the Normandy landings took place in June 1944, the Red Army had already entered Poland. On 27 January 1945 the soldiers who opened the gates of Auschwitz were soldiers of the Red Army. The backbone of the European resistance — in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania — was the communists.
So what made this possible? What stopped Hitler in 1941 was the society that 1917 had built. The heavy industry built in the 1930s in the middle of the Depression was moved beyond the Urals in the first months of the war, 1,500 factories with it, and in 1942 it produced more tanks and aircraft than Germany — that was the planned economy's test in war. The literacy campaign gave the army millions of young people able to take technical training. The policy of equality between peoples allowed a multinational country to fight without falling apart. And one thing more: the people of that society knew what they were fighting for.
Today a narrative is circulating that equates the army that liberated half of Europe with the regime that built the concentration camps, as "two totalitarianisms". This narrative has no historical value; it has a political function. Making people forget who defeated fascism also makes them forget who fed it.
Part Seven: What Could Not Be Taken Back
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; we described what today's Russia has left of it in the Dossier: The Real Russia. But the permanence of a revolution is not measured by the lifespan of a state; it is measured by its opponents starting to speak its language. Look at this list and think about how each item was considered an "extreme" in 1917 and how it is "normal" today:
| In 1917 | Today |
|---|---|
| Eight-hour working day: a dangerous workers' demand | Universal norm; violated, but its legitimacy is not questioned |
| Women's right to vote: not in any major country | An undisputed right across the world |
| Women's equal participation in paid work: a radical idea | A United Nations norm |
| Free education open to all: a utopia | Written in every constitution, defended everywhere |
| Health as a right not bought and sold: a dream | A World Health Organization principle; remembered again in the pandemic |
| Unemployment, sickness and old-age insurance: charity | A right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights |
| Colonialism: "bringing civilisation" | Indefensible; illegitimate at the UN |
| Right of nations to self-determination: Bolshevik propaganda | A basic principle of international law |
| Paid leave, maternity leave, crèches: a luxury | The minimum of labour law |
| Public ownership and planning: impossible | State intervention in the economy "normal" in every crisis |
| Anti-fascism: a communist affair | A founding value of Europe |
| Racial equality: lynching in the South, discrimination in the North | Legal equality; the struggle goes on |
| Science and art: the privilege of one class | Libraries, museums, concerts, sports facilities: a public service |
| Worker, peasant, woman, colonised people: objects of history | Subjects of history; writing their own history |
You do not need to be a socialist to defend these today. Even a conservative politician defends the eight-hour day, women's right to vote, free primary education and the wrongness of colonialism. This is October's greatest victory: it forced even its opponents to speak its language.
And there is one thing more important than all of these: the knowledge that it is possible. Before 1917 the sentence "workers can take power and run society" was a belief. After 1917 it became a fact. The Paris Commune had lasted 72 days; the society October built stayed on its feet for decades, under siege, in war and in peace; it industrialised, learned to read and write, defeated fascism and went into space. This is something that can never again be called "impossible". What has happened cannot be said to be unable to happen.
Part Eight: October and Türkiye — A Neighbourhood
Let us not pass over the part of this story that touches us.
The founding of the Republic of Türkiye took place in the international space October opened. It was the Decree on Peace that exposed Sykes–Picot to the world. In the hardest years of the War of Independence, Ankara's only friend was Moscow: the Treaty of Moscow of 16 March 1921, and the gold and weapons that came from Soviet Russia, were part of the material basis of Sakarya and the Great Offensive. In the 1930s Türkiye's first industrial plan was prepared with Soviet experts; the Kayseri and Nazilli textile combines were built with Soviet credit — Sümerbank's first factories. The years in which Türkiye brought in women's suffrage (1930 and 1934), secular education and the civil code were the years in which its northern neighbour had the most advanced laws in the world in these fields.
Türkiye's communist movement is a direct product of October: the Communist Party of Turkey was founded in Baku in September 1920, and its founder Mustafa Suphi was drowned with fourteen comrades in the Black Sea off Trabzon on 28–29 January 1921. This too is part of the story; we do not hide it. Nâzım Hikmet went to Moscow in 1922, and his poetry was born there.
And Türkiye's own "social state" — the social rights of the 1961 Constitution, the Social Insurance Institution, free education, the state economic enterprises, severance pay — is the product of the Cold War balance, that is, of the fear of October; after 1980, by the same logic, it began to be dismantled as the fear lifted — we told the story of the armed beginning of that dismantling in the 12 September dossier. Today, when we defend severance pay, social security, public hospitals and free universities, what we are defending is the legacy October left us.
Part Nine: What Is to Be Done Today?
Dear Young Comrades, commemorating October is not sharing a photograph on 7 November. Commemorating October means defending today what it gave the world. In concrete terms:
- Read. This piece is an introduction. Start with Lenin's The State and Revolution, Stalin's The Foundations of Leninism, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don and Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered. Then, for "a reply to the bourgeois narrative", move on to the books of Domenico Losurdo and Ludo Martens. Set up a reading group; a book read alone is half read.
- Tell. At your workplace, at your school, in your neighbourhood, tell "the history of the eight-hour day". Print the two tables above on a single page and hand them out. Most people do not know where the eight-hour working day came from; once they learn, the way they see things changes.
- Defend. October's legacy in Türkiye is being dismantled: the severance pay debate, the retirement age, the marketisation of health through the city hospitals model, fees and dormitory shortages at university ("Whom Is the University For?"), the 45-hour week and working hours that in practice reach 60. Each of these is the taking back of a right won in 1917. Defend each one as a class question.
- Commemorate 8 March and 7 November with their history. A celebration of 8 March that does not know it was the day women textile workers marched in Petrograd in 1917 and started the February Revolution is incomplete. Let every commemoration be a lesson, every anniversary a call to duty.
- Organise. What took power in 1917 was not an idea but an organisation: the factory committees, the soviets and the party that united them. Today the committee at your workplace, your union and the party of the class are links in the same chain. This is October's first and last lesson: rights are won with organised strength and kept with organised strength.
The Age Is Still October's Age
Dear Young Comrades,
In this piece we have tried to answer a single question: what kind of place would today's world be without October?
Your eight hours, your weekend, your paid leave, your right to vote, your free school, your public hospital, your mother's maternity leave, the fact that you live in an independent country and not a colony, the fact that Europe was freed from fascism — 1917 is written in the history of every one of these. One hundred and nine years ago, when workers and soldiers took power in Petrograd, a bargaining table was set up in every part of the world, and at that table the working class was not alone for the first time.
The Soviet Union was destroyed in 1991. But what was destroyed was a state; the age that had opened did not close. Because the contradiction that opened that age — the contradiction between a handful of monopolies running the world and the working people of the world — goes on with all its force. The machine is new, the chain is old. And October's question has not grown old — the same question we asked in the Socialist AI Manifesto: in whose hands are the means of production, under whose control, for whose benefit?
Those who made October owe us nothing. What we owe them is to tell what they won and to walk the road they opened. We will settle accounts with our own past with great maturity, learn from experience and build a more beautiful world.
The history of the eight-hour day runs through 1917.
Long live the October Revolution!
Sources
Primary documents
- The first decrees of Soviet power (Peace, Land, the Eight-Hour Day, the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples, Workers' Control, Family and Marriage): V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 26; English texts: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/
- Constitution of the International Labour Organization, Preamble (1919), and Hours of Work (Industry) Convention No. 1 (Washington, 1919): https://www.ilo.org
- David Lloyd George, "Fontainebleau Memorandum" (25 March 1919), in Memoirs of the Peace Conference.
- Text and context of the Stinnes–Legien Agreement (15 November 1918): Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany 1914-1918.
- United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Articles 22–26: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
- United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), "Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples" (14 December 1960).
- World Health Organization, Declaration of Alma-Ata (12 September 1978).
- The Truman Doctrine speech (12 March 1947) and George Marshall's Harvard speech (5 June 1947).
History and analysis
- Henry E. Sigerist, Socialised Medicine in the Soviet Union, London, 1937.
- Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2000.
- Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, 2007.
- Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend.
- Ludo Martens, Another View of Stalin.
- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press; data: World Inequality Database, https://wid.world
- David Kotz & Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, Routledge, 1997.
- Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- David Glantz & Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, University Press of Kansas, 1995.
- Mete Tunçay, Türkiye'de Sol Akımlar 1908-1925 (Left Currents in Turkey 1908–1925); Bülent Gökay, Soviet Eastern Policy and Turkey, 1920-1991; Stefanos Yerasimos, Türk-Sovyet İlişkileri (Turkish–Soviet Relations).
- John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919).
Related posts on this blog
- Dossier: The Real Russia
- 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup — the founding violence of neoliberalism and the dismantling of the social state
- Víctor Jara, Chile, and the Class Legacy of Latin Resistance
- From Having to Being: Reading Erich Fromm with Class
- The Socialist AI Manifesto — on the planning debate
- Whom Is the University For?
- The Bell Does Not Ring the Same for Everyone
- On Enver Hoxha's Birthday: From the War Against Fascism to Today's Albania
- The Space Race from Sputnik to Starlink
- From Futurism to Techno-Fascism — on the contrast between the Soviet avant-garde and Italian Futurism
- BRICS Behind the Curtain and AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation — imperialist rivalry and anger drifting to the right in a world without the fear of October
Note: The figures are based on the sources named in the text, on the Soviet censuses (1897, 1926, 1939) and on UN and ILO historical series.
