USA

Racial Injustice Inferno

Saturday 27 December 2025, by Against the Current Editors


HISTORIAN VAN GOSSE writes: The many forms of despotism crowding in around us… represent a fundamental counter-revolution whose only counterpart would be the decades-long ‘Redemption’ that overturned Reconstruction’s biracial democracy in the former Confederacy and locked in White Supremacy for three-quarters of a century. (“Red Scares — and a Blue Scare? A Brief History of Repression in the United States”)

That specter of enormous rollbacks in the long struggle for racial justice will be our focus here, even though it’s hard to see past the headlines of the Trump regime’s nonstop atrocities and swirling chaos.

The context includes the administration’s daily signs of possibly cracking — over economic failures and rocketing health costs, popular outrage and community resistance to ICE atrocities, cancellation of all asylum applications, serial-murder bombings of boats in the Caribbean, the pardon of drug kingpin former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, and whatever’s hiding in those Epstein files.

Its twofold core mission, however, remains intact: massively expanding the wealth of the already rich, and dismantling at warp speed decades of accomplishments of Civil Rights and racial justice struggles. The first of these was not only the primary focus of Trump’s big barf-bag bill. It also energizes global moves to enrich his family and corporate cronies — that scheme for Mar-a-Gaza luxury resorts without Palestinians, the treacherous betrayal of Ukraine to line up business deals with Putin’s Russia, his looming regime-change war plan to grab Venezuela’s oil (and distract attention from all-Epstein-all-the-time news).

But it’s the counterrevolution against civil rights and racial equality that’s likely to have the longest-lasting consequences even after this post-constitutional gangster administration is gone. It’s far from clear that even a post-Trump Democratic presidency would seriously commit to undoing the damage.

Reversible Progress

That Black Liberation and racial equality have constantly been central to the hard struggles for democracy and social progress in the United States is of course no new discovery. Leaders from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois to A. Philip Randolph to Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, Jr. and every historian of the civil rights movement have all emphasized the point. Indeed, the reason why the movement is so intensively studied in every generation is that U.S. history simply cannot be understood without it.

By the same token, restoration of white supremacy is the pivot on which democratic rights can be turned back. Today, the speed with which so much of the civil rights revolution is being reversed is both astonishing and instructive. From the halls of academia to the military to the federal work force and the iconic Smithsonian museums, the quest for equality is vilified — while “Make America Great Again” is a barely disguised appeal to assumptions of inherent “white” intellectual and cultural superiority.

Ground had been prepared by decades of “backlash” as white southern Democratic (“Dixiecrat”) voters moved to the Republican Party after the 1964 election and passage of civil rights legislation. Waves of litigation were launched, twisting the civil rights quest for equality into a mythology of “anti-white discrimination.”

Thus, for example, the 1970s Bakke case in California sharply restricted affirmative action in higher education admissions, although not fatally all at once. At the University of Michigan, the African American proportion of the undergraduate student body was cut in half after affirmative action was banned by a 2006 voter referendum, from around eight percent to 4.5% today. The Associated Press (October 23, 2025) reports on the national trend:

After decades of gradual growth, the number of Black students enrolling at many elite colleges has dropped in the two years since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in admissions, leaving some campuses with Black populations as small as 2% of their freshman class.

Wrecking Ball

Even more menacingly, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has step by step weakened the critically important 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) until it is practically a dead letter. During the Obama administration, the Court removed the federal government’s oversight of election procedures in states that historically disenfranchised Black voters. It now enables state legislatures to engage in hyper-partisan political gerrymandering of voting districts, so long as they’re not explicitly labelled as racially motivated even when everyone knows they are.

Quite likely, the remaining protections under Section 2 of the VRA, allowing citizens to sue over racially biased redistricting, are targeted to be swept away in the Court’s current term.

In any case, the irregular mid-decade redistricting ordered by Trump in Republican-controlled states beginning in Texas, Missouri and Indiana is geared to weaken Black representation in Congress. And the retaliation by Democratic-controlled California can only deepen the justified cynicism with which so much of the population already views the country’s dysfunctional institutions.

When Trump and his merry band of gangsters returned to power, then, they inherited a quietly crumbling edifice of civil rights protections to which they’re taking the wrecking ball. Vilifying “woke,” DEI (diversity/equity/inclusion) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), their intent is to turn the racial and social justice clock back six or seven decades.

CRT is especially relevant as an academic framework holding that racism is not simply an individual prejudice but is systemically embedded in U.S. legal systems, policies and institutions. That’s central to the study of how American society’s racial structures can enable civil rights and social progress, thought to be permanent, can be reversed.

Does this mean literally restoring legal Jim Crow? That would be neither possible nor necessary. After all, the demise of post-Civil War Reconstruction after 1876 did not mean literally reviving slavery in the South. White supremacy was entrenched instead through systematic economic and social restrictions — from sharecropping to enforced segregation, a thousand crippling restrictions on Black people’s accumulation of wealth in the North and South alike, lynch mob terrorism, etc.

In this issue of Against the Current, Paul Ortiz discusses how so many critical issues today cannot be confronted separately from each other. That’s a key to understanding where Trump/MAGA and the wretched duopoly of the capitalist Republican and Democratic parties are dragging us.

The brutal inequalities in U.S. capitalism, under which one in eight people and a higher proportion of children rely on food assistance (SNAP), which they were about to lose in the government shutdown, are being deliberately widened by Trump’s tax policies as well as the obscene self-enrichment of corporate elites and Trump’s corrupt cronies.

Deepening inequality directly impacts the lives of African American and Latinx communities of course, in myriad ways from urban food deserts and desperately unaffordable housing to a looming wave of rural hospital closings — devastating to non-affluent white people as well.

Mass incarceration is both a deliberate tool of social control, and a perverse kind of economic stimulus where prisons are constructed, providing local employment where few other job opportunities exist. It’s catastrophic for the incarcerated, their families and communities, and actually a big financial loss for society as a whole, but the “prison-industrial complex” is baked into the structure of race and class injustice.

Broader Connections

Understanding and confronting these structures is also highly relevant to other struggles even if they may not appear directly related. A powerful example is the reign of terror against immigrant communities.

But since the targets of ICE and Border Patrol are not mainly African American, what do the ongoing and pending rampages in Latinx, South Asian, Haitian, Somali, Afghan and other communities have to do with the civil rights counterrevolution?

Quite a lot. Under Trump and the right wing, for example, oversight of police conduct such as consent decrees against racial profiling and brutality have been eliminated. Police violence is thereby producing the climate for the Gestapo-like body-snatching, car-smashing ICE tactics.

Trump’s calling the Somali community “garbage,” or that Haitian immigrants “are eating the dogs,” are pure anti-Black bigotry. Even more cynical is the campaign against Afghan refugees, attempting to reverse the wide popular support they have, especially among U.S. military veterans of that miserable war, for the services the Afghan provided and for the safety they were promised in return.

An infamous Supreme Court ruling allowing ICE to grab people on the street or at home for looking brown, written by Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh, flows from the effective abolition of prohibitions against racial profiling. It will of course feed straight back into the conduct of police forces against communities of color everywhere in the USA.

As for the mass incarceration epidemic and the spreading plague of for-profit private prisons, it quite logically extends to the rapid construction of huge immigration detention centers with cynically comic names like Alligator Alcatraz, Speedway Slammer (Indiana), Cornhusker Clink (Nebraska) and Deportation Depot (Florida).

Bringing the horrors of Guantanamo home to the U.S. mainland, such facilities might be left intact for future use as concentration camps for political detainees or designated unwanted “surplus” populations.

Such examples are readily multiplied. Trump’s full-frontal assault on university admissions, governance and DEI programs — to which some like Columbia, Indiana University and Northwestern have disgracefully capitulated — are inextricably intertangled with criminalizing campus Palestine solidarity, reducing international student access, and threatening to remove students for the crime of exercizing free speech rights.

The overall lesson is that injecting toxic racism into political life is a pivotal strategy of this administration, a set of policies that will poison our society for generations unless they’re directly confronted and defeated. How?

Looking Forward to Fight

Much of what was won for civil rights, democracy and liberation will have to be fought for again, in new conditions and undoubtedly with new tactics. More court battles are being won than lost, although the courts will not save what rights and democracy we have in the face of a lawless regime.

The biggest shortcoming of the resistance so far is that the major forces of the U.S. working class, the unions, are only weakly involved — with some important exceptions.

Particularly in response to the gutting of union rights for federal workers, school voucher schemes and voter suppression tactics, public service unions including the American Federation of Teachers, National Nurses United, AFSCME and the Service Employees International Union as well as the American Federation of Government Employees have launched various campaigns and court challenges. Industrial unions, broadly speaking, haven’t yet mobilized — in part because sections of their members are pro-Trump, they’re divided over his tariffs, and projects like massive data centers offer construction jobs even though they’re short-term and come with ruinous environmental impacts.

The good news is that active resistance is rising, along with popular revulsion, most visibly in well-videoed community and street mobilizations against ICE. It’s also seen in Trump’s collapsing approval ratings, although the absence of any strong independent political force means that anger and energy are channeled into the Democratic Party — where they’ll ultimately face disappointment and dissipation.

The excitement over the New York City mayoral election of Zohran Mamdani points to both the potential of popular power, and the dangers. Mamdani’s performance at the good-vibes meeting with Trump doesn’t negate the threat of ICE in New York, which will require a continuing mobilization to overcome — along with all the other obstacles to Mamdani’s progressive housing, transit and food affordability agenda.

It’s not only about New York. Take for example Trump’s threats to the large Minnesota Somali community: “we don’t want them here” and “reverse migration is the only answer.” Not coincidentally, that same “reverse migration” term is raised by the far-right racist AfD party in Germany, openly supported be Elon Musk and J.D. Vance.

It’s the responsibility of state and local officials to put a threatened community under emergency protection, and only that community’s self-organization and a powerful allied movement can bring the political pressure to force them to do so — along with mounting the independent defense actions that are urgently necessary.

Whether the Trump presidency is truly in crisis is too early to say. If its daily crimes against humanity are to bring about its downfall, it has to be organized and disciplined movement activism to push it over the cliff.

Source: January-February 2026, ATC 240.

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Against the Current Editors is published by Solidarity, USA, a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International. It is a bi-monthly analytical journal explaining its goal: as part of our larger project of regroupment and dialogue within the U.S. Left, the journal presents varying points of view on a wide variety of issues. As such, debates are frequent and informative, with the goal of promoting discussion among activists, organizers, and scholars on the Left.

Trumpist fascism: The worm turns

By Kevin B. Anderson

Published date 28 December, 2025

First published at MR Online.

For those who lived through Richard Nixon’s lurch toward authoritarian rule, the period after his reelection in a landslide in November 1972 was frightening. (And it was a real landslide, with 60 percent of the vote.) Nixon soon launched a brutal “Christmas” bombing of Vietnam and prepared further revenge against his “enemies list” at home. Though weakened by then, antiwar youth still constituted the largest presence among the 100,000 people who demonstrated against his inauguration in January 1973. But even though Nixon seemed to be riding high, the worm had begun to turn. A few weeks later, the American Indian Movement began its epochal Wounded Knee Occupation. By May, the Democratic Party had recovered some of its backbone and the Senate Watergate hearings were underway. The rest of the story is well known.

Today, the worm is turning for the Trumpist fascists, despite their control (unlike Nixon) of all three branches of government and their massive attempts to transform the US state and society. In November, Zohran Mamdani’s electoral victory in New York, as well as other victories for progressives in Seattle and elsewhere, showed not only a widening opposition to Trumpism, but also its radicalization. The No Kings demonstrations in October drew over five million into the streets. The immigration raids in the Los Angeles and Chicago regions met with fierce citizen opposition on the streets, slowing and even derailing efforts at mass roundups, in actions reminiscent of the legendary struggles against the Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s. By December 2025, amid more electoral defeats, most notably for a Cuban right-winger in Miami, Trump’s poll numbers plummeted amid severely worsening jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What went wrong for the Trumpist fascists?

According to the famous statement by Martin Niemöller,

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

Niemöller was describing what are sometimes called “salami tactics”: divide one’s opponents by picking them off one at a time, starting with the most reviled.

But this has not been the case with Trumpism in 2025. The Trumpist fascists have instead gone after everyone, everywhere, all at once.

They went after transgender people from day one, but also attacked large LGBTQ constituencies and even prominent centrist liberal feminists. They denied transgender military veterans their pensions. This kind of repression took place in purportedly liberal institutions as well, as when the University of Pennsylvania acceded to Trumpist pressure by severely restricting trans people from its athletic programs. But the Pride demonstrations in June saw very large turnouts, including in lots of smaller cities and towns.

Under mad hatter multibillionaire Elon Musk, DOGE attacked federal agencies with a sledgehammer, not just the social programs or diplomatic jobs, but also the police/security apparatus. The administration also decreed in peremptory fashion that it was ending union representation for one million federal workers. Other Trumpists even attempted to prosecute the likes of the former director of the FBI. The working class recoiled in the face of Musk, anyone’s worst nightmare of a boss. The racist and sexist nature of these attacks was also seen in the fact that huge numbers of federal workers are women, among them many women of color. As Erica Green observed at the end of the summer: “The most recent labor statistics show that nationwide, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in the public and private sector between February and July of this year, the only major female demographic group to experience significant job losses during this five-month period” (“Black Women Most Affected by Trump Cuts,” New York Times, September 1, 2025). A furious backlash has ensued, as seen not least in the election returns in the DC area and elsewhere.

Trumpist fascists tried to seal the border with Mexico, claiming they were targeting violent “criminal aliens,” while rounding up random brown people across the country, seizing everyone from high school students to pregnant women to grandmothers. Many were in fact citizens, while countless other citizens and residents showed solidarity on the streets.

At universities, the Trumpists went after pro-Palestine speech and organizing even more than during the Biden administration, further weaponizing charges of antisemitism. But instead of waiting to consolidate this form of repression before moving against more powerful constituencies, they also targeted from the start the more established Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion structures, and they even jeopardized the funding of scientific researchers holding massive Defense Department contracts. Research funding for science dropped to its lowest level in decades, while that for humanities and social sciences plunged even lower. Almost immediately, some university administrations surrendered without a fight, like at Columbia, which, among other outrages, removed self-governance from its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department. By December, Northwestern University president Henry Bienen, who actually began his academic career as an Africa scholar with expertise on Tanzania, did Columbia one better. In his deal with the Trumpist fascists, Bienen ignominiously revoked an agreement with pro-Palestine protesters from 2024 that had mandated scholarships for Palestinian students and the establishment of an advisory committee that would have included discussion of divestment from apartheid Israel. He did so in the face of a 595–8 Faculty Assembly vote rejecting this kind of capitulation.

Most universities in relatively liberal areas of the country have attempted rotten compromises — curtailing Palestine protests, eliminating or renaming DEI — that fell short of complete capitulation. Harvard struck a slightly stronger pose than most, but its degree of willingness to compromise is unclear. Meanwhile, students have shown few signs of accepting the Trumpist agenda. Nor have faculty, as seen by the lawsuit at the University of California launched by the faculty association rather than by craven administrators. At UCLA, the contrived nature of Trumpist antisemitism charges has even led to the resignation of a significant number of Justice Department prosecutors, normally hardly in the progressive camp. At many universities, the defense of academic freedom continues to include Palestine and transgender rights, the two issues centrist liberals want us to downplay or even drop.

Meanwhile, in the South and in some of the more conservative states elsewhere, academic repression has been even more pervasive. Faculty have been fired for discussing transgender rights, Palestine, or socialism; or even over chance remarks about assassinated rightwing leader Charlie Kirk. Some universities are policing syllabi and eliminating courses they accuse of DEI or “wokeism.” At the University of Texas, once a flagship research university, the pro-Trumpist administration is attempting to strip faculty of the forms of self-governance that have marked universities since their inception nearly a millennium ago. The outright firing of even faculty with tenure is not limited to Southern and conservative states, however. This can be seen in the dismissal over faculty objections of Professor Sang Hea Kil of San José State University for her participation in a Palestine demonstration. To make this point, Kil is working with Tom Alter, a historian dismissed for socialist speech from Texas State University, in a joint campaign for their reinstatement and for academic freedom more generally.

Most big corporations and law firms readily agreed to drop or curtail DEI programs, which were never all that strong in the first place. Trumpists attempted to appeal to majoritarian sentiment here (“anti-white” discrimination, etc.), but at the same time enraged many people of color and youth who will not easily forget.

Inside the military, the Trumpists have summarily fired long-serving Black and women officers, removed references to General Colin Powell from websites and restored Confederate monuments and symbols. They also pulled Black studies books from military academy libraries in response to the Trumpist attack on DEI. In national parks and monuments, depictions of slavery were also removed. These moves have outraged many veterans, who are speaking out openly when many still serving cannot.

The Trumpists have intimidated several of the major broadcast networks and attacked popular comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Rob Reiner, the latter right after he was brutally murdered. The backlash was immense, and some networks had to backtrack. Meanwhile, billionaire Trumpists like the Ellison family are buying up large media properties, including most notably the storied CBS News, celebrated for having in the past stood up to both McCarthy and Nixon. The new CBS news editor, self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, has already blocked a 60 Minutes segment that featured migrants recounting their deportation and torture at the notorious Cecot Prison in El Salvador.

Trumpist fascists have rolled back or seriously undermined over a century of health and environmental protections. Most damaging here in the short term are the policies of anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr., which will result in the deaths of more people than anything else the Trumpists are doing. In terms of the environment, Trumpists are slashing anything they can, even trying to abolish wind farms. They have also broken up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the agency that monitors and predicts hurricanes.

Such callous disruption, destructiveness, and brutality, not limited to just a few sectors, but taking place in numerous directions at the same time, has amounts to an overreach that has made even some Trumpist constituencies uneasy. While none of this portends something like what Nixon experienced, forced to resign eighteen months after beginning his second term, it is clear that the public has turned against Trump, as seen both in elections and in numerous opinion polls showing his support at below 40 percent.

Three historical episodes of violent state repression, US style

There is much fear of a third Red Scare or a second “Redemption,” the name given by its perpetrators to the violent resurgence of white supremacy in the South in the 1870s. But are we really on the verge of something so momentous? What are the chances that the Trumpist fascists can get their increasingly unpopular agenda through, either by force or by changing public opinion radically in their favor? Since they don’t seem to be succeeding in the latter, can they create truly violent and massive repression at a societal level? Another look in the historical mirror may help illuminate this.

Here, a glance at the three most serious bouts of political repression the United States has experienced to date may be instructive. It should be noted that each of them took place in the aftermath of a truly serious crisis involving war and revolution. I would argue that as serious as is the situation facing us in 2026, the chance of such levels of repression is not as great as is often being assumed.

1. Starting in the 1870s, white vigilantes and politicians across the South visited tremendous violence upon Blacks and their supporters and murdered thousands, rolling back Reconstruction. In the process, they created a violent wall of racial segregation and disfranchisement that held for nearly a century across the region. But this was the counterrevolution that followed the only real social revolution the United States has ever undergone, the Civil War and Reconstruction, when four million enslaved people gained physical and, for a time, political freedom. Because that revolution did not cross the horizon of distributing land to formerly enslaved people, something that Northern capital and some liberals also hesitated to support, the new democratic freedoms of the era came to lack any solid economic foundation. In a few years, the reactionaries pounced, abetted by the acquiescence of northern capital and the Republican Party in the infamous compromise of 1877.
2. In 1919–20, a truly massive Red Scare targeted Socialists and Wobblies, as well as the nascent Communist Party, all the while blaming immigration as the source of radicalism. The Red Scare began during World War I amid a pervasive patriotic fervor that marginalized antiwar and leftwing voices. But it also occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, seen as a global threat by capital and its states across the world, including the United States.
3. The second Red Scare, McCarthyism, was meeting stiff resistance until two large geopolitical events, the Chinese Revolution of October 1949 and the start of the Korean War in June 1950, put dissenters and the left severely on the defensive. Without full-scale war and the “loss” of China, McCarthyism would likely have had milder effects.

What of the United States today? While nothing like a social revolution has occurred over the past decade and a half, we have seen threats to the global social order that began with the Great Recession of 2008 and the Arab revolutions and Occupy in 2011, and then continued into the Sanders campaigns, the #MeToo movement, and the Movement for Black Lives of 2020. While not fully cataclysmic, these events were radical and widely situated enough to scare both of the major wings of Trump’s base: (a) primarily lower-middle class, disaffected, mainly white people, many of them deeply racist and some of them working-class, who feel threatened by immigration and the rising prominence of people of color, all this amid declining or stagnating living standards; and (b) a new plutocracy disdainful and fearful of even the mildest taxation or regulation.

The former group is by no means incorrigibly Trumpist, though the persistence of its support for an entire decade has been truly remarkable, never going below 35 percent in national polls even after the January 6, 2021 coup attempt and the huge revulsion against Trump that followed. Nor is Trumpism a one-person show; rather, it is a deep movement of opinion and practice, as David Norman Smith has recently argued. At the same time, as Bill Fletcher noted last spring with regard to our response going forward, “rank-and-file members of our unions should be won over to fully appreciate the nature of the danger facing us.” In this way, we need to dialogue with at least some elements of that Trumpist base, while also trying to break up the deep pessimism into which many of the more progressive sectors of the working people have fallen.

The rapid shift rightward of the new plutocracy, in response to slights and mild threats to its hegemony, is a more recent phenomenon, as can be seen in the evolution of Elon Musk from moderate liberal during Obama’s time to Trumpist fascist, or more recently, in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s tilt toward Trump in late 2024. As Naomi Klein exclaimed last spring, the tech billionaires, once hailed as heroes even by many progressive, are so arrogant that “they truly believe they are gods.” The way in which both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times refused to publish their usual liberal editorials supporting Kamala Harris in 2024 — at the last-minute direct order of their billionaire owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong — was also a remarkable turn. But as Klein also noted, their alliance with Trump’s more plebeian base is deeply unstable. Nor do these moves have much support among the technical workers or journalists at these big institutions.

What we accomplished in 2025

The Trumpist fascist overreach has led to increased support for a wide array of forms of resistance. Three of these stand out at the end of the year 2025.

First and foremost, the defense of immigrants has been a shining moment of community mobilization and solidarity across ethnic lines. If the mainly Latinx communities being targeted were initially startled and intimidated by massive raids by ICE and the Border Patrol, the dispatch of US Marines and federalized National Guard troops to Los Angeles over the summer constituted a turning point.1 Since Los Angeles is a global media capital, the whole world witnessed the sight of armed troops guarding federal installations, of Latino US Senator Alex Padilla being violently arrested for asking a question of “Cruelty Barbie” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem inside the Westwood Federal Building, of ICE agents on horseback and in armored vehicles going through a city park full of children taking part in a summer camp, of President David Huerta of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in California being throttled and arrested while protesting ICE roundups of working people in Downtown LA, and of the death of a man fleeing onto a highway to avoid ICE—all this turned fear into rage.2 Groups like Union del Barrio, which has been doing this work for decades, organized regional neighbors to come out to protest ICE everywhere, so effectively that they could have protestors at most sites in a matter of minutes. In these networks, unions like SEIU were also crucial actors. After some weeks, amid reports of dissension within the national guard, themselves California residents called up involuntarily, the troop and ICE presence was scaled back, a clear victory for the resistance. At the same time, many arrests of protestors and draconian charges against them resulted in grand juries failing to indict or acquittals by juries of their fellow citizens, most recently in December in the trial of a tow truck driver who had removed an ICE vehicle from blocking a driveway during a raid.

By fall, when ICE and the National Guard hit Chicago, the population was even more fully prepared, with their long trains of civilian cars and their ubiquitous whistles “escorting” ICE agents everywhere, often slowing arrests to a trickle. In Chicago’s more compact urban neighborhoods, government thugs were more easily surrounded and blocked. As LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, a champion of immigrant rights, noted during trip to Chicago’s predominantly Mexican American Little Village neighborhood:

We don’t have the whistles. They’ve become the fall soundtrack of the Windy City to the point organizers are holding “Whistlemania” events to hand them out by the thousands. Chicago has a radical legacy that predates LA… People poured out of businesses and their residences. Others looked out from rooftops. The intensity of their pushback was more concentrated, raw and widespread than almost anything I’ve seen back home. It wasn’t just the activists on call — block after block was ready.

As with Chicago, a number of other struggles have not gained the kind of media spotlight that has been shone on LA, but two examples are illustrative: In November, high school youth went on strike in Charlotte, NC to protest ICE raids on their communities. By December, Minneapolis community members also brought their whistles. On a freezing cold afternoon, the community, clearly better adapted to local conditions, outlasted shivering ICE agents, who gave up and left, allowing the people to secure an immigrant from their clutches.

The No Kings Day rallies, in June and in October, demonstrated the breadth of the opposition far and wide to Trumpist fascism, including in small towns in conservative areas of the country. Gigantic marches took place in many major cities, larger in October than in July. While controlled mainly by the liberal Invisible coalition, these events did not exclude either Palestine supporters or leftists, far from it, and they also featured a large trade union presence.

But it was Mamdani’s stunning double electoral victory in New York City that created the largest mobilization in a single city against Trump, with some 1.1 million voting for the democratic socialist, despite tens of millions being spent by billionaires, including centrist Democrats and Republicans, many of them rightwing Zionists who couldn’t believe how much “their” city had changed. To be sure, Mamdani hewed to the doctrines of reform socialism, which included some important economic measures like a wealth tax and free daycare and buses, while backing away from saying anything concrete about police brutality and murder. However, on one point he stood consistently to the left, refusing to back down in his clear support for Palestine, including the charge of genocide against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a metropolis whose City Council never managed to pass a Gaza ceasefire resolution, this was a stunning outcome indeed. Moreover, Mamdani’s campaign won via true grassroots organizing, over 100,000 volunteers to knocking on 3 million doors, thus bypassing the corporate media. In many cases recruited by the Democratic Socialists of America, these canvassers echoed Socialist Party efforts in cities like Milwaukee a century ago. Two weeks later, Seattle elected Katie Wilson as mayor, defeating a centrist incumbent who’d opposed a wealth tax.

The danger that Trumpism could still triumph

It is very sobering to recall, as mentioned above, that the radicalization of Trumpist actions and policies in his second term, and the growing opposition, has resulted in only a slight diminution of his support base. As also noted above, his core support, as measured by opinion polls, has never gone below about 35 percent, even in the months right after his 2020 electoral defeat and his January 2021 fascist coup attempt. Equally dangerous is the fact that support levels for Trumpism are surely higher inside the military and police apparatus, plus the fact that many of his civilian supporters are armed to the teeth.

As also mentioned above, the last year has also seen a sharp turn toward Trumpism on the part of many big capitalist individuals and firms, ranging from Silicon Valley billionaires to giants of Wall Street. Thus, the most flamboyant among them, Musk, is by no means alone. Other plutocrats have not expressed open support but acquiesced more quietly. Still others have tacked in a parallel direction, as seen in Bill Gates’s recent abandonment of environmental initiatives. All this gives Trumpism, at least for now, much more solid support among the dominant classes and their representatives than during his first term.

A look at Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s is instructive here too, since it shows how the resistance Trump is experiencing now could conceivably fade. Elected with just over 50 percent of the vote in 1980, Reagan met with fierce and massive opposition during his first few years. But an easy military victory in the 1983 Grenada invasion, amid footage of “rescued” white US students and of captured Black Grenadian soldiers, put the opposition — both electoral and grassroots — on the back foot for several years. This allowed Reagan to win a 59 percent popular vote landslide in 1984 and to consolidate neoliberalism for decades to come. Trump’s present military maneuvers against Venezuela, if successful in toppling the Maduro government without a fight, could offer him a “Grenada” boost. But Venezuela is a much larger country — with a population of 30 million versus Grenada’s 100,000 in 1983 — that would not be easy pickings.

While these examples are indeed worrisome, it needs also to be recalled that Trump has never received the kind of popular support that Reagan or Nixon achieved, let alone Woodrow Wilson during the First World War–era Red Scare. As of now, the opposition to Trumpist fascism is deep and wide, with no sign of abating. And while he is using the state apparatus in vicious, extremely destructive ways, he has not succeeded in intimidating his foes on the streets or at the ballot box—quite the contrary. While a semi-coup is of course possible, in forms like militarized voter suppression during the 2026 midterm elections, this seems unlikely for a presidency whose popularity is hovering around 40 percent. Of course, more severe repression, carried out by the elements of the state in league with vigilantes like the Proud Boys, could possibly silence the opposition. But that would take far greater force than anything seen up to now, including mass arrests and the violent intimidation of large sectors of the population. There are of course precedents for this, like the KKK and allied forces in the South from the 1870s to the 1960s. One sign to watch in this regard would be if Trumpist forces could create no go zones in states where they exercise a great degree of political domination. But so far, they have not been able to do so.

If the worm has indeed turned, what now?

Despite the above concerns, and they are undoubtedly serious ones, the tide seems indeed to have turned sharply against Trumpism as the year 2026 dawns. Republican congressional representatives are resigning either due to simple weariness or differences over the Epstein files or the prospect of skyrocketing healthcare costs. Even the right-wing Supreme Court blocked his use of the National Guard in Chicago as 2025 was coming to an end. The opposition, both grassroots and electoral, is gaining strength and confidence across the country. At the same time, tremendous damage has already been done and will continue to be done to the social and political fabric of an already wounded society as long as this regime is in power.

We need to continue and deepen the struggle, making it as broad as possible while still fighting for our principles within that struggle. As Marxists, we especially need to highlight the issues of class, race/gender/sexuality, environment, imperialism, and national liberation. Thus, we must insist that that class oppression and resistance remain at the center, whether in the defense of immigrant day laborers or more privileged US government workers. We also need to struggle within our unions and our communities for class unity versus racism, sexism, and xenophobia, cutting into the Trumpist base. The national liberation of the Palestinian people, who are struggling for their very existence in the face of genocidal Israeli colonialism, and Venezuela’s right to maintain its independence against Trumpist imperialism, cannot be sacrificed to any mythical “broader” unity. Nor can that of trans people, who are also fighting for their very existence, amid silence even among progressives. The protection of the environment cannot be put on the back burner, despite calls even from progressive to do so on a “temporary” basis, or to resort to nuclear power.

We need to build up organizations and coalitions that cut across all these issues and constituencies, but not in a way that erases their particularity, or that ignores capital and class. In order to do so, we will need build the struggle theoretically as well, against mainstream liberals who want to brush aside the most “controversial” issues, against some types of radicals who may wish to downplay the importance of capital and class, and against those among the Marxists and socialists who attack what they call “identity politics” in ways that cut us off from some of the most revolutionary forces in society today by downplaying race or the historical links of capitalist accumulation to colonialism and slavery.

At a time when some on the left are saying that we need to break completely with the tradition of the Russian revolution, of Lenin, I would argue the opposite. At a juncture like ours, when the world has changed in wrenching fashion, when established progressive forces are hesitating or even betraying, Lenin’s intransigence in opposing the imperialist First World War, an epochal event that created a civilizational crisis for the “West,” is still relevant. But it is not only that. In opposing war and imperialism, Lenin was joined by a number of other leaders and thinkers, from Eugene Debs and Leon Trotsky to Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg. What Lenin did differently from these others was to dig deeply into revolutionary theory amid all the chaos of war and repression. First, he made a profound study of Hegel’s dialectic. Second, out of that he developed his epochal theory of imperialism and of anticolonial, national liberation movements as a key to future revolutions, from India and China to Ireland. Third, in the summer of 1917, even as he was fleeing what seemed to be a wave of reaction that could repress the revolution, he wrote his masterpiece The State and Revolution. He and his comrades also made serious errors, which we can also learn from, but on the above matters he can still inspire us, most of all on the need to unite theory and practice, to face and analyze what is new very deeply even as one continues the socialist struggle without betraying its longstanding principles.

Thus, we need to renew and deepen the struggle in the streets, the schools, and the workplaces, while at the same time renewing and deepening our theoretical groundings.

Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

• 1

  Hereafter, I will use ICE, the largest and most active among them, as shorthand for the various federal forces that have been rounding up immigrants.

• 2

  The appellation “Cruelty Barbie” was used to characterize Noem by Anita Chabria in her column, “ Homeland Security Says It Doesn’t Detain Citizens. These Brave Californians Prove It Has,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 2025.

Paul Le Blanc on Russia’s 1917 Revolution and the problems of socialist organization

By Paul Le Blanc

Published date 27 December, 2025

“Russia’s 1917 Revolution: Problems of Socialist Organization,” by Paul Le Blanc, is the text (with sources added) of a December 4, 2025 presentation kicking off the third installment of Solidarity’s online study group dealing with “Problems of Socialist Organization.” It is reprinted with permission from both the author and Solidarity and, as such, appearing simultaneously on LINKS and Communis.

Russia’s revolution of 1917 resulted from the blend of terrible catastrophes and profound hopes. The First World War was going very badly for the Tsar’s army and for the Russian people, adding new grievances to old, and generating a new wave of working-class radicalization. The tsarist system of oppressive absolute monarchy was beginning to collapse as expanding catastrophes overtook Russian society. Historian Roy Medvedev noted: “By drafting millions of peasants and workers into the army and training them to handle weapons, the tsarist regime, without intending to, provided military and technical training […] The likely allies of the working class, the peasants, were armed and organized in military garrisons in every major city, with especially large garrisons in Moscow and Petrograd.” (Medvedev, 42-4.)

Journalist-historian William Henry Chamberlin once commented: “the collapse of the Romanov autocracy in March 1917 was one of the most leaderless, spontaneous, anonymous revolutions of all time.” (Chamberlin, vol. 1, 73.) This is both true and false — a paradox shedding light on the role of the revolutionary party. The deepening exasperation with the old system spreading throughout Russian society was compounded by war-weariness and despair. The only hope for a better life seemed to be in some kind of radical social change. Such moods and beliefs — “spontaneously” generated by objective conditions — were certainly the source of the uprising, but the revolutionary parties played an essential role in offering coherent conceptual alternatives to the status quo.

Protest actions were organized by such activists, including on the socialist-inspired holiday, International Women’s Day of March 8, 1917 (February 23, according to the old Russian calendar). In earlier years, there had traditionally been a relative political “backwardness” and passivity among unskilled workers — such as female textile workers — in contrast to the militant activism of the “conscious workers” among the more skilled laboring strata, such as those predominating in the heavily Bolshevik-influenced metal trades. Now it was metalworkers who were inspired to take to the streets in response to the appeals of militant textile workers, women of the factory districts on International Women’s Day chanting “Down with the war! Down with high prices! Down with hunger! Bread for the workers!”

On the following day demonstrations and strikes spread throughout Petrograd, with a proliferation of anti-war and anti-government banners. The military units of the city for the most part refused to take action against the insurgents, and in some cases even joined them. This appeal was issued by an on-the-ground united front:

We Bolsheviks, Menshevik SDs [Social Democrats], and SRs [Socialist-Revolutionaries] summon the proletariat of Petersburg and all Russia to organization and feverish mobilization of our forces. Comrades! In the factories organize illegal strike committees. Link one district to another. Organize collections for the illegal press and for arms. Prepare yourselves, comrades. The hour of decisive struggle is nearing! (Melancon, 22.)

Days of street fighting saw the police take the offensive, fire into the crowds, and then be routed as the workers fought back with growing confidence. As a general strike paralyzed the city, the overwhelming majority of the working class seemed alive with enthusiasm for revolutionary change. Increasingly, masses of soldiers, mostly peasants, joined with the workers. Historian Michael Melancon has emphasized the interplay between the socialist groups and radicalized working-class layers that were coming into the streets, noting: “Direct and organized socialist involvement and intervention occurred at every single stage.” (Melancon, 35; also see Mandel.)

The 1917 reports from knowledgeable New York Tribune foreign correspondent Isaac Don Levine give a sense of the events. While the “mainstream” politicians reared back in fear (with prominent liberal Pavel Miliukov predicting “the revolution will be crushed in fifteen minutes” by tsarist troops), Levine reports on “the leaders of the socialistic, revolutionary, and labor elements organized for a general attack . . . against the old regime.” Their democratic councils (soviets) mobilized “a revolutionary army, composed of soldiers, armed students, and workers. Red flags were now waving in the air everywhere, and, singing the songs of freedom and revolution, the masses continued their victorious fight. The leaders of the movement commandeered every motorcar they could get, armed it with a machine-gun and a gun crew, and set it free to tour the city and round up agents of the Government.” (Levine, 220, 225)

The revolution was triumphant. Traditional liberal and conservative politicians, with support from moderate socialists, hastily composed a Provisional Government, but its power was limited. “It was the workmen and soldiers that actually fought and shed their blood for the freedom of Russia,” Levine reported at the time. The politicians “took a hand in the situation only after the revolution had achieved its main success.” (Levine, 227.)

Levine explained to his readers that the gulf between the Provisional Government and the workers’ councils “is as wide as between the United States Government and socialism. Only such an upheaval as the revolution could have bridged this chasm between the two extremes.” While the Provisional Government “represents . . . business and commerce,” he noted, “the ultimate aim of the Workmen’s Council is social revolution. To achieve this revolution it is necessary to de-throne the political autocrats first, they say. Then the capitalistic system must be attacked by the working classes of all nations as their common enemy.” (Levine, 271.) This was in June 1917.

When he returned to Russia from revolutionary exile, Lenin came into conflict with some comrades in the leading circles of the Bolshevik party, as highlighted in his April Theses.

The theses asserted that Russia was “passing from the first stage of the revolution which … placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.” The Provisional Government was, he said, a “government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.” Instead, the theses insisted, the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies (or Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Laborers’ and Peasants’ Deputies) “are the only possible form of revolutionary government.” There should not be a parliamentary republic, but instead a soviet republic “throughout the country, from top to bottom.” The theses called for the abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy – Lenin believed the organized workers and peasants should take over the functions of these entities, with “salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.” The theses also emphasized that “it is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.” (Lenin in Žižek, ed., 56-61.)

But Mensheviks and SRs were in control of the soviets. The Bolsheviks had not yet recovered the hegemony they had gained in the workers’ movement before the wartime repression of 1914. Despite growing frustration with the Provisional Government, the moderate socialist leaders insisted the soviets should support the Provisional Government to help establish a capitalist democracy, which they saw as a lengthy but necessary prelude to socialist transition.

Alexander Kerensky, on the periphery of the SRs, had put himself forward as a bridge between the soviets and the Provisional Government. He was ultimately selected by others in the Provisional Government as President. Though many believed Kerensky was destined to build a democratic Russia, those who knew him well had doubts. “In Kerensky everything was illogical, contradictory, changing, often capricious, imagined, or feigned,” wrote SR leader Victor Chernov, Kerensky’s minister of agriculture. He added: “Kerensky was tormented by the need to believe in himself and was always winning or losing that faith.” (Chernov, 174.)

While still claiming to represent the soviets’ interests within the Provisional Government, Kerensky began to side with other establishment politicians against the councils, which were undermining his government’s authority. More and more frustrated workers were joining the Bolsheviks — even the SR and Menshevik left wings found Bolshevik arguments convincing. The brilliant maverick Leon Trotsky was only the most famous of many Bolshevik recruits.

The popular aspirations animating the February Revolution had been peace, bread, and land: an end to the mass slaughter of Russians in the imperialist war; the end of bread shortages caused by the impact of the war; and sweeping reforms to transfer land from the thin layer of aristocrats to the masses of land-hungry peasants. The Provisional Government balked at all these aspirations, and it was especially committed to continuing the war effort.

A crescendo of working-class anger in July culminated in a revolutionary demonstration. Militants in Petrograd, not under party control but with Bolshevik support, initiated what verged on a spontaneous uprising. The ensuing violence gave the government a pretext for large-scale repression. As Left SR Isaac Steinberg recounted, “troops of officers, students, Cossacks came out on the streets, searched passers-by for weapons and evidence of ‘Bolshevism,’ committed atrocities.” (Steinberg, 174.)

In the wake of “the July Days” (as this upheaval came to be known), Kerensky appointed right-wing general Lavr Kornilov commander-in-chief of the Russian army. Both hoped to counter the pressure from “unreasonable” workers, who were setting up factory committees to take control of workplaces and organizing their own “red guard” paramilitary groups to maintain public order and protect the revolution against reactionary violence. Kerensky found such radicalism disturbing, but right-wingers like General Kornilov thought moderates like Kerensky were just as distasteful. Traditional politicians — liberals as well as conservatives — began viewing military dictatorship as the only way to stabilize the nation. As Kornilov put it: “the spineless weaklings who form the Provisional Government will be swept away […] It is time to put an end to all of this. It is time to hang the German spies led by Lenin, to break up the Soviet, and to break it up in such a way that it will never meet again anywhere!” (Kerensky, 368.)

Prominent Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch recalled: “The news of Kornilov’s revolt electrified the nation, and especially the left. The Soviets and their affiliated organizations, the railroad workers and some sections of the army, declared themselves ready to resist Kornilov by force if necessary.” Another Menshevik eyewitness, N. N. Sukhanov, noted the Bolsheviks had “the only organization that was large, welded together by an elementary discipline, and linked with the democratic lowest levels of the capital.” He emphasized: “The masses, insofar as they were organized, were organized by the Bolsheviks.” (Abramovitch, 63; Sukhanov, 505.)

Working-class insurgents still identified with a variety of socialist currents, but as Abramovitch explained, “the threat of a counterrevolutionary revolt roused and united the entire left, including the Bolsheviks, who still exerted considerable influence in the Soviets. It seemed impossible to reject their offers of co-operation at such a dangerous moment.” (Abramovitch, 64.)

The Bolsheviks won immense authority in the soviets and greater support from workers in general. Trotsky, who helped manage these practical efforts and became president of the Petrograd Soviet, later recalled: “The Bolsheviks were in the front ranks; they smashed down the barriers blocking them from the Menshevik workers and especially from the Social Revolutionary soldiers, and carried them along in their wake.” (Trotsky, 1970, 185.)

The right-wing military offensive disintegrated before it could reach Petrograd. “The hundreds of agitators — workers, soldiers, members of the Soviets — who infiltrated Kornilov’s camp … encountered little resistance,” wrote Abramovitch. (Abramovitch, 63-4.) Kornilov’s troops responded to the Bolshevik, SR, and left-Menshevik agitators’ appeals by turning against their officers and rallying to the soviets.

In the wake of Kornilov’s failed coup, the Bolsheviks won decisive majorities in the soviets and secured overwhelming support among the working class as a whole. A majority of the SR party split to the Left, as did a significant Menshevik current, aligning with Lenin and Trotsky. This united front set the stage for revolutionary triumph in October. A majority was won for the demands: “Down with the Provisional Government, All Power to the Soviets!” Eyewitness John Reed offered this judgment:

Not by compromise with the propertied classes, or with the other political leaders; not by conciliating the old Government mechanism, did the Bolsheviks conquer the power. Nor by the organized violence of a small clique. If the masses all over Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed. The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the work of tearing down and destroying the old, and afterward, in the smoke of falling ruins, cooperating with them to erect the framework of the new. (Reed, 292.)

This is consistent with a consensus among historians seriously studying the matter. (For example: Mandel; Rabinowitch 2017; Suny, 2017.) But the revolutionary majority soon crumbled amid the terrible difficulties that overwhelmed Russia in 1918-1921. Yet if we restrict ourselves to 1917, what Reed says is true. The spirit of this reality can be found in Lenin’s proclamation to the Russian population immediately after the triumph of the Bolsheviks and their allies. (Le Blanc, ed. 2008, 278-80.) In it, Lenin says:

socialism is dependent on the Russian working people taking power into their own hands;

• it will come into being gradually;
• it must take place with the consent and approval of a majority of peasants;
• it must be in keeping with practical experience of the workers as well as of the peasants;
• it must be secured by working-class insurgency in the advanced industrial countries.

Another useful insight has recently been emphasized by Eric Blanc, who notes “the party that led the October Revolution … was not simply the product of the numeric expansion of the Bolshevik current.” Rather, “Bolshevism itself contained a wide variation of tendencies” but also “underwent a fundamental transformation in 1917 due to . . . unification with other Marxist currents.” This included: some left-wing Mensheviks; some who had been aligned with the Bogdanov wing of the Bolshevik faction; an anti-factional “Inter-District” grouping associated with Trotsky and others; veterans of the Jewish Bund; militants of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania; and more. “An ability to avoid the crystallization of a rigid, self-perpetuating leadership team was one of the secrets of Bolshevik success.” (Blanc, 278.)

A tilt toward majority rule is suggested in a point made by Ronald Suny: “much of the revolution took place in meetings of one sort or another — committees, soviets, conferences, and congresses — punctuated by demonstrations and the occasional armed clashes.” (Suny 2020b, 665.) A young participant, Mikhail Baitalsky, recalled “our exhilaration with the ideas of the revolution,” which “came from the depths of our soul.” He explained: “We were sincere above all because we formulated our views in absolute freedom […] It was based on a Communist faith — pure and unsullied — probably much like the faith of the first pre-Christian societies on the shores of the Dead Sea, with their doctrine of justice and their sacred writings that they read many hours each day.” Engaged in similar reading, discussions, meetings, Baitalsky and his young comrades “were never bored.” This was living democracy according to Baitalsky. Democracy, he explained, “is directly related to sincerity in human relations. I speak not about democracy as a social institution but about democratization as an element of social norms.” He concluded: “We carried in ourselves democratism as a consciousness of something akin to a mission – an extraordinary mission for the universal equality of all people.” (Baitalsky,13-4.)

At the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in January 1918, Lenin explained the controversial decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, after a single day, when it refused to recognize the authority of the soviets. Noting the workings of bourgeois parliaments as a sparring-place for the verbal contests of politicians, he concluded: “In Russia, the workers have developed organizations, which give them power to execute their aspirations […] We did not organize the soviets. They were not organized in 1917: they were created in the revolution of 1905. The people organized the soviets. When I tell you that the government of the soviets is superior to the Constituent Assembly, that it is more fundamentally representative of the will of the mass, I do not tell you anything new.” (Lenin quoted in Beatty, 432-4.; also see Douds.)

Many revolutionaries agreed that democratic soviets provided the best governmental form. “In the era which we are now entering the old standards no longer suffice,” proclaimed Maria Spiridonova, whose Left SR party worked with the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution and the early Soviet regime. “Until recently the phrase Constituent Assembly spelled revolution,” she acknowledged. “It is only recently, when the character of the revolution has made itself more and more clearly felt, that parliamentary illusions began to be dispelled from our minds. It is the people themselves, not parliaments, that can bring about the social release of man. Yes, when the people discovers the secret of its own power, when it recognizes the soviets as its best social stronghold, let it then proclaim a real national assembly. Let that national assembly be the only one invested with legislative and executive functions.” (Spiridonova quoted in Steinberg, 191.) Tragically, the Left SRs soon broke from the Bolsheviks over a treaty with Imperial Germany. They soon joined the many Right SRs (and even a few Mensheviks) who, along with tsarist and pro-capitalist forces, had launched a bloody civil war, supplemented by military interventions from major capitalist powers and an economic blockade, designed to bring down the Soviet regime. And yet, the revolution’s initial phase could still be described in this way, even by the Cold War scholar Alfred G. Meyer:

The October Revolution brought about the overthrow of all remnants of the old order […] The distribution of all gentry land among the peasants, which the Leninist seizure of power guaranteed, was as thorough as it could possibly have been. This … “bourgeois revolution” … carried with it all those changes usually attributed to the complete abolition of the precapitalist order. National self-determination of Russia’s many nationalities was, at least for the moment, carried to its logical conclusion […] Legal separation of church and state, removal of the old judiciary, reform of the calendar—all these measures were … part of the “bourgeois revolution.” This revolution was also expressed in the social institutions, in science, art, and education — in virtually all functions of public and private life. . . . [T]he revolution carried with it maximum freedom of expression and experimentation. Even where political liberties were soon curtailed, a certain degree of personal freedom was not extinguished for several years. (Meyer, 185-6.)

Unfortunately, the defeat and blockage of socialist revolutions in other countries meant catastrophes already afflicting revolutionary Russia widened and deepened. The Soviet Republic became what Lenin called a “besieged fortress,” engulfed by the increasingly brutal civil war, foreign invasion, and economic collapse. (Lenin, “Letter to Americans,” in Le Blanc, ed., 300.) Mistakes were made. Popular support badly eroded. The brutal and authoritarian realities of 1919 resulted in a one-party dictatorship by Lenin and his comrades. Complexities of the 1920s would culminate in the Stalinism of the 1930s. (Le Blanc 2017, 219-54, 293-367; Mayer; Rabinowitch 2008; Suny 2020a.)

The fact remains that there is much we can learn from the inspiring liberation struggle of 1917 that we have focused on here.

Sources

Abramovitch, Raphael 1962, The Soviet Revolution: 1917-1939. New York: International Universities Press.

Baitalsky, Mikhail 2025, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Supporter of the Marxist Opposition to Stalin WhoSurvived the Stalin Terror. Translated and edited by Marilyn Vogt-Downey. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.

Beatty, Bessie 1918, The Red Heart of Russia. New York: Century Co.

Blanc, Eric 2022, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Chamberlin, William Henry 1987, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chernov, Victor 1935, The Great Russian Revolution. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press.

Douds, Lara 2018, Inside Lenin’s Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.

Kerensky, Alexander 1965, Russia and History’s Turning Point. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

Le Blanc, Paul 2023, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. London, UK: Pluto Press.

Le Blanc, Paul 2017, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Le Blanc, Paul, ed. 2008, Lenin: Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, Selected Writings. London, UK: Pluto Press.

Levine, Isaac Don 1917, The Russian Revolution. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Lih, Lars 2011, Lenin. London, UK: Reaktion Books.

Mandel, David 2017, The Petrograd Workers in the Russian Revolution: February 1917-June 1918. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Mayer, Arno J. 2000, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Medvedev, Roy 1985, The October Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press.

Melancon, Michael 2000, Rethinking Russia’s February Revolution: Anonymous Spontaneity or Socialist Agency? Carl Beck Papers, Russian and East European Studies, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh.

Meyer, Alfred G. 1967, Leninism. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.

Rabinowitch, Alexander 2017, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Rabinowitch, Alexander 2008, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Reed, John 1926, Ten Days That Shook the World. New York: International Publishers.

Steinberg, Isaac 1935, Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist. London: Methuen and Co.

Sukhanov, N. N. 1984, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Suny, Ronald G. 2017, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution. London, UK: Verso.

Suny, Ronald G. 2020a, Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment. London, UK: Verso.

Suny, Ronald G. 2020b, Stalin: Passage to Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Trotsky, Leon 2017, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols. in one. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Trotsky, Leon 1970, “What Next?” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, ed. by George Breitman and Merry Maisel. New York: Pathfinder Press.

Žižek, Slavoj, ed., 2002, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917. London, UK: Verso.