Russian Revolution - festival of the oppressed

The challenge before the Bolsheviks was to forge unity among a working class and peasantry where there were deep divisions based on oppression. Anti-Semitism, national oppression, and women’s oppression were identified specifically by Bolsheviks as severe barriers to the unity of the working class.

VI Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, started from the general theory of oppression developed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and applied it to the specific conditions of the Russian workers’ movement.

The method developed by the Bolsheviks can be summarized according to two basic guidelines. First, revolutionaries place themselves at the front of the movements against oppression, as "tribune of the people." Revolutionaries are the voice of the oppressed against oppression in all circumstances and struggles.

And second, revolutionaries fight at all times for organizational unity within the working class, across the divisions between oppressor and oppressed.

Again and again, the key guiding principles of Bolshevik theory and practice regarding oppression were based on a commitment to breaking the hold of even a shade of acceptance of oppressive ideas within the working class. The Bolsheviks understood that ideas that scapegoat an oppressed section of the class would inevitably hold back the entire working class.

Within both the oppressor and oppressing sections of the divide, the Bolsheviks understood that there were pressures to ally with sections of the ruling class. Winning working class unity against oppression was therefore not an easy task. The struggle against oppression in the working class had to be won in the practical struggle against capitalism, not by abstract phrase mongering on the sidelines.

Lenin was particularly adamant about the politics of oppression.

In 1903, at the conference where the Bolsheviks were first formed, he challenged a dominant view in the Russian left that trade unions, still illegal under the Russian Tsar, were an adequate model for revolutionary organization.

Oppression had to be challenged in all its aspects, not only when the working class was the victim of this oppression, but also when any section of any class was victimized by oppression.

Revolutionaries, or what were at the time called Social-Democrats, had to operate on a completely different basis than reformists who were committed only to patching up the system.

Lenin argued that the struggle against oppression was actually a defining characteristic of a revolutionary socialist.

In What is to Be Done?, Lenin wrote:

But this is still only one side of the task of revolutionaries. To leave it at this would be to romanticize oppression.

Lenin was just as aggressive in challenging any notion of, ‘painting the leadership of the oppressed with communist colours’, to paraphrase his formulation regarding national oppression.

A Marxist theory of oppression starts from understanding that oppression is a weapon of the ruling class, and it therefore acts to hold back the class struggle.

Opposing oppression does not automatically lead to working class unity. It can create its mirror image, tailing any one who opposes oppression regardless of their strategic goals. It would be wrong to presume that every leader against oppression seeks to oppose capitalism.

Because oppression influences all classes, movements against oppression commonly unite sections of the ruling class with sections of the working class among the oppressed.

Without a clear strategy not only to fight oppression, but also to forge a united working class that can oppose the class basis of oppression — in other words to oppose capitalist society — movements of the oppressed would be led by middle class forces and co-opted.

Certain groups within the middle class or even the ruling class in certain historical conditions suffer from oppression. However, their class allegiance to the system holds back their ability not only to challenge capitalism, but also oppression.

The result is vacillation and opportunistic leadership that confuses and further divides the working class.

The Bolsheviks saw socialism, in the tradition originally developed by Marx and Engels, as the expression of the highest unity of the working class. It could only be achieved if a mass revolutionary party engaged in persistent arguments and participated in practical struggles against oppression.

Lenin emphasized the importance of the political struggle against oppression when discussing the tasks of the revolutionary women’s movement in 1920 with the German revolutionary Clara Zetkin.

Lenin described revolution as the festival of the oppressed. This is a goal well worth fighting for today.