Happy 100th Birthday USSR

Happy birthday USSR. The October Revolution in Russian in 1917 was the defining event of the Twentieth Century. It was one of those dialectical events that happen when quantity – as in number of people in the street – turned into quality. That the revolution encountered myriad problems cannot be disputed. Serious revolutionaries are not utopians. We are focused on the process, the dialectical process by which human progress evolves. I don’t mean progress in the sense of more gadgets, but in the sense of a powerful unification of humanity toward a compassionate society focused on meeting all human needs. October 1917 showed it could be done. I’d like to recommend that everyone at least watch Reds or re-read Ten Days that Shook the World this month. October 25 is the exact date or November 7, depending on what calendar you follow. Hell let’s celebrate the whole two weeks.

The collapse of 29 wasn’t so much caused by 17 as predicted by it – the shift that highly favored world revolution. In the U. S. this resulted in the rise of the union and civil rights movements, arguably creating the middle class. Then came Hitler, a last ditch effort on the part of the capitalists to terrorize the world’s workers into submission. But who won that war? The USSR defeated Hitler and won that war. Yes Stalin and his cohort effed things up big time. Still, talk of lesser evils. What if Hitler had won?

The word “communism” has been dragged through the mud way too deep to be a useful term for what we want, at least not in this period. I like Bobby Seale’s idea of co-operational humanism. The creation of the new society should be based less on ideology than on authentic human connection. Or as the other Lennon put it, “Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.”

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