The October Revolution and a middle-aged Communist

For many a 40 something year old, born in the Soviet century and raised in a Capitalist world, the October Revolution isn’t top of the mind recall per se. In fact, for the few who do venture into understanding what Communism, Socialism, Anarchism is it is an arduous task of sifting through now debunked propaganda by Robert Conquest, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and, especially if you are an Indian, oodles of complaints about how Communism is the same as trade unionism. Once you get through that fog of misinformation, comes the real journey. But like all journeys, Communism and Marxism was never just about the textbooks but about real life itself. Thus, my journey….

I was a kid of the late 70s. The word was rife with revolutions, the Iranian Communist party the Tudeh had just been banned by the Shah of Iran at America’s orders and the Revolution there was coming to a head but with a theocrat as a leader. Vietnam was still on everyone’s minds and people were still talking about the puny Chinaman who brought down the might of American imperialism, though at great cost. Pol Pot was deposed and consigned to History by Communist Vietnam while the US refused to intervene in that crisis in Cambodia. South America….a pot that was always boiling since the Cuban revolution. The 70s in India (though I was diaspora at the time) were a time when every Indian youth was clamouring for Revolution and Revolt; Naxals were not the bad guys yet; Sitaram Yechury was firebrand orator! Though there was also the counter narrative by bourgeois cinema that always showed the Communists as either jungle fighters or trade unionists who just ruined the lives of those who went to work. All this hadn’t damped the spirit yet though. These were the times of the Cold War. Angola, Mozambique were all turning red. The world was poised to be a worker’s state!

The eighties perhaps marked the real fight back by the imperialist powers in the media. Everyone suddenly was told to stop romanticising Revolution, get to work and make money. A fair point considering that this was the start of the Neoliberal project and Globalisation was just beginning as a start up. And then came the mid-eighties… the time of Indira Gandhis death, economic turmoil, the initiation globally of trade agreements by the Western world through the World Bank and IMF. The end of Socialism began with these stabs.

Thus, the nineties of Gorbachev and Yeltsin… the miserable end of the Soviet dream began. It was at this time that my first tryst with Communism began in my early teens in Africa. Nelson Mandela had just been released from Robben Island and F. W De Klerk had declared that the end of White Rule in South Africa was imminent. This was a victory of the colored races but also the time of great reactionary sentiment and the first time that I had heard from the mouths of Indians…. “Why are you celebrating with the Blacks? Why are you touching them? Don’t you know that they are cannibals?” To which, I asked my mother with my feeble knowledge at the time…. “Amma, What is Communism?” She of course only knew of Communism superficially from her growing years in Kerala. Communism was liberation, fighting against discrimination, destroying the might of the rich, equality for all, building a new society, a soviet of Kerala even, and the how the evil American imperialist empire was all pervasive.

The latter part of the nineties put my initial Communist fervor to rest. India had taken the World Bank loan and shipped planeloads of its sovereign gold to the Bank of England as surety – the biggest insult to a country that threw English Imperial rule out of its soil. But in exchange, the Neoliberal project had begun! The USSR was no more, and Liberal Democracy was touted as the entropic state of the world – World history it seemed had come to an end as Francis Fukuyama was to later say.  But this was a time of opportunity… We graduated from college and there were loads of jobs if you could string together a sentence in English. We all targeted doubling our salaries every year by changing jobs….the dream run had begun! And as for that little churn in society called Babri Masjid and the communal riots – it was a warning sign that India and Bharat were not going to develop in economic harmony.

In came the 21^st century! The Neoliberal project was at its peak! Equality was unnatural! Welfare to poor a State Sin! The Poor had to be starved into oblivion! Until the eve of 2008, when the world suddenly crashed around us. Economic and financial terms were bandied about and we didn’t know what it meant! How can Neoliberalism and the Rich fail us? It was then that we all realised that there was something called Economics and we had to understand it – it was not trade, not industry but something far more dark, mysterious and sexy seeing how countries and their wealth would exist and disappear.

It was at these times, I suddenly became a manager and started handling big teams at work. I learnt about Production, Time, Materials, Productivity, etc. And when 2008 crash had struck I also saw how disposable people were to the modern Corporate machine. In the words of the man who gave me my first Pink Slip… “People come and go, there are a 100 to take the place of a Worker who doesn’t fall in line, is too old or is too costly. The Corporation is the new God and God must survive” Needless to say, he had no idea how true his words were when his Pink Slip came after he dutifully rendered 100 people jobless thinking he was sacrificing to his “God.” I promised myself that I would never be the guy who hired too much or too little, that no matter how high I climbed or believed I was higher than my crew, I was and always was a worker, and I finally realised that Work success was built by my Team not by Managers. The seeds of Worker Class consciousness were thus sown – not by a textbook or the Communist Manifesto but by Cold, Hard Capitalism.

The journey ends in Capitalist Dubai, a land where the Neoliberal project is at its most vulgar. Construction workers bussed from their quarters to work sites well before the more well-heeled citizens could catch a glimpse and be upset by the sight of them, a world where people could be told to leave the work in 10 minutes flat and escorted out by security, where no one fought back against injustice at work or in life but rather cooled their frustrations and insecurities in consumerism. A world that was make believe and fake. But more importantly, what was stark was that nobody was really Producing anymore. Work was outsourced, the “factory” was dead. Project managers were merely Executive Assistants to Directors.

The questions plagued me: If the population keeps rising and there is no more Production where will everyone be hired? Not everyone has access to expensive education like an MBA – which in itself was just a monetary roadblock to ensure that the lower classes would never be managers. And most importantly, if there is no job security, how the hell will I survive to old age when my bones don’t allow me to work anymore. Another system must exist! And that is when I remembered that it did… it was Called Socialism. My frequent meetings with a Kazak revealed a Soviet Union where, as he was growing up, you always had a job, you never were poor, you never had to worry about your healthcare, you never had to worry about being taken care of once you couldn’t work anymore. The State ensured all that. This was an anathema to the Indian experience! To everything I knew! But it was just the perfect solution! And thus I picked up Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto for the second time in my life. This time it all made more sense and the world Capitalist crisis, as foretold by Marx, had already come to pass and that made Marxism the most obvious solution in the world.

This is perhaps the greatest legacy of the October Revolution to my generation who are Communists. We never lived in Communism and only experienced its demise in the Soviet Union but through its demise and the impending demise of Neoliberalism, we learnt that a better world was not something Utopian and in the future, but was also a Reality in our past. Something that put us the Working Masses who sell our labour for sustenance at the seat of power, A form of Politics where wealth did not decide politics, where we would not be looked down upon for the color of our skin and that was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Lal Salaam, Red Salutes, Jai Bhim, Hul Johar!

Iquilaab Zindabaad!