The talk will concentrate on how the revolution occured and its consequences! It will also explore future possibilities for the socialist idea.

SPEAKER: Dr.V.Janardhan is a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad. His research interests include industry and labour, and business studies. He has been a keen student of labour for nearly two decades now. As a researcher primarily but also in a limited sense as an activist, he has been associated with trade unionism in premier industrial metropolises in India.

CONTEXT: It is hundred years since the Bolshevik revolution happened! But when it happened it shook the world and also shook many ideas, beliefs and prognoses. According to orthodox Marxian theory it was not supposed to happen there. But it happened due to certain peculiar or unique material conditions in Russia at that time, AND, in significant measure due to the presence of one man – LENIN.

Lenin took the revolution when it happened, to another phase, in the direction of socialism and communism. He was for speeding up the process of the ‘stages of history’ by immediate transcendence from a nascent capitalism in Russia to consciously building socialism, under the aegis of a workers’ state and a Party that held power in the name of the working class. The latter was not exactly the most numerous class then but by Marxist doctrinaire understanding the most ‘progressive’ class historically.

The working class, controlled by the Party which also would dominate the state apparatus, was to push towards socialism. The movement eventually went towards a totalitarian state and society, a movement which can be dubbed as ‘from Lenin(ism) to Stalin(ism)’.

These were all crucial deviations from orthodox/classical Marxism. The Russian/Bolshevik revolution attracted severe philosophical, theoretical and ideological criticism from several other Marxian tendencies.