NUMSA celebrates the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917
One hundred years ago on the 7th November 1917 (or the 25th of October in the old style Russian calendar) the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin launched an armed insurrection against the Duma, which is the legislative body in the ruling assembly of Russia. The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in Petrograd, and soon a new government was formed.
The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 resulted in an upheaval of the social fabric of Russian society. After the October Revolution, no one could deny the remarkable strength and unity of the working class and the peasantry. For the first time in human history, political power and the state were transferred to the working class majority; the dictatorship of the bourgeois state was replaced by a democracy of a workers state.
Fast track 100 years later to present-day South Africa and the conditions which were facing workers in Russia, are similar to the conditions facing workers today. The working class and the poor are suffering under the oppression of the neo-liberal capitalist system. More than half of the South African population lives in poverty; at least 35 percent of the working population is unemployed in a society which has the highest levels of inequality in the world.
The majority of the working class and the poor live a dehumanizing existence in slums and informal settlements, which do not have basic services like water and electricity. Furthermore, they are denied access to quality education or healthcare. The same conditions which were responsible for the suffering of the African working class majority continue to persist 23 years after the end of the brutal racist Apartheid system.
We now know that the negotiated settlement which ended the repressive regime of the racist National Party government, in fact resulted in a more sanitized version of Apartheid which is being administered by a Black government through the ANC.