We celebrate with great joy today the 108th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia.

This was the first successful revolution built on the foundations of Marxism, with leadership by V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The revolution brought food, housing, education, and healthcare to all the people of the new Soviet Union. But that isn’t all. It brought women’s emancipation and put into place special pro-equality measures dealing with the struggles of previously oppressed minorities. It ushered working and oppressed people, including women, into the exercise of political power.

The same struggles that propelled the October Socialist Revolution exist today. Working people continue to struggle in the United States for democratic self-determination and an end to economic exploitation for private profit. Peoples in Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, and elsewhere are already working collectively to meet their needs.

The United States is in the grip of a pro-democracy, anti-fascist struggle that is bringing peoples’ movements into motion. They are countering MAGA’s attacks on programs to help with food access, education, voting rights, and fundamental democratic participation in the national political dialog. All these rights are dramatically curtailed by the Trump–MAGA movement. The struggles to protect these rights build the foundation for a stronger, more organized U.S. working class.

The fightback includes the election of Communist Party USA candidates in various parts of the country. These candidates tend to be young. Their campaigns reflect a broad struggle, including those of organized labor, the fight to stop MAGA’s attack on working people and migrants, for peace in Gaza, and for a government that helps workers meet their subsistence needs to survive and thrive.

In 2023, 47.4 million people in the U.S.A. lived in food insecure households. Food insecurity has only deepened post-2023 due to the Trump–MAGA economic policies like the imposition of tariffs which raise prices, including food prices. Rental units and owner-occupied home ownership are likewise both growing in expense. There is an open war on the working class in the United States today. Workers are fighting back.

Over the past year alone, Oxfam noted, the wealth of the 10 richest U.S. billionaires soared by $698 billion.

“The data confirms what people across our nation already know instinctively: the new American oligarchy is here,” said Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America. “Billionaires and mega-corporations are booming while working families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, and groceries.”

The fundamental contradiction between workers who sell their labor power to survive and exploiters who use that labor power to produce profit that they then seize for their own use is sharply drawn in a country where the wealth is so inequitably distributed.

U.S. workers’ experience is part of a global trend. Globally today, 700 million people live in extreme poverty, while 3.5 billion more struggle to survive below the poverty line. In contrast, just 3 thousand capitalists now control a total wealth of 16 trillion dollars.
Workers suffer deeply from this assault of impoverishment. While millions of workers live below the hunger and poverty thresholds, the ten richest capitalists have increased their wealth from 20.9 to 31.9 billion dollars in just five years.

Immense poverty feeds the insatiable greed of the capitalists, fueling the growth of their already boundless fortunes. To end this, workers in the U.S. are exercising their right to to engage in struggle for change, and winning. Communist candidates won in Bangor, Maine and Ithaca, N.Y.

The Russian October Revolution showed that building a society led by workers that meets workers’ needs is realistic. Building an organized working class movement in the United States to do the same for working and migrant peoples, indigenous folks, Black, Brown, Asian, and all oppressed peoples, and ending NATO and U.S. imperialism, are intertwined struggles. Move money from the U.S. military budget to meet human needs now!

The struggle for socialism is a global struggle. We salute our fraternal parties — all built from the same political “big bang” of the Russian Revolution. We join them, and all people in the United States who struggle for workers’ needs and power, in solidarity.

La lucha continua.

Image: Fred Barr / CPUSA