ABSTRACT
Any revolutionary strategy must proceed from analysis of the material base of social production as it has developed logically and historically. The material base is the most profound determination within the mutual production of subjects which makes possible the objective forms of their subjectivity. Lenin’s slogan of “Peace, Land, and Bread” of April 1917, captured perfectly the direct relation to the material base of social production. Revolutionary strategy is not abstractly intersubjective or rhetorical. The right wing of the Bolshevik Party prior to the October Revolution failed to touch base and confused the relations of classes, thinking abstractly of a bourgeois revolution, lacking con4 dence in the workers, peasants, and soldiers. The contradictions within social production which made the classes subjects in their objective forms were the contradictions which had to be overcome. These contradictions were the necessary product of the forms of ruling class appropriation. A system of private appropriation is as it is because it is necessary to the ruling class. In Russia, this was the extension of foreign imperialism in the creation of the working class, the peasantry as largely hired labor, and soldiers as necessary to imperialist alliances and war. The Russian bourgeoisie were not simply weak. As a class, they lacked the capacity to mediate their class relations that grew out of their domination by foreign imperialism. The bourgeois-supported attempted military coup in August 1917 was a product of all of these imperialist contradictions. To say otherwise is to treat the Russian Revolution as only national and, then, only later, international. The fact is that the classes involved were already inextricably bound to each other through imperialism.
