The hunt for Red October

"Russia 1917: Start of the World Revolution" is a pamphlet published by the International Communist Current, a small group in the "Left Communist" tradition. The pamphlet contains two articles previously published in ICC's journal International Review.

The ICC defends the position that the 1917 October revolution in Russia had a "proletarian class character", and so had the Bolshevik Party. The degeneration of the Bolsheviks was a result of the international isolation of the revolution, rather than the inevitable product of pre-revolutionary Bolshevik theory and practice. The ICC's main target are the "councilists" (or council communists), who claimed that the October revolution had a "bourgeois" class character, and was destined to set up "state capitalism". Thus, October was degenerated from the start. The councilists seek the causes of this inevitable outcome in pre-revolutionary Bolshevik philosophy and actions. Inevitably, the councilist analysis is similar to the anarchist ditto, but - as the ICC points out several times - it's also remarkably similar to the *Menshevik* position!

A subsidiary target for the ICC's pamphlet are the Bordigists, who apparently regard the October revolution as a "double revolution", both proletarian and bourgeois simultaneously. (This was arguably also Lenin's position - see his neological formula "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry".)

I'm not sure who could be interested in this little pamphlet (sold for six rupees in India, according to the cover). People interested in Left Communism? People with an inordinate fondness for theoretical discussions about Red October? People with six rupees to spare?