In 1995 I moved to St. Petersburg and lived there for ten years. Although my antennas were always up for signals of a socialist spirit, or even just the memory of one, they registered none. My reaction was to dive deeper into the history of the 1917 revolution, and I began noticing things about it that were out of sync with my reading of Marx and Engels. These included the fact, for example, that almost all the top Bolsheviks were from the upper class, not to mention that what they did to the workers they were supposedly leading to communism was far worse than what they had suffered under their old masters.

Lenin brought his Bolshevik Party to power on the cresting wave of the democratic workers’ councils, or soviets, in 1917. Then, with a few changes, he essentially restored tsarist autocracy. Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were again suppressed, and the absolute power of a non-elected monarch, a dictator, reappeared along with a centralized bureaucracy. Under Lenin, the chinovnik-bureaucrat apparatus once more became the master of the land and of thousands of industrial enterprises. It included many tsarist bureaucrats, who, together with a few Bolsheviks, were the bosses in the ministries. Lenin’s bureaucracy blended with the tsarist bureaucracy and quickly adopted the same rules. Everything that upset or challenged the interests of centralized economic and socio-political life was eliminated.

Naturally, the USSR presented itself as socialist. From the standpoint of capitalists the world over this was confirmed by the abolition of private property and the free market. For Soviet workers, however, their government, though endlessly spewing Marxist phraseology, was a harsh exploiter. The USSR had very little in common with socialism, if by this we mean a society without exploitation and classes. Abolition of private property and nationalization of the means of production are not socialism if the direct producers do not control the economy. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a union because Moscow ruled despotically over the regions. It was not soviet because the Bolsheviks eliminated the workers’ councils. It was not socialist as workers’ self-management was destroyed. And it was not republican because there were no free elections. Every word in this “USSR” was a bald lie.

German and Dutch Marxists, including among others, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches, Paul Levy, Franz Mehring, Otto Rühle, Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, exercised an early criticism of the concept Lenin elaborated in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? whereby a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries would “substitute” for the working class and carry out a socialist revolution in its name. They insisted that socialism was not a party affair and argued that all political parties—even those identifying as socialist—are inherently bourgeois in nature because they always have a hierarchy with leaders who make all the important decisions and followers who do as they are told. They considered the very idea of the political party to be a violation of the credo and collectivist spirit of socialism.

For the longest time, I could not understand the phenomenon of well-off, usually well-educated, individuals leading revolutions, people like Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Guevara, and Mao. The answer is self-evident, but it took me a while to realize this. Intellectuals have two routes to power. One is to join the establishment and work to preserve and extend it in the spirit of Niccolo Machiavelli. For the more daring or desperate, the other way is to lead a revolution and make the establishment theirs. Leftists, including Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists and other “ists,” have a special interest in state capitalism, and they exploit and rule over the workers. Ipso facto, they make up capitalism’s “radical” left wing.

Since the Paris Commune of 1871, the world’s workers have not discovered any other form of revolutionary organization than the council. Councils know no hierarchy and all decisions are taken collectively. Their representatives answer only to their members and are recallable at any time. This is the form in which the social-revolutionary workers’ movement has clothed itself for over a century-and-a-half, and include, among many others, the soviets in Russia in 1905 and 1917-1921, the arbeiterrate in Germany in 1918-1923 (and 1953 in East Germany), the consigli dei lavoratori in Italy in 1919-1920, the szovjetek in Hungary 1918-1919 and 1956, the comites d’entreprise in France in 1968, the shoras in Iran in 1978-1979, and the rady rabotnicze in Poland in 1980-1981.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not say, “Unite the workers of the world!” They said instead, “Workers of the world, unite!” Their audience were workers, not upper-class intellectuals with guilt complexes and political ambitions. Indeed, if they are to blame for anything, it is the exceedingly sanguine hope they gave to so many that capitalism would spread across the planet and take root much faster than it did, along with the expectation that the victory of the proletariat, by virtue of its sheer size and majority alone, would be guaranteed and the world would finally lay the awful system to rest. In fairness to Marx and Engels, however, the first words of the Communist Manifesto, published in distant 1848, are, “A specter is haunting Europe.” The confusion may be due to the pamphlet’s forward-looking last sentence: “Workers of the world, unite!”

It is now 2025, and there have never been more workers on the planet. Moreover, the hold on them of political parties is largely a thing of the past. The prospects for international socialist revolution have never been better.

Evel Masten Economakis lives in Rafina, Greece.