Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

The prime minister is expected to announce an end to the triple lock on pensions in the manifesto. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

More elderly people will have to pay for their own social care in the home and lose universal benefits under a new Conservative policy which, Theresa May will say on Thursday, is difficult but necessary to tackle the crisis in funding.

Introducing the partys election manifesto, the prime minister will say it is the responsibility of leaders to be straight with people about the challenges ahead as she unveils a controversial policy that would reduce the value of estates that many people hope to pass on to their children.

The policy will be a flagship measure in the Tories election manifesto, which the prime minister will pitch as a programme for solving some of the challenges facing Britain. It means wealthier people with more than 100,000 in assets will have to pay for their own elderly care out of the value of their homes, rather than relying on the council to cover the costs of visits by care workers.

The Conservatives will attempt to soften the blow by promising that pensioners will not have to sell their homes to pay for their care costs while they or a surviving partner are alive. Instead, products will be available allowing the elderly to pay by extracting equity from their homes, which will be recovered at a later date when they die or sell their residence.

Labour responded to the announcement by saying that people could not trust the Tories promises on social care. Barbara Keeley, shadow minister for social care, said: In their last manifesto, they promised a cap on care costs. But they broke their promise, letting older and vulnerable people down.

Its the Tories who have pushed social care into crisis; their cuts to councils have meant 4.6bn axed from social care budgets between 2010 and 2015, leaving 1.2 million people struggling to get by without care. And NHS bosses have recently said that the money the Tories promised them wont help alleviate the problems.

To provide a more immediate boost in funding for social care, the government will also end universal winter fuel payments of 100 to 300 a year for pensioners, bringing in a means-tested system instead. The Conservatives declined to say how much they would raise from this, or what limits they would place on who is eligible for the benefits, but the payments currently cost the government around 2bn a year.

The manifesto is set to have a markedly different tone from Labours, which promises a populist programme of mass nationalisation, more spending on the NHS, the abolition of tuition fees and an end to the public sector pay cap.

May billed it as a declaration of intent: a commitment to get to grips with the great challenges of our time and to take the big, difficult decisions that are right for Britain in the long term.

People are rightly sceptical of politicians who claim to have easy answers to deeply complex problems. It is the responsibility of leaders to be straight with people about the challenges ahead and the hard work required to overcome them, she will say.

Other measures expected to be included in the manifesto are:

A pledge to scrap free school lunches for infants to pay for free breakfasts for all primary pupils, saving around 650 a year per pupil, which will be used to increase schools funding by about 4bn over the parliament.

Extra charges for businesses that employ workers from overseas and higher charges for foreigners who use the NHS.

A ditching of the triple lock on increasing the state pension, as signalled by May and other ministers during the campaign.

The care policy is an attempt to meet the cost of looking after the elderly in their homes, which councils across the country are struggling to fund in the face of severe budget cuts. In turn, this has been putting unprecedented pressure on the NHS.

At present, people have to pay for their social care at home if they have wealth of more than 23,500, excluding the value of their residence. Under the new policy, people will have to pay for their social care only if they have wealth of more than 100,000 but the value of their homes will be included as well. As a result, more homeowners will be liable to pay for the cost of home helps and carers provided by the council.

It is better news for the elderly in residential care, whose homes are already included in calculations of their assets. It means they will now only have to pay for their care until they have remaining assets of 100,000, instead of 23,500. There are no details on when the policy would be implemented, but it is likely that it would require consultation and legislation.

The Conservatives will also say they plan to do more to integrate the NHS and social care, stop unnecessary stays in hospitals, and examine how to make better use of technology to help people live independently for longer. An additional measure to help family carers will be a new right to request unpaid leave from work to look after a relative for up to a year.

May will hope the measures address deep concerns about the long-term costs of funding social care, which have been having a knock-on effect on the NHS as more elderly people stay in hospital.

On Thursday, doctors leaders will accuse ministers of a callous disregard of the NHS and putting its funding into deep freeze. The British Medical Association will call on ministers to plug the enormous funding gap in healthcare spending between Britain and other major European countries.

May said at a press conference on Wednesday that the manifesto would seek to address five major challenges, in an echo of social reformer William Beveridges five giant evils.

The social care announcement is likely to get a mixed reception, as some Conservatives will worry about it going down badly with middle-class voters who want to pass on the value of their homes to their children.

May is already under pressure from some on the right of her party over interventionist policies, such as her pledge to cap energy costs for households. Previous attempts to reform the funding of social care have met with deep hostility from the rightwing press, which branded Labour proposals for a levy on estates a death tax.

Her decision to include a measure that could be unpopular with middle-aged and elderly voters is likely to be taken as a sign of confidence in winning the election, given the Tories double-digit lead in the polls over Labour. Strategists also hope it will paint the prime minister as a realist and pragmatist in contrast to Labours manifesto promising more spending on public services paid for by higher taxes on companies and high earners.

Other measures in the manifesto are likely to include proposals on improving skills and apprenticeships, and a promised expansion of workers rights, which Labour has dismissed as spin.

The document is also likely to retain the Conservative commitment to bringing down immigration to the tens of thousands from hundreds of thousands. That approach was challenged on Wednesday by a leader in the Evening Standard newspaper, edited by the former chancellor George Osborne, which claimed that no senior cabinet ministers support Mays desire to keep the target.

In a leader column, the newspaper said there had been an assumption at the top of the Conservative party that May would use the election to bury the pledge made by David Cameron before he was elected in 2010 because it was unachievable and undesirable. Thats what her cabinet assumed; none of its senior members supports the pledge in private and all would be glad to see the back of something that has caused the Conservative party such public grief, the newspaper said.

Editorials are written anonymously as the voice of the newspaper, but Osborne tweeted a link to the column and the front page of the Evening Standard, which attributes a squeeze in the cost of living to inflation caused by Brexit.

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Tory manifesto: more elderly people will have to pay for own social care - The Guardian

File: 'South Africa hates women. It hates children. It hates the poor. And poor, black children who are girls are least valued.' Photo: eNCA

We are the most unequal society in the world. The country we live in is inordinately violent. We remain an extremely stratified country. Bessie Head once described the country as "a situation where people are separated into sharp racial groups ... one is irked by the artificial barriers. It is as though, with all those divisions and signs, you end up with no people at all.

We have come a long way since Heads indictment of the colonial and apartheid pathology and its impact on people in South Africa. But in some respects we have not overcome the habit of categorical thinking, or of the unequal distribution of power in line with those "artificial barriers".

We no longer legislate "race", and officially police every aspect of life in line with such prescriptive categorising in South Africa. We abolished that elaborate formal structure in 1994. But old habits die hard. Additionally, other, perhaps even older and more entrenched divisions, artificial barriers which have come to be seen as natural such that we no longer even see them, remain mostly unaddressed, despite our aspirations to do so, and despite the constitutional compulsions that are supposed to shape our society.

Class is one axis along which much that ought to have changed in the post-1994 settlement has yet to be addressed. It remains part of that bundle of issues we have inherited from the past that Terry Bell and Dumisa Ntsebeza have elsewhere called "unfinished business". The crimes committed in the past have not been fully accounted for, and this in a society where there are many calls for us to move beyond that past. Memory of oppression, we are told, ought to be nothing more than that: recollections of the past. Those who resist such calls to "move on" often draw attention to their scars, some literal, but manymetaphoric.

But scarring was not only the consequence of institutionalised racism. Colonialism and apartheid, and many of the systems they engendered as "indigenous African culture", also institutionalised specific arrangements for distributing power among people in this part of the world, but also violently displaced older arrangements by which men and women, older and younger people, insiders and outsiders in polities, among others, related to one another. And while much of that which has been so violently displaced by colonial conquest and its avatar, apartheid, survives in multiple sites, there can be no return to some pre-colonial wholeness for those of us who live here and now.

But the way we live now is not only explicable by what is going on here and now. Our past, and all its unfinished business, includes specific articulations of sexism and heteronormativity which benefited some but not others. The value placed upon some people rather than others, the infantilising of black women in legislation and political practice, the reduction of black men to labour units and the figuration of their bodies as threats to the imperial and apartheid order, and the organisation of legitimate and illegitimate desire in relation to the earlier imperial and later white supremacist nationalist project affected all of us, and in many respects, affect us still.

This is not to excuse the inordinate violations those with less power routinely suffer in contemporary South Africa. It does go some way towards understanding some of the social dynamics which contribute to that violence. Can a society with South Africas levels of inequality material and symbolic really expect to be more peaceful?

Men and women in this society, despite the hard work done by many and despite the provisions of the Constitution and the political economy it is supposed to frame, are not fully equal, and are not equally valued. Everyday sexism is real. Some of us can expect to navigate our day in public without being reduced to objects of someone elses unwanted and incontinent professions of sexual attention. The majority among us, women, have no such guarantees. And the boys and the men learn every day what is allowed, what is tolerated and what is encouraged, and what they will be able to get away with, because they are boys, or men. It takes a lot of work to unlearn those habits, and goodwill among us, as men, is not enough.

Similarly, the privileging of heterosexuality (or what is read to be such, or those versions of sexual expression which closely mirror or deliberately imitate it) cannot be denied. Though it is harder for many people to admit that habits of mind and being founded in heteronormativity and homophobia are as destructive of the humanity of those subjected to such prejudices, but also of the humanity of those who have such habits of thought and behaviour.

Our contempt for poor people outstrips our contempt for poverty in South Africa. How else explain our failure to undo the effects of those old divisions by which the current distribution of material resources from land through income, from nutrition to education, from employment chances to recognition of talent, can hardly be seen as accidental except by the wilfully blind? History has not been undone over the last 23 years, and while it would have been insane to expect such to have been possible, it ought also to outrage us at how much progress we could have made in the last near-generation since the abolition of formal apartheid.

South Africa hates women.It hates children.It hates the poor. South Africas record is clear on this. And poor, black children who are girls are least valued How we came to this state is hardly mysterious. Devaluing those with less power is a longstanding habit of thought. Whole systems were dedicated to ensuring that the material reality matched the ideas, and for centuries. And some of those systems actively taught such beliefs about the world and the value of various people in it Worst, many of those systems remain active today.

Look to university campuses where young men can indulge in belittling the women around them as part of a ritual by which they get to become part of the organisation. Listen to people who use phrases like "man up" and "dont be a sissy". Observe the pigmentocratic standards of beauty by which the advertising and entertainment industrial complexs South African chapter configures desirability. Remind yourselves how adults relate to children in schools and churches, on buses and taxis, in trains and planes, in parks and sports grounds.

We all need to listen to ourselves, to watch ourselves, and remind ourselves why we are the way we are. We need to change our habits of thought and being, thoroughly, and it may help many of us to remember the deep histories of some of those habits. We have unfinished business. Despair and hopelessness are not enough, and neither is hand-wringing. Nothing can bring back the lesbians killed, the children murdered, the woman violated, the poor people dehumanised and deprived of their lives because they were inconvenient in a society where it seems increasingly that we have ended up with no people at all. We must do the work of mourning them, certainly, but we also owe them more.

Violation and violence, the stuff we breathe. We need fresh air, here and now, not elsewhere.

eNCA

20 April 2016

As women protest against the way rape is dealt with on campuses, Angelo Fick argues that our responses continue to be shameful.

11 December 2015

The United Nations special rapporteur Dubravka imonovi compiled her report after an eight day visit to South Africa.

28 June 2014

In recent times, we have increasingly used the idea of the monster to describe people who perpetrate acts which we think lie beyond the human category.

Continued here:

The toxic stuff we breathe: South Africa, 2017 - eNCA (satire)

The big four will be hit by the abolition of the 457 visa.

The big four accounting and advisory firms may have to refocus their efforts on training local staff as the abolition of the 457 visa system curtails their ability to import staff from their overseas operations, especially for specialised consulting roles.

The firms also couldbe hit with an extra $1 million a year in costs as part of the government's proposed new levy on employers that use visa workers, as revealed in last week's budget.

PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte have about 1400professionals who are 457 visa holders in their ranks, representing about 5per centof the 25,800 staff at thefirms.

The now-abolished 457 visa wasparticularly useful for these global firms asit allowed them to sponsor professionals from overseas offices to work for up to four years, and featured a possible migration pathway as an incentive to come to Australia.

It has been replaced with a much tighter two-year and four-year temporary skill shortage visa as part of a government "crackdown" on the 457 visa in other industries, said Chris F Wright, a senior lecturer specialising in immigration and labour markets at the University of Sydney Business School.

While accountants remain on the four-year visa stream, management consultants have been relegated to the two-year stream which removes any path to permanent residency.

Dr Wright said the firms still have other migration pathways open, such as the 186 permanent migration visa, but they also mayhave put more effort into developing specialised skills in their local operations.

"They might have to think more creatively about developing the skills of their local staff," he said.

"It seems to me that these policy changes have been designed to address problems in two industries hospitality and construction but the blunt instrument the government has wielded has affected industries that are doing the right thing.

"The 457 visa when it was first introduced in 1996 was designed explicitly to serve the needs of organisations like the big four consultancies, their use of the visa was in line with its intended purpose of sourcing specialised skills."

PwC is the biggest user of the visas, with 550 of their approximate 7500 headcount on a 457 visa, or around 7 per cent of total staff.

"For PwC, the changes as they stand now, will make attracting and keeping global talent more challenging," said Carter Bovard, a partner and immigration practice leader at PwC.

"Most of the difficulties we expect to encounter are in the domain of management consulting, with the visa validity period reduced, and restrictions on the firm sponsoring this category for permanent residency."

On top of the new restrictions, PwC and its rivals would all face the government's proposed foreign worker levy of $1800 a visa per year from March 2018.

The levy, which goes towards a new Commonwealth fund to train local workers, replaces the current system where a sponsoring company had to pay 2 per cent of its payroll to a training fund unless it already paid 1 per cent of payroll towards internal training.

Despite the big four already investing heavily in training, the new system would, for example, force PwC to pay an additional $990,000 a year based on its current intake of 550 visa workers. That would be in addition to the costs from the government's doubling of the four-year visa application fees, which have shot up from $1060 to $2400. The two-year visa cost is $1150.

Rival KPMG has about 300 workers on 457 visas, or around 5 per cent of its 6600-odd headcount,and about 140 Australians working in overseas offices of the firms.

"We do have concerns that the government's changes to the 457 program have not sufficiently taken into account the needs of multinational enterprises who need to move staff around," said Michael Wall, a partner and KPMG's head of immigration services.

"It must be remembered that it is more expensive to hire people on 457s than recruit locally so employers only do this when there are skills gaps they cannot fill domestically."

The proposed new training levy also wouldset KPMG back $540,000 a year based on 300 workers.

At EY, there are around 300 professionals on the 457 visa, or around 5per cent of its 6415 staff, "across a couple of dozen professional occupations", said Wayne Parcell, a partner in people advisory services at the firm.

"EY sponsors EY professionals to work in Australia where there are skills that cannot be readily sourced from the Australian labour market.Many EY Australia employees are sponsored to work outside Australia throughout the firm's global operations as part of our global talent strategy," Mr Parcell said.

Finally, Deloittehas about 250 staff on 457 visas, or around 4 per cent of its total staff of 6000.

"Deloitte's priority is to focus on analysing impacts of the changes and working with our people who are feeling uncertain or unsettled about how their work arrangements will be affected,"said Alec Bashinsky, a partner and the firm's head of people and performance.

The change has had a variable impact on other professional service firms who import staff for projects.

A spokeswoman for technology consultants Accenture said the changes would not "materially impact our business".

Strategy firm McKinsey said they had made use of the 457 visa but did not detail how the changes would impact their operations.

"McKinsey Australia has used 457 work visas for highly specialised roles to access skills and experience which in some cases aren't available in Australia at short notice. This includes situations where clients' needs require people with in-depth understanding of overseas markets," said Tiffany Withers, McKinsey Australia's director of professional development.

Strategy firms Bain and the Boston Consulting Group declined to comment.

edmundtadros@afr.com.au

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The big four will be hit by the abolition of the 457 visa. - The Australian Financial Review

KARACHI:The Association of Builders and Developers of Pakistan (ABAD) a country-wide body of over 700 members has expressed concern over the possible move of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to abolish the fixed tax regime for builders and developers in the upcoming federal budget.

This will discourage construction industry and again open the gates of corruption, which is not in the interest of businessmen and the country, according to a press release.

ABAD Chairman Mohsin Sheikhani said ABAD members had deposited Rs150 million as 5% advance tax under the fixed tax regime in the past four months of current fiscal year, which reflected total fixed tax payment of Rs3 billion, while ABAD had committed that the sector would pay Rs2-3 billion.

We also said last year that the construction sector was paying almost Rs80 million in minimum taxes, which would rise 10 times if a corruption-free fixed tax regime is allowed, he said.But before that, the FBR brought the issue of new property valuations, virtually blocking the wave of new construction for almost six months. We started getting NOCs for new construction from January 2017; had the FBR bureaucracy given us chance to work from first month of the fiscal year, we could have reached the fixed tax target, he said.

ABAD members are involved in 25% of construction activities across the country while other players are responsible for 75% construction. He insisted that ABAD members were more than willing to pay taxes and the government should continue to collect fixed tax for at least three years.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 17th, 2017.

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ABAD fears abolition of fixed tax - The Express Tribune

U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn pledged to raise48.6 billion pounds ($62 billion) in taxes on businesses and the wealthy to pour more money into health, education and infrastructure.

The main opposition partys 128-page manifesto for the June 8 election promises 37 billion pounds of funding for the National Health Service, the abolition of university tuition fees and the establishment of a National Investment Bank to lend 250 billion pounds over the next decade.

Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

There will be an increase in income taxes on those earning more than 80,000 pounds a year, and another one on earnings over 123,000 pounds; a hike by a third on corporation tax and a new levy on companies paying staff more than 330,000 pounds a year.

For the last seven years our people have lived through a Britain run for the rich, the elite and the vested interest, Corbyn told a rally in Bradford, northern England, on Tuesday. Labours program will reverse our national priorities to put the interests of the many first.

On June 8, voters will be electing a new government almost a year after a slim majority of the country chose to pull Britain out of the European Union. Prime Minister Theresa May called the snap vote, citing the need to strengthen her hand for Brexit talks, and polls show her Conservatives handing Labour its worst defeat since at least 1983.

Still, Labour has enjoyed an uptick in support since a leaked draft of the manifesto last week, with voters rallying behind calls for higher income taxes on the top salaries and a promise to ban contracts that allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work.

If Corbyn succeeds in edging above 30 percent of the vote, he could make the case that he has matched or bettered the performance of his predecessor, Ed Miliband, and stay on as leader, something he has vowed to do regardless of the election result.

A slew of nationalizations in the rail, water and energy industries capped Labours pitch with Corbyn offering aradical and responsible plan to contrast with Mays oft-repeated selling point of strong and stable leadership. The biggest cheers for Corbyns speech at Bradford University came when he announced hed abolish university tuition fees and take control of the railways.

The Conservatives have been holding Britain back. Low investment, low wages, low growth, Corbyn said. Labour will move Britain forward with ambitious plans to unlock the countrys potential.

The party said it accepts last years referendum result for Britain to withdraw from the EU but it would scrap Mays negotiating position, prioritizing continued access to the single market and customs union.

Labour would immediately guarantee the rights of some 3 million EU citizens living in Britain, rather than making that contingent on a reciprocal guarantee for Britons abroad. It also ended its vacillation over immigration, accepting that the free movement of EU nationals to Britain would end after Brexit.

The party also promised increased regulation of taxi companies, including national standards to guarantee safety and accessibility. It said these would be updated to keep pace with technological change and ensuring a level playing field between operators, a reference to Uber Technologies Inc.

More than 24,000 words long, the document mentions taxation 38 times. Here are the key takeaways from Labours program for the next five years:

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U.K. Labour Party Vows to Raise $62 Billion by Taxing Rich - Bloomberg

Written by Navjeevan Gopal | Chandigarh | Published:May 16, 2017 6:13 am Captain Amarinder Singh

Nearly two months since Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singhs announcement to do away with the post of District Transport Officers (DTO), the state government is yet to finalise the blueprint to abolish the post and put an alternative system in place.

Abolishing the post of DTOs and transferring the powers of DTOs to sub-divisional magistrates was one of the key decisions of Amarinder government in its first cabinet meeting on March 18.

In the run up to elections, Congress leader Sunil Jakhar Jakhar is now the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president had said that posts of DTOs had become synonymous with den of corruption and that after being voted to power, the government would abolish the posts.

Sources told The Indian Express that the government was now thinking to bifurcate the non-commercial and commercial works, dividing those between sub-divisional magistrates and Regional Transport Authorities.

The non-commercial works will cover cars and two wheelers, while commercial works will cover operations on a bigger scale involving bus permits and collection of taxes from commercial vehicles among other things.

According to sources, the government was mulling over to have at least ten Regional Transport Authorities (RTAs). Currently, there are four RTAs in Patiala, Bathinda, Jalandhar and Ferozepur.

After the Amarinder-government had announced the abolition of posts of DTOs, a four-member team of transport department officials was tasked to study practices prevalent in the adjoining states, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana.

The team has already submitted its reports.

Yes, there is a proposal to increase the number of RTAs and divide the operations between non-commercial and commercial, said Punjab Transport Secretary Sarvjeet Singh. He, however, added that nothing was finalised yet.

An official, however, said putting in place an alternate system by abolishing posts of DTOs was a tall order.

There are a number of SDMs in many districts. Dividing the work between them would be an uphill task, especially when not all data of the transport department has been computerised yet and officials still have to rely on checking records manually through registers.

Sometimes, you have only one register pertaining to particular data. For example licenses which are to be renewed, said an official.

It is not correct to associate the post of DTOs with corruption. DTOs have a lot to do. The monthly targets of revenue set by government are huge in many districts. I think the transport department is the second biggest department after excise and taxation department as far as generating revenue for the state is concerned. I do not think DTOs can be done away with. At the most, there could be a change of designation, said an official who has worked as a DTO in the past.

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Punjab govt yet to come up with plan to abolish DTOs - The Indian Express

Washington D.C., May 14, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA).- A Catholic pledge against the death penalty cites Pope Francis stand as a motive to increase Catholic action against capital punishment.

Catholics and all like-minded individuals need to sign it; it is a pledge that will go about urging people to educate, advocate, and pray for an end to capital punishment, Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice, Florida said.

The bishop, who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, told a press call May 11 that he had signed the anti-death penalty pledge from the Catholic Mobilizing Network.

Bishop Dewane said the pledge will encourage parish priests to talk more about the death penalty.

It is a matter of life, so they need to be talking about it, he said.

Pope Francis comments on the death penalty feature prominently in the pledge.

All Christians and people of good will are thus called today to fightfor the abolition of the death penalty, whether legal or illegal, and in all its forms, the Pope said in Oct. 23, 2014 remarks to the International Association of Penal Law.

The pledge commits the signer to educate himself or herself and the community about the death penaltys injustices, including the ways it risks innocent life, fails victims families, and contradicts the Catholic Churchs pro-life teaching.

The signer pledges to advocate for the dignity of all life and to be actively working to end the death penalty in my state and in my country. The signer also pledges to pray for mercy and healing for all who are involved in the criminal justice system.

Among the other backers of the pledge is Marietta Jaeger-Lane, whose daughter was murdered in 1973. She rejected claims that the death penalty brings closure to victims families.

I spend a lot of time thinking about Gods idea of justice. When I see Jesus life in Scripture, I see someone who came to heal us, to restore the life that has been lost to us, she said. I have signed this pledge, and I believe that the Catholic community can be the one to end the death penalty.

Karen Clifton, the Catholic Mobilizing Networks executive director, said the network launched the pledge to amplify the Churchs work to end the death penalty. She said there is growing opposition to the death penalty, especially following the April executions in Arkansas, where the governor tried to execute eight men in 11 days, and ended up executing four of them.

Clifton said the effort amplifies Pope Francis call while continuing the work of the U.S. bishops Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty.

The Catholic Mobilizing Network is a sponsored ministry of the Congregation of St. Joseph.

The pledge is located at http://catholicsmobilizing.org/pledge.

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New pledge aims to amplify Catholic opposition to death penalty - Catholic News Agency

BEVERLY The Beverly Multifaith Coalition and ECCO are co-sponsoring a forum Monday evening about the country's immigration policy and deportation.

"An Overview of Immigration Policy and Deportation in the USA: How did we get here?" will feature Rob McAndrews, an immigration attorney and social work professor at Salem State University, and Alexandra Pineros-Shields, executive director of the Essex County Community Organization.

It's set for 7 p.m. Monday, May 15, at the First Baptist Church on Cabot Street.

"We want to be part of a debate that's taking place nationwide related to immigration, related to refugees and related to deportation," said the Rev. Kent Harrop of the Baptist Church.

What sparked the forum is the idea that deportations of undocumented immigrants may heighten in a few months, according to immigration attorneys Harrop spoke with.

"We need to understand where we've been historically and where we are," Harrop said.

After the presentations, attendees will have an opportunity to ask questions.

This forum is one of three to be hosted by the church.

The second will focus on the sanctuary congregation movement, Harrop said. This includes looking at the Underground Railroad that hid slaves before the abolition of slavery, as well as protection of Central American people escaping war during the 1980s.

"We will be educated on an emerging new sanctuary congregation movement," Harrop said. A growing number of faith communities are part of a sanctuary movement that pledges to help immigrants facing unjust deportation.

A third forum, to be scheduled sometime this summer, will focus on those who want to get involved in advocacy for refugees, immigrants and those who face a deportation risk.

Arianna MacNeill can be reached at 978-338-2527 or at amacneill@salemnews.com. Follow her on Twitter at @SN_AMacNeill.

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Immigration forum set for Monday night - The Salem News

On 18 April 2017, the Government announced that the Temporary Work (Skilled) visa (subclass 457 visa) will be abolished and replaced with the completely new Temporary SkillShortage (TSS) visa in March 2018.

The TSS visa programme will be comprised of a Short-Term stream of up to two years and a Medium-Term stream of up to four years and will support businesses in addressing genuine skill shortages in their workforce and will contain a number of safeguards which prioritise Australian workers.

This new visa is part of the Governments significant reform package to strengthen the integrity and quality of Australias temporary and permanent employer sponsored skilled migration programmes.

Key reforms include:

The implementation of these reforms will begin immediately and will be completed in March 2018.

Further information on reforms is available:

Further information on different aspects of the reforms will be published in due course.

1 Set at $53,900 as at 12 April 2016.

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Abolition and replacement of the 457 visa Government ...

In her book Inside the Russian Revolution, Rheta Childe Dorr described her first impression in Russia:

About the first thing I saw on the morning of my arrival in Petrograd ... was a group of young men, about twenty in number, I should think, marching through the street in front of my hotel, carrying a scarlet banner with an inscription in large white letters.

What does that banner say? I asked the hotel commissionaire who stood beside me.

It says All the Power to the Soviet, was the answer.

What is the soviet? I asked, and he replied briefly:

It is the only government we have in Russia now.

Judging from this passage, most of us would assume that Dorr arrived in Russia after the October Revolution, since only then did the soviets overthrow the Provisional Government. But Dorr came to Russia in late May 1917 and left the country by the end of August. Her book was sent to press before the October Revolution and thus gives us an invaluable look at what was happening in 1917, free of hindsight.

Dorrs account brings home an essential fact: The soviets, or councils of soldiers and workmens delegates, which have spread like wildfire throughout the country, are the nearest thing to a government that Russia has known since the very early days of the revolution. Though a socialist herself, Dorr was fervently committed to the war against Germany and therefore intensely hostile to what she saw as tyrannical mob rule. She regarded soviet rule as no better and in some ways worse than the tsars. Take censorship of the press: Even if [the average American traveler] could read all the daily papers, however, he would not get very much information. The press censorship is as rigid and as tyrannical today as in the heyday of the autocracy, only a different kind of news is suppressed. In order to give her American readers an idea of the committee mania that had taken over Russia, she used this analogy:

Try to imagine how it would be in Washington, in the office of the secretary of the treasury, let us say, if a committee of the American Federation of Labor should walk in and say: We have come to control you. Produce your books and all your confidential papers. This is what happens to cabinet ministers in Russia, and will continue until they succeed in forming a government responsible only to the electorate, and not a slave to the Council of Workmens and Soldiers Delegates.

Dorrs account is one-sided: soviet power was strongly contested throughout 1917 and the Provisional Government had its own ambitious agenda. Nevertheless, she brings out realities that wont be surprising to most historians but that cast an unexpected light on the slogan All Power to the Soviets!. Its worth exploring this new perspective, first by demonstrating the continuity between February and October, then by asking what kind of revolution this was, and finally by looking at the leadership of the Bolsheviks and Lenin in particular.

All power to the Soviets! is one of the most famous slogans in revolutionary history. It is right up there with Egalit, libert, fraternit as a symbol of an entire revolutionary epoch. It consists of three words: , vsya vlast sovetam. Vsya = all, vlast = power, and sovetam = to the soviets. The Russian word sovet simply means advice, and, from that, council.

Another Russian word vlast presents more of a challenge. Power is not an entirely adequate translation for a variety of reasons. Vlast has a more specific reference than the English word power, namely, the sovereign authority in a particular country. In order to have the vlast, one has to have the right of making a final decision, to be capable of making the decisions and of seeing that they are carried out. Often, in English, in an attempt to catch these nuances, vlast is translated by the un-idiomatic phrase the power. I will use power and vlast interchangeably.

Basic to the usual understanding of 1917 is a contrast between February and October. The educated reading public is given a liberal version of this contrast: February is the good revolution of political freedom and democracy, and October is the bad, illegitimate revolution of tyranny and extremist utopianism. On the Left we find a similar contrast, but with the value-signs reversed: the bourgeois-democratic revolution versus the socialist revolution.

Overlooked is the strong continuity between February and October. Right from its beginnings in February, the upheaval in 1917 should be seen as an anti-bourgeois democratic revolution. Soviet power was actually proclaimed in February the role of October was to confirm that it would not leave the scene peaceably.

The basic force behind this new power or sovereign authority the soviet constituency was the people, the narod, the workers, soldiers, and peasants, the mob; as opposed to the elite, the tsenzoviki (census people, the propertied classes), educated society. The central aim of the soviet revolution was to carry out the vast program of reforms earlier denoted by the term democratic revolution first and foremost, land to the peasants and liquidation of the pomeshchiki (gentry landowners) as a class and also to end a murderous and pointless war.

At the same time, the revolution was intensely anti-bourgeois, even if this feeling did not translate into a programmatic demand to install socialism in the short or middle term. The surprising fact is not the social base of the revolution nor the anti-bourgeois values of this base, but rather the creation almost simultaneously after the fall of the tsar of a viable candidate for sovereign authority in the land that relied on this broad popular constituency.

In February, the longstanding Romanov dynasty often termed the historic vlast dissolved, leaving Russia essentially without a functioning vlast, that is, without a generally recognized sovereign authority. The fundamental lines of force for the whole year were set up almost immediately, indeed, during the revolutionary events of February 27. During this day, the following happened:

Thus the Petrograd Soviet took on the role of the ultimate source of the vlast, the sovereign authority though at this stage it was still careful not to take the name. The soviet was the elected representative of the workers and the soldiers: an essential difference from its 1905 incarnation. There were two fundamental moments in this assertion of authority: first, the Provisional Government was forced to commit itself to key parts of the Soviet program in order to gain elementary legitimacy, and indeed, in order to come into existence. Second, Order Number One allowed the soviet (almost without noticing it) to gain an essential attribute of any vlast, namely, control over the ultimate means of coercion, the army. These two facts government commitment to carrying out key parts of the soviet program and the ultimate loyalty of the armed forces to the soviet rather than the Provisional Government determined the course of politics for the rest of the year.

On the surface, the vicissitudes of soviet power during the course of 1917 found expression in a series of dramatic political crises. Underneath, a more molecular process was taking place that clothed the soviet with the essential attributes of a genuine vlast. Let us take a look at this deeper process.

According to some Bolshevik observers at the time, the Soviet in February was an embryonic vlast. This is an excellent metaphor, leading to the following question: what would it take for it to become a full-blooded, independent vlast that could fend for itself? An effective vlast needs at least the following:

These are the key features of a functioning vlast. The embryonic soviet vlast established in February started off with some of these features in virtual form, and then these and all the other features steadily acquired more substance, first in 1917 and then during the civil war. For example, the soviet gained a national institutional form, through an all-Russian conference in late March and two congresses of soviets (June and October). In contrast, the Provisional Government progressively lost even those essential features with which they started, so that it became more and more spectral. By the fall of 1917, it had lost the support of even moderate soviet leaders and was no more than a phantom vlast.

We turn now to the unbroken series of political crises that marked the relations of the soviets and the elite reformers in the Provisional Government. The political struggle in 1917 was conducted within an unwritten constitution that stated that the soviet majority has the final say on matters of program and personnel. Right at the beginning, Alexander Kerensky was inserted into the government as a soviet representative. For this and other reasons, the contrast often made between an initial period of dual power and a later coalition period is inessential.

In early May, the Provisional Government proposed but the soviet disposed it agreed to the governments request to send more representatives into the government. No matter how many individual representatives the soviets sent to the government, the fact remains that no major policy initiative was carried out against the explicit wishes of the soviet majority. Thus the various political crises that arose through the year all ended when the soviet authority made its will known, since it had ultimate control over coercive force. This was true in March, April, July, and August, as well as October.

Of course, soviet power was strongly contested from the beginning: the counterrevolution also had its origin in February. The key source of conflict was over what was called at the time the krizis vlasti, the crisis of power. The issue was often framed as follows: dvoevlastie, dual power, dual sovereignty, is a contradiction in terms if the buck stops here and over there, then who makes the ultimate decision, the one that really counts? Thus dual power is the equivalent of multiple power which is the equivalent of no vlast at all: a recipe for governmental dysfunction. Russia needs one undisputed, recognized, and tough-minded (tverdaia) vlast.

At this point, opinions began to differ. The liberal Kadet party, the first ones to bring up this line of thought, said that therefore the soviets must retire from the scene. The Bolsheviks, who quickly picked up on this argument for their own purposes, said that therefore all power must go to the soviets!

The existential question facing the soviet constituency was: could the soviet program be carried out by means of a good faith partnership with elite reformers or was the gap between elite and narod on such fundamental questions as the war, the land issue, and economic regulation too wide to be bridged? The Bolsheviks labeled the attempt at cross-class partnership as soglashatelstvo a term often misleadingly translated as conciliation, but which can be rendered in English in a more straightforward way as agreementism. So the question before the soviet constituency was: is agreementism viable? Yes, it may be convenient to work with the elite rather than against it, but not if it means giving up on the aims of the revolution.

From the point of view of the incipient counterrevolution, there were two possible strategies for eliminating the soviet system: a hard coup or a soft coup. An attempt at a hard coup was made by General Kornilov in late August but this was a misbegotten adventure from the beginning, one that quickly ran up against the hard fact of politics in 1917, namely, the ultimate loyalty of the armed forces to the soviets. The soft coup relied on a different strategy of creating by various means an alternative wide-ranging vlast with national support, all the while asking the soviets to voluntarily bow out. Under this category comes such experiments in the fall as the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament. More and more, the Constituent Assembly became the centerpiece of attempts at a soft coup, that is, of inducing soviet power to bow out gracefully.

For the soviet constituency, the question was decided by early September, when new majorities in the soviets of Moscow and Petersburg showed their support for an all-soviet, anti-agreementist government. It became evident that the forthcoming Second Congress of Soviets in October would take the same line. So the question became: would the unwritten constitution hold? Would the new soviet majority be able to exercise the same ultimate control over the policies and personnel of the government that the old soviet majority did? In the usual telling, October was the time when the soviets overthrew the Provisional Government. From our perspective, it was the time the Provisional Government failed to overthrow the soviets.

At the same time, the soviets assigned political leadership to the Bolshevik Party. This choice was an inevitable implication of the more fundamental decision to keep soviet power in existence, since the Bolsheviks were the only organized political force willing and able to do this. (The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries [SRs] were willing enough, but barely even an organized political force.) The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in early January ended the last chance to end soviet power peacefully, that is, through voluntary self-dissolution. Thereafter the question was settled on the fields of battle.

According to the unwritten constitution, a regularly elected Congress of Soviets representing soviets all across the country had the right and duty to determine both the personnel and the policies of the revolutionary government. The Second Congress that met on October 25 and 26 was just such a body. We often get so fascinated by the dramatic debates among the Bolsheviks, and by the armed uprising organized by the Petrograd Soviets Military Revolutionary Committee, that we tend to forget that the basic political fact in the autumn of 1917 was the new majority that had formed nationwide among the soviet constituency.

The uprising takes on a new meaning in light of this fact: we can imagine the Second Congress without the uprising, but we cannot imagine the uprising without the Second Congress. As Trotsky said at the congress: The political formula of this uprising: All power to the soviets by means of the Congress of Soviets. We are told: you didnt wait for the congress. We, as a party, considered it our task to create a genuine possibility for the Congress of Soviets to take the vlast into its own hands.

Accordingly, a look at the proceedings of the Second Congress will give us some idea of the meaning of October in October that is, what the Second Congress as a whole, including both its majority and minority, thought it was doing. According to the unwritten constitution, a properly constituted Congress of Soviets had the right to determine the governments personnel and policies. This was the heart of the matter, and no one at the Congress disputed it, not even the Bolsheviks most determined enemies.

Instead, they tried to undermine the Congresss legitimate status by various other means: First, by using walkouts to deprive the Congress of its necessary quorum and turn it into a private conference. Second, by claiming that armed conflict and civil war on the streets made the work of the Congress impossible. But note: the anti-Bolshevik socialists did not protest the arrest of the Provisional Government, but only the treatment of the socialist ministers and even here the outrage was not caused by their status as ministers, but rather because they were party comrades on a party mission. Finally, even while granting that the Congress had a right to create a new government and even a government that excluded any non-soviet parties, they insisted that this new soviet vlast represent all soviet parties and even all democratic forces thus the Martov wing of the Mensheviks and the Left SRs, though the creation of such a wide coalition was an unrealistic pipe dream. Thus no one at the Congress really contested the unwritten constitution.

What program did the Congress give to the new government? Three things were accomplished during the two-day session: an official government proposal for a democratic peace, land to the peasants and concomitant abolition of gentry property, and the creation of a worker-peasant government. All three of these measures were essentially democratic in the parlance of the time, and this democratic quality was given heavy emphasis by official rhetoric and Bolshevik spokesmen. A very famous statement by Lenin perhaps the first pronouncement of the new vlast runs as follows: The cause for which the narod fought the immediate proposal of a democratic peace, the abolition of gentry property in land, worker control over production, creation of a soviet government this cause is now secure.

In his original draft, Lenin had written Long live socialism! but he crossed this phrase out. This fact points to another feature of the debates at the Congress: the low profile of socialism, as either word or concept. True, mention can be found of socialism as the final goal. But the Bolsheviks never defended the actual program set out by the Congress as a socialist one nor, most revealingly, did those who attacked the Bolsheviks make any critique of unrealistic attempts to install socialism in Russia. Socialism was simply a non-issue at the Second Congress.

The historic meaning of the Second Congress, then, was that the previously unwritten constitution now openly affirmed itself as the ultimate law of the land. The embryonic vlast created in February a vlast based solidly on the workers and peasants, and dedicated to the program of the revolution announced to the world its firm intention to survive and thrive.

Our look at the Second Congress and its program makes unavoidable the question: what kind of revolution was the Russian Revolution of 1917? In some ways, of course, a worker-peasant revolution in Russia would inevitably be socialist, that is, it would be led by committed socialists whose ultimate aim was to establish a socialist society. Socialist parties had an absolute monopoly of political loyalty from the narod and none but socialist parties were ever represented in the soviet system. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks finally placed their project in the context of the Europe-wide socialist revolution that they believed was in the offing. On the other hand, when we look at the actual program for Russia adopted by soviet power in 1917, and also at the actual message sent out by the Bolsheviks day in and day out to the soviet constituency, we will find that democratic demands crowded out socialist ones almost completely.

The binary contrast between bourgeois-democratic revolution and socialist revolution goes a long way back in the Marxist tradition, but by the early twentieth century it was showing definite signs of strain. In 1906, Karl Kautsky wrote a seminal article entitled Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution. This article delighted Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, all of whom wrote commentaries on it. Even after the 1917 revolution, Kautskys article was endorsed by Lenin, Trotsky, and even Karl Radek as a classic exposition of the logic behind Bolshevik revolutionary strategy.

Here Kautsky made the argument that Russia was undergoing neither a bourgeois revolution in the traditional sense nor a socialist one but a quite unique process which is taking place on the borderline between bourgeois and socialist society. For Kautsky, the once and future Russian revolution was not bourgeois, because it was led by socialists, but it was also not socialist because the peasant allies of the proletariat were not ready for socialism. All Russian Social Democrats (including Trotsky) agreed that Russias peasant majority was a barrier to socialist transformation, absent a game-changing European revolution.

Given this, it seems all the more apt to understand the 1917 revolution as an anti-bourgeois democratic revolution. The revolution that created and defended soviet power was democratic both in terms of its class content and its program. The Petrograd Soviet was created by the workers and soldiers of the capital city that is, soviet power was a worker-peasant vlast from the very beginning and it never lost this character. By the rules of Marxist discourse accepted by everybody in 1917, a revolution that embodied the interests of the peasantry was thereby a democratic one.

As we have seen, the soviet revolution was also democratic in its program in 1917. There is an idea among many Marxists today that proclaiming the socialist character of the revolution was a logical necessity for the project of soviet power to make sense. This idea wilts under inspection and indeed it was forcefully refuted in 1917 by Lenin and Trotsky themselves. There is also perhaps a tendency among some Marxists today to look down on a merely democratic revolution as one restricted to paltry reforms and a measly minimum program. The Bolsheviks had a very different attitude. They saw the democratic transformation of Russia creation of a radical democracy, land to the peasants, liquidation of the landowning gentry as a class, and modernization of all spheres of life as a highly ambitious and rewarding mission. Furthermore, it was one that only committed socialists could carry out.

Which brings us to the second part of our definition: in contrast to the classical bourgeois-democratic revolutions, the Russian revolution was anti-bourgeois from the very start. First, for the reason noted by Kautsky: it was led by socialists and not by liberals or bourgeois of any stripe. Second, both wings of the soviet constituency workers and peasants were thoroughly hostile to the burzhui and to bourgeois values. Third, the Russian Revolution took place amid an accelerating breakdown of any workable market system.

From the beginning that is, from February the soviet constituency was hostile to the burzhui both in its narrow meaning of industrial owners and in its wider meaning of the tsenzoviki (an abusive word for the educated elite that derived from the property requirements or census that restricted the number of voters), the beloruchki (the ones with white hands), and other unfriendly terms for the educated elite. Even in the early days, when hopes were high for a real partnership, the burzhui were regarded with suspicion and, indeed, with an automatic assumption of insincerity. Commitment in a positive way to socialist institutions was much less powerful than a negative attitude toward the bourgeois as individuals as well as toward bourgeois values. The anti-bourgeois drive arises organically out of the very fact of soviet power, not just the dreams of socialist intellectuals.

Anything like a bourgeois class, market institutions, and middle-class values were destroyed by the Russian time of troubles starting in 1914, and there was no social or political will to reconstitute them. Thus, socialism in the Soviet Union acquired content by the drive to make a great modern country work without a bourgeoisie, or an autonomous market, or bourgeois pluralism. Both the short-term social dynamics and the long-term economic result of the revolution were determined in the first place by the anti-bourgeois drive of the soviet constituency.

To understand why it was the Bolsheviks and no other party that was given leadership by soviet power, we have to take a broader view and look at the so-called hegemony strategy that defined Bolshevism before 1917. Hegemony is a word with many meanings in many different contexts. When the Bolsheviks used it to sum up their view of class dynamics in Russia, they meant first and foremost that the socialist proletariat would act as leader (hegemon) for the peasants. In a fuller formulation: the socialist proletariat would carry out the revolution to the end by creating a revolutionary vlast based on the common interest of the workers and peasants, and by rejecting any bid by liberal reformers to halt or turn back the revolution.

The prewar hegemony strategy gave the Bolsheviks a head start a blueprint that led eventually to majority support at the Second Congress. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd did not need Lenin to size up the situation and to set their sights on winning over the soviet constituency both workers and peasant soldiers to the project of full soviet power and to persuade them to reject any agreementism with elite reformers. Bolshevik leaders such as Kamenev and Stalin were confident that the Provisional Government would be utterly unable to carry out the revolutionary program and indeed would quickly reveal its counterrevolutionary essence.

In all of this, the role of the peasant ally remained the heart of the matter. Most of the discussion among Bolsheviks in April after Lenins return was devoted to ensuring that everybody was on the same page about the crucial revolutionary role of the peasants. This is why some Bolsheviks insisted that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not finished this was another way of saying the peasant is still a revolutionary ally. Lenin responded by underlining that any so-called steps toward socialism (for example, bank nationalization) could only be undertaken with peasant understanding and support.

This fundamental wager on socialist leadership of the peasantry explains not only Bolshevik victory in 1917, but Bolshevik victory in the civil war. In 1920 (prior to New Economic Policy), Evgenii Preobrazhensky described the middle peasant as the central figure of the revolution:

Over the whole course of the civil war, the middle peasantry did not go along with the proletariat with a firm tread. It wavered more than once, especially when faced with new conditions and new burdens; more than once it moved in the direction of its own class enemies. [But] the worker/peasant state, built on the foundation of an alliance of the proletariat with 80 percent of the peasantry, by this fact alone cannot have any competitors for the vlast inside the boundaries of Russia.

The Red Army was the embodiment of hegemony: peasant soldiers, political leadership by revolutionary socialists, officers providing expertise but shorn of political influence, all fighting together to defend the existence of the worker-peasant vlast. So much was recognized even by the Menshevik Fyodor Dan. Writing in 1922, Dan observed that the defeat of the peasant-based Red Army in Poland in 1920 was not just a military failure:

To defend the land he has seized against the possible return of the landlord, the peasant Red Army man will fight within the greatest heroism and the greatest enthusiasm. He will advance barehanded against cannons, tanks, and his revolutionary ardor will infect and disorganize even the most splendid and disciplined troops, as we saw with the Germans, the British and the French in equal measure

But the idea of Bolshevik communism is so alien and even hostile to the mindset of the peasant Red Army, that he can neither be infected by it himself, nor can he infect others with it. He cannot be attracted by the idea of war to convert capitalist society into communist society, and this is the limit of the Red Armys potential for the Bolsheviks.

Dan had a strange understanding of the idea of Bolshevik communism. Nevertheless, his remarks bring out two central points about the Russian Revolution. First, it was strong when it was compatible with peasant interests, and weak when it strayed beyond those limits. Second (a point obscured by Dan), the peasants could hardly have constituted an effective fighting force unless they had been given political leadership by a political party based on the urban branch of the narod.

The Bolsheviks were thoroughly committed to a worker-peasant alliance and ipso facto to an essentially democratic revolution. Only in his last articles did Lenin explicitly advance the idea that the proletariat could lead the peasant majority all the way to socialism. In some ways, this outlook was a break with the original version of hegemony, but more profoundly, it was just a further extension of the core idea of socialists leading peasants.

In October, the leadership of soviet power was entrusted to the Bolshevik Party. Looking at events from this point of view prompts a new look at Lenins leadership within the party, one that brings out some unexpected features. But we must start with the fact that Lenin was primarily responsible for elaborating and defending the hegemony strategy before and after the 1905 revolution. In October 1915, he sharpened his scenario by suggesting that a worker/peasant vlast would take power during the second stage of the revolution, replacing an anti-tsarist but defencist regime. He thus provided the party with its basic strategic orientation.

When Lenin returned in April after a decade in emigration, there was great potential for discord and demoralization. What is striking about Lenin in April after we look in detail at the give-and-take among the Bolsheviks is his ability to listen to his party comrades, sort out what was primary and what was secondary, and help clear up misunderstandings, both on his part and on the part of the Petrograd Bolsheviks. Let me give one small but revealing example of Lenins learning from the locals. In his Letter from Afar that he sent from Switzerland before returning, Lenin continually referred to the Soviet of Worker Deputies. When they printed his article in Pravda, the editors silently changed each occurrence of this phrase to the correct title Soviet of Worker and Soldier Deputies. In the original text of his April Theses, delivered immediately after his return, Lenin still used the inaccurate shorter title. Alerted by his comrades to the problem, he immediately switched over to a title that was an important symbol of the foundational peasant-worker alliance.

Lenin also deserves credit for the adoption of the famous three-word slogan All Power to the Soviets! but in an unexpected way. The slogan does not appear either in the April Theses or in the resolutions of the party conference that ended on April 29. Its first recorded use seems to be on a banner that was carried in the streets on April 21 during antigovernment demonstrations. Lenin noted its appearance and later quoted it in a Pravda article on May 2. The first use of the slogan, not just on an anonymous banner or in a signed article by an individual but in an authoritative party document, occurs in Pravda on May 7. Thus Lenin was perspicacious enough to observe the slogan and note its possibilities. On present evidence, it was indeed Lenin who lifted it out of anonymity and made it central to Bolshevik agitation.

After the July Days, Lenin thought that the unwritten constitution had been abrogated and that the current soviet system was no longer capable of exercising power. He therefore wanted to retract the slogan All Power to the Soviets! As he later admitted, this was a leftist deviation. Luckily, other party leaders managed to keep the slogan intact, and this served the Bolsheviks well in the fall when the soviet system took on new vigor. As this episode shows, Lenin was an effective leader because he was a member of a team that corrected individual misapprehensions.

Looking past the drama of Lenin haranguing his fellow Bolsheviks in October to carry out an uprising, we should focus on his central argument: the soviet constituency nationwide, peasants as well as workers, had rejected any sort of agreementism and therefore had de facto declared for full soviet power. The armed uprising was no doubt a good idea, but the uprising did not itself create soviet power instead, it protected the Second Congress and its capacity to turn the unwritten constitution into a written one.

Lenin was the strong leader of a united party. But the party was not united because he was a strong leader rather, he was a strong leader because the party was united around the basic strategy of socialist leadership in establishing a worker-peasant vlast.

Looking back on the course of events from February to October, one is struck by the improbability as well as the inevitability of soviet power. October was only possible because of the confluence of three highly unusual circumstances: the utter collapse of the former vlast, the creation of an institution based on workers and peasant soldiers that immediately won the effective loyalty of the army, and the existence of an underground party with a national structure and a ready-to-go program that responded to the first two circumstances.

All these features became evident within hours of the fall of the tsarist government. After that, October seems almost inevitable. Agreementism was a dead end, given the profound chasm between the aspirations of the Russian people and those of elite society. Once this became apparent, the Bolsheviks and their program of full soviet power were the only alternative left open for the soviet constituency. Even the counterrevolution was not a real alternative, since it was not yet ready to take power in order to repress the soviets.

1917 was thus a year of clarification about the stakes of the battle. The worker-peasant vlast created in 1917 survived the civil war that followed, but it paid a heavy price.

One casualty was the complete abolition of political freedom, even though this had been a central prewar goal of the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, early Soviet Russia can accurately be described as a worker-peasant vlast in several crucial aspects. The whole stratum of landowners had been liquidated as a class, the former educated elite was completely barred from power, the new government institutions were increasingly staffed by workers and peasants, many of the policies of the new government were aimed at gaining support from these classes (for example, mass literacy campaigns), and the workers and peasants were celebrated continually in song and story. Even massive political intolerance was in some ways a democratic feature, insofar as it reflected widespread popular values.

The soviet power that was created in February 1917 and was preserved in October by accepting Bolshevik leadership established itself as a mighty force in the world, for good and for ill.

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From February to October - Jacobin magazine