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China Miéville. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2017).

Miéville’s October is a history of the events in Petrograd between January and November, 1917, the period of the two revolutions, with special emphasis on the Bolshevik revolution of October 25 (Julian calendar; November 7 in the Gregorian calendar). Miéville appropriately opens with a chapter that briefly outlines the founding of St. Petersburg by Peter the Great and moves rapidly through the nineteenth century.

China Miéville October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. (New York and London: Verso, 2017)

The left is plagued by a lack of strategy or vision. We seem to be stuck within a treadmill of activism and hyperactivity while nothing changes around us. And when election time rolls around in the United States, we are told to “shut up” and vote for some “lesser-evil” Democrat. Yet electing a Democrat never creates space for radical movements; rather it only pulls radicals to the right and to accept the politics of the possible. None of this is revolutionary; it is the politics of NGOs and liberals.

Concluding an essay written in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, Robin Blackburn quoted Raymond Williams to argue that it is “only in very complex ways, and by moving confidently towards very complex societies, that we can defeat imperialism and capitalism and begin that construction of many socialisms which will liberate and draw upon our real and now threatened energies.”¹ The invocation of complexity corresponded to the left’s self-critical mood in those time

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the
one who is firmly convinced that even the dead shall not be safe from the
enemy if he is victorious.
- Walter Benjamin, The Concept of History

Introduction

     Only he who builds the future has a right to judge the past.
F. Nietzsche

Les choses pourraient être autrement. (Things could be otherwise.)
R. Ruyer

“We communists”… Or, in other words: we, faithful to the event of October 1917.
If the failure does not entail the abandonment of the underlying hypothesis, it becomes
simply the history of its justification.
both by A. Badiou
 

Part 1: Guidelines from Walter Benjamin

Suren: I would like us to reflect on what Socialism and Democracy has achieved within the context of a broader left, and also on what the future may hold for us – especially at this moment where we seem to be in some sort of transition between political generations, with a still newer left that has strands of anti-fascism but that is also entering new space, or revisiting older themes, especially in terms of gender relations. How do we situate the journal (as a medium) and specifically Socialism and Democracy in building these currents?

More than any other historical figure . . . a biography of
Stalin . . . comes to approximate a history of the world.¹
Stephen Kotkin.

Anniversaries of momentous historical events often trigger calls to glean some wisdom from those events, some lesson. Yet, in thinking about this particular anniversary—the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution—I find myself uncomfortable talking about what we’ve learned or should have learned from the failures of the Soviet Union.

In my earlier work on gender and revolutions (Moghadam 1997), I developed a model of gendered revolutionary processes and outcomes, by which bourgeois, socialist and populist revolutions are classified as either egalitarian (“the women's emancipation model”) or patriarchal (“the women in the family model”). I used this model to analyze the gender dynamics of, inter alia, the French revolution of 1789, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the East European revolutions of 1989.