Future Legacy of the Russian Revolution: Participatory Political Economies

ABSTRACT

The article is based on the assumption that the October Revolution had a major impact on human history and brought into play relevant motifs, which may also influence the future. The author deals with this future legacy in three steps. First, the article shows the parallels between the soviets (councils) and current participatory systems, which allow the implementation of various concepts of economic and political democracy. Second, the text analyses several kinds of economic democracy. In the third step, the author analyses the heritage to-date of socialism. He explains the need to overcome economic, political and cultural reductionism, to involve various progressive social groups as subjects of social change and to base their emancipation on the institutional social justice models that these social groups have created at local, national, macro-regional, and global levels. It clarifies that the future will indeed be limited by past and future conditions but the historical development will hardly copy a linear trajectory. The future legacy of the Russian revolution is both potential and burden which will influence our activities next decades.

KEYWORDS:

• Russian revolution
• October Revolution
• soviets
• participation
• economic democracy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marek Hrubec is Director and Senior Fellow of the Centre of Global Studies and also of the Department of Moral and Political Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences. He teaches at Charles University in Prague. In 2014 and 2015, he was the first Head of East Africa Star University. He has published on social, economic and political justice, global conflicts, intercultural dialogue, development and the global poor. His main book is From Misrecognition to Justice: A Critical Theory of Global Society and Politics (in Czech, 2011). The last book (with J. P. Arnason) is Social Transformations and Revolutions. He has lectured in many countries including in the European Union, the United States, China, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Iran, India, Vietnam, New Zealand, etc.