Lessons from the Russian Revolution and Its Fallout: An Epistemological Approach^*

* This article is dedicated to to Johan and Linnéa Anglemark in Uppsala, sine quibus non, and to Michael Löwy, a pioneer of rethinking. Thanks are due in Uppsala to the university libraries’ system and my assistant Ms Disa Hasselberg, as well as to the friends to whom the essay is dedicated. Also to many others, in particular to Prof. Jerry Harris for discussions on the “transnational capitalist class.” Unacknowledged translations are mine.

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Notes

* This article is dedicated to to Johan and Linnéa Anglemark in Uppsala, sine quibus non, and to Michael Löwy, a pioneer of rethinking. Thanks are due in Uppsala to the university libraries’ system and my assistant Ms Disa Hasselberg, as well as to the friends to whom the essay is dedicated. Also to many others, in particular to Prof. Jerry Harris for discussions on the “transnational capitalist class.” Unacknowledged translations are mine.

1 This not quite finished work (possibly intended by Benjamin as his provisional testament, certainly taken as such) was left by him without a final title; the present one, to my mind unsatisfying, was suggested by Adorno, who is well known for being at important points unable or unwilling to honour his friend's horizon. Quotations here are from the original German text.

2 My approach to the Russian Revolution is guided, first, by the older writings of E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Victor Serge, Charles Bettelheim, Moshe Lewin, Robert C. Tucker, and Stephen F. Cohen, then in Russia by Roy Medvedev; and second, by the newer sources cited. I have also used insights arrived at in my essays “From the Archeology,” much informed by the writers cited in it. Though I dislike god-like capital letters and nominations, I could not escape using “Party” for the Russian communist party (Bolsheviks) and as its envisaged but central mutation later.

3 In this remarkable speech, Lenin posited that Russia contained the following “socio-economic structures”: “(1) patriarchal, i.e. to a considerable extent natural, peasant farming; (2) small commodity production (this includes the majority of those peasants who sell their grain); (3) private capitalism; (4) state capitalism; (5) socialism.” To his mind, this was also a progression in usefulness, so that he favoured more State capitalism as against the hunger-producing small commodity production.

4 I shall here only briefly summarise arguments and desiderata I formulated earlier (in “From the Archeology,” “Communism,” and “What”).

5 The complex Roman term dictatorship, beloved by Marx the classicist and still useful to Lenin (for one central matter, it meant a strictly limited duration), has since 1917 become so corrupted by both Stalinist and bourgeois use that I would not employ it in practical agitation any more.