A political via negativa, an apophatic revolutionism

Lenin has fought a lonely battle insisting that the invidious demands be accepted

The shift is born of despair, as any prospects for international revolution recede. But if it is utopian to hope that international support is around the corner, how much more so is it to wager on the impossible – autarchic socialism?

Party activists are hounded in great numbers, forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations

did October lead inexorably to Stalin? It is an old question, but one still very much alive. Is the gulag the telos of 1917?

The party’s shift after Lenin’s death, from that plaintive, embattled sense that there had been little alternative but to strive in imperfect conditions, to the later bad hope of Socialism in One Country, is a baleful result of recasting necessity as virtue.

And in the traducing and misrepresentation of opponents

Those who count themselves on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes. To do otherwise is to fall into apologia, special pleading, hagiography – and to run the risk of repeating such mistakes.

The specifics of Russia, 1917, are distinct and crucial. It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

What could be more inimical to any trace of teleology than those who take account of the sidings of history?