Russia’s 1917 October Revolution: A warning, an alternative, a challenge
Each anniversary of Russia’s 1917 October Revolution (November 7 in the new style calendar) offers an opportunity to reflect on the global significance of that historic event. For some, it is a chance to condemn the “horrors of Communist dictatorship”; for others, an occasion to recall the first serious attempt to replace the capitalist order with something different, however contradictory, bloody and ultimately defeated it may have been.
In contemporary debates, October most often appears either as a moral warning or an ideological phantasm: either as proof that “every deviation from the market leads to the Gulag,” or as a romantic myth of the storming of the Winter Palace and workers “seizing history.” In both cases, what was obvious to the very actors of the revolution themselves is pushed out of view: that it was a response to a specific set of global problems — imperialist war, extreme social inequalities, the underdevelopment of the periphery of European capitalism — and not a mere whim of a small group of fanatics.
From a distance of more than a century, the October Revolution can be read as much as a symptom of a crisis of the world system as a project for its transformation. It opened up a series of questions that remain unresolved even today: whether it is possible to “catch up” rapidly with the developed capitalist centre through planned mobilisation of resources; whether the working class can truly rule or is inevitably replaced by a new bureaucratic elite; whether partial emancipation from external dependence is possible without the creation of internal repression. The way we answer these questions shapes not only our relationship to the past, but also the limits of what we today consider politically thinkable.
The October Revolution followed on from the earlier revolution of February 1917, which abolished the tsarist regime. Yet however much that democratic change had been anticipated, expected and supported by the majority of the population and political actors (including Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party), the fall of the monarchy in itself could not solve the serious political and economic challenges facing Russia. The government of the “minister-capitalists” continued with the same policies, merely repackaged in new, democratic wrapping paper: the war went on, land was not returned to the peasants, workers did not gain any real control over production, and Russia’s peripheral position in the world economy remained unchanged.
In this sense, October was not the whim of a radical minority that “destroyed a young democracy,” but an expression of disillusionment with a mere change of political form without a change in social content. The democratic freedoms brought by the February Revolution — the press, assembly, party life — were not without importance, but proved insufficient when the majority of the population still remained without peace, land and bread. Only when it became clear that the new authorities did not intend to withdraw from the war, could not secure a redistribution of land and did not wish to touch the economic privileges of the elites, did space open for a more radical project.
Revolution, post-socialist experience and capitalism
It is here that the parallel with the present becomes painfully visible. Today, in many countries, the replacement of authoritarian regimes by liberal-democratic governments often ends as “February without October”: party pluralism, independent institutions and new constitutions are introduced, but the basic structures of economic power remain intact. Promises of social justice, reduced inequality and an “end to the oligarchy” turn into cosmetic reforms, while old patterns of exploitation are reproduced under the banners of the market, responsibility and European integration.
The October Revolution reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: political democracy without a restructuring of existing class relations in the economy has a very limited reach. This does not mean that the Bolshevik answer to that problem represented a universal model or ready-made recipe for the present, but the experience of 1917 warns that any “change” that leaves untouched the logic of capital accumulation, external dependence and social inequality will necessarily generate a new round of disappointment and radicalisation. In this sense, the question posed by each anniversary of the October Revolution is not only what do we think of the Bolshevik project, but also how prepared are we today to accept the idea that without deeper intervention into economic relations there can be no real democracy.
In the post-socialist space we can already see precisely such repeated cycles of revolt, disappointment and radicalisation. From the “Maidan” revolutions in Ukraine, which promised a break with corruption and oligarchic control but ended in a new redistribution of power within the same class, to the waves of mass protests in Serbia, where the energy of social discontent is regularly channelled into a struggle for a “normal state,” but without any serious intervention into the economic foundations of the order.
Prominent Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky notes in his analysis of the current situation in Serbia, sent to me from prison, that the momentum of a movement and its mass character by no means guarantee any substantive results if the foundations of the order remain untouched: under the dominance of liberal ideology, the key structural contradictions that generate crises are not resolved, even the most elementary political conclusions are not drawn, and democratic victories often turn into “technical” triumphs that are quickly reversed.
Kagarlitsky argues that, for such victories to become genuinely substantive, a second, more radical wave is required — at least an anti-oligarchic, if not a socialist transformation — as we can see with the experience of several left governments in Latin America that, despite social reforms and a certain redistribution of income, remained within the framework of an oligarchic order and export dependence. In these cases, the change of elites and political symbols leaves intact the key patterns of dependence, the privatisation of public resources, and the subordination of the local capitalist strata to the global centre.
The October Revolution did not stop at the level of a change in political regime, but sought to transform the very foundations of the socio-economic order. In this sense, it stepped beyond the framework of the then familiar “democratic revolutions” and opened an unprecedented experiment: the reorganisation of the economy on the basis of social ownership, planned allocation of resources and the proclaimed abolition of exploitation.
For that reason, its impact far exceeded the borders of Russia. The October Revolution became a point of reference for all later attempts to challenge the “naturalness” of capitalism: from the workers’ movement in Europe, through to the anti-colonial struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America, to the movements for the welfare state in the very core of the world system.
With all its many shortcomings, the socialist system, at least until its developmental potential was exhausted, was able to deliver unprecedented levels of growth and structural transformation. In the interwar period and the first postwar decades, the Soviet Union achieved some of the fastest industrial growth rates in the world, narrowing (though never closing) the gap with the capitalist core despite starting from a far lower base and operating through the Great Depression and the devastation of war. According to Maddison Project estimates, between 1928 and 1939 the Soviet Union’s GDP per capita rose from about 19% to roughly 32% of the US level.
At the same time, it pioneered what later came to be known as the “welfare state”: universal social protection and socio-economic rights, such as the right to work, education (including higher education), healthcare, pensions and material provision in old age, as well as extensive systems of paid sick leave, maternity benefits, childcare and subsidised housing.
In this sense, capitalism owes a good part of its later “victory” to socialism: it was socialist experiments that first piloted and scaled many of the social innovations now taken for granted in mature capitalist welfare states — mass public education, universal health coverage, comprehensive social insurance, paid maternity leave and legally guaranteed job security.
Socialist social investment also created unprecedented channels of vertical mobility. Free and massively expanded secondary, technical and higher education, together with admissions quotas for workers, peasants and women, rapidly overturned the old imperial pattern when there were no workers’ or peasant’s children among the students. By the late 1930s more than half of university students came from popular classes, while women moved in large numbers into skilled professions, management and representative institutions decades before comparable shifts occurred in advanced capitalist countries.
Yet some of these gains are still not available to large segments of the working population in the capitalist core even today: the US, for example, remains the only OECD country without guaranteed paid maternity leave at the national level, and access to higher education in many wealthy countries is conditioned on high tuition fees and heavy indebtedness.
Naturally, the history of this experiment was neither linear nor romantic. Already in the first years after victory, invasion, destruction, isolation, civil war and a socially backward environment created conditions under which the original slogans “peace to the peoples, factories to the workers, land to the peasants” began to turn into their bureaucratic and authoritarian surrogate. Instead of direct workers’ control, a party–state hierarchy was consolidated; instead of emancipation, a new stratum of managers emerged, presenting itself as the “vanguard” acting in the name of those who supposedly ruled. Yet even this process of degeneration does not erase the fact that the starting point was an attempt to break with the logic of capitalist accumulation, and not merely to “humanise” it or distribute it more evenly.
From today’s perspective, in an era in which capitalism is globally presented as the only possible form of society, it is precisely this rupture that makes the October Revolution intolerable for ruling ideologies and, at the same time, indispensable for any serious left politics. In a world in which cycles of liberal euphoria, disappointment and authoritarian backlash keep recurring, the legacy of the October Revolution is not a set of ready-made recipes, nor can it be revived through a simple “return.” Its significance lies in the fact that it poses, in radically sharp form, the question of whether it is possible to organise the economy and society on foundations different from private profit and competition, and what price societies pay when they attempt to do so.
How we answer this question today determines whether we see the history of 1917 as a “foreign deviation” or as the first, contradictory but unavoidable attempt to move beyond the limits of the capitalist century. It is precisely for this reason that contemporary ideologies work systematically to delegitimise even the very possibility of such an alternative.
Within that same ideological landscape, the legacy of the October Revolution is further suppressed through increasingly frequent attempts to present Communism and fascism as “two sides of the same totalitarian evil” — of which the 2019 resolution of the European Parliament is only the most prominent symbolic expression.
There is a formal similarity in the fact that both the Communist project, in the form in which it crystallised in “actually existing socialism,” and fascism built authoritarian, repressive regimes. But ideologically they stood on opposite poles: Communism, at least declaratively, advocated the brotherhood and unity of peoples, the overcoming of national and racial hierarchies and a universalism of human rights in a class perspective; fascism rested on a racial ideology, a cult of violence and open intolerance as the basis of the political order.
The history of the twentieth century shows quite clearly that “democratic” capitalism had a genuine ideological conflict only with Communism, while its conflict with fascism was above all economic and security-related: fascist powers became unacceptable only when they threatened the balance of interests within the capitalist world itself, and not because they negated democratic values.
That is why today we witness marches and rallies of Nazis and neo-Nazis, as well as commemorations of former members of Nazi formations (including Waffen-SS units), justified by the claim that they were “essentially” not fascists but fighters against Communism — a claim taken as almost complete exoneration. In 2022, all European Union member states, together with the United States, Britain and their main allies, voted against the United Nations General Assembly resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and former members of the Waffen-SS.
At the same time, in those same “democratic” states that tolerate or even celebrate collaborators with fascism without major scandal, the harshest repressive measures have been introduced against Communists: from arrests and bans on Communist parties and symbols to restrictions and de facto censorship of the study of Karl Marx’s Capital, one hundred and fifty years after its first publication.
In this shifting of moral coordinates, the significance of the October Revolution becomes twofold: on the one hand, it remains a warning about the dangers of the authoritarian degeneration of emancipatory projects; on the other, it reminds us that at one historical moment there did exist a serious, globally relevant alternative to the capitalist order, one that cannot be reduced to a footnote squeezed between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Lessons of actually existing socialism and the fate of the socialist idea
Communism reflects the hope that a just and free social order without exploitation is possible, with distribution in favour of all citizens, and not just a handful of powerful rich. The contradictions of capitalism that Marx analysed have therefore not disappeared, nor have the limits of bourgeois democracy that he pointed to. As Yanis Varoufakis recently argued, “we live not in democracies but, rather, under oligarchic rule punctuated by periodic elections.”
The collapse of actually existing socialism did not magically resolve capitalism’s tensions or make the system suddenly work better. On the contrary, the crises that continue to shake the global economy have intensified since the euphoria over the supposed “final victory” of capitalism and the “end of history” faded.
Capital’s extortionate power is exercised everywhere. According to the 2022 World Inequality Report, globally, the richest 1% have captured roughly 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, while the bottom half of the world’s population has received only about 2%. Today, that same top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 95% combined. In such a context, the image of a “handful” that makes up just one in a hundred is not a metaphor but an accurate description of how concentrated economic power has become.
Precisely for that reason, despite the collapse of actually existing socialism and the rise of neoliberal capitalism (and perhaps indeed because of that), the idea of socialism has survived and continues to be actively discussed — in academic circles, social movements, trade unions and even within the frameworks of a deformed social democracy that periodically tries to regain a lost connection with its own historical roots.
The October Revolution (and what followed it) therefore does not negate the idea of socialism, but warns about the conditions under which an attempt to realise it can turn into its opposite. It shows how dangerous is the combination of backwardness, war, destruction, international isolation and concentration of political power in the hands of a narrow stratum of the “vanguard,” as well as how risky it is to separate social transformation from political democracy, pluralism and the real participation of subordinated classes in decision-making.
None of this means that the failure of actually existing socialism can be reduced to its internal distortions alone. External pressure mattered as well. From the Entente military intervention and economic blockade of 1918–20, through to the devastating attack by Nazi Germany in 1941 and the destruction of a third of the country’s productive capacity, to the long Cold War siege that followed, socialism in the Soviet bloc developed under conditions of almost permanent emergency.
Western states imposed far-reaching restrictions on access to technology and credit, from strategic export controls on advanced machinery, electronics and computers to trade discrimination such as the Jackson–Vanik amendment and various embargoes and sanctions regimes. A system that must constantly prepare for war, sustain an enormous military establishment and live under the perception of encirclement will almost inevitably be pushed toward centralisation, secrecy and repression, even when it claims an emancipatory goal.
This raises a counterfactual that bourgeois caricatures of communism carefully avoid. Both Marx and Lenin envisaged communism as a profoundly democratic order, based on the self-government of associated producers and the progressive withering away of coercive state power, not on an omnipotent party-state standing above society.
Lenin repeatedly insisted that “socialism cannot maintain its victory and bring humanity to the time when the state will wither away unless democracy is fully achieved” and that ordinary workers must “learn to govern the state,” so that administration would cease to be the preserve of a specialised bureaucratic caste.
In the absence of permanent external threat and capitalist siege, could actually existing socialism have evolved in more democratic, less authoritarian directions? Nothing in the communist idea as such predetermines the ugly forms it assumed in history; these were the result of a particular combination of internal contradictions and external pressures, not a logical consequence of the aspiration to a society without exploitation.
If anything, the experience of the October Revolution and of actually existing socialism sets the task of continuing the search for alternatives to capitalism with a clear awareness of these limits and dangers: the idea of a society without exploitation remains an open horizon, but it can no longer be imagined as a project realised through “historical necessity” and party infallibility, rather as a long, contradictory process of democratic struggle and self-management from below.