1917–2017: 100 years of the Russian Revolution
D. L. Jacobs
Platypus Review 190 | October 2026
On November 7, 2017, D. L. Jacobs gave a teach-in on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, facilitated by the Young Communist League of Houston. D. L. Jacobs was a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society and took a leading role in many of its activities. He sadly passed away in September 2026. This teach-in was chosen for publication not just to honor his memory but to continue his invaluable work of educating others. What follows is an edited transcript of the teach-in recording.[1]
AS PAUL MASON PUT IT in The Guardian last week, the approach of the October Revolution centennial is met with three typical responses: “conservative condemnation; the liberal mixture of admiration and regret; and enthusiastic commemoration.”[2] On the one hand, the revolution is condemned, this means everything from a kind of John Birch Society, “communism is bad,” to various Left criticisms: the revolution wasn’t democratic, it was hijacked by intellectuals, the Bolsheviks dismissed the Constituent Assembly, they gave land to peasants when they should have nationalized land, etc. These criticisms are further split on the relation of Lenin to Marx. Was Lenin true to Marx and thus true to Marx’s authoritarianism? Or did Lenin betray Marx, was he too much of a “traditional Marxist,” who affirmed labor rather than seeing capitalism as the potential to overcome labor? Everyone has the solution to the riddle of 1917.
On the other hand, the revolution is praised. The Bolsheviks launched a series of revolutions that allowed former colonial countries to assert their independence from imperialist powers. Lenin caught the imperialist powers off guard and launched a heroic war against imperialism. Communism increased the standard of living of various citizens after the war, allowing them to assert their industrial independence from imperialism, giving workers and oppressed people the empowerment that was denied to them under capitalism. But this is judging the outcome on the basis of capitalism itself. Certainly the Soviet Union stopped the march of Nazi Germany, but you didn’t need Marxism to do that. The talk of the gains made by Marxists ends up being an apologia for the 20th century, Marxism has come to be identified with progress under capitalism, or just with capitalism itself.
I don’t want to take a third position on the Russian Revolution — like I’m gonna go down the middle — but rather raise the question, what view tasks the present? The negative view presupposes that we know better, Lenin did policy X and that is where everything went wrong. But do we know better? Why? Because we have the facts? The affirmative view just mirrors the negative view: history happened how it had to happen and the Bolsheviks made it so by discovering the laws of history. I rather want to raise the October Revolution as the greatest attempt to change the world in human history, whose outcome has conditioned and even haunted history for the past 100 years. Meaning that it has conditioned how we even reflect on it right now in this very room. We have failed to receive the task and that is what makes us uncomfortable. Hence we swear we know exactly what went wrong, as if we were plumbers and we discovered the leak. Or we swear on the revolution in order to give meaning to something whose impact becomes more unclear by the day. In order to do this, to raise it as a question, we have to return to what socialism was for Marx, whom Lenin saw himself fulfilling.
The view from 2017 to 1917 reflects not just the temporal distance but perhaps even the distance from Marxism itself. Why did Lenin want socialism? Is it more ethical? Just? Is it even more efficient, as Einstein put it? Karl Marx was the greatest critic of communism who ever existed. This part has been mostly lost. Communism, as Marx put it in a letter to Arnold Ruge in 1843, is a dogmatic abstraction.[3] An expression which is still infected with its opposite, private property. Communism for Marx did not do away with private property, rather it generalized private property, making everyone a capitalist and worker at the same time. It was infected with this ostensible opposite because its very goal presupposed private property. Literally, communism for Marx was the thoughts of every piece of private property — and by property he means us, by the way — turned against the wealthier properties, realizing competition better than any free market could ever do. Marx neither morally affirmed nor condemned this. Rather this is what was meant by critique, or to make socialism “scientific.” “Scientific” in the Hegelian sense: what are the conditions of possibility? What possibility does communism offer us?
The contradictory character of communism was not a mistake but expressed a real contradiction, a historical contradiction. It was not that labor, bourgeois right, was the source of value but for the bourgeoisie denying it through property or laws. But rather on the basis of labor, society had developed something that had undermined that very right. Hence communism for Marx, in trying to realize bourgeois right, trying to realize labor, was in fact a regression, an attempt to go back to a mythical beginning. Marx thought that the more conscious a political movement was of this contradiction, the more the overcoming of the problem could be achieved by merely realizing communism, but only if it was conscious. Hence the goal is not communism, so much as communism was how the task appeared to us. It says more about the present than it does about the future.
The Communist Manifesto, published just days before the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution, was meant to provide a critique of the communist movement. In order for the proletariat to understand why it existed at all, history had to be presented as a history of class struggles. Class was a modern, not ancient phenomena. The very existence of a proletariat, that is a class that destroys its property by reproducing, was the signal of the need for social revolution. Just to make that clear, in bourgeois society, property was through production. It’s John Locke: you mix your labor with the land. So the proletariat was the exact opposite of that. It did not make any sense to bourgeois society.
The social revolution was to be done, not by winning democracy, but rather by the battle of democracy. At the time of the Manifesto modern revolutions were associated with the unified democratic revolution. But something had developed since the classical revolutions, democracy itself had become contradictory. What represented the nation, the democracy of the producers or the democracy of property? The expression of this was found in the pseudo-democratic pretender Louis Bonaparte — the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte — who represented everyone, and therefore represented nobody. Bonaparte ascended because the bourgeoisie could no longer rule and the proletariat could not yet rule. The state, which seemed to exist over and above society, was in fact the expression of democracy, radical democracy even. Capitalism is not against democracy, it rather renders it necessary but impossible. Rather than being an instrument of the ruling class, like it was for Marx under the July Monarchy, the state had become completely independent under this second Bonaparte. In fact the revolutions of 1848 ended with the bourgeoisie being shot down on their balconies in the name of bourgeois society.[4]
This experience caused Marx to change his mind regarding the proletariat’s goal of centralizing the means of production in the state. The state had become something separate that established itself as an artificial caste along the classes of society. The misrecognition of this whole circumstance has led to a lot of different views on the state. On the one hand anarchists and libertarians condemn the state as a bad habit, a habit of authority infringing upon the organic freedom of civil society. In effect, the liberal view was that the state was supposed to whither away anyways. On the other hand, people like Proudhon; with Louis Bonaparte, Lassalle, and Bismarck, tried to use the state to tame the capitalists. They recognized that the state is no longer just a racket for the capitalists, but seems to have a mind of its own. But they didn’t recognize why the state was there.
Following the 1848 Spring of Nations, socialist parties began to grow, especially in the last quarter of the century. The failure of 1848 demonstrated the need for the working class to constitute itself separately, not just against the bourgeoisie but independently of democracy, even social democracy itself. As Ferdinand Lassalle put it in a letter to Karl Marx dated October 24, 1849; Hungary had multiple opportunities for a revolution in 1848 but failed because the party there was not in a state of division and sharp antagonism. Two rival trends in the socialist movement, Proudhonism and Blanquism, made their exit in the martyrdom of the Paris Commune. The Commune itself showed democracy fully in the modern era, while the state was smashed up by democratizing the bureaucratic functions, it was also the democratic deliberation itself that was the fatal obstacle which allowed the Commune to be smashed by the Prussian military. The Commune repeated 1848, all the old ghosts of the June Insurrection returned in Paris during March of 1871, and thus again came the need for a party for socialism.
Marx only lived to see the birth of a few Marxist parties and while supportive was also not uncritical. “If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist,”[5] was directed at the Parti Ouvrier Français (French Workers’ Party), the French party whose programme Marx had a hand in writing. The German SPD received the lashing of not just Marx but Engels later with the Erfurt Program.[6] While the First International was not a party, the Second International became one under the leadership of Marxism. The establishment of the Erfurt Program was the victory for the hegemony of Marx’s ideas. For the radicals of the Second International faced something that Marx only saw very briefly. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in her classic pamphlet Reform of Revolution, opportunism, or the capitulation to the inertia of capitalism, came out of not just the failures but the successes of Marxism.[7] Eduard Bernstein saw the successful growth of Marxist parties as overcoming the problem that Marx experienced in 1848. Hence the phrase, “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” This was something new, on the basis of Marxism itself one could claim to stay true to Marx, while liquidating Marxism altogether. In fact the revisionists saw themselves as being more true to Marx than the orthodox Marxists. Marxism had come to occupy the place that was vacated by the liberals, who had totally tainted their reputation in 1848. The success of Marx’s influence created a new contradiction, Marxism. When Luxemburg reversed Bernstein with the phrase, "Without the end, the movement is nothing,” it is because the end sheds light on the critical character of the means. Building a socialist movement is a contradiction. This insight, while recognized by Lenin,[8] was missed by the majority of the Second International. Revisionism was supposedly defeated at the congresses of 1903 and 1904, but it was not a problem of certain individuals. Rather it was an inevitable problem of building a socialist movement.
Starting in 1905, the radicals of the Second International knew they were in a period of revolution. Soviets, the democratic forums that were the return of the Paris Commune, had emerged, but this time with Marxists vying for leadership. While this was progress in one sense, it also deepened the crisis in another sense. The slogan around the Soviets in 1905, “The democratic dictatorship of the peasantry and the proletariat,” would return in 1917 to play a conservative role. The pressure of the Russian Revolution of 1905 already began to create a counterpressure by the socialist parties of Western Europe. Following 1905, the trade unions in Germany concluded a secret agreement with the SPD, allowing them to be independent of all the party actions. As Karl Kautsky put it in the 1909 pamphlet, Road to Power, the danger was that the party would appear more moderate than it actually was.[9] But this was a question the Second International could not answer.
Despite having one third of the Reichstag under its control, the SPD ended up voting for war credits on August 4. It was the first counter-revolution in Marxism. But why did they vote for war credits? Were they just secretly nationalists? Social chauvinism was the form by which decades-long opportunism, going all the way back to the revisionist dispute, had revealed itself. The social chauvinists were not made up of nationalists, but rather those who did not think the war provided an opportunity for socialism. It was a step back, and the best one could do was to defend themselves. The pacifists similarly would consider the war a mistake and therefore something that simply needed to end.
Lenin differed in recognizing the responsibility of the proletariat in the outbreak of the war. In other words both the social chauvinists and pacifists did not recognize the new content in an old form, that is the old human activity of war. The imperialist states, for example, were pushed to turn the colonies towards resource extraction in order to maintain internal labour conditions. The socialist movement, with Marxism as its hegemon, was the motor pushing the unconscious rudder which is imperialism. Indeed as J.P. Nettl put it, imperialism was a domestic problem.[10]
The disagreement between Lenin and Kautsky over the 1917 Revolution, then, has to be traced to the disagreement over the meaning of World War I. Kautsky was not for the war, but he did not see it as any opportunity for socialism. Centrism, for Lenin, was worse than social chauvinism, precisely because Kautsky was trying to cover history. A history, just like Marx and Engels’s, that could serve as a critique in the present. Kautsky wanted to preserve the Second International, which he saw as splitting for absurd reasons. But Lenin wanted to make this into a history, to redeem the crisis of the Second International. As he put it in a response to Julius Martov, the stunning success of opportunism is also its Achilles heel: "The rapid growth of a painful abscess on a healthy body can only cause it to burst more quickly and thus relieve the body of it.”[11]
The standard historiography of the revolution is that the February Revolution was the bourgeois revolution and October was the proletarian revolution. But what does that mean? A bourgeois revolution after the industrial revolution, as a farce, falls below classical bourgeois revolutions. The bourgeoisie, as Lenin put it in 1905, are inconsistent. The experience of 1848 was the bourgeoisie rejecting their own revolution and being massacred for it. The Soviets returned in February but played a conservative role for most of 1917. Dual power for example was an anomaly expressing the contradictory character of the revolution. The Soviets were councils that governed regions without the police, without the special bodies of armed men, but voluntarily ceded power to the bourgeoisie. They did not yet recognize themselves as the executive power. The problem, as it was in 1848, 1871, 1905, and still today, was political. So State and Revolution for example, has sometimes been called Lenin’s book report on Marx. Indeed Lenin doesn’t really say anything new in it, but this is where the new content comes in. For while the first five chapters are a concise formalization of Marx’s view of the state, it is the final chapter which makes the punchline. Marxists themselves have regressed from Marx, as expressed by Kautsky and Pannekoek on the state.[12] This regression was not arbitrary, it was not a matter of intellect, but practical. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not immediately apparent, it was not apparent to the socialist movement — especially one that had become compromised.
Why did Lenin think the proletariat could take power, making a global dictatorship of the proletariat? It was the international situation. The war had nationalized the means of production, had given workers weapons, disciplined the democratic masses, and created resentment. But most importantly it had decades-old socialist parties that could lead a revolution. As Lenin put it, 1917 had shown the essential lesson from Marx: you were either going to get the dictatorship of the proletariat or Bonapartism, or as Lenin said, the Bolsheviks or Kornilov. The same conditions which are the preconditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat are also those which lead to Bonapartism and imperialism. What the October Revolution showed was that the working class could constitute itself as a class, lead a revolution, and constitute a state. That is a real accomplishment, period. Whether or not that leads to communism is still only a theory. Whether or not a dictatorship of the proletariat is still going to lead to socialism, still speculation.
At the end of the day we must remember that not only must we reach the height of 1917, but actually go beyond it. 50 years ago, in 1967, the new social movements of the New Left offered new critiques of society and promised to go beyond the limits of their parents and grandparents. As the French communists put it in May 1968, the communism of the preceding generations was obsolete. 50 years after 1967, it's hard to consider how exactly that was true. Did the New Left progress or regress from the first part of the 20th century? Have we even overcome the problems of the New Left? We are told the struggle continues, sure, but the Right struggles against capitalism as well, from the incels up to the investment bankers. Regardless, our understanding of 1917 is to be colored by the rest of the 20th century. As we celebrate this centennial tonight I would like to at least suggest that we reconsider all of our certainties regarding how we stand with respect to the October Revolution. The condemnation and commemoration both have a certainty about them, but I would rather raise what remains ambivalent and obscure. |P
Transcribed by Matthew Ramirez
[1] Video of the teach-in is available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0nniC1Rfzk>.
[2] Paul Mason, “Those who lived through the Russian Revolution understood history – unlike us,” in The Guardian, March 30, 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/30/russian-revolution-those-who-lived-through-understood-history-unlike-us>.
[3] Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm>.
[4] See Karl Marx, “Chapter 1,” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/>.
[5] Engels relates a version of this quote in a letter to Conrad Schmidt. See Friedrich Engels to Conrad Schmidt (August 5, 1890), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htm>.
[6] The Erfurt Program established Marxism within the SPD, as opposed to the earlier Gotha Program which was heavily criticized by Marx.
[7] See Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1900), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/>.
[8] See the first footnote in V. I. Lenin, “Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism,’” in What is to be Done? (1902), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/>.
[9] Karl Kautsky, Road to Power (1909), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/>.
[10] Nettl reiterates this point in a review of Rosa Luxemburg’s book The Accumulation of Capital. See J.P. Nettl, “Socialist Classic,” International Socialism 16 (Spring 1964), <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1964/no016/nettl.htm>.
[11] V. I. Lenin, “The Place of Imperialism in History,” in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm>.
[12] V. I. Lenin, “The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists,” in The State and Revolution (1917), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm>.
