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?
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On September 28, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on the reemergence of the Popular Front in French politics under the original title “Le sens d’une politique de Front populaire aujourd’hui.” The panelists were Gilles Candar (historian, president of the Société d'études jaurésiennes), Aymeric Monville (writer, founder of Les éditions Delga), Victor (L’Offensive), and Alexis Henri (Ligue trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League in France).
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It was understood by Engels that simply being a “Marxist” was insufficient. Marxism needed to acclimate itself, to be attuned to, the particular circumstances of the countries and civilization in which the struggle for socialism was concretely being carried out. For Marxists in America, it was not enough to simply study Marx. Marx had to always be “translated” into one’s context. I do not simply mean a literal translation of text, but more fundamentally a translation of the insights central to Marxism into the common sense and sensibilities of the people.
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On September 25, 2025, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion at Australian National University with panelists Barry York (C21st Left blog), Lachlan (Communist Party of Australia), and Christina Veselovskiy (Revolutionary Communist Organization – Applicant Member).
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There's a famous line that the Bolsheviks used to say even before October 1917, that 1905 was the dress rehearsal. This is a phrase liable to abuse. A rehearsal is a trial performance for a later performance. One remembers the cues, the rote memorization, etc. They try to perfect the act in order to prevent any contingency. But history is not a laboratory, where if you do something wrong, you just correct for the problem in the future. Insurrection is an art, Marx used to say, and this was one of Lenin’s favorite lines. It is not something that has a formula, but rather, like art, is a judgment of the speculative type, of how the present forms point beyond themselves.
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