NM's blog

The attempt to account for America’s anti-socialist exception has sustained a thriving academic cottage industry among historians, sociologists and political scientists over many decades. As long ago as 1906, the German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart was asking: “Why is there no socialism in the US?”  The answer, he thought, lay in the success of capitalism and the extent to which American workers identified as a result with the prevailing social and economic settlement. “On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie,” Sombart wrote, “socialistic utopias of every sort are sent to their doom.”  There were other factors at work too, Sombart argued. America had no feudal past, which meant that workers there felt the political system was largely responsive to their needs, in a way that their European counterparts, who’d had to fight to achieve the franchise, did not. Greater social mobility led most Americans to value self-improvement over collective action, while the open fr...

“How to relate to the Leninist tradition? How to extract its truth? The basis of Lenin’s success was the perfect adaptation of his political strategy to the historical terrain of late Tsarist Russia, with its still quasi-feudal agrarian structure, its absolutist state and its supine bourgeoisie. But the Bolsheviks mistakenly drew from this experience the conclusion that they had discovered a general formula for revolutionary transformation: a cadre party of full-time revolutionaries aimed at the seizure of state power. This generalization was of course a distortion since Lenin was a highly sophisticated political thinker, who understood the importance of linking the socialist project to the democratic movement against the Tsarist autocracy. But after the revolution a certain schematism set in, especially with the establishment of the Communist International and the demand that all affiliated parties adhere to the 21 points. This forced an unhealthy process of splitting which severely w...

Written after Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s Class of Civilisations , but before the ‘war on terror’, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of China, the 2008/09 Great Recession, the Arab uprisings, the rise of the far right, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ————- Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilization and manners to different continents? Why not to Europe itself? – Joseph Roth, 1937 “Modern democracy, like the nation-state it is so closely associated with, is basically the product of the protracted domestic and international experimentation which followed the collapse of the old European order in 1914. In the short run, both Wilson and Lenin failed to build the ‘better world’ they dreamed of. The communist revolution across Europe did not materialize, and the building of socialism was confined to the Soviet Union; the crisis of liberal democracy followed soon after as one country after an...

Undoing Lenin

 "The British bourgeoisie do not spare any money as far as this institution is concerned, and that is as it should be." — Lenin,  impressed by the British state's commitment to the British Museum library. London's role in the Russian revolution

Reviewing The Age of Catastrophe by Henrich Winkler

"We cannot ignore that war if we want to understand the end of this revolutionary democracy, and those who draw a straight line from October 1917 to Stalinism invariably ignore or downplay the impact of that bloody conflict." The Revolutionary Democracy of 1917

The unsevered umbilical cord that leaves large swathes of the Global South economically reliant on their old colonial powers, even after formally attaining national independence, is the  structural dependence  of these peripheral states on foreign credit and investment, which has long been provided to them by private banks, international investors and financial institutions in the advanced capitalist countries. Subjecting the nature of this structural dependence to closer theoretical and empirical scrutiny may therefore allow us to approach the problems faced by “the new debt colonies” from a somewhat different angle, enabling us to better understand the more subtle contemporary forms of financial subjugation operating at the structural and institutional level that serve to reproduce these deeply entrenched international power asymmetries over time, even in the absence of territorial control or outright military intervention. The New Debt Colonies should be read along with...

100 years after the Russian Revolution History from Below

'Revolution against Das Kapital ' and 'the Lonely Hour Economy'

Gramsci and the Russian Revolution

Lenin's eco-warriors    ( The New York Times )

“A lot has changed in the past 300 years,” Captain Picard explains to a cryogenically unfrozen businessman from the 20th century in an episode of a later “Star Trek” franchise, “The Next Generation.” “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.” In The New York Times 'Star-Treck" and its debt to revolutionary socialism

Socialism's Future May Be Its Past    (NYT)

At The British Library 'There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.' – Lenin Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths

China Miéville's book October "is  very deliberate in what it covers and, more importantly, doesn’t cover." John Medherst: " As someone with a book on the Russian Revolution out later this year (August 17th) with a different and more critical take on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, I had to buy and read China Mieville’s October. It is, as you would expect, a great read. Vivid and immersive, it skilfully recreates how kinetic, stressful, confusing and exciting February-October 1917 in Russia must have been. But it is very deliberate in what it covers and, more importantly, doesn’t cover. Although it has a brief prologue and epilogue, 95% of the book sticks tightly to the nine months of February-October. As such it is, surprisingly for a Marxist writer, a rather old-fashioned narrative history. Considering that nearly all the main issues and controversies of the Bolshevik revolution arise from events post-October, the decision to barely address that period prevents wide...

"One can disagree with, say, historian Orlando Figes’s conclusions without querying the seriousness of his research, but his assertion in  A People’s Tragedy  that “hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders” is simply absurd (and his disapproving fascination with their leather jackets curious). In Russia, Virginia Woolf wrote in  Orlando , “sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them”. Of course this is a literary flourish, a common and unsustainable romanticised Russian essentialism. But even so, the formulation feels prophetic for this particular Russian story. Chernyshevsky’s dots describe the revolution itself. Pravda’s blank hole contains tactics. Unsayables are by no means all there is to this strange story, but they are central to it." Why does the Russian Revolution matter? See also this in the New York Times

Top 10 books about the Russian Revolution I have read John Reed's book and it's good.

What was Lenin thinking? Tariq Ali in the New York Times

" To be sure, Miéville, like everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russia’s revolution, the historical outcome was ‘Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch’. But that hasn’t made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form. The world’s first socialist revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because ‘things changed once, and they might do so again’ (how’s that for a really minimal claim?). ‘Liberty’s dim light’ shone briefly, even if ‘what might have been a sunrise [turned out to be] a sunset.’ But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them." The Russian Revolution: What's Left?