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Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra October!

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Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra October! Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra October! To Commemorate the Future The best way to commemorate October 1917 is by looking forward, not back—to remember the future. We have no desire to continue drawing up balance sheets of the Soviet experience, assessing its successes and failures, identifying when the revolution went wrong, defending it from detrac- tors, denouncing those who betrayed it, or debat- ing theories of “totalitarianism.” The time for all that has passed. The ideological clashes of the Cold War—which for decades both elevated and obscured all of those issues—and even the post– Cold War are now, thankfully, behind us. What remains important, instead, is to appreciate how the rupture opened by the October Revolution revealed new horizons for political thought and practice, making what was previ- ously unthinkable the order of the day. It was the source of great theoretical and political innova- tion, and, indeed, vast territories of that unknown universe illuminated by the October Revolution still remain to be explored and experimented. But the revolution primarily serves us today as a testa- ment to the continuing potential of political rup- ture. It is a testament to the fact that a lightning bolt can shatter the continuum of historical time, not only shifting the course of history but also The South Atlantic Quarterly 116:4, October 2017 doi 10.1215/00382876-4234939 © 2017 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/116/4/649/518850/001_october.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 650 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2017 instituting a new calendar, a new temporality (Benjamin 2003: 395). That same lightning bolt can also scramble established geographies from the bot- tom up, instituting a new world map that no longer has Europe at its center, bringing together regions of the world that had previously seemed distant, as if great tectonic plates had shifted over the course of days rather than millen- nia. It is a globalizing event or, rather, a remaking of the globe. Most important are the effects of the revolutionary lightning bolt on the political imagination. It is realistic to demand the impossible because such events transform what used to be thought impossible into entirely real- istic and even necessary demands. And, furthermore, the transformative powers of the event carry beyond the impossible to the unthinkable, opening new and vast horizons for the political imagination, allowing us to desire what we previously could not even imagine. That is where the highest power of the event lies. We are not advocating, of course, to replay the political strategies or resurrect the political forms of 1917—for instance, to create a vanguard communist party to play the part of the Bolsheviks like those historical reenactors who dress up on weekends in Union and Confederate uniforms to replay US Civil War battles. We take the centenary as a reminder, instead, that such a radical political rupture remains possible, even when, as today, conditions do not seem propitious. That does not mean that we should sit back and wait for its second coming (or third or fourth). Revolutionary events do not arrive from the outside. We need to explore what it would mean today for an event the magnitude of the October Revolution to open new potential for liberation and understand, moreover, what are the condi- tions necessary to bring it about. Against the Day It may seem imprudent to talk about revolution today when right-wing move- ments and governments are on the rise and even the specter of fascism is materializing in countries throughout the world. Keep in mind, though, that in the years prior to the October Revolution the forces struggling for libera- tion in Europe were at a low point. Europe was swept by war, the belle époque had ended up in “storms of steel” and mass slaughter in the trenches. Nationalism was the political religion of the day. While in Germany intellec- tuals were praising the “ideas of 1914” in contrast to those of 1789, in France major figures such as Émile Durkheim stigmatized the German “mental- ity” as responsible for the war. Powerful processes to reorganize capitalist Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/116/4/649/518850/001_october.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Hardt and Mezzadra • October! 651 society, under way since the 1890s, were accelerated by the “total mobiliza- tion” for war. Nation, state, and capital seemed destined to dominate the future. At the same time, the labor movement and the forces of internation- alism, which had shone prominently at different moments through the sec- ond half of the nineteenth century throughout the continent, descended into darkness. The vote of the German Social Democratic Party on August 4, 1914, to approve war credits, which paved the way for Germany to go to war, symbolized the end of internationalism and a deep crisis of the labor movement. Meanwhile, something unprecedented—and completely against the day—was emerging in the East. Through the course of 1917, from the first demonstrations in January on the anniversary of the “bloody Sunday” of 1905 to the February Revolution and the fall of the czar, from the uprising in Petrograd in July to the Bolshevik October, the rhythm of an uncontainable revolutionary movement was driven by mass mobilizations and very simple slogans, such as “Bread, peace, and freedom” and “All power to the soviets.” The movement spoke a new internationalist language, and the October Rev- olution was widely perceived (by friends and enemies alike) as the historic success of a project of collective liberation led by workers and soldiers, peas- ants and commoners. “For the first time in human history,” Lenin (1951a: 452) wrote in early 1918, “a socialist party has managed to complete in the main the conquest of power and the suppression of the exploiters, and has managed to approach directly the task of administration.” This radical novelty opened up a completely new political horizon. A New Geographical Imaginary The Bolsheviks, of course, were primarily facing west, looking to the Paris Commune as a precedent for a victorious workers’ insurrection and to Ger- many, the historical stronghold of the labor movement in Europe, as the main source for the propagation of revolutionary theory and activity. And, more generally, as Susan Buck-Morss (2000: 68) argues, the mentality of the Bolsheviks was deeply embedded in the modernizing project dictated by the dominant line of Western European thought. And yet, despite the fact that many Russian revolutionaries imagined Petrograd as residing on a line ema- nating from Berlin and Paris, the revolution completely rearranged the coor- dinates of political geography. Antonio Gramsci (1977) could see from the relatively peripheral position in Italy that the October Revolution was not so much a realization of Marx’s Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/116/4/649/518850/001_october.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 652 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2017 vision but a revolution against Das Kapital and, specifically, against all assumptions of linear historical development whereby the dominant coun- tries will lead and the others follow in their tracks. The fact that October took place in what was considered a backward country on the border between West and East had momentous implications for the geographical imagination of the day. While from across the Atlantic, especially in the course of the Great War, the rise of the United States dramatically shifted the distribution of power in the capitalist world system, the October Revolution signaled the emergence of a completely different world, one oriented primarily outside of Europe, one in which imperialism became a central object of Marxist theory and in which combating colonialism became an ineluctable and even central task for social- ist struggles, as Enzo Traverso’s essay in this issue demonstrates. The Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in September 1920 in Baku (present-day Azerbaijan), was one symptom that a new geographical imagination had emerged.1 Grigory Zinovyev presided over the encounter together with other well-known communist figures such as Karl Radek and Béla Kun. And the participants formed, as Zinovyev remarked, a heteroge- neous, multicolored composition: the major part were intellectuals and activ- ists from former Russian colonies, Turkey, Armenia, and Persia, and there were representatives, too, from India, China, and Japan. Together they sought to orient the potential opened by the October Revolution toward a global revo- lution against colonial and imperialist rule. In Baku the circuits of interna- tionalism were being rewritten outside the European sphere in an anticolo- nial key. In his closing remarks Zinovyev recognized that “the peoples of the East” had good reason from decades of experience to distrust European and especially Russian promises, and indeed Soviet policies in later decades cer- tainly did distort international cooperation into another kind of imperialist rule and sought to “Russify” populations under its control. But that does not negate the fact that a door to a new internationalist terrain had already been opened. The writings and activities of Manabendra Nath Roy and Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, for instance, are testaments to how the October Revolution echoed across Asia and the Middle East. Wang Hui’s essay in this volume explores the extent
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