Is Social Revolution Still Possible in the Twenty-First Century?

The eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Stalinist regimes were treated by many analysts and commentators as signalling the end of the contemporary form of social revolution. The defeat of “communism” had apparently removed the possibility of any systemic alternative to capitalism, which now emerges as the telos of history. Henceforth, the only conceivable revolutions were regime-changing political revolutions, a claim that appeared to be supported by the subsequent Colour Revolutions and the Arab Spring. This interpretation is, however, based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the Stalinist regimes and the revolutions which created them. Following an analysis of the categories of political and social revolution, and the different varieties of the latter, the article will argue that Stalinism has to be seen, on the one hand, as the counter-revolution (in Russia) and, on the other, as contemporary bourgeois revolutions (everywhere else), leading to forms of state capitalism in both cases. From this perspective, the negative effect of the Stalinist regimes on the formation of revolutionary consciousness was not their downfall, but their existence and the distorted idea of socialism which they perpetuated. The article concludes by arguing that, while there are indeed obstacles to the resumption of socialist revolution as a goal, these are more to do with the defeats inflicted on the international worker’s movement by neoliberalism than by the events of 1989.