"October" and "What Happens After?"

October and "What Happens After?"

October by science fiction writer, China Mieville, tells the story of the 1917 Russian Revolution from February to October, calling those earthshaking events "still ground zero for arguments about fundamental radical social change. Its degradation was not a given, was not written in any stars."

A new (2017) collection of writings of Raya Dunayevskaya, Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution, highlights the intimate connection between Lenin's philosophic reorganization and 1917's new page of self-determination opened by workers and peasants. Lenin's reorganization came as a result of studying Hegel's Logic when established Marxism collapsed at the outbreak of WWI.

Even though Lenin's reorganization was crucial in setting the course of the first successful proletarian revolution, Dunayevskaya confronts the problem of our age, namely, the counterrevolutionary transformation of Russia into a totalitarian state-capitalist monstrosity. The point is not to re-live the past, but to see what can we learn from it. What do we learn from 1917 for today?