By Andrey N. Medushevsky · Thursday, January 2, 2020 Andrey N. Medushevsky’s “Law and Revolution: The Impact of Soviet Legitimacy on Post-Soviet Constitutional Transformation” appears in Telos 189 (Winter 2019), a special issue on constitutional theory. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 The systematic investigation of the Russian revolutionary tradition in comparative, historical, and functional perspective provides the opportunity to understand its impact on the creation of the modern world and the contemporary social and political system. This article discusses the meaning, formation, and evolution of the Soviet project—the concept and practice of social and legal reorganization in Russia inspired by Marxist philosophical ideas and fulfilled during the period from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. Employing a cognitive theoretical approach in historical studies, the author examines the role of Communist myth in the formation of the Soviet state, the ideological and legal grounds of one-party dictatorship, the nature of nominal constitutionalism, and the role of institutional continuity in the formation of the current political system. He shows the place of the permanent grounds (ideology, nominal constitutionalism, and dictatorial impetus) as well as the place of changing parameters of the project (Soviet, federative, and class-oriented regulation) regarding their formal and informal influence on the political regime’s legitimacy and the cumulative impact on the system’s transformation and failure. In this context, the author discusses the evolution of the legitimating formula of the political regime from Tsarist times to the collapse of the Soviet regime, as represented in ideological programmatic, nominal Soviet constitutionalism (1918, 1924, 1936, and 1977 Soviet constitutions) and changing practices of the social mobilization. That makes possible the general evaluation of the revolutionary heritage and its influence on the current post-Soviet ideological priorities, political system, legal transformation, and prospects for its modernization.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Sunday, June 16, 2019 The ongoing Sudanese revolution has emerged at a time when most of us had already given up any realistic hope for what has become known as the Arab Spring. Yet, if anything, the revolutionaries in Sudan have the best chance yet of simultaneously defeating both nationalist dictatorship and religious fundamentalism. This would be no small feat; it would arguably mark the most significant historical turning point in the struggle for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since World War II.
Since the protests began in Tunisia in late 2010, the Arab Spring has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promise of democratic governance. I argue that this is primarily because the protest movements have simply not been revolutionary enough to break free from the dominating orbit of the retroactive forces of nationalist dictatorships and religious fundamentalism. Under these circumstances, the non-violent, mostly liberal movements were quickly neutralized, demonstrating the degree to which the death of the Left has left contemporary societies at the mercy of fascist forces.
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By Loralea Michaelis · Monday, February 25, 2019 Loralea Michaelis’s “Temporality and Revolution in Horkheimer’s Early Critical Theory: A Luxemburgian Reading of Dämmerung” appears in Telos 185 (Winter 2018). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 This article challenges the related assumptions about temporality and the significance of success and failure for revolutionary activism that have governed the standard interpretation of Horkheimer’s critical theory as foundering on the disappointment of its early revolutionary expectations. The early influence of Luxemburg on Horkheimer is used to bring into clearer focus Horkheimer’s handling of the problem of a failed revolution in Dämmerung, his earliest published work, which bears a striking resemblance to Luxemburg’s own positions on the centrality of failure to the development of the revolution as well as her critique of the success-oriented politics of reformism. Dämmerung foregrounds the German revolution of 1919–23, but the working through of its failure yields not pessimism over the future but a challenge to the preoccupation with future prospects which underlies both pessimism and optimism; it also yields a conception of revolution as a present-oriented resistance that not only does not expect to succeed in its aims but regards the aim of success with a skeptical eye. Contrary to the standard reading, the failed revolution is not a problem for which Horkheimer’s early critical theory needs to find a solution; rather, it is its practical correlative.
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By Vasiliy A. Shchipkov · Thursday, October 5, 2017 The following paper was presented at the conference “After the End of Revolution: Constitutional Order amid the Crisis of Democracy,” co-organized by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University Higher School of Economics, September 1–2, 2017, Moscow. For additional details about the conference as well as other upcoming events, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.
It is important not only to analyze the legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917 from the point of view of historical science, but also to bear in mind its impact on the modern information and ideological processes. Discussing the Russian Revolution has become a way to think and talk about today, and different approaches to the discussion correspond to different views on modernity and different political ethics. There are five approaches to the evaluation of the Russian Revolution in the ideological space of today: the classic liberal, the neoliberal, the Western left, the Russian left, and the traditionalist approach.
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By Telos Press · Friday, April 14, 2017 Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, there is arguably a crisis of democracy: not only has the transition from totalitarian communism failed to bring about liberal market capitalism, but politics in mature democracies has been becoming post-democratic. Models of authoritarianism and state capitalism are spreading in different parts of the world, while countries with long-standing democratic traditions are characterized by a rejection of the political mainstream and a turn to extremes on the far left or the far right.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, September 7, 2016 “Two reefs tower in front of the anarchist. The first, the state, must be overcome, especially in a hurricane, when the waves soar. He ineluctably runs aground on the second one, society, the very image that flickered before him. There is a brief intermezzo between the fall of the legitimate powers and the new legality. Two weeks after Kropotkin’s funeral cortege, in which his corpse had followed the Black Banners, the sailors of Kronstadt were liquidated. This is not to say that nothing had happened in between—Merlino, one of the disillusioned, hit the nail on the head: ‘Anarchism is an experiment.’”
—Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
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