Daniel Aarão Reis (A lost revolution. The history of Soviet socialism.)

Abstract

The greatest difficulty in any attempt to assess the meaning and historical reach of the October Revolution and Soviet socialism is finding the most objective critical perspective. To this end, it is not enough to leave aside (on the left side) the thickly apologetic literature, and also, on the other side (the right), that produced on an industrial scale and fed with dollars by well-paid political scientists serving the US empire. More insinuating but no less partial is the attitude of those on the left who dismiss the most important revolution of the century and the first to undertake socialist transformation, under the pretext that it was not the socialism of their own dreams. This position is the same, with changed signs, as that of the ideologues of actually existing socialism or Sorex. Both are incapable of understanding the dialectic of the revolutionary program as a concretization of the objectively contradictory character of the construction of socialism.