Lan Yang: Hobsbawm on the Triple Logic of the October Revolution
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was a renowned British left-wing historian. As a contemporary of the Russian October Revolution, Hobsbawm spent his entire life exploring the logic of this revolution’s development, its historical experience, and its contemporary effects, while engaging in a resolute struggle against various ideologies that sought to negate the October Revolution.
In fact, since the outbreak of the October Revolution, a trend of criticism or negation has persisted within Western theoretical circles. Some scholars question the historical necessity of the revolution, arguing that war and revolution interrupted Russia's normal path of capitalist development; some claim that the October Revolution was nothing more than a "Blanquist political conspiracy" [1] and that the political path it set out upon was "premature"; still others believe the October Revolution was a contingent event that did not "conform to historical laws," and that with the end of the Cold War, it has become a mere historical relic.
In response to these doubts and attacks, Hobsbawm—with the theoretical consciousness of a Marxist historian—utilized the methodology of historical materialism to launch forceful counterattacks and fundamental critiques. In his view, the fatal flaw in Western academia is the conflation of factual judgments with value judgments. For Hobsbawm, the October Revolution was first and foremost the sum of a series of historical events, and only secondarily a choice between two political paths. The former involves specific historical contexts and the actions of historical agents; the latter involves the interaction between revolutionary theory, political goals, and realistic conditions. Therefore, we should conditionally distinguish the historical logic of the revolution from its theoretical (political) logic; only on this premise can we further correctly understand the practical logic and contemporary value of the October Revolution. A detailed examination of Hobsbawm’s research on the October Revolution and its triple logic offers important insights for deepening our understanding of Marxism and further elucidating the historical significance and contemporary value of the October Revolution.
I. The Historical Logic of the October Revolution
Hobsbawm believed that exploring the historical logic of the October Revolution requires restoring the historical context in which it occurred and assessing the subjective and objective reasons for the revolution's outbreak and success within that context. On this point, two diametrically opposed views exist in Western academia. One view holds that the revolution was the inevitable result of the long-term accumulation of structural contradictions in Russian economy and society. For example, Leopold Haimson pointed out that even without World War I, Russia's class conflicts and the corruption and incompetence of the Tsarist government would have been sufficient to bring revolution to Russia. The other view emphasizes that the contingent event of the war interrupted the development of Russian capitalism and weakened Russia's state capacity, thereby leading to the outbreak of the revolution. Based on these two different tendencies, Western academia also has sharp disagreements regarding the dominant factors in the revolution's success. Theda Skocpol emphasizes the decisive status of the peasantry while downplaying the role of the working class. Walter Goldfrank explains the causes of the revolution from the perspective of external geopolitical pressure. Jack Goldstone places state power above other factors, arguing that political divisions within the ruling class and the collapse of governmental capacity were the primary conditions for the revolution's success. Marxist theorists, on the whole, explain the revolution as the inevitable result of class struggle, identifying the working class as its leading force.
Faced with these theoretical disputes, Hobsbawm argued that no single historical event is determined by a single factor; the key lies in identifying the causal links and the primary versus secondary relationships. The advantage of Marxism lies in its long-term vision, capable of organically combining structural analysis with situational analysis, and economic/social analysis with political analysis. In his "Centuries" tetralogy—specifically The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes—Hobsbawm utilized the Marxist method of class analysis to interpret the class structure of pre-revolutionary Russia. He argued that the complex class contradictions of early 20th-century Russia, particularly the simultaneous occurrence of class conflicts in both city and countryside, provided the fundamental impetus for the revolution. He analyzed Russia’s class situation from four aspects:
First, compared to other countries, the Russian peasantry was more likely to trigger serious unrest. This was because from the 1861 emancipation of the serfs to the 1907 Stolypin land reform [2], Russia failed to achieve agricultural modernization or form a mature class of agricultural capitalists. Instead, it produced a highly exploitative class of absentee rent-collecting landlords, while the power of the village communes (mir) was actually strengthened. Combined with the fluctuations of international wheat prices and the 1891 famine, these old and new agricultural crises fueled growing peasant discontent.
Second, although the Russian working class was small in number, it was exceptionally concentrated, primarily located in large industrial and mining areas in St. Petersburg and Moscow. This facilitated the formation of unified working-class organizations and class consciousness. Furthermore, because much of this industry was foreign-owned, contradictions were further sharpened.
Third, the Russian bourgeoisie was dualistic: on the one hand, it was weak and lacked public support and political organization; on the other hand, it was dissatisfied with Tsarist autocracy and possessed a subjective revolutionary will.
Fourth, the Tsarist government, representing the ruling class, was so corrupt, incompetent, and fearful of the 1905 Revolution that the political flexibility between the Old Regime and its opponents became extremely narrow. This greatly squeezed the space for reformism and made it highly likely for the opposition to form a political alliance.
Synthesizing these four class conditions, Hobsbawm argued that, looking at the structural contradictions of Russian social classes, the revolution was destined to break out; the only questions were when and where it would erupt and which force would lead it. The claim that "without World War I, Russia would have become a prosperous bourgeois society" is, according to Hobsbawm, a myth that does not tally with historical reality.
Of course, Hobsbawm noted that one cannot directly deduce the specific events of class struggle from the aforementioned structural contradictions. In the process of the potential explosive power of the class structure transforming into actual class struggle—or rather, the process of the revolutionary classes moving from fragmentation to alliance—World War I acted as a catalyst. Hobsbawm believed that as a "Total War," the First World War placed immense pressure on Russia, exceeding the limits of what its economic and social conditions could bear. By 1917, Russia faced multiple crises: economic collapse, social disorder, and national fragmentation. In this situation, the February Revolution broke out. However, the bourgeois Provisional Government could neither control the political situation nor was it willing to stop the unpopular war. As the crisis intensified, the objective conditions for the October Revolution rapidly matured.
Hobsbawm summarized these conditions into four aspects: class basis, external pressure, military preparation, and national movements. First, the working class, peasantry, and even segments of the middle class formed a tight anti-war alliance against the Provisional Government’s continued participation in the war. Within this, the working class played a decisive role in the transformation from an initially uncertain, spontaneous urban movement to a revolutionary struggle led by the Bolsheviks. While the peasants were not the primary initiators of the revolution, their struggle destroyed the local foundations of the Tsar and the Provisional Government. At the critical moment of the revolution, the peasantry did not side with the government, thereby avoiding a tragedy like that of the Paris Commune and providing a vital condition for the victory of the October Revolution. Second, military defeat and immense external pressure led to the loss of Russian state capacity, especially the loss of effective control over military forces. Massive casualties and the government's inefficient supply capacity meant the army no longer remained loyal to the ruling class. Third, the establishment of Soldiers' Soviets broke the government's monopoly on the military, providing revolutionaries with armed forces. The army became a site for workers and peasants to receive ideological propaganda and organizational training; their alliance with the soldiers was the fundamental guarantee of revolutionary victory. Fourth, minority independence movements triggered a strong wave of nationalism, which both weakened the power of the Provisional Government and brought about the real danger of national disintegration. In short, Hobsbawm argued that by the autumn of 1917, the Provisional Government was no longer sustainable. The objective situation of internal troubles and external threats prompted the Bolshevik revolution to deepen continuously. What was extraordinary about the Bolsheviks, and especially their leader Lenin, was that they seized this historical opportunity and knew how to lead the masses by meeting their needs, organizing the drifting masses in a state of anarchy, and transforming uncontrollable social upheaval into a revolutionary movement under their leadership.
Hobsbawm pointed out that, as subjective conditions for the revolution, the Bolsheviks possessed the following advantages: First, they had a centralized and disciplined organization, having formed iron-clad party discipline under clandestine conditions, which helped members maintain cohesion in harsh environments and use flexible strategies to seize final victory. Second, their faith in the inevitable victory of socialism gave them high ideological cohesion, allowing them to unite as a tight and combat-ready fortress. Third, they could correctly handle the relationship between ends and means, adopting flexible tactics to meet the peasants' demand for land, thus successfully avoiding the Paris Commune’s earlier oversight regarding the peasantry. Fourth, they possessed the ability to recognize the needs of the masses and adopted realistic policies—namely, "Bread, Peace, and Land"—thereby gaining universal support. In short, because the subjective strategy aligned with the objective conditions, the Bolsheviks’ ascent to power became a logical outcome.
Through this analysis of the subjective and objective conditions, Hobsbawm restored the historical context of 1917. Within this context, we find that the revolution itself involved two different but interconnected causal chains: one chain consisted of structural social contradictions and state policies of an autocratic dynasty (which received strong support and contained capitalist elements) leading to sustained and serious class conflict; the other chain consisted of military disasters triggered by geopolitical conflict and militarism, which weakened the state’s despotic power (especially control over the army) and infrastructural power (especially control over the countryside). The former determined the necessity of the revolution and the aspirations of the revolutionary subjects, while the latter provided the specific situation and unifying force for revolutionary victory. These two causal chains together constituted the historical context of 1917 and, as the crisis deepened, provided the revolutionary subjects, objective conditions, and historical opportunities for the transition from the February Revolution to the October Revolution.
Accordingly, Hobsbawm pointed out that the idea that a revolution can skip certain stages is anti-historical. The greatest error in the view that the revolution should have stopped in February lies in severing the continuity of the historical context, because the revolutionary process does not change according to individual will. "In the final analysis, the historical choice in 1917 was not between liberalism and illiberalism, but between Russian unity and the inevitable disintegration of an old, defeated empire (much like the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires shortly thereafter)." Russia’s danger lay in the fact that: "In the face of powerful enemies pressing at the borders, there was a lack of a strong political group to control the mass movements and national separatist movements; nor could a lasting bourgeois revolution occur, because the bourgeoisie lacked mass support and the ability to identify and satisfy the needs of the masses. The Bolsheviks were the only political force at the time capable of unifying Russia as a single country while enjoying broad support (especially from the army). The objective situation urged the Bolsheviks to take up this historical task, and they successfully maintained the unity of most of the old Russian territory for another 74 years."
It is in this sense that Hobsbawm believed the October Revolution was not essentially a coup d'état imposed on Russia and plotted by a small number of conspirators; its outbreak had deep social-structural causes and was an emergency response to the crisis of the time. The success of the revolution was both the result of popular support and a manifestation of the political capability of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Therefore, as a historical event, the legitimacy of the October Revolution is beyond doubt.
II. The Theoretical Logic of the October Revolution
While the rationality of a historical event can be defended within a specific historical context, it does not naturally constitute a sufficient explanation for the establishment of a new social system. Therefore, Hobsbawm argues that a complete explanation of the October Revolution must also explore its theoretical logic—that is, clarifying its theoretical foundations, its objectives, and the interaction between these goals and material reality. Regarding this point, many criticisms exist in Western academia. For example, some scholars argue that the political goals of the October Revolution did not conform to the principle of historical materialism—that the economic base determines the superstructure—or that the political path of the revolution did not align with Russia’s actual conditions. Some even claim that the socialist character was "added on" only after the revolution had occurred. In the face of these doubts, Hobsbawm advocates for examining the developmental process through which the nature of the Russian Revolution was interpreted from Marx to Lenin, thereby reflecting on the roots of this transmutation within the two-way interaction between theory and practice.
Hobsbawm first divides the interpretations of the Russian Revolution from Marx to Lenin into three stages. In the first stage, when considering the "Russian question" in their later years, Marx and Engels once envisioned a model of revolutionary interconnection. Their general line of thought was that communism is a "world-historical" undertaking launched on the basis of the high development of productive forces and universal intercourse [3], which could only be realized if all nations progressed simultaneously "all at once." Based on this logic, Marx pointed out in the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party: "If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development." In the view of Marx and Engels, on the one hand, as a backward nation, a revolution launched by the Russian proletariat could only "avoid passing through the Caudine Forks [4] of the capitalist system" and "possess all the positive achievements of the capitalist system" if it occurred at the right time and served as a precursor (a detonator) to the West European revolution. On the other hand, the possibility of the Russian Revolution triggering a West European revolution through a conduction effect also endowed it with historical significance, as Engels said: "Once a revolution breaks out in Russia, the face of the whole of Europe will change." In short, Marx and Engels regarded the "mutual complementarity" of the Russian and European revolutions as a precondition for the success of the former.
In the second stage, prior to the October Revolution, Lenin assessed the situation and proposed a systematic discourse on the Russian socialist revolution. In Hobsbawm’s view, Lenin inherited and strengthened Marx's idea of "mutual complementarity," while simultaneously downplaying the requirements for the level of productive forces and universal intercourse in a socialist revolution. On the one hand, Lenin believed that the elimination of global capitalism could only occur through global revolution. Russia, as the weakest link in the imperialist chain, would inevitably see its revolution spread westward once it erupted; the center of the revolution would rapidly shift from Russia to Germany and diffuse throughout Western Europe. On the other hand, the determination of whether revolutionary conditions are ripe could only be based on the integrated global mode of production, rather than the specific circumstances of the productive forces in a single country. In fact, the general occurrence of revolution in Europe gave the Bolsheviks faith and strength. After the success of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks indeed did not view Russia as the sole subject of the socialist revolution, but instead made continuous efforts to push the revolution’s expansion from East to West. Therefore, around the time of the October Revolution, the theoretical interpretation provided by Lenin and the Bolsheviks was that the historical significance and destiny of this revolution were part of the world socialist revolution, and that Russia’s path to socialism likewise required powerful complementarity from European socialist countries. However, historical facts eventually showed that while proletarian revolutions broke out in both Germany and Hungary, the world revolution the Bolsheviks expected did not happen. By 1923, the situation in Europe had stabilized, and Soviet Russia became an island in the capitalist world. Regarding this, Hobsbawm points out: "When the possibility of world revolution disappeared, the arguments made from Marx to Lenin for the Russian socialist revolution faced reconstruction." The vision of "mutual complementarity" was not realized, and the productive forces and universal intercourse shifted from being the premises of socialism to becoming its goals. He wrote: "The only program the Bolsheviks could adopt was to transform its backward economy and society into an advanced one, thereby proving the superiority of socialism and its own raison d'être. Its progressiveness, under the conditions of the time, depended on whether it could liberate technical innovation—which was suppressed by capitalist monopolies—while simultaneously eliminating the duplication of production capacity, the gap between consumption and production, periodic economic crises, resource waste, and unemployment."
Consequently, in the third stage, the theoretical foundation of the October Revolution was finally determined to be "the theory of victory in one country" and "the theory of building socialism in one country." Hobsbawm believes that both of these theories differed significantly from Marx's original vision, a shift related to the important adjustment in the Bolsheviks' self-positioning before the October Revolution. This transformation process was both the product of the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, continuously exploring a practical path under a revolutionary situation where the capitalist world system was heading toward collapse, and a breakthrough regarding the theoretical dilemmas faced by Marx and Engels in their later years.
Hobsbawm points out that within Marx's vision of the proletarian revolution, three internal tensions always existed. First, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, Marx never abandoned his long-held wish for a pan-European revolution; however, according to the principles of historical materialism, a proletarian revolution can only occur and succeed when the productive forces come into sharp conflict with capitalist relations of production, yet "history clearly showed that the state of economic development on the European continent at that time was far from mature enough to eradicate capitalist production." This is the tension between subjective revolutionary desire and objective conditions. Second, Marx firmly believed in the historical prospect that the proletariat would inevitably replace the bourgeoisie, but he refused to speculate on the details of the future socialist society and its institutional arrangements. This is the tension between the belief in historical necessity and the lack of political institutional design. Third, after the mid-19th century, the historical trends of overall capitalist economic prosperity and the rise of nationalism made Marx's logic of "simultaneous revolution" and "mutual complementarity" difficult to realize. This is the tension between idealism at the level of normative values and realism at the level of political operation.
Around the time of the October Revolution, what Lenin sought to resolve were precisely these three contradictions. He replaced an insufficiently developed social class with a consciously created and constructed political organization as the core force of the revolution, thereby changing the decisive factor of revolutionary success from the level of social productive forces to the nature of the political organization. By emphasizing the primacy of politics and establishing a broadly united revolutionary organization, Lenin answered the question of how the proletariat could seize power in an area with a backward level of productive forces, breaking through the practical dilemma wherein the European revolution had fallen silent during the later years of Marx and Engels. Therefore, in terms of revolutionary theory, Lenin effectively filled the theoretical gaps left by Marx and Engels regarding party structure, political organization, and sociological issues; in terms of revolutionary results, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin demonstrated immense power and achieved great success in the national liberation movements of Russia and the Third World.
The fact that the revolutionary process was inconsistent with Marx's original vision cannot serve as evidence to negate the revolution's theoretical foundation. In Hobsbawm's view, those perspectives attempting to negate the theoretical basis of the October Revolution are either born of ideological distortion or have fallen into "intellectual thinking" and "representational thinking" [5]. In fact, the most prominent characteristic of Marxism when considering problems is its insistence on historical dialectical thinking. The dialectical nature of this thinking is reflected in the fact that Marxism both emphasizes the restrictive factors of historical development and provides sufficient space for subjects in history to exercise their agency. Examining the October Revolution on this basis, Hobsbawm emphasizes the dialectical nature of the revolution itself: on the one hand, it was carried out under historical conditions completely different from Marx's vision, and thus one cannot mechanically copy individual conclusions or viewpoints from Marx; on the other hand, once the revolution achieved victory, the establishment of a new system became a reality, and thus initiative must be exercised to create the corresponding conditions to demonstrate institutional superiority. For Lenin, therefore, the key to the problem lay in how to build socialism under Russia's backward economic, social, and cultural conditions. Hobsbawm points out that this problem involves two aspects: First, how to establish relations of production under backward conditions that conform to the level of productive forces and are capable of promoting their development? Second, how are the development of productive forces and the establishment of relations of production reflected in the political goals and value aspirations of socialism? The former indicates the essential requirements of socialist construction, while the latter reflects its value orientation. In this sense, the path initiated by the October Revolution was itself experimental, opening up a space of multiple possibilities. The success or failure of any socialist path ultimately depends on whether it can correctly handle the relationship between subjective capability and objective conditions, and between realistic constraints and value aspirations.
III. The Practical Logic of the October Revolution
As stated above, Hobsbawm's research on the October Revolution constitutes an organic whole with an internal logic. By distinguishing between the historical logic and the theoretical logic of the October Revolution, Hobsbawm is able to clarify and transcend many misunderstandings present in previous research. It can be seen that opponents of the revolution often use the later flaws of the Soviet model as an excuse to deny the necessity of the revolution's occurrence, resorting to a kind of ahistorical "hindsight." In Hobsbawm's view, this is an anti-historical argument. Conversely, defenders sometimes use the rationality of the revolution within its historical context as a direct basis for justifying the Soviet socialist path, appealing to the name of some "historical choice," which also suffers from oversimplification. In fact, the October Revolution as a historical event and as a political path are neither separate from each other nor directly identical. Separation would ignore historical continuity and the subjectivity of political actors, while direct identification would ignore the objectivity of historical conditions and historical logic. To overcome these shortcomings, Hobsbawm's research is committed to the dialectical application and dynamic development of Marxist thought and methodology, attempting to truly grasp the core content and main tasks of the transition from theoretical logic to practical logic, and from historical logic to realistic logic, in the path of socialist revolution and construction initiated by the October Revolution.
The value of ideas often lies in observing reality from a historical height and discovering subtle signs within contemporary circumstances. Hobsbawm’s research proposes two benchmarks for measuring the socialist path initiated by the October Revolution—the "productive forces benchmark" and the "value benchmark"—and takes these as the fundamental foothold for exploring new development paths for 21st-century socialism. The so-called "productive forces benchmark" refers to the fundamental requirements and restrictive conditions of the socialist path based on the principles of historical materialism. On one hand, as Lenin said, the development of productive forces is the "chief criterion of total social development"—that is, the prerequisite for achieving thorough social transformation, the primary manifestation of social progress, and the objective hallmark of social development. On the other hand, the level of productive forces constitutes history’s most fundamental restrictive condition. As Marx said: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Therefore, new relations of production cannot be established artificially in isolation from the limitations of the productive forces; otherwise, they will leapfrog historical stages and exceed objective capacities. Regarding this historical restrictiveness, Marx once provided a most incisive summary: "No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society." [6]
The so-called "value benchmark" represents the political stance and value objectives established based on the nature and fundamental tenets of socialism. On one hand, the emphasis of historical materialism on restrictiveness is not mechanical determinism; on the contrary, it fully respects human subjective agency. As Hobsbawm stated, "Marx relied not on the spontaneous action of historical forces, but on political action within the range of possibilities provided by history." Marx and Engels consistently believed that "the prospect after the revolution is a long, complex, by no means necessarily linear, and actually presently unpredictable process of development." As for "what form the actual transfer of power and subsequent social transformation will take? This depends on the degree of development of the proletariat and its movement. This development reflects both the stage the proletariat has reached in the development of capitalism and the process of the proletariat's own learning and maturation through practice." On the other hand, historical materialism holds that all achievements of social development must ultimately be reflected through human development, and their success or failure can only finally be tested by the status of human development. The superiority of the socialist system is manifested not only in the high degree of progress in the productive forces but more so in the comprehensive development of the person—that is, continuously moving toward the "association" pointed out by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that could replace the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms, "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
In summary, under the two aforementioned benchmarks, the real question raised by the October Revolution and the socialist path it initiated is: how should we understand and handle the relationship between human initiative and the restrictiveness of historical conditions, and between the crossable historical stages and the value orientation of socialism? On one hand, as indicated by Marx’s aforementioned "two 'nevers'" [6], when what Marx called the "second great form" of human history ("personal independence founded on objective dependence") has not been fully developed—that is, when "a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities" [7] has not been fully developed (and this is founded upon the high development of productive forces with the modern commodity economy at its core)—it is impossible to transition directly to a higher stage. On the other hand, when Marx emphasizes that "the second stage creates the conditions for the third," his evaluation criteria for social action include not only objective conditions but also value orientations. In socialist practice, the "communal, social productive capacities" [7] nurtured within the historical process should exert initiative to create conditions for the "comprehensive development of the individual." Therefore, Hobsbawm emphasizes that only by unifying the unsurpassable tasks of the era (developing the productive forces) with the value positioning of socialism (safeguarding social fairness and justice and promoting the comprehensive development of the person) can socialist practice maintain its vitality.
(This article is a periodic achievement of the National Social Science Fund of China Youth Project "Research on Marx's Paradigm Shift in Explaining the Origins of Capitalism and its Contemporary Value" [21CKS012].)
(Author: Lan Yang, School of Marxism, Renmin University of China; Contemporary Political Party Research Platform, Renmin University of China)