1989

1989 is a political threshold in the book: the point at which an emancipatory sequence reaches exhaustion, but not the point at which its unresolved demands disappear. Its significance lies in the dilemma it leaves behind. The Left must reckon both with the failures and violence bound up with revolutionary history and with the limits of a politics that substitutes accommodation or endlessly deferred change for action.

The aftermath of an emancipatory sequence

The discussion of contemporary politics describes the Left after 1989 as divided between cautious reformism and post-revolutionary despair. One side turns to pragmatic liberalism, emphasizing peaceful coexistence, mutual respect, dialogue, and recognition. The other retains an aspiration to radical change but places it perpetually in the future. In this account, the promise of transformation becomes self-defeating when it can only be imagined as something still to come, leaving thought unable to respond to concrete situations or demands.

That deadlock is not presented as the final word. The book identifies a renewed contradiction in the convergence of increasingly severe neoliberal adjustment with more aggressive imperial intervention, particularly in Iraq and Haiti, alongside forms of resistance and critique that have proved resilient. These conflicts make the post-1989 settlement less a stable endpoint than a contested political field: the exhaustion of one emancipatory sequence does not eliminate the conditions that call for collective change.

Revolution, transformation, and historical consequence

The account of the October Revolution gives historical depth to this assessment. Drawing on Sheila Fitzpatrick, the book argues that collectivization and rapid industrialization in the late 1920s belonged to the revolution’s internal dynamic, and that the revolutionary sequence proper continued until 1937. On this reading, the decisive Thermidor came when the purges were cut short, allowing the Party nomenklatura to stabilize as a new class. Stalinism is therefore not explained simply as an accidental detour from an otherwise completed revolution.

The difference between the earlier years and the upheaval after 1928 is rendered through the transformation of everyday social life. The New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of the social body—peasants, artisans, and intellectuals—largely intact. The later drive aimed more directly at changing that composition: peasants were liquidated as a class of individual owners, and the old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians was replaced by a new one. The comparison of Moscow in 1914, 1924, and 1934 conveys the scale of the change: a person returning after ten years away might still recognize the city in 1924, but not its transformed social texture in 1934.

The book rejects two simple explanations of the Stalinist outcome. Stalinism cannot be reduced either to a contingent deviation, as in the Trotskyite account criticized here, or to proof that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. Instead, the tragedy of the October Revolution requires holding together its emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. The argument about forced collectivization sharpens that tension: after revolutionary expansion failed and the Soviet Union was left isolated, the revolutionary drive turned inward. Industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for revolution abroad, while the liquidation of the kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule elsewhere. The book distinguishes this inward turn from the earlier attempted export of revolution, which ended with the Red Army’s defeat in Poland.

Power, violence, and political responsibility

The historical reckoning around 1989 also depends on how political violence is understood. The book argues that violence cannot be treated only as an instrument controlled by political actors: it can exceed their intentions and draw them into destructive cycles. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre serves as an example of a limited political plan becoming uncontrolled bloodshed. Catherine de' Medici intended to have Admiral de Coligny assassinated and to direct blame toward the Guise family, hoping to weaken both houses; the violence that followed exposed the limits of a strategy that underestimated the force of people’s beliefs.

A related argument, drawing on Hannah Arendt, distinguishes political power from direct violence exercised through command in institutions such as the Army, Church, or school. Yet the distinction does not make power innocent of violence. Public authority depends on an obscene supplement of coercion, while apparently nonpolitical relations of subordination also embody political struggles and decisions. The book’s point is not that every form of violence is identical, but that a supposedly neutral social order can conceal the political forces that sustain it.

Human rights and the unresolved present

The post-1989 political landscape is further tested through humanitarian intervention and the status of rights. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was justified as a response to the suffering of the Iraqi people, but the book argues that it also served political-economic interests, including oil, and advanced a specific program: Western liberal democracy, private property, and incorporation into the global market. When humanitarian action is framed solely as the prevention of suffering, it can foreclose debate over the collective political transformation that might otherwise be proposed.

The book also questions the assumption that universal human rights can be separated from citizenship and political membership. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s account of refugees and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Homo sacer, it describes the paradox in which a person stripped of a particular political identity may also lose effective recognition as human. The example of Guantánamo prisoners makes the problem concrete: an argument that they had merely survived bombs directed at legitimate military targets places them in a status resembling living death, outside ordinary legal protection while biologically alive. The authorities exercising power over them, in turn, act in a legal space where their conduct is no longer effectively limited by law.

The book’s treatment of invisible threats offers another measure of the period’s political afterlife. Sovereign authority can sustain the universal rule of law while reserving the power to declare an exception to it. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics, the imagined threat is often displaced onto an external enemy, and the threat’s lack of definition gives it force: fantasy supplies the horrors left unspecified. The ensuing logic of preemption and permanent emergency helps explain why 1989 cannot serve as a simple boundary between a completed past and a settled present. The political forms that followed it continue to negotiate the unresolved relation between emancipation, coercion, and the authority exercised in the name of security.