Introduction

This chapter introduces the major themes of the work and offers historiographical background on exile and the Russian revolutionary movement. It argues that the émigré colonies created by tsarist subjects in late nineteenth-century Europe should be viewed as utopian communities that prefigured the better world of the future of which the foreigners dreamed. It also examines how these communities transformed revolutionary thought and practice. The chapter introduces Ernst Bloch’s concept of concrete utopia, which treats utopia not as a quixotic goal but as a form of lived revolutionary praxis realized through quotidian activities. This is the central analytic apparatus that the author uses to analyze émigré politics.

The Art of Revolutionary Praxis

Merleau-Ponty, in Humanism and Terror (1947), addresses the spectrum of problems related to revolutionary action. His essay, Eye and Mind (1960), is best known as a contribution to aesthetics. A common structure exists in these apparently disparate works. We must reject the illusion of subjective clairvoyance as a standard of revolutionary praxis; but also we must reject any idealised light of reason that illuminates all—that promises a history without shadows. The revolutionary nature of an act must be established as such through praxis. The creative praxes of the political revolutionary or the revolutionary artist are recognised ex post facto; yet each involves the creation of its own new aesthetic wherein the value of that praxis is to be understood spontaneously and all at once.

Engels, humanism and revolutionary praxis: The centrality of the dynamic analysis of historical materialism and its inherent relation to overcoming capitalist alienation

At the end of the 19th century, a debate emerged among academics of historical materialism on the apparent divergence between Engels’ and Marx’s theoretical developments. During the 20th century, those who wanted to argue that there was a dichotomy between the two authors identified Engels as responsible for historical materialism’s crises. This paper aims to demonstrate that Engels, far from distancing himself from Marx’s central positions, contributed to the formation of historical materialism as a revolutionary praxis that seeks a more rational regulation of the human metabolism with nature through overcoming the alienating conditions of the capitalist system. For this reason, the paper analyses Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, one of Engels’ most controversial texts, and exposes the correlation with the historical development of the revolutionary praxis in the Engels’ and Marx’s work. The article will be drawing on Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez’s Philosophy of Praxis, understood as a ‘revolutionary’ activity, and his analysis of Marx’s and Engels’ work. It is argued that one of Engels’ primary purposes, in Ludwig Feuerbach, was to show the demystification process of the Hegelian dialectical method, resulting in the formation of historical materialism as a dynamic epistemic model, that seeks to transform social reality through revolutionary praxis. The Feuerbachian ontological categories and Feuerbach’s perception of nature were the objects of the same process of demystification and critique, resulting in the characterisation of the human being in Marxism as a generic, social and historical being. Finally, it is shown that Engels demonstrates the possibilities for transformation of the human subject; for that reason, Engels’ argument is associated with the revolutionary praxis.

Meditative Revolutions? A Preliminary Approach to US Buddhist Anarchist Literature

This article discusses the various shapes, inner structures and roles given to transformative and liberative practices in the work of US Buddhist anarchist authors (1960-2010). Unlike their Chinese and Japanese predecessors, who focused more on discursive parallelisms between Buddhism and anarchism or on historical instances of antiauthoritarianism within the Buddhist tradition(s), US Buddhist anarchists seem to favour practice and experience. This emphasis, characteristic of the way Buddhism has been introduced to the West,sometimes masks the way meditative techniques were used in traditional Buddhist contexts as oppressive technologies of the self. Whereas the emphasis on the inherently revolutionary nature of Buddhist practice represents a radical departure from the way those practices have been conceptualised throughout Buddhist history, it also involves the danger of considering Buddhist practice as an ahistorical sine qua non for social transformation. This is due to the fact that most early Buddhist anarchist writers based their ideas on a highly idealised, Orientalist imagination of Zen Buddhism(s). However, recent contributions based on other traditions have offered a more nuanced, albeit still developing picture. By assessing a number of instances from different US Buddhist anarchist writers, the article traces the brief history of the idea that meditation is revolutionary praxis, while also deconstructing and complicating it through historical and textual analysis.

V.I. Lenin’s Theory of Socialist Revolution

Lenin transposed Marx’s analysis of capitalism from the advanced capitalist economies to the dependent colonial countries. He combined political economy, geopolitics, political organisation and a sociology of social structure to form an innovative revolutionary praxis. The expansion of Western capitalism shifted the social and political contradictions to countries moving from feudalism to capitalism. Lenin was correct in his appraisal of the social forces in support of a bourgeois revolution. But he provided an over-optimistic prediction for the disintegration of monopoly capitalism and only a partial analysis of the working classes in the advanced capitalist countries. His political approach requires a redefinition of countervailing forces and class alliances and a shift of focus from the semi-periphery to the ‘strongest links’ in the capitalist chain. A ‘return to Lenin’ is not to adopt his policies but a prompt to reinvent a socialist sociological vision derived from the expectations of the Enlightenment and Marx’s analysis of capitalism.

Non-Violence as a Tool of African Revolutionary Praxis in Femi Osofisan’s Red is the Freedom Road

The deployment of violence as a subversive and revolutionary tool for effecting social change in post-independent African states has been very controversial among literary scholars. This paper employs Marxism in re-reading Femi Osofisan’s Red is the Freedom Road, and argues that the use of violence as a popular means of engendering progressive transformation of society is too costly in blood and devastation. Instead, tackling the various sociopolitical challenges confronting postcolonial African nations is better pursued through dialogue and negotiation rather than armed confrontation. Osofisan’s revulsion in response to the use of violence permeates his drama; but this does not in any way reduce his literary stature when compared with Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka, whose literary works seem to support the view that there comes a point when the deployment of violence becomes necessary.

‘Sovereign Democracy’ and the Politics of Ideology in Putin’s Russia

The concept of sovereign democracy dominated the political discourse in Russia in 2006–8 but lost much of its significance since. In this article, I argue that sovereign democracy is best understood as the response of Russia’s authorities to the threats of democratization, following Eurasian color revolutions. I distinguish between three conceptually distinct aspects of sovereign democracy: (1) a social contract (2) a legitimation discourse; and (3) a counter-revolutionary praxis. These dimensions allow us to understand what functions sovereign democracy fulfilled within the framework of Russia’s authoritarian regime and why it lost its prominence over time.