October 1917: A challenging colloquium

In November 1997 the colloquium 'October 17: Causes, Impact, Long-Term Consequences' was held at the University of Paris 8 in the suburb of Saint-Denis. There were more than a hundred papers submitted. Even more contributions were made in person by the many French, British, German, Russian, Cuban, Mexican and US scholars present. Among the sponsors was the Ernest Mandel Study Centre, which provided a high proportion of the international speakers (from the US and Russia in particular) and took charge of simultaneous translation for international guests.

Eminent specialists in various fields took part in dozens of panel discussions. The diversity of the participants corresponded to the height of the challenge this conference faced. Unlike earlier anniversaries of the Russian revolution, this event was not meant to 'commemorate' it but to think about it and debate it - and debate many other things for which the Russian revolution provides a starting point.

Thanks to the date, a Black Book of Communism had just been published in France. This monumental book (800 pages), the expression of a forceful ideological and media campaign meant to criminalize communism and socialism in general, had essentially only one message. Through a macabre bit of bookkeeping, it rendered the verdict, 'Communism equals 85 million dead.' That says it all: no more need to discuss, think or research!

Still burning issues

This colloquium stood in a certain sense for the opposite approach: October remains an object of study, open to different interpretations and beckoning with new areas for investigation. In the present context, it was a political act to bear witness that October had not been swallowed up in the collapse of the USSR; that it remains alive, if only because of the issues that it raises more compellingly than ever.

The titles of the first day's sessions give a sense of the range of issues tackled: 'The revolution: coup d'etat or popular movement?', 'The system: was collapse inevitable?' and 'The worldwide impact'. The second day's workshops were on 'The revolution: political strategies', 'The system: battles of the 1920s and genesis of Stalinism', 'The worldwide impact: in Europe', 'The revolution: emancipation and cultural revolution', 'The system: the model and its crisis', and 'The worldwide impact: in the countries of the South'.

The last day was devoted to a roundtable discussion on 'the balance sheet'. Among the IIRE Fellows who spoke at the conference were Daniel Bensaïd, Michael Löwy, David Mandel, Catherine Samary and François Vercammen. A number of other participants have been familiar figures at our sessions or have joined in the work of the Ernest Mandel Study Centre.

Pluralism taken for granted

A conference like this could not be dominated by a single political current or tradition. This was the decision taken from the beginning by the organizers: Espaces Marx, the Ernest Mandel Study Centre, other scholarly institutions and about a dozen different journals. People from the French Communist Party and Trotskyists as well as academics never associated with the organized left were all well represented among the speakers.

Evaluating the event as a whole, we must conclude that it could have been on an even greater scale than it was. This was doubtly due in large part to low levels of participation from the Socialist Party and not terribly vigorous organizing by the political families that were involved. The other regret-a relatively happy one-was the lack of sufficient time for debates among participants. So many of the problems raised called for in-depth confrontations, while in the existing conditions there often could be little more than an exchange of counterposed positions. This means that these three days were not enough: there must be a follow-up. Besides publication of the papers, the conference decided to set up a network for further discussion and research.

Francis Sitel

Ernest Mandel's defense of the Russian revolution is available as an IIRE Notebook for Study and Research:
October 1917: Coup d'Etat or Social Revolution? [614]
See also the related IIRE Notebook:
Factory Commitees and Workers' Control in Petrograd in 1917 [615]