The Day the World Changed Forever

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. — Karl Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach,” 1845

On October 24th (and 25th) of the Julian calendar in 1917, the world forever changed. In one of those very rare moments, the sum of a people seized the wheel of history and demanded something brand new: change. The Bolshevik Party successfully revolted against the Russian provisional government and challenged the status quo of the capitalist world order.

Communism was no longer an idea. To use the words of a popular Leftist film critic in one of his many reviews of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film October (Ten Days that Shook the World), “it was momentous and unparalleled in history, that monarchy and religion can collapse and that freedom is possible.”

Perhaps we need a change of that scale again. A revolution not against monarchy but capitalism, the very thing killing our shared planet.

The climate disaster, the most significant emblem of the Anthropocene, has triggered the “sixth extinction.” If we continue as is, and perhaps even if we don’t, mass species extinction will continue accelerating. The scientific consensus is that human CO₂ emissions are making Earth uninhabitable.

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