What may be wrong with the "end" in the end-of-revolution thesis?

Boris Kapustin

pp. 121-152

in: Elena Namli (ed), Future(s) of the revolution and the reformation, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

That revolution has ended in, or is about to vanish from, our contemporary world has become a common sense of published opinion. Although there are still some dissenting voices, this chapter focuses exclusively on the argument structure undergirding the end-of-revolution thesis, as it has been elaborated recently, in the context of the global domination of neoliberal capitalism. The purpose of the chapter is to reconstruct the architecture of the argument structure of the end-of-revolution thesis and to probe the validity of each of its six central elements. Without refuting the end-of-revolution thesis as such, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that its substantiations, in their present form, are either banal and unspecific or theoretically underdeveloped and inconsequential, or both.