Changing Societies & Personalities, 2018
Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 143–160
http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/csp.2018.2.2.034

Received 16 April 2018 © 2018 Victor Martianov
Accepted 5 June 2018 martianovy@rambler.ru
Published online 1 July 2018

ARTICLE

Revolution and Modernity1

Victor Martianov

Institute for Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences

ABSTRACT 
Revolution simultaneously legitimises and denies the coordinate 
centre of the political order of Modernity. It is difficult to describe 
the historical evolution from the early industrial, class-national forms 
of political organisation to late or global Modernity other than in 
terms of a low-intensity revolution in the rate of social change. On 
the other hand, this permanent modernisation is not revolutionary in 
the sense that the periodic splits of elites, colour revolutions, coups 
and national liberation movements do not in and of themselves 
make demands for fundamental change in the value-institutional 
core of the political order of Modernity. The potential for a new 
revolution can be consequent only on a repudiation of Modernity in 
favour of an alternative political project having a greater capability 
for universalisation and totalisation. If, in legitimising its liberal 
consensus and nation-state models as the dominant political format 
of their synthesis, capitalism is the value-institutional quintessence 
of the political order of Modernity, it is precisely in challenges to 
capitalism, the liberal consensus and nationalism that provide the 
most obvious means for crystallising revolutionary movements. From 
such a perspective, capitalism increasingly comes up against the 
global limits of its expansion, with class ideologies degenerating into 
a fragmented, technologically-intermediated populism, and nation-
states experiencing increasing pressure from alternative political 
formats (city networks, multinational corporations, etc.) as they attempt 
to preserve the model of the social state. While various discourses 
and social groups profess to play the role of revolutionary utopias 

1 The article is prepared with the support of RFBR grant No. 18-011-00211 “Social Consensus 
in Russia: Mechanisms for Ideological and Institutional Regulation”.

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144 Victor Martianov

and subjects, in essence, their ability to present a totalising alternative 
to late Modernity remains an open question. A utopian systemic 
challenge to Modernity, connected with a morally more justified 
configuration and associated hierarchy of legitimate violence, is yet 
to emerge, whether from within Modernity or some source external 
to it. It is demonstrated that in the long term a serious (and possibly 
revolutionary) correction of the political order of modern societies will 
be capable of producing a rental transformation of capitalism and an 
expansion of the rent-class stratification mechanisms associated with 
precarisation, along with a reduction of social mobility trajectories 
and the prospects of active social groups.

KEYWORDS
revolution, violence, political order, legitimacy, modernity, late 
modernity, centre-periphery, global economics, political subject, 
consensus, rental society, precariat

The Political Project of Modernity as a Permanent Revolution?

Since all the ideological coordinates of the basic liberal consensus (Immanuel 
Wallerstein) are by definition reducible to it, revolution can be seen to form a sacred 
reference point in the political project of Modernity, a kind of event analogue of 
the Nativity of Christ in Christian chronology. In this constructed history, revolution 
appears freed from all references to divine prescriptions in the guise of the common 
will of the people regarding their common destiny. Therefore, as Ortega y Gasset 
aptly notes, “…referring to the uprisings of medieval peasants and burghers as the 
precursors of the revolutions of modern times testifies to a complete absence of 
historical intuition. Between them there is almost nothing in common. In rising up 
against his feudal masters, a medieval man was rebelling against the abuses of those 
masters. The revolutionary, conversely, does not rebel against abuses, but against the 
order of things” (Ortega y Gasset, 2016, p. 133). A revolution may create a heterarchy 
in which alternative sources of power are the condition for meaningful social changes 
but it is unable to maintain a stable political order associated with the daily regulation 
of the conflictual space of individual and collective freedom. As a result, “…the 
entire history of Modernity as the story of different societies faced with the ‘absolute 
independence’ of the individual can be represented as a series of successful and 
unsuccessful attempts to achieve and maintain public order” (Kapustin, 2010, p. 587). 

Revolution is an initiating event for the political order of the New and Newest 
Times. However, it cannot provide final answers to the question of how the modern 
political order may be subsequently maintained. This order is one in which the initial 
principles of maximising both collective and individual autonomy entail endless 
contradictions and engender a mass of conflicts whose resolution can only be 
achieved with the institutional support of a hierarchy of values and interests in society. 



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A study of the history of the political order of Modernity reveals a constant revision 
and re-creation of social hierarchies along with associated compromises. As a 
metaphor, revolution refers to an instant transfiguration, transmutation, resurrection 
and a new life; it appears as a chiliastic dream of a collective and instantaneous 
transition to an earthly paradise, or, in later ideological forms, a rational plan for the 
realisation of a utopia. However, revolution never definitively establishes anything in 
the constant movement and renewal of generations, social groups, technological 
structures, and the dominant configurations of values and interests. Therefore, the 
revolution never reaches its final goals, which are ostensibly connected with a total 
change in relations between man, society and state. The stratification of revolutionary 
agents in the course of revolution leads to the attainment of the most radical goals 
being determined by terror, purges and mutual annihilation of the revolutionaries, 
who seek to monopolise the revolutionary ideology as the new basis of power. If 
the monopolistic claim of the revolutionary subject is successful, the new political 
order will become totalitarian; however, a compromise is more typically established 
between the outgoing and rising classes, with any social contradiction entailed by 
the former tending to be replaced by another inherent to the latter. In any case, the 
temporal unfolding of the revolution invariably involves the instrumental incorporation 
of the revolution by the revolutionary political subject into new structures of political 
hegemony. In their attempts to fix and routinise the achievements of the revolution, 
the subjects of revolution seize the coercive apparatus of the state; however, in so 
doing, the revolutionaries are themselves inevitably overtaken by the logic of the 
reproduction of the political order, transforming them into a new bureaucracy.

If the usual political order is based on the legitimisation of violence, then the 
revolution appears both as the foundation of Modernity and as an ineliminable 
challenge to it. The revolution confirms in practical terms the primary liberal thesis 
that the social order is not eternal but is the work of human hands. However, this 
is also why, being divided between finite and imperfect people, it cannot become 
finalised or its laws remain absolute and unchanged. For this, people would have to 
live forever, without the succession of generations or the movement of history. The 
revolution generates a modern political order, which offers alternative and morally 
more convincing grounds for violence than those operated by the estate-monarchical 
Ancien Régime. Exemplary, classical revolutions concerned the demolition of the 
Ancien Régime, which did not possess the internal conditions and mechanisms 
for reform in the course of growing systemic contradictions of the changing social 
structure and background in which Christian values were being eroded by new 
practices introduced by capitalism: “the policy of the medieval ‘petit bourgeois’ was 
to counterpose the privileges of the nobility with exactly the same privileges. City 
guilds and communes were famous for their narrow, suspicious and selfish spirit – 
even more so than feudal lords” (Ortega y Gasset, 2016, p. 138).

In other words, the revolution is inevitably rethought during the process of the 
institutionalisation of Modernity. From the initiating event, it is more confidently 
interpreted from the position of the new liberal consensus as political extremism, 
which threatens the modern political order. In this way, Modernity is simultaneously 

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constituted by a legitimisation and a denial of the revolution, which, in destroying 
the Ancien Régime, brought it into existence. Institutional Modernity, then, is wholly 
derived from the revolutionary event that engendered it. Revolution appears as the 
transcendental centre of Modernity, to which, however, it does not belong completely, 
and therefore eludes attempts at complete control. However, at the same time, the 
above-noted centre legitimises this order from a sacred-symbolic space in which 
everyday and routine legitimation procedures lose their power. Moreover, the 
question of a destructive/creative incursion or a return of this sacrosanct centre to 
the political order of Modernity always remains open. In connection with this, the 
political order of Modernism, as an epiphenomenon of the revolution, constantly 
strives to gain independence from it with the help of all kinds of institutions and 
procedures that aim to ensure its repeatability, its immutability and its self-identity 
outside of historical time.

With a more detailed examination of contemporary political ontology, it can be 
noted that the ineradicable contradiction between the modern political order and 
revolution is not necessarily fatal. It can be said that, following the establishment of 
the revolution-event, Modernity represents the same revolution, but a low-intensity 
revolution, unfolding across a long period of historical time. This is the undulatory 
or wave-like revolution that continues after the big bang that caused it and is 
associated with the endless changes and reconfigurations of the value-institutional 
core of the emergent society. However, if the basic legitimacy of the political order of 
Modernity always refers to the revolution, to the fact that we continue to live within 
this unfolding historical event mediated by many years and generations, then an 
obvious question arises: in what can a revolutionary change consist here and now 
against the background the fact that modern society is based on the tradition of 
progress – of constant improving changes – as a social norm? Modern societies 
may no longer require total revolutions. More important is the search for subtler 
socio-cultural adjustments that determine the effectiveness of the progress of each 
particular society. In such a system of coordinates, the absolute can only consist in 
change itself as a value. 

Modernity counterposes the new morality of change to the customary morality 
of tradition, while at the same time strongly defending itself against any other radical 
changes that could undermine the new world. According to the thought of Jean 
Baudrillard, Modernity “gives rise to a crisis of values and moral contradictions. 
Thus, as an idea in which a whole civilisation recognises itself, modernity assumes a 
regulatory cultural function and thereby surreptitiously rejoins tradition.” (Baudrillard, 
1985, p. 424). Here arises the image of Modernity as a new tradition of controlled 
changes in the turbulent social order. In such a context, the true revolution will consist 
in a total rejection of the political project of Modernity. Since it is only revolution that 
can become a new absolute event (Filippov, 2006, p. 108), superseding Modernity 
in favour of a totalised alternative, an event that rejuvenates the very system of 
modern ideological coordinates that is substantiated by the liberal consensus. In the 
meantime, in place of total rejection, it is possible to observe predominantly limited 
utopias caused by the internal contradictions of Modernity, which are, however, 



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unlikely to consist in its potential alternatives. These include, for example, the logic of 
postmodernism, acting as a method of intellectual self-criticism and self-correction 
of late Modernity (Martianov, 2012).

The only revolution became a possibility within the new linear timeframe 
of Modernity, in which there exists a utopian discourse concerning a possible 
alternative future capable of being realised in the space of collective freedom. This 
contradicts previous cyclical concepts of time, in which the future is predicated 
by the present, and the recurrence of historical cycles does not entail significant 
differences that would allow the past to be distinguished from the present and the 
future as fundamentally different states of society. At the political centre of the 
Ancien Régime was the pre-ordained divine tradition; this is essentially what was 
refuted by rationally utilitarian and liberal Modernity. All the subsequent revolutions 
within Modernity were naturally limited in character, since either comprising the 
victories of nations in the struggle for sovereignty and independence; or were 
presented as counter-revolutions in the form of partial kickbacks to the Ancien 
Régime; or they only led to a rotation of the elites and an upgrade of the existing 
version of Modernity in the given society. This is the case irrespective of whether we 
are discussing the version of late Modernity, ideas about multiple modernities or the 
alternative project of Soviet Modernity. In all cases, we are dealing with invariants 
within the self-referential system of Modernism, which draws its legitimacy from the 
original act of its creation. This even applies, for example, in the case of the USSR, 
when the rational interpretation of the revolution as a whole still fits into the logic of 
liberal consensus in terms of its radical socialist invariant. 

Moreover, the currently observed colour revolutions taking place under the 
conditions of late Modernity do not assume an analogous level of system development 
of the alternative political project, being essentially a discourse of cultural 
reconstruction, whether involving the logic of optimisation, reform or correction of 
the liberal consensus and capitalist ontology, but never implying a direct repudiation 
of the latter. Therefore, neither the struggle for sovereignty and periodic collapse of 
empires nor political upheavals or transition to different version/model of Modernity 
can properly be referred to in terms of revolution, any more than the dozens of other 
cases of political convulsion taking place in specific modern societies. This is true even 
if the results of the latter, thanks to symbolic politics and the construction of another 
collective memory, become a palliative reference point in the chronology of the new 
political regime. Thus, in fact, humanity has not yet experienced any new revolutions 
since the pulling down of the Ancien Régime. Significant transformations of individual 
societies were associated primarily with a global transition to Modernity and then to its 
late value-institutional versions. Against this background, the historical transformation 
of the project of Modernity is yet to lead to its revolutionary displacement of the 
alternative political project, despite all the fundamental differences between early-
industrial, class and national Modernity variants and its later versions taking the form 
of second, global, radical, fluid or singular Modernity.

In abandoning reliance on tradition, the value centre of the political order 
of Modernity acquires a multifaceted character, which becomes the subject of 

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permanent coordination and recognition by key social groups. Institutionally, it is 
constantly adjusted under the influence of parties, regions, ideologies, classes, 
states and endless co-ordination procedures: the activities of bodies of different 
branches of government, elections, referendums, public-political and trade union 
activities, mass communications, international interactions, etc. All these subjects 
of influence are in themselves ambivalent: they can support, change and/or destroy 
the basic liberal consensus that lies at the foundation of Modernity. Moreover, all 
these particular entities themselves claim ideological representation of the whole. 
Therefore, in modern nations, the centre is always divided and implicit, being the 
subject of constant discussion or bargaining. However, any danger, catastrophe or 
external threat leads to a mobilisation of society, during the course of which the 
value centre is manifested and consolidated. 

The post-revolutionary stabilisation of a modern society is achieved by means of 
a consistent differentiation and empowerment of the subsystems of society in terms of 
the private conflicts that arise within them. Here, it is necessary to ensure that the latter 
are solved at the lower and middle levels, not generalising and not ultimately covering 
the entire social system (Luhmann, 2006). The paradox consists in the fact that the 
constant accumulation of internal contradictions never reaches a critical level. In every 
subsystem of society – politics, economics, law, art, etc. – special mechanisms for 
coordinating interests and facilitating partial, gradual changes that prevent revolutionary 
scenarios are being elaborated. On the basis of this modern political order, feudal 
political power was divided into autonomous spheres, in which private ownership, for 
the first time, became relatively independent of power (i.e. power ceased to be directly 
equivalent to ownership). As a result, politics as a zero-sum game, in which the winner 
takes all, became a means of permanently reconciling social interests within a pre-
established time period (Ankersmit, 2002). Complicated procedures for instrumental, 
day-to-day legitimation of the political order of Modernity, e.g., elections, referendums, 
rotation of elites, reconciliation of class and/or civil interests, turn the revolution into 
a ritual political reference point. The possibility of revising the conditions of social 
consensus through the political participation of citizens and the rotation of elites 
significantly reduces the severity of conflicts and limits the possibilities for their 
totalisation. An important role in smoothing political contradictions is played by the 
division of Modernity into elective and functional bureaucratic elites, which allows the 
day-to-day, rational-functional goals of the state apparatus to be combined with the 
setting of strategic goals related to a reconciliation of the interests of the dominant 
social groups. The processes of systemic differentiation naturally lead to modern 
citizens being increasingly unwilling to place high hopes in the revolution under the 
conditions of a growing autonomy within private life and the structurally autonomous 
subsystems of modern society that limit the political sphere. 

Nevertheless, the modern political order always contains the seeds of future 
revolution. Appeals to the revolution in the context of legitimising and rhetorical 
power (in the case of its opponents, critical and practical) reveals the utopian 
space of the political order of Modernity, proving that it is still capable of further 
improvement in public laboratories and unpredictable social experiments – and 



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therefore, in principle, a candidate for early abolishment in favour of an alternative 
project. Therefore, the revolutionary challenges – whether cultural, economic, 
political – simply cannot accumulate in a sufficient volume for their own revolutionary 
resolution. A flexible political order either eliminates the initial causes of social unrest 
or actively incorporates new social forces. If it fails in this, a general reconfiguration 
takes place, during which meaningful social groups achieve recognition and places 
at the common table, thus establishing a new equilibrium.

From this perspective, if the revolution consists in a disruption of the state, then 
it is only natural if the political logic of the state and the revolution are embroiled in 
insoluble conflict. According to the latest theories of the revolutionary process, it is 
not so much the historical class struggle as an elementary crisis of legal competency 
or a default on obligations to the population on the part of the government that in most 
cases becomes the mechanism by which broad social movements and revolutions 
uncontrolled by the elites are launched (Goldstone, 2012; Skocpol, 1979). In the 
first instance, the triggering factors tend to be default, malfunction, disintegration 
and delegitimisation of the state (political order). The revolution appears in the 
form of the establishment of a total self-organisation of society in the transition to 
a new social equilibrium by means of collective practices and institutions. A space 
of collective freedom for the realisation of various political utopias arises together 
with a new state assembly. Here, an appeal to preservation of the political order 
(constitution, law, tradition) as a basic, unconditional value is directly comparable 
in terms of conferring political legitimacy with revolutionary calls for overthrowing 
this order. Moreover, values associated with maintaining order prevail in the eyes of 
citizens under conditions of stability and the competency of the state; that is, during 
the overwhelming majority of history, except in situations of crisis and the collapse 
of states. In this context, locking in the results of the revolution is always connected 
with compromises, with the collapse and/or betrayal of utopias in favour of reaction 
and various conservative kickbacks. Trade-off solutions, in principle, do not suit any 
of the social forces; however, they eventually allow them to be reconciled with them 
in exchange for ending the debilitating struggle between asserting a new utopia or 
maintaining the old order. Sooner or later the state is once again recognised as an 
indispensable public good and a kind big brother.

In the context of the interconnected world economy of late Modernity, substantial 
doubts concerning the possibility of a classical revolution at the scale of individual 
states are raised due to their growing global interdependence. National communities 
are increasingly becoming only private moments in the movement of more general 
background processes associated with an accumulation of the contradictions inherent 
in capitalism as well as demographic, technological and institutional transformations 
entailed by late-modern societies. In this situation, it makes little difference what kinds 
of social forces in a particular society invoke and uphold the mechanisms of social 
change, whether these be counter-elite, marginalised, precarious, working class, 
middle class, liberation movements, different minorities, etc.

From this perspective, a given state can be considered as merely an initial 
platform for the permanent global revolution. This key idea was carried by the political 

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150 Victor Martianov

thought of the left throughout the entire twentieth century. Actually, the problem is 
of a rather different nature, viz. whether it is possible to initiate a revolution under 
conditions when the elites and the majority of citizens are as close in terms of their 
human qualities, their initial rights, education, morals and opportunities as never 
before in history? Accordingly, the revolution, both as a concept and as an event, is 
increasingly seen in metaphorical terms. As such, it is subject to constant deferment, 
which becomes comparable to eternity. At the same time, mechanisms for procedural 
legitimisation of changes within the tradition of modernity are strengthened in the 
form of a permanent reconfiguration of the value-institutional core of late-modern 
society for the purposes of self-preservation and the prevention of constantly arising 
conflicts, challenges and threats.

The Crisis of Late-Modern Subjectivity:  
from Class-Consciousness to the Schizophrenic Subject

The spectre of the revolution, always hovering over the political order of Modernity, 
draws its strength from the fact that any citizen can potentially exercise his or 
her inalienable right as a member of a political society to represent his interests 
in his personal capacity, take actions and make attempts to change the political 
order. For the most part, this allows the hegemonic disciplinary mechanisms 
to be effectively ignored or bypassed along with the regulatory procedures of 
political representation designed to control the political energy of the masses, 
which, strictly speaking, also constitute the routine institutional framework of 
the political order of Modernity. Active citizens and social groups that represent 
themselves and do not need intermediaries or representatives thus comprise 
the revolutionary political core of Modernity. These are the Kantian adult 
citizens who dare to be guided by their own minds and to act without external 
permits and approvals, without power of attorney and without guarantors. This 
individual and collective political action, proceeding according to the logic of the 
revolutionary rupture with approved actions and procedures, perforce reveals 
the constructed and conventional nature of the political order that presented 
itself as monolithic and unchanging in its tautological discourse. Of course, on 
the part of the beneficiaries of a particular political order, uncontrolled political 
activity and/or mobilisation of the population by non-system actors is traditionally 
represented as rioting teenagers, freaks, office plankton or fifth columnists, i.e. as 
the actions of those who reject political maturity and/or expose their conscious 
or unconscious dependence on foreign interests. On the other hand, the logic 
of street democracy is structurally analogous to the logic of a given present 
government, when it is shown by new leaders of public opinion that the official 
representatives of the people, by acting in their own, particular – not popular – 
interests, have lost legitimacy. Thus, it is obvious that direct democracy cannot 
ensure the effective functioning of complex and geographically dispersed political 
communities of Modernity, in which representative mechanisms of expression 
and the harmonisation of collective interests predominate. However, the latent 



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mechanisms of direct democracy come to the fore in a situation in which a political 
order based on representation is faced by a revolutionary crisis (Bikbov, 2012).

The revolution assumes as its key feature the emergence of alternative 
sources of political order (heterarchy) as a result of the rise and subsequent fall of 
mass political subjectivity (Kapustin, 2015, p. 7). Alternative subjects are directly 
connected with the permanent threat of revolution in the course of expanding 
and intensifying conflicts already present in society. Therefore, the dominant elite 
seeks to discredit any non-systemic political subject by describing it with the help 
of a variety of marginal and peripheral non-norm codes, whereby other actors 
appear as terrorists, extremists, cynics, agents of influence, youth manipulated by 
such agents, as lacking the necessary competencies, etc. However, even when 
proclaiming the pathology or death of a revolutionary political subject, the state 
cannot stop the movement of history. The disciplinary logic of desubjectivisation 
and depersonalisation, as an attempt to build a total biopolitics of power, will only 
lead to a growth in the accursed share of things (Baudrillard), which attracts to itself 
all that is excluded from the discourse of power as an indispensable element of the 
antinomy of power. As a result, the emergence of a revolutionary situation, in which 

“the revolution can be understood not as a reversal of the top and bottom, when 
the subordinate group or ‘lower classes’ suddenly intercept power or become ‘the 
elite’, but as an uprising of those segments of the population who are convinced that 
they are bearers of the idea of the state or ‘raison d’État’” (Hestanov, 2012, p. 58). 
The current pessimism in assessing the possibility of a future revolution is closely 
connected with the problem of the disintegration of effective collective action, the 
political subject and the capacity of states themselves under the conditions of late 
Modernity (Rossiya v poiskakh ..., 2016, pp. 78–104).

The paradoxical consequences of a state strategy that seeks to monopolise 
political subjectivity, thus creating new actors in the revolutionary logic of heterarchy 
(Martianov, 2009), coexist with a number of other processes leading to an overall 
weakening of political subjectivity in late-modern societies. Socio-political, economic 
and cultural forms are increasingly breaking away from the everyday experience of 
individuals. This gap between the individual and society, leading to an increasing 
inaccessibility and unknowability of the latter, is compensated by ideology and 
mythology, whose significance as a connecting link of individual preferences and 
collective prescriptions can only increase. As a result of the revolution, society came 
to accept experimental social practices and concepts that previously took place 
at its periphery and were the object of ridicule, its carriers ignored, suppressed or 
persecuted. However, in the situation of the reconfiguration of the social structure, 
these excessive, heretical, marginal and even criminal notions turn out to be 
in demand by a new political order (Lobovikov, 2015). The revolution realises the 
structural possibilities into which the society has already matured, but at the same 
time it continues to think of itself in terms of the relations and hierarchies of social 
interests and groups, whose configurations and relationships experience ever greater 
deformations. On the one hand, a stalemate situation arises when modernity fails to 
accumulate sufficient contradictions for the political order to be disturbed by revolution 

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152 Victor Martianov

despite the many individual conflicts by which the society may be permeated at local, 
national and global levels. On the other hand, when differentiation and complication 
occur in contemporary societies, the disintegration of public spaces makes it difficult 
to maintain the usual hierarchies and instead promotes revolutionary heterarchies. 
Simultaneously, alternative axiological grounds for the political order and common 
good arise and a search for new ways of assembling sociality and principles of 
stratification is set into motion. Small groups and groups with weak social ties begin 
to have more effective identities and cultural codes than blurred economic macro-
classes deprived of their former political subjectivity. The natural result of these 
transformations is the spread of the schizophrenic type of social subject, which loses 
its ability to effectively organise its interests over the course of history. 

The schizophrenic postmodern subject loses the ability to perceive time and 
think historically. Accordingly, it cannot deliver utopia, because it lacks desires or 
hopes that underpin collective action according to the utopian impulse (Jameson, 
2004). The space of history is entirely obscured by the space of culture that simulates 
history. Accordingly, the actions of schizophrenic subjects (consumer class, creative 
class, middle class, etc.), taking place within a culturally coded space that cannot 
be taken for reality itself, turn out to be the actions of a predominantly symbolic 
order that do not – and cannot – lead to changes in the socio-political reality. As a 
result, they lose the ability to capture social changes in time or create revolutionary 
utopias oriented towards the future as an alternative to the present. However, from 
the standpoint of preserving the political order, the insensitivity of such a subject to 
the past or the future is interpreted positively, as a sign of its freedom in the present, 
despite occluding the entire chronological horizon of possibilities. 

Summarising the interim result, we can say that revolutions do not create 
the political, economic and cultural order of Modernity directly. Formulating more 
precisely, we can remark that revolutions create new individual and social subjects, 
which, by virtue of their extrinsic nature relative to the Ancien Régime, are able 
to create a different order. However, the formation and strengthening of the new 
political order will inevitably be associated with the transformation and extinction of 
revolutionary actors. The ability to create utopias is the historical mission of a kind 
of political demiurge, who, by virtue of their extrinsicality to the old and new orders – 
their intermediacy – feel themselves to be all-powerful within that specific historical 
moment. But the revolution in its deployment instantly corrects and dismisses its 
creators, as, for example, the democratically- and republicanistically-inclined French 
aristocracy of the second echelon: “in the terror of 1793–94, the internal horror of 
the Jacobins was externally manifested: they saw their terrible mistake and wanted 
to correct it with the guillotine, but, no matter how many heads they chopped off, 
they still bowed their own to the strength of the ascending social stratum. Everyone 
bowed to that which overpowered the revolution and reaction, which flooded the old 
forms and filled them with itself, because it was the only active and modern majority; 
Sieyès was speaking more accurately than he knew when he said that the Third 
Estate was ‘everything’. The Third Estate – or commoners – were not born in the 
revolution, but were ready with their own traditions and customs, which were alien to 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2018, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 143–160 153

the other tune of the revolutionary idea. They were treated roughly by the aristocracy 
and kept in third place; liberated, they trampled the dead bodies of their liberators to 
introduce their own order” (Herzen, 1946, p. 410).

Accordingly, the ability of the political order of late Modernity to prevent revolution 
is straightforward, not least due to the rapid erosion of the former social classes of the 
demiurge. The extrinsic – whether to pre-Modernity or to Modernity – political subject 
disappeared; the present domineering subjects consist wholly within Modernity. And 
for as long as the unpredictable revolution fails to wrest some people from Modernity, 
they will lack a sufficiently strong collective subjectivity, since this only arises during a 
revolution. Until then, political utopias will not appear, because utopias do not precede 
revolutions, but are formulated during their process by new actors. 

Undoubtedly, prior to the outbreak of a revolution, there are political change 
discourses as, for example, the work of Rousseau, Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists; 
however, these can serve only as preliminary material for revolutionary utopias. 
Nevertheless, the landmark “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the 
Human Mind” was only written by Nicolas de Condorcet at a time when the French 
Revolution was in full swing; in general, key modern ideologies took shape only as a 
result of subsequent reflection on the revolutionary transition to a new social state.

Thus, the prospect of a revolutionary alternative to Modernity is closely related 
to the possibilities for continuing the reproduction of ideologies and utopias that 
totalise social reality within the structures of group experience. Totalisation generates 
an image of society that is oriented towards the re-creation of its integrity. This is 
true even if the received cognitive coordinates of society are recognised by other 
interpreters as subjective, vulnerable and ideological. The creation of ideologies and 
utopias as a means of cognitive mapping, allows the subjectivity and identity of a 
particular social class to be recreated, including through the construction of its social 
coordinates relative to other classes. Conversely, the logic of preventing revolution is 
manifested in the form of attempts to remove conflict and class content from politics, 
replacing them with various palliatives in the form of homo economicus, metaphors 
of the natural market and various theories of modernisation. This tendency involves 
the introduction of universal standards into all areas of life, releasing them from 
historical traditions and cultural contexts. 

However, a closer look proves that, on the one hand, the theory of modernisation 
and democratic/market transition, and, on the other hand, civilisational discourses 
on the insurmountability of cultural differences and ruts of tradition, are merely forced 
palliatives of class ideologies in the situation of the weakening and schizophrenisation 
of the established political subjects of Modernity. These discourses do not exist as 
a means to understand the particular societies in respect of which they are applied, 
but rather in order to make them more similar to other societies acting as a target 
sample. Or, alternatively, they serve to justify the unavoidable differences from the 
target societies, which by virtue of their uniqueness also free themselves from an 
understanding of their society from a comparative-historical perspective. Thus, the 
idea of Modernity presented in a neutral form as modernisation, i.e. the permanent 
achievement of an increasingly modern state of affairs, is analogous to an endless 

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154 Victor Martianov

cul-de-sac for a society entirely lacking in utopias that go beyond economic 
(capitalism) or cultural (civilisation) determinism.

However, if (a) capitalism in (b) legitimising its liberal consensus and nation-state 
as the dominant political format of their synthesis, comprises the value-institutional 
quintessence of the political order of Modernity, it is precisely in challenges to (a) 
capitalism and (b) the liberal consensus and nationalism that the most obvious 
means for crystallising revolutionary movements are presented. It seems that in 
late-modern societies, these challenges and the corresponding ideological/utopian 
formats under the conditions of stagnation are increasingly likely to be determined 
by economic means. The geographic and technological expansion of the capitalist 
world system during a particular historical period (the Glorious Thirty from 1945–
1975) made it possible to smooth out internal class contradictions through extra-
market regulation and compensation for the costs of capitalism in the form of the 
welfare state and an expanding middle class. However, under the conditions of 
suspended economic growth, robotisation and a decline in the status of working 
people, such stabilisers cease to compensate for the growing costs and non-
economic challenges to capitalism associated with the growth of the unemployed 
and the precariat, as well as a decrease in the ability of states to perform protective 
functions for these sectors of citizens. 

In his influential book One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse concluded 
that “underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts 
and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colours, the 
unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; 
their life is immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and 
institutions. Thus, their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is 
not.” (Marcuse, 1964, pp. 260–261). Over half a century after these words were 
written, social forces that are ostensibly trying to torpedo it in the name of these or 
those alternatives continue to mature within global Modernity. These social forces 
comprise a wide range of radical movements (fundamentalists, alternative globalists, 
anarchists, new Luddites, environmentalists, different minorities, etc.), usually 
constructing their ideological niches in the form of private utopias aimed at solving 
private challenges, problems and contradictions in modern society. 

It seems that in the context of this process there will be an increasingly diverse 
cultural determination of group interests and collective actions as well as the value of 
the social status and social capital of its participants. However, the particular nature 
of the criticism of Modernity becomes the chief problem of the global revolutionary 
movement. Political ultra-projects do not permit the possibility of a total alternative 
to Modernity, to all intents and purposes replacing it with a discourse of justice, 
restoration of a balance of interests, or discourses related to the repair of Modernity, 
but ultimately only strengthen the political order that constantly incorporates those 
movements into the mainstream and periodically satisfies protest demands. This 
problem is not resolved by the efforts of leftist forces against the backdrop of 
global challenges to resuscitate familiar ideological coordinates and class struggle 
from the times of national-industrial Modernity (Kagarlitsky, 2017, p. 264–265). If 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2018, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 143–160 155

the lives of the majority are ipso facto significantly affected by the consequences 
of revolution, the field within such potential changes may take effect is becoming 
less and less directly related to politics. Under the conditions of late Modernity, 
the revolutionary potential of social change is increasingly fuelled by the possible 
consequences of the implementation of non-political, private utopias. This occurs, 
for example, when biomedical or technological progress replaces human workers 
in production processes, resulting in capability for work no longer comprising 
the basic usefulness resource of the majority of the population in the sense of 
providing automatic access to various benefits. Technological progress, a sharp 
increase in life expectancy (and consequently, in the number of disabled and old 
people), universal basic income, unlimited sources of energy and the management 
of biological mutations can have unexpected political consequences comparable 
to the class revolution in terms of transforming the political order and the principles 
of its stratification.

The New Revolution as the Problem of a Political Alternative to Late Modernity

Revolution feeds on utopia as the energy of the future. Thus, revolutions are caused 
by utopian discourses associated with social forces, whose constituents would 
like to expand their rights and opportunities by gaining control over their own 
destiny. However, under the conditions of late Modernity, the utopian dimension is 
experiencing increasing difficulties in comparison with those alternatives that make 
their appeal to the past and the present. The future, in common with the metanarratives 
associated with its justification, is increasingly being viewed as something vague, 
suspicious and unconvincing. As a result, it turns out that “a revolution in the usual 
sense is no longer possible, since there are no intentions for a break with the past 
and associated breakthrough into the future, dynamism is suspicious, and violence 
is unacceptable” (Puchkov, 2017). 

The problem of the possibility of a new revolution is not only that the value of 
order/stability is almost always perceived to be more fundamental than the value of 
change. It consists in the search for an alternative that would be attractive to active 
social forces, which would lead to a conscious rejection of the liberal consensus 
of Modernity that, in one version or another, continues to dominate. Alternatives to 
this consensus at the present time are generally limited to partial utopias in which, 
instead of recognising and discussing real social and economic problems, conflicts 
and interests, a process of continuing mythologisation takes place. For example, this 
may be seen in the (conservative) form of reasoning based on the concept spiritual 
bonds or (liberal) calls for the redistribution of social hierarchies and resources in 
favour of some minority or other. Alternatively, it may be seen in the form of calls 
for the destruction of the social order, which often emanate from peripheral social 
forces or requirements that actually become ends in themselves under conditions 
vaguely referred to in terms of some alternative future. This leads not so much to 
an overcoming of Modernity as to various kickbacks from Modernity, conceded in 
favour of the archaising and strengthening of pre-modern and anti-modern values, 

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156 Victor Martianov

practices and institutions, especially in societies drifting from the centre of the 
capitalist world-economy towards its margins and periphery.

Here, the question of the global subject of the revolutionary changes of late 
Modernity and its moral advantages with respect to the hegemons also remains 
unclear. Negation of the political order results in a transcendence of the act of 
cultural disavowal or revolutionary breakdown itself. Despite the growing social base 
from which revolutionary demands are being issued, those ideological options for 
the liberation of human nature from the normative order of late Modernity not related 
to a return to the Ancien Régime are yet to acquire a systemic character. The ability 
of ultra-movements to organise systemic collective action in the context of a crisis 
of class subjectivity and a general decline in political subjectivity in the consumer 
society raises multiple questions. The repudiation of ideological meta-narratives, 
whether from class struggle – or even from the more blurred cultural hegemony – in 
favour of agonistic democracy (Mouffe, 2000, pp. 80–107), actually dissolves the 
political subject in cultural discourses, depriving him of the necessary initial political 
ontology. Here another question naturally arises concerning the social regulators 
of a possible post-modern society, since, in the field of mechanisms of cultural 
domination, late Modernity is permeated with an effective mixture and eclecticisation 
of its entire previous ideological heritage. It turns out that late capitalism is rather 
successful at commodifying and expanding into fields of non-economic regulators, 
such as morality, law, art and politics, which are potentially capable of producing 
alternative non-capitalist hierarchies and orders of social life.

Finally, in favour of the political order of late Modernity against the backdrop of 
weak alternatives, there is a strong practical argument: never before in history have 
such a large proportion of the population had such opportunities to exercise individual 
freedom as in the present. Consequently, contemporary revolutionaries lose the 
struggle for the interpretation of human nature and the generation of normative ideas 
concerning the desires and purposes of human existence (Jameson, 1983, pp. 1–14). 
Thus, it is becoming increasingly difficult for new utopias entering the field of political 
imagination to challenge the capitalist order underpinned by the developed mass 
consumer culture with a call for collective political action. Therefore, the growing 
stagnation of global capitalism paradoxically leads to demands for a disciplinary and 
regulatory strengthening of the political order of nation-states. This is due to the latter 
being seen as counterbalances to growing discontent with the transformation of the 
capitalist global economy associated with rising unemployment, a precarious labour 
market and the intensification of various forms of geographical and social inequality. 

It can be observed that the most significant threats to the political order of Modernity 
are generated for and by itself: “Western Modernity – first the European manifestation, 
then the American – has for centuries maintained the conviction that it is nothing more 
than contemporaneity in action and that its goal is not the effective mobilisation of 
resources, but rather the replacement of traditions with reason.” (Touraine, 2014, p. 99) 
Indeed, universal reason in politics proved impossible, disintegrating into its various 
conflicting and class-based variants. Against the backdrop of the crisis between 
economic classes and within instrumental reason, ideas concerning the guaranteeing 



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of commonality, universality, justice and progress on a new round of globalisation 
are once again returning to political nations; meanwhile, global Modernity is facing 
ever more insoluble challenges. As a result, a future revolution may ensue from the 
exhaustion of the communication and dialogue opportunities for key social actors: 

“a revolution begins with the negation of the other and ends with the disintegration 
or destruction of the negating actor; only chaos or absolute power can follow it” 
(Touraine, 2014, p. 112). The possibility of an active, including revolutionary, return of 
peoples to direct participation in their common history and collective destiny under the 
conditions of late Modernity remains an open and debatable political issue. However, 
when the mass apathy of a schizophrenic consumer subject is combined with endless 
modernisation as a mode of living under the conditions of Modernity, the revolutionary 
utopia disappears over the event horizon. A global crisis having the potential to 
envelop many modern societies and launch uncontrolled events seems extremely 
unlikely; its genesis from the contradictions of capitalism, which have already existed 
for 500 years, is also rather doubtful, although the corresponding forecasts are issued 
with enviable consistency (Wallerstein et al., 2013).

It is suggested that the possibility of a new revolution can be realised only on the 
basis of a putative repudiation of Modernity in favour of an alternative political project 
having a greater capability for universalisation and totalisation. If, in legitimising the 
liberal consensus and nation-state as the dominant political format of its synthesis, 
capitalism is the value-institutional quintessence of the political order of Modernity, 
it is precisely in challenges to capitalism, the liberal consensus and nationalism 
that provide the most obvious means for crystallising revolutionary movements. 
At present, despite postmodernist criticisms, the crisis of the market model of 
capitalism and mass democracies, the weakening of the social state and other 
challenges to the political order of late Modernity all relate to internal transformations 
or the archaisation of modern societies rather than any real alternative. Finally, 
the global scale of late Modernity also requires another scale to be achieved by 
its potential revolutionary subjects. If the modern revolution was initiated in key 
European polities, then revolution, as an alternative to late Modernity, presupposes a 
transnational rise in political subjectivity together with a corresponding coordination 
and institutionalisation that transcends territorial states. This presupposes the 
emergence of an effective counterbalance to the current global economy in the form 
of a future global policy, which, being subordinated to the interests of the leading 
national states, is still very much in its infancy. While various discourses and social 
groups profess to play the role of revolutionary utopias and subjects, in essence, 
their ability to present an alternative to Modernity remains an open question. Thus, 
a utopian systemic challenge to Modernity, connected with a morally more justified 
configuration and associated hierarchy of legitimate violence, is yet to emerge. 

In the long term, a serious (and possibly revolutionary) negative correction of the 
political order of modern societies will be capable of producing a rental transformation 
of capitalism and an expansion of the rent-class stratification mechanisms associated 
with precarisation, along with a reduction in the social mobility trajectories and other 
prospects of active social groups. The present global exhaustion of the market-based 

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158 Victor Martianov

development model, which is oriented towards the infinite expansion of profit, reveals 
the contours of a future society without economic growth (Policy Challenges, 2015). 
Robotisation has in no way compensated for the costs of technological progress in 
terms of filling society with superfluous people, while simultaneously turning them 
into increasingly dangerous classes: the precarious, the unemployed and the various 
minorities concealed in public policy blind spots or openly ignored by the state (Ford, 
2015). The discovery of resource limits applying to free, self-regulating markets leads 
to an increase in protectionism and nationalism, leading to the tendency to replace 
market competition mechanisms with the forceful redistribution of markets and 
resource chains. In an increasingly entrenched society without mass labour, mass 
taxpayers or profitable capital, the resource crisis affecting the social state model is 
exacerbated. The depletion of its resource base is accompanied by a growth in state-
dependent social groupings. As a result, a rental political order is formed, in which 
market communications are replaced by hierarchical models of distributive exchanges, 
which are increasingly controlled by the state. Social stratification increasingly depends 
not on market-based class formation, but on the access of citizens and social groups 
to the distribution of rental resources as regulated by the state. These trends lead 
to the dominance of rent-seeking economic behaviour (Davydov & Fishman, 2015). 
Mass behaviour associated with the search for rents that have a guaranteed status 
is increasingly becoming a more profitable strategy than risky entrepreneurial activity 
or the desire to take advantageous positions within a shrinking and increasingly 
unreliable labour market.

Paradoxically, the most urgent challenge faced by existing mechanisms for 
coordinating collective interests is the archaisation or simulation of Modernity, in 
which neo-patristic, neo-patrimonial models of political order unite power, law and 
property. A potentially revolutionary situation arises when Modernity turns into a 
new non-modernity that is incapable of transforming itself or effectively responding 
to the constantly arising challenges and threats of the volatile contemporary society. 
This situation becomes especially clear at the periphery of global capitalism. Here, 
the beneficiaries of peripheral capitalism strive to preserve the established political 
order, in which the radicalisation of various contradictions is intensified by their 
nonsolubility. To this end, political elites may attempt to freeze fluid contemporaneity 
(Z. Bauman), something that is impossible by definition. Such rigid and non-modular 
institutional states can, as a rule, only be reversed by revolutionary means. Therefore, 
the likelihood of a revolution is higher on the periphery of the global system, where, 
as a consequence of a variety of subtle sociocultural configurations, contemporary 
societies lack the flexibility demonstrated by the countries of the centre.

Finally, in the course of its development, the revolution always goes beyond the 
framework of any previous theoretical justification. Collective praxis outpaces outdated 
social ontologies and categorical descriptive apparatuses in favour of the imaginary 
establishment of society (Cornelius Castoriadis), which is gradually overgrown with a 
new institutional framework and legitimating self-descriptions. Therefore, in order for 
revolution to take place, policy must necessarily take centre stage in public life at a 
time when political issues have become questions of life and death.



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2018, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 143–160 159

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