by DAVID NORTH
IMAGE/Mehring Books
(David North’s forthcoming book, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century (416 pages; ISBN 978-1-893638-40-2), is available for pre-order from Mehring Books. North is chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party. )
There is broad agreement among historians that the twentieth century—as a distinct epoch in politics and culture—began in August 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. But the question of when the century ended—or whether it has ended at all—is the subject of intense controversy. The dispute is not over the formal dating of a given 100-year span of time. Clearly, the 1900s are over and we live in the twenty-first century. And yet, though halfway through the second decade of the new century, our world remains well within the gravitational field of the twentieth. If historians still look back in anger on the last century, it is because mankind is still fighting—in the spheres of politics, economics, philosophy, and even art—its undecided battles.
Until recently, historians were fairly confident that the twentieth century had been successfully laid to rest. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 set into motion a tidal wave of capitalist triumphalism that engulfed, with little resistance, academic institutions all over the world. The professoriat proceeded rapidly to bring its theories of history into alignment with the latest newspaper headlines and editorials.
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