I’m about to write the most earnest thread I’ve ever done. It’s about what we can learn about the power of political possibility from history.

I’ve had so many people tell me recently what is not possible. No, we can’t give everyone healthcare and cancel student debt. No, abolition is not realistic. No, we can’t pay grad students enough to keep them off food stamps.

It’s a weird thing to have the limits of the possible policed like this when you’re reading and writing about what happened in Russia in 1917.

Russia’s systems of police oppression and oligarchic rule were even more complete than ours, and its society was similarly fractured. Yet in eight months, it went from autocratic rule to a fledgling parliamentary democracy, to the first socialist state. How? Why?

Three reasons: 1) everyone reached the conclusion that the system was broken beyond repair—even the political elites who had created the system to benefit themselves (structure). 2) politicians and activists refused to believe that the impossible was in fact impossible (agency).

3) it’s impossible to overstate the role of accident (contingency). Lenin evaded arrest upon returning to Russia. An premature Bolshevik uprising in July nearly doomed the cause, but the party’s fortunes were bolstered by an attempted right-wing coup in Aug. etc, etc

Ultimately, structures, agency, and contingency collided in a way that made the impossible possible in a matter of months. The changes of fortune that resulted were some of the greatest ever seen in world history. One text captures how stunning this change was particularly well.

It was written by Herbert Fitch, a Scotland Yard agent who chased Russian radicals through the streets of East London. He recounts with glee how he and other agents infiltrated exile circles, posing as waiters to eavesdrop of Lenin and Trotsky at party conferences.

This is a narrative of power, explaining how international police states psychologically broke “the flotsam of exile,” revolutionaries who had already been chased from their homes and were living in abject poverty and isolation abroad.

But by Nov 1917, things were different.

Fitch writes, “Lenin, once a fleeing exile… had become a ruler more absolute than the Tsar he superseded; Trotsky was now a general..."

'"...and over here men who had formerly been furtive anarchists living in slum streets with the official eye never very far removed from their neighborhood had suddenly been appointed ambassadors, consuls, plenipotentiaries, and welcomed as official and respected visitors.”

Of course, it takes extraordinary circumstances for the impossible to become possible. In this case, it took a long process of state decay, decades of intensifying social mobilization, and above all the shock of the First World War, which made the old system unsustainable.

But we kid ourselves if we don’t think we’re living through a similar moment today. We have a complete state collapse that is compounding deep and old inequalities.

We have a generation of youth in which even the most privileged feel that they have no future. We have climate and public health catastrophes unfolding unchecked.

So a lot more may be possible than you think! If you doubt this, try harder/have more imagination.

(And before someone @s me with “but the Red Terror!” go back and read what I said about agency and contingency. No one outcome of any event—including revolution—is ever structurally inevitable). The end.