This article asks whether the 1917 Russian revolution was a revolution against Marx’s Das Kapital, as Gramsci claimed. The answer is that Marx changed his approach to historical development and, from the late 1850s onwards, adopted a multilinear rather than a unilinear theory of history. This put in question the idea that capitalism was a necessary prelude to a fully communist society. The article finishes by asking what a fully communist society – one, according to Marx, based on needs rather than wants – might look like and the role of technology therein.
