The article aims to present different ways of comprehending the two main concepts of revolutionary thought—the concepts of truth and totality. In the first part, the article focuses on the Leninist reading of Hegel’s dialectics, which understands the moment of truth as the journey of knowledge in its search for an absolute truth that is also reflected in the historical movement of the proletariat. The article tries to present the epistemological conditions of the possibility for the emergence of such theory and develop the consequences of its realization for the actually existing socialisms in the first part of the 20th century and the critical distancing from its assumptions in the second part. By introducing Adorno’s negative dialectics, the article presents the challenges that revolutionary thought faces today—especially regarding the concepts of truth and totality. Trying to think about the revolution today, as the main thesis of the article wants to argue, means making a theory of revolution capable of establishing the relationship of knowledge to the un-truth of social totality and comprehending the social moment of the non-totality without falling in the postmodernist plurality of different theoretical positions.
