The Future of Revolution

The Future of Revolution:Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising

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How might a twenty-first-century revolution against class society succeed?

Communism comes from the future, but its hopes haunt our past. Reading revolutionary history from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising by the light of communist theory, from Marx to C. L. R. James, The Future of Revolution illuminates the possibilities for overcoming class society in the twenty-first century.

When Marx wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” he identified a principle that will remain true as long as capitalism and its class antagonism persist. Historical revolutions reveal essential features of our communist horizon, which would-be revolutionaries, then as now, must negotiate one way or another. In chapters that move from a critical history of the workers’ council to a reading of Marx’s theory of value as an inverted description of communism, Jasper Bernes synthesizes from a history of failure the key criteria for success. He defines for our present moment the urgent mission of the world proletariat.

Reviews

  • [Jasper's work is] sobering and optimistic at once

    Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick
  • Bernes is working with a remarkably sophisticated and resilient new critical model which will doubtless have a lot of traction in the years ahead

    Julian MurphetAffirmations: Of the Modern
  • Bernes' wonderfully detailed historical analyses of workers' councils and communes serves as the basis for important and provocative proposals for the tasks of communist thought and action today.

    Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies