The Future of Revolution
Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Verso Books
Publishing:29th Apr '25
£16.99
This title is due to be published on 29th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
[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 Murphet * Affirmations: 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
In this extraordinary study into revolutionary histories and possibilities, Jasper Bernes does not let his reader off lightly. He pushes us to think hard alongside him about the logics and activities of collective emancipation-in this task, we couldn't ask for a more brilliant guide than Bernes. We need this book now, and will continue to need it long into the future. -- Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
A rescue project for the radical imagination, Bernes draws together a new lineage of communist thought and action that will leave readers raring to go make a new world. -- Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
ISBN: 9781788737531
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 250g
192 pages