The Future of Revolution

How might a 21st-century revolution against class society succeed? From the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising, anticipations of a future communism.

Communism comes from the future, but its hope haunts our past. Reading revolutionary history from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising by the light of communist theory from Marx to CLR James, The Future of Revolution illuminates the possibilities for an overcoming of class society in the 21st century. When Marx wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 showed that the “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 persists. Historical revolutions therefore reveal essential features of our communist horizons 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 inverted description of communism, Jasper Bernes synthesizes from a history of failure key criteria for success and clarifies for our present moment the still-urgent mission of the world proletariat.