One would be hard-pressed in America presently to feel exceedingly hopeful about the prospects of the left. The administrative state is being ripped up, the economic world system is in flux, legal norms erode further by the day, and at least for now, little resistance is being mounted capable of halting—let alone reversing—this evisceration. The world is getting hotter, and the necessary global coordination to halt this increase appears further away now than it did even a decade ago. It is the sheer difficulty of thinking in a hopeful key right now that makes The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects From the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising feel like a clarion call from a long-distant past reminding us to take heed of a future that is still ours to write.
The latest work by the literary scholar, poet, and communist political theorist Jasper Bernes is a study of council communism, a little-remembered strain of Marxist thought and revolutionary theory that saw in the workers’ council a powerful tool for the construction and organization of communist revolution. Emerging in a nascent form during the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871 as the political body of the uprising, the workers’ council only came into its own during the 1905 uprising in Russia, when the councils emerged from the workplace itself in an effort to cooperatively determine the reproduction of the revolution by producing for the collective need.
The form would later appear in revolutions and upheavals throughout the frenzied period between 1917 and 1923, most famously in Russia but also in locations as far-flung as Germany and Hungary; São Paulo, Brazil; and Seattle, Washington. A rediscovery of the council form in the global struggles of 1968 led to a renewed study and attention to its history and generative possibilities by a new generation of scholars whose critique of the model of council communism formed the current of thought known as “communization theory,” which continues to be a lively intellectual force. The workers’ council is, in Bernes’s formulation, the single new political idea in the history of communism since Marx’s death. It is in the form of these councils, Bernes argues, that we can see a way in which the dispossessed proletariat can create a world no longer ruled by the law of value and the forces of the state. For Bernes, it remains our historic task to build a “classless, moneyless, stateless society [of] freely associated workers meeting their needs with the means of production under conscious and planned control.” His book contends that revolution is the mode of political activity that will bring this society into being, and studying the history of the workers’ council is a way in which we can think about how such a process could be undertaken.
The Nation spoke with Bernes about his new book, organizing, and the legacy of the George Floyd uprising. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Clinton Williamson: Your work upholds and extends a conception of communism as a revolutionary possibility that for the vast majority of working people (and even perhaps for a majority of those who identify as leftists or even Marxists) has simply disappeared from the realm of the thinkable. Yet you rigorously take up communism as an achievable politics. What are the key components that make up communism for you?
Jasper Bernes: This book is not the book that you would expect in this particular moment, and it isn’t the idea that you would expect to encounter among left-wing writers. SoI have to kind of explain the untimeliness to people who are leftists and who oppose capitalism but don’t really see revolution as on the table in any way. And that’s a very understandable perspective.
We are in a situation in capitalism where the kind of crisis that humanity faces really can be overcome only by a revolutionary transformation of society. And if we don’t achieve that, then things are looking extraordinarily grim. I’m writing this book for people who already have assumed that there really is no alternative aside from revolution, and that we need to be looking forward to that, whatever that means. I think this chiefly has to do with the climate crisis, but also other developments within this dying, decaying late capitalism that we can see. We already see the political side of that right now.
CW: You take up the George Floyd uprising as the last major event in a chain of insurrections extending back to the Paris Commune. How do you thread the needle between seeing in something like the George Floyd insurrection an inroad to glimpse the communist prospect within the 21st century, and a critical analysis of its internal limitations and shortcomings?
JB: I do give an account of the George Floyd uprising, but my account is mostly interested in what would have needed to happen for that insurrection to have progressed further. The very image that that insurrection produced of its propagation was a limit, in that the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis is a powerful example of the kind of revolutionary negativity of that movement and its will to abolish police power. That was not something that could itself be reproduced just on its own: You could burn more and more police stations, but eventually you would get into a kind of civil war scenario, and that seemed only likely to lead in a dark, militaristic direction. And that means that the movement was missing another dimension of propagation. We could think of that as being something like the council form that the movement really would have needed. Revolution can only progress to the extent that the armed power of the state is abolished. But that’s just the negative moment, and that negative moment can’t be extended without these other positive dimensions, which have to do with the constitution of a collectivity that is about reproducing itself in a communist way. You can see little glimpses of attempts to do that within the George Floyd uprising, but they quickly became tragic in some way. They were very vexed and contentious spaces as people tried to come together and work together.
The other thing I should say: I’m talking about the George Floyd uprising as an example of a kind of struggle that we see emerging in the 21st century, and though it was particular in many ways to the United States, it also has characteristics that are similar to other struggles in the last 10 to 15 years.
CW: An absence in the book is the activity of those segments of the working class aligned with the right, a bloc that has seen significant and self-proclaimed “revolutionary” gains in the last half-decade. Meanwhile, the left—broadly conceived as everything from progressive electoralists to trade unionists, democratic socialists to communists—appears nearly everywhere to lack any significant political power. Where does this right-wing segment of the working class fit within your analysis?
JB: I’m not sure to what extent we’re seeing an increasingly conservative working class. We would have to really get into the numbers and the nitty-gritty, and we would also have to have a definition of class. It’s important to note that it’s still the case that most people don’t vote in the United States. So we cannot look at the recent Trump election and take it as a kind of measure of the ideology of the working class, because most of the working class doesn’t vote. We’re looking at the ideology of a layer of the working class at most.
What I do think about the last election is that sympathy for Trump and avowed MAGA leanings are less important than a hatred of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, as well as the miserabilism of the Democratic Party and a kind of general anomie… people just being like, “What’s the point of voting?”—which is an understandable reaction. Also, the economy has been really, really bad. That’s part of my materialism. Trump’s election did have to do with inflation, partially. By no means do I think that the working class is immediately and always communist in its orientation. There have always been reactionary segments of the working class, and that’s likely to remain true.
At the same time, people change, and most people—especially when we’re talking about elections—are just not thinking very hard about these things. Leftists think really hard about these things, but most other people are not thinking that hard about it, you know? There’s a difference between being a foot soldier and somebody that’s like, “Yeah, I voted for Trump.” As stupid as we can say that it is to vote for Trump, or whatever, there can be a lot of reasons that people give which within their worldview and their framework might make sense. And it doesn’t mean that we’re talking about people who are angels, but there’s a difference between somebody who’s really motivated by some kind of particularly hateful ideology and lots of people who’ve been won over, including working-class people, proletarians—Black proletarians and Latino proletarians, all kinds of people—who are just really into Joe Rogan or whatever and kind of get on this tip. There is some of the former that is going on, but that’s a bit overstated right now. It’s just the way the wind is blowing, and that’s dark—I don’t want to deny how dark that is. I talk to people every day who think that we’re at the beginning of 30 years of fascism, and I’m not saying that’s impossible; I’m not going to deny that that’s a possibility. From where we stand, I’ve always considered that a possibility. But the jury is out for me, and it’s just easy to overstate things, because it’s a scary moment, and it is a moment of real weakness, and a moment where no one has real answers.
CW: A common criticism leveled at communization theory is its perceived passivity—that it simply contends that we must wait for a major crisis of capitalism to arrive, out of which communism may have a chance to organically develop. How do you see your work responding to such critiques?
JB: One thing I would say is: Yes, that’s right. It is not a correct characterization of communization theory in its entirety; there are lots of different ideas. But it is a correct characterization of my view and the view of many people associated with communization theory, in the sense that revolutions pretty much only emerge out of crises of some sort, and they tend to unfold in the wake of wars, disasters, and economic collapses. But there are many kinds of crises, and capitalism already is the crisis, and the system itself is in crisis. The ecological crisis that is on our doorstep is going to be bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. I don’t think this claim makes me passive in any way, although it’s true it doesn’t give you something to do right now.
The contravening view is: What if we just organize hard enough all the time? But if that were possible, then why haven’t people done it? And so to people who say that communization theory discourages people from doing something that’s necessary now, or from fighting now, or from organizing now, which is an important preliminary, I just don’t think that’s true. I certainly wouldn’t discourage people in that way. People should struggle where they are, and they should try to win and to achieve some things. They should be as creative as possible, and they should build the organizations that they feel are necessary. We need to be sober in assessing the value of those kinds of efforts. In the end, the revolution will have been both the result of an event, something unpredictable, and the result of the patient work of building organizations. It’s not one or the other. The evental characteristic of history [“histoire événementielle”] isn’t always something that comes out of the blue on one day; it’s also something that emerges over generations.
When we’re talking about what will or will not work when building the sorts of working-class and proletarian organizations we want to see in the world, there’s also a certain amount of chance and indirection there as well. We don’t really know—but I hope that my book isn’t discouraging people from struggling now, or from acting now, or from doing things now at the same time. If we’re going to be honest about what a revolution looks like, I think our best analysis will tell us that it’s likely to emerge in the wake of some kind of crisis. But the crisis is here, and it’s coming, and it’s going to keep coming.
CW: You end the book on a call to action for a collective study of logistics, a project of mapping out the material infrastructure that undergirds our everyday life. You write: “What do people do for work where you live? What is produced, using what inputs? Where does the electricity come from? The water? How are the markets supplied?” What might beginning to sketch out answers to these questions do for those of us desiring to work toward a communist future?
JB: Being revolutionary is kind of meaningless in a non-revolutionary moment, because most of the organizing work that you find or that you can get involved with just isn’t going to be revolutionary and is going to be fundamentally about working with the balance of capitalism. Which isn’t to say that it’s something you shouldn’t do, but there are limits to it, and that tends to be discouraging and also produce an innate opportunism, and it tends to kind of weaken the sense of possibilities. I think, alongside that, being able to do this work of anticipating communism and revolution, gathering information—or at least information about information that would perhaps be useful in this future moment—gives people a way to be communist in the present. Which isn’t to say that it should take the place of participating in movements or organizing, but unless you’re going to do really seriously underground work, there just aren’t opportunities to be a revolutionary in non-revolutionary moments. So this is one of them. And as I say, it’s something that’s going to have to happen one way or another. There’s benefit in beginning that work now, in beginning to sketch it out. The only reason not to do that is if you thought that it would take the place of something better that people should be doing, and I just don’t think that’s the case. In fact, it’s likely to give people a sense of resiliency and hope that they might bring into other projects. That’s my pitch for it.
