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

How might a 21st-century revolution against class society succeed? A history of uprising from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd protests show how we build a communist future

The Future of Revolution is a forceful critique of authoritarian perspectives on how revolution unfolds. Developing instead an alternative account of "revolutionary motives,” it forcefully argues that we treat as decisive not the ideas of leaders or intellectuals but the motivated action of self-organized partisans.

In overturning the left’s longstanding ideas about why the dispossessed revolt, movement-veteran Bernes develops an account of how a twenty-first-century revolution might succeed or fail.

If each era produces its own distinct vision of revolution, from the agrarian utopias of the Diggers to twentieth-century dreamworlds of cybernetic planning and full automation, then The Future of Revolution tries to trace the outlines of what a rupture fit for our 21st century of low-growth capitalism and cascading ecological collapse might look like. As global reorganization of both capital and labor has nullified older conceptions of the revolution it has introduced new horizons and new prospects.

For Bernes, within the actions and experiences of riots, rebellions, and recent social movements, there are vitally important intuitions and capitalism and its restructuring. Premised on direct, contemporary experience, they often contain insights that many contemporary theoreticians have overlooked.

Through riveting accounts of contemporary class struggle, The Future of Revolution throws off the commonplace ideas about politics that obscure our understanding of the present world, as well as the one to come.

Jasper Bernes is the author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, 2017) and two books of poetry: We Are Nothing and So Can You, and Starsdown. Essays, poems and other writings can be found in Critical Inquiry, Modern Language Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Endnotes, Lana Turner, The American Reader, and elsewhere. Together with Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, he edits Commune Editions.