Inquiry on the Future of Revolution, Part 1

Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai Drama College, 1971

In his recent book The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising, Jasper Bernes laments that a lot “of self-organization during our own period … often takes place without any revolutionary horizon, promising nothing so much as the reproduction of the proletariat as proletariat.”1 To fill this imaginative void, the book reappraises numerous council-communist programs and examples of mass self-organization—from the Paris Commune to today—and seeks to determine rigorous criteria for the transition to a classless, moneyless, stateless society. Rather than “what is to be done,” Bernes instead thinks about “what will have needed to have happened differently.” 

Communization theory, which emerges from an immanent critique of council communism, continues to be a generative force today for those committed to abolishing capitalism and avoiding the reproduction of hierarchical and oppressive social relations and subjectivities. As M. E. O’Brien writes in Endnotes, “Unlike current countercultural efforts to form alternative families, the abolition of the family would be a generalized restructuring of the material conditions of social reproduction dependent on communization and the suppression of the economy.”2 We might say that the same must be true for all abolitionist projects. As O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi describe in the introduction to their novel Everything for Everyone, where they write to us from a postcapitalist future, “Abolition preserved and transformed authentically loving features of the old society, but in radical and often unrecognizable new forms.”3 

This conversation is an edited transcript of a discussion between the authors that took place at e-flux in Brooklyn on November 18, 2025. At the event, Bernes first read a passage from the first chapter of The Future of Revolution about the Paris Commune and its temporal and spatial expansiveness. O’Brien then presented a new piece of fiction set in Brazil in the 2040s, which was written in response to Bernes’s book and which continued the speculative project of Everything for Everyone. 

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Andreas Petrossiants (AP): Jasper, to start with, do you want to respond to M. E.’s contribution and the Everything for Everyone project?  

Jasper Bernes (JB): I just really love it. I think it’s a great exposition of some of the themes and ideas and problems that I get into in the book. In the last chapter, I make a proposal about what I call “technical inquiry,” which is the idea that we really need to develop information about how the technical material infrastructure of capitalism functions so that we can take it over. Simply put, in order to expropriate the means of production—given the technical and scientific complexity of production right now—we also need to expropriate the knowledge that corresponds to those means of production. Since we don’t really want to simply do with those technologies and machines what they’re already doing, it’s also a speculative process. It requires imagining what we can do with these things. So it isn’t a simple matter of gathering information. It also requires a kind of technical imagination. I think M. E.’s story demonstrates that in a really beautiful way. 

AP: It makes me think of Marina Vishmidt’s writing on actively negative speculation.4 Jasper, towards the end of the first chapter of your book you write, “If everything belongs to everyone, some part of that belonging will be by necessity virtual, imaginary, since what is counted in such inventories is not only what is but also what might be.”5 Or as you say at the start of the second chapter, “The theory of the commune [is] both retrospective and prospective at once.”6 

JB: I think speculation is really important. There’s an old idea that comes from how Marx talked about his own relationship to communism. Marxists have interpreted this as a ban on graven images of the revolution, concluding that we really can’t and maybe shouldn’t say anything about what a revolution would look like because the revolution is going to be made by revolutionaries. It’s not a matter of coming up with blueprints or programs or instructions. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

Obviously, M. E.’s book details a process of collective speculation that will need to occur. Nothing can really happen unless that happens. At the same time, we live in a moment in which there’s a real absence of futurity and thinking about the future. Marx lived in a time when everyone—not just the socialists and the anarchists but even the liberals and the reactionaries—thought that communism was inevitable. We live in a very different moment, one in which only catastrophe seems possible. So I think it’s really important for us to rekindle that vision of a future that’s still possible. Of course, speculation on its own without praxis is meaningless, but I do think that the contemporary left spends too little time thinking about and talking about what we want. I have relationships with people that I’ve organized and done stuff with for years. We probably have completely different ideas about revolution. A lot of the people I work with don’t even believe in it. We never talk about these things, and that’s an issue. I’m not saying that’s all we should be doing, but I do think that speculation is important. 

M. E. O’Brien (MEO): I try to theorize about the kinds of thinking that becomes possible during moments of mass rebellion. For example, in the 2000s I was working in AIDS services in New York City and started moving in and out of various revolutionary organizations. I spent some time in the prison-abolitionist group Critical Resistance. It had come out of collaborations between Black Marxist academics and incarcerated intellectuals, and involved various anarchists and socialists. We were talking about a world without prisons. In the 2000s, this was not a particularly widespread idea. The kind of analysis we had lent itself to talking about the abolition of police, and seeing the interconnections between different kinds of violent state forms. And then a long time later, the George Floyd Rebellion kicked off, and suddenly the abolition of police went from something that a few hundred ultraleftists talked about to something that tens of thousands of teenagers were arguing about on social media.

We certainly can’t abolish police in the broad sense without abolishing property. Debates about police abolition are a way of trying to theorize communism. A mass effort to theorize communism emerged because of the scale, intensity, and depth of the rebellion. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five million people were in the streets. Twenty-one states had the National Guard out. There were riots in a couple hundred cities, with curfews instituted in two hundred of them. It was quite extraordinary. It’s hard to remember the scale of it. And the scale of it made this revolutionary horizon intuitively graspable on some level to people, resonant and meaningful. 

On the topic of blueprints, as Jasper mentioned, Marx and Engels have this helpful critique of the utopian socialists. They come up with these beautiful plans but have no way of achieving them, no model for what social change looks like. What actually happens is that there are immanent contradictions within capitalist society, and people fight over their own survival and their well-being. In their struggle, they begin to build a new world. Whatever your plans are, they are not likely to be relevant to that dynamic process. Some people have called Everything for Everyone a blueprint or prophecy. It’s certainly neither of those things. But it is an articulation of what we want in a collective context, based on participation in radical social movements for the last thirty years. As these revolutionary horizons and speculative projects subtly emerge within mass demands and mass thinking, we see that one of the roles of a theorist or artist is to distill those implicit speculative horizons, to think about them, to listen to them, and then to offer them back in some form. I think Jasper’s book absolutely does that. I like to imagine my work does that as well. If you do it right, it can be meaningful for people. They’re like, “Yes, this is part of what we are fighting for!” 

AP: Speculative ideas, like anything else, can be recuperated, or at least redirected back to reproduce the dominant order. The phrase “defund the police” achieved serious mainstream currency during the George Floyd Rebellion, but more recently, all of the mayoral candidates in New York City ran from it like the plague. It’s shocking how quickly we can forget. As my friend Vicky Osterweil puts it, “The forgetting of the uprising has been a crucial part of [the counterinsurgent] reaction, and is an active and ongoing process.”7 

Both of your books discuss the commune’s expansiveness, in both space and time. I’m reminded of Kristin Ross’s first book on the Paris Commune, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. She writes that a lot of the communards who weren’t killed were sent to New Caledonia to become foot soldiers for the colonial French project, turning their exile into imperial expansion. As Indigenous communities rose up against the settlers, this became another test of the commune, transposed somewhere else—a test which the communards failed. So I want to ask about expansion. Jasper, I’m thinking of the argument in your book that “from the science of value, we can develop a critical science fiction of value, tracing out the course a revolution must take by delineating certain logical points of failure, certain guardrails.”8 But again, this isn’t about sketching blueprints. 

JB: If I had a program or a blueprint, I probably wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t be writing this book. I would be trying to go about convincing people to do whatever it was I’d come up with. But I don’t really think that a small group of people can convince others to do things. It has to be something that emerges as a process of collective reason, collective deliberation, and collective imagination. Until the idea of communism seizes the minds of millions of people, it doesn’t really exist. But that doesn’t mean we can’t theorize that process. 

And so, what I’m talking about in the book is rather the functions of workers’ councils. Instead of thinking about revolutionary organization in terms of form or content, it’s better to think about it as a series of functions that a revolution will need to fulfill. When I say we’ll need delegation, there’s thousands of ways in which that delegation can take place. It’s probably not going to be the same everywhere. Obviously, historical council communism had several different proposals for how to do this, but we don’t necessarily need to look to those proposals. We will invent our own proposals for how to do delegation and how to do coordination. I also think it’s highly unlikely that we’ll call it a “commune” or a “workers’ council.” I really don’t care what it’s called. What matters is what it is. I think internationalism is extraordinarily important; as soon as you let the revolution fall within the boundaries of the nation-state, you have a real problem. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so against constitutions as a way to form workers’ councils. You see this with the Gilets Jaunes movement in France, or with the Estallido Social in Chile.  

One of the smartest things anyone said to me about the George Floyd uprising was that you could see it going in the direction of trying to amend the constitution and come up with an explicitly abolitionist, anti-racist constitutional intervention. It’s understandable that people would want that, but I think it would be a disaster. So there has to be some way to transgress these borders and these divisions. A lot of the work has to do with overcoming divisions of labor that are sedimented into geography. There are certain kinds of machines and tools that only exist in certain places. These are material inequalities that will need to be remedied. It would be a massive technical project to remake the world so that people have access to the things they need to live lives of dignity and meaning and fulfillment—so that the free development of every person can be the maxim of a communist society. It’s not going to happen overnight. We’ll need to move stuff all around the world in order to remedy a lot of the imbalances that have been created by centuries of capitalism and colonialism and dispossession. How do we do that? Well, it’s a vast project of imagination that no one mind could solve, but I think with millions of minds it can be solved. 

Continued in Part 2