undant Futures” of the “TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art” collection, however, clearly shows that neither the Art of the bourgeoisie nor its most “sensitive” members can even imagine a decent future for the human species whose social work they organize. For them abundance means scarcity just as peace means war.
The European bourgeoisie has been testing a new discourse on the working class for some years now. The simple denial of its existence, overwhelming since the 1990s, was already becoming insufficient before the pandemic. A new message was needed. The broadcasting of “Le temps des ouvriers”, a documentary originally commissioned by the Franco-German channel Arte, throughout last year in practically the whole EU, provides us with a clue as to the shape of the new discourse we will be bombarded with in the coming years.
Under communism… why would the sexual division of labor disappear when it pre-dates even class society? Isn’t it an exercise in voluntarism to declare that Communism will simply abolish the sexual division of labor?
Income distribution data in Europe show increasingly worrying patterns of territorial inequality apparently condemning whole regions to rural depopulation and massive and eternal unemployment. Local nationalisms and regionalisms use these differences to justify their aspirations. But neither the cause of the problems resides in a territorial conflict nor does the solution lie in gaining “levels of statehood” or “a voice in the capital city”.
In communism the capacities of social production would multiply. Communist society would satisfy everyone’s needs and the economy would no longer be based on capital accumulation, but rather on a common metabolism with Nature. But what happens then with Art, craftsmanship or traditional forms of production that do not allow massification? Won’t alienation return through the back door by separating us from our capacity to directly transform and create things on a small scale?
In various ways several readers have asked us what agriculture will be like under communism. As always the first thing to say is that communist society will not be the product of a preconceived plan to be imposed, but the result of a social process which will open up as we free ourselves from the contradictions of capitalism. However, we can read the trends already underway and explore them in a new installment of our series on communist society.
We start a new series answering questions our readers ask on communism.
The premise was as appealing as it could be: retelling Bogdanov’s Red Star amid the 1917 revolution. The main character, Leonid, actually a surrogate for Bogdanov himself, would have had a daughter in the communist Mars. The young woman comes back to look for him in the midst of the world revolution. But no. We discover that the plot begins in 1927, in the midst of the Stalinist counterrevolution, shortly before the killing and purging of the generation that had carried out the revolution. And that the authors replace historical context with a jumble, a tangle even, of prejudices and distortions… A tngle that is anything but innocent.
In some of the messages we received from our readers from different parts of the world, this second wave seems to be setting a turning point. In places where struggles seem to have receded after the first wave or failed to develop and gain momentum tamed by union control, the spectre of demoralization looms large.
Is it possible to open borders? Why do states say they can’t even absorb refugees?
ne of the more advanced examples of proletarian insurrection occurred exactly forty years ago in South Korea, a date so recent that many of the participants are still alive. The events of that time are a lesson not to be forgotten.
While the US media focuses its attention on “racial conflicts” in a not so innocent way, a series of day laborers’ strikes in Washington state this month has shown much more clearly the forms and alternatives of the emergence of workers as a class.
Agricultural and food production has become dysfunctional even within the parameters of the system itself. If agriculture and the food sector are increasingly regulated, subsidized and financialized, it is simply because capitalism does not even work to meet social food needs and the system itself has to prop it up by accumulating band-aids… that do not fix its own underlying dynamics.
We are in the middle of the most synchronous and geographically widespread wave of strikes and struggles in the last century. It shows to what extent universal, human needs can only be defended by the workers as a class, because only to the workers do they present themselves as their immediate and direct objective throughout the world. And what is no less important, it shows that we workers are capable of affirming a global alternative when we break with the subordination of our demands to companies’ profits, in other words, when we break with the discourse that unions have been hammering out for years and that they continue to repeat today
