‘Let us now imagine, for a change, an association of free men working with the means of production held in common…’
Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy Volume. I (Penguin Classics, 2004)

Apocalypse

As the first decade of the 2000s neared its end, and the waves of the financial crisis still battered against the doors of banks and states across the world, the slogan was taken up: ‘Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing’. What this slogan represented, daubed in dark paint upon the walls of Californian universities in 2009 and on the occupied Wall Street a few years later, was an absolutist millennialism, an instinct perhaps more than a rationalistic belief, that an insurrectionary movement must act as a total negation to the present system, whatever that might mean¹. 

‘Communisation’² is the name of one (self-confessed) ultra-leftist tendency that became somewhat fashionable in that period in the US and provided one possible meaning to the everything/nothing slogan. While diverse, what united most communisers was the assertion that, to be successful, any revolution against capitalism must look to establish communist relations as soon as possible in order to survive. It must immediately work to abolish wage-labour, money, capital and establish common access to goods, that is to say, ‘communise’ society. While often tying their conception of revolution to a close reading of Marx’s Capital, the communisers utterly rejected the classic Marxist political strategy of the seizure of power by a mass communist party – rooted in, and driven by, the workers’ movement – which, implementing its programme, constructs a socialist society.³ Parties, unions, and the whole of the old workers’ movement failed to produce communism in a now-dead era of mass factory labour in the 19th and 20th centuries; now is the time of riot, refusal, occupation, spontaneous and networked uprising.⁴

While the communisation theory of this period often grounded itself in history, looking back to the communisers of post-68 and the council communism of earlier in the 20th century, its own time in the limelight felt short-lived. With the rise of the Sanders campaign and the DSA in 2015, the question of how to leverage the real possibility of reforms⁵ toward socialist change became a motivating question, and the millennialist moment faded. 

Perhaps it is appropriate that, now that the democratic socialist project has entered a more ambiguous phase and lacks a unifying electoral project, the communisation theory of this earlier period should create a strange afterlife for itself.

Communisation, an Afterlife

It is out of this context that Jasper Bernes – author of The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising – emerges as a writer. Writing in Endnotes – communisation’s most well-known journal – and adjacent publications, he is today also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

A slim volume, the book consists of an introduction followed by three chapters. In the introduction, Bernes quickly gives us the formation of communisation theory post-68 and its internal critique of council communism, a primer in the history and idea of the workers’ council, and what these elements imply about the strategies of communists today in a context of changing capitalism. With this, we are then ready to absorb his chapters, which are more-or-less an expansion of those themes. The first is an expanded history of the emergence of workers’ councils and their revolutionist-theorists, covering France, the Russian Empire, Germany, Italy and Spain, from the Paris Commune in 1871 to the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The second chapter focuses on one of Marx’s most fundamental analyses of capitalism – his theory of value – which Bernes looks to use to negatively describe what communism must achieve, in what he terms a ‘test of communism’. The third and final chapter returns to the story of the council, taking us from the Second World War to the present, and touching on post-war US, 1968 France, the Portuguese Revolution, and the US during the George Floyd Uprising. This last chapter is where Bernes returns most explicitly to the question of communist strategy today, given the changing conditions of capitalism.

Taken together, the book is a valuable exploration of both the history and theory of the workers’ council, effectively using it as a means to explore the necessary political and social form of future communism, and what this means about communist practice. It is presented with a welcome clarity, particularly compared to other works on Marx’s theory of value and much in the communiser tradition.

For a relatively short text, Bernes makes an interesting range of arguments. It is sometimes difficult to divorce Bernes’s arguments from those of his theorists, which he incorporates into his historical-theoretical narrative without always clarifying his stance, at least immediately. Still, we finish the book with a fairly straightforward sense of some core claims.

Firstly, from his analysis of historical councils, Bernes sees that each conciliar regime he explores ultimately fails to become a communist political formation because it cannot live up to, whether because of structural or external causes, certain basic features that would have it cross the Rubicon: 

1. Can the councils disarm the existing state power? If not, they are doomed to become helpmeets to a capitalist state or dust under its boot. The Paris Commune was the first to prove this first ‘condition of insurrection’, when workers armed themselves, transformed into a National Guard controlled and revocable from below. Unable to expand, the commune was crushed by the French Army, illustrating by example that, without the dissolution of the state’s armed power in Paris itself, the commune could not have lasted even those months. 

2. Can the councils go beyond the simple coordination of a mass strike and act with rapid unanimity? In 1905 Russia, in the first emergence of the soviets, Bernes sees an infant form of such unanimity, where a young soviet not only enforces the strike but dictates certain exceptions for vital services, and later attempts to impose the 8-hour working day itself. In such a form of rule, “there was nothing to vote on, only practical matters to decide”.⁶ In each historical case, though, this kind of urgent and singular activity, representing the activity of a unified proletarian class, could not be transformed from strike coordination to communist construction. Unitary power, embodied by systems of delegation and recall, devolves into representation by some other force: a party, or a republican constitution.

3. Can the councils enact explicitly communist measures, abolishing the distinction between the economic and political? During the German Revolution, nascent councils asserted their political dominance, partly through the mutinous army, without real control of the means of production. In the mass strikes in Italy between 1919 and 1920, councils remained at the level of the workplace, sectorally organised, with an economic ‘workers control’ eclipsing any aims of political power. Similar in the Spanish Civil War, where sectoralism in half-existent councils was compounded by a lack of a clear vision, by anarchists and others, of communism as a political aim. Without combinatory political-economic communist measures, councils become appendages of a republican state, a union or a party officialdom. Communism appears only in fragments, ad hoc and unsustainable.

Secondly, from Bernes’s analysis of Marx’s theory of value – which describes the social relations that reduce labour and goods to abstracted, quantifiable commodities utilised for profit – Bernes looks at several possible attempts to read a negative description of a future communism. Against some of these attempts, he argues that the ‘abolition of value’ – i.e. the dismantling of the system of social relations mediated and dominated by commodities, money, and market exchange – does not in itself mean communism is achieved. This merely gives us a test for some necessary conditions of communism, but a positive element is missing, which must not be taken for granted. Bernes looks again to Marx, for whom ‘free association’ must replace the domination of value. That means free, conscious control over a common plan for society that is transparent to and understandable by all (what Bernes concisely calls ‘tractability’). 

Systems that transparently measure inputs, outputs, real hours of labour performed, and so on, do not necessitate the return of the universal measure and domination by money, and therefore the market and capitalism, as some hard-liners such as Bordiga would have it. Nor is the replacement of money by certificates measuring labour-time necessarily doomed. 

The key remains: do such systems bind us to productive decisions (individual or collective) that we would otherwise never make, or do they assist ininforming free decisions about consumption and/or production? For example, does a system of labour certificates force you to work x hours in order to receive food, or does it simply indicate that you probably shouldn’t take more than y amount from the common store, or there won’t be enough for everyone else? Where in the former, perhaps such certificates are provided by a state supercomputer and not the market (and we have abolished value, hooray), only in the latter are we helped to understand and freely act on a common plan based on need. What is required is precisely this: ”an open book, a living inventory, [that] allows for everyone to participate in decisions relevant to their life”.⁷

What this argument means is that there are still tasks for communist politics even as capitalism is finally abolished. What to make of positive proposals and political forms are still crucial questions as we pass from the abolition of value to the construction of communism. Then, in communism too, production and consumption are open and political questions, not foreclosed by the dominating logic of economic value.

Thirdly, and perhaps most interestingly, by bringing together the lessons above and from his analysis of the more recent council-ish formations, Bernes gives some remarks on strategy and on what an organisation of communists should look like. He does so similarly to how he considered possible future communisms, by gently prodding at historical ultra-left and council communists’ visions of organisation (CLR James, the Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières (ICO), Bordiga, Debord, etc).

Bernes makes what might now be considered a familiar communiser argument, mentioned already, that the changes to capitalism now and toward the end of the 20th century (post-Fordism, the logistics revolution, globalisation, casualisation, or some combination) have rendered the mass workplace no longer the automatic and only location of revolutionary action. Today, the blockade and occupation are equally important, with workers from outside of a specific workplace putting a chokehold on distribution and consumption, rather than production.

Relatedly, Bernes sees that the workers-councilism of the early 20th century cannot be reasonably maintained in such conditions. In particular, the councilism of the pre- and inter-war period was grounded in an analysis of the councils that were actually arising from a definitely revolutionary situation. Without such a revolutionary situation today, we must look to what fragments of changed council forms we can see in workers’ self-activity, specifically in more recent uprisings (George Floyd; Oaxaca 2006; Estallido Social), however far they may be from communist revolution.

What then for communists themselves (probably the central audience for the book)? This too, must be defined closely by our present conditions.

Bernes seems to follow and expand on the communisation theorist Gilles Dauvé. He quotes favourably Dauvé’s rejection of two incorrect poles of action for communists.⁸ On the one hand, what Dauvé calls ‘militantism,’ which acts to forcibly fuse the self-activity of the class with the movement of communists. On the other hand, the urge to completely self-liquidate – to assert that any activity of a group of communists is bound to disrupt and meddle in the self-activity of the class as a whole. Bernes asserts the supremacy of ‘self-activity’, but is not as liquidationist as this second pole that Dauvé rejects. He looks to historical and contemporary projects engaged in ‘correspondence’ or ‘inquiry’ of the real arrangement of work and logistics under capitalism and workers’ most promising activities against it. Communists should undertake and publish such inquiry as a means to critically reflect the most advanced struggle, “facilitiat[ing] the spread of revolutionary examples chosen by struggle itself”.⁹ Anything more than this would be necessarily unmoored from self-activity and doomed to out-of-time sloganeering.

While such correspondence projects are unlikely to become fully-fledged relays for proletarian action in non-revolutionary times, if an uprising bursts forth, knowledge of capital’s functioning will be vital for any council-like formations to push forward. In such a revolutionary scenario, where before the movement of communists (ie explicitly communist ‘parties’, organisations, publications, networks) and the fragmentary movement toward communism (by workers’ self-activity) were necessarily separate, now a ‘historical party’ can emerge that can put the two into interrelation. When the form of revolutionary workers’ self-activity selects itself, the movement of communists can either dissolve into it or act as an obstacle to it. This organisational form must then become the real movement toward communism, which can finally act as ‘party’ without anachronism, taking on the basic tasks Bernes outlines above, as well as expanding the task of inquiry: reflecting and amplifying the forms and tactics of struggle; clarifying the movement’s communist ends; catalysing action among non-militants and non-activists within and beyond the workplace. The communist party is forged only by the insurrection itself.

Comrades, Sit On Your Hands?

As laid out, Bernes’s arguments may strike many communist readers as equal parts frustrating and inspiring.

What is perhaps most welcome is Bernes’s full-throated and utterly plain allegiance to communism, both as a struggle and as a real aim. A society, named with a simple honesty, without class, without the state, and without the domination of value over all life. So often, it seems, do we hear veiled illusions –  ‘imagining radical futures’, and similar such phrases –  in academic papers and essays that, in acts of radical open-mindedness, say nothing at all. Sometimes they may name the enemy, capitalism. Orientation toward actual, named emancipation – communism – is nowhere.

In real political activity, too, the communist aim is too often eschewed, for fear of alienating the mythical mass of ‘ordinary’ workers.¹⁰ Rather than putting forward the political argument, many communist and socialist organisations in Britain and elsewhere cloak themselves in broad left, ‘common sense’ demands, hoping to bring workers to their side who can then be exposed to the real politics as they become more initiated. This is communism via the pyramid scheme. In the Corbyn years, the ‘non-reformist reform’ was seen as a policy means to enact popular measures that would ground workers’ interests concretely in socialist transformation and provide tools to defend it. Not completely unworkable, the strategy nevertheless meant that socialism as a political aim was obscured as alliances were forged with left-liberals, and an orientation to liberation behind the backs of the people remained.¹¹ In the era prior, the Occupy and student movements of the early 2010s were often also stuck between individual demands (reverse university fee increases) and a millennialist ‘blank maximalism’, with what might come next left unsaid. Bernes’s book plants a sign in the ground – this way communism, which we hope might be taken as a direction to finally make such politics explicit.

It is, however, a question of politics and political agency which sparks frustration. In Bernes’s account, the agency of political actors, communists and working-class organisers of any stripe, appears and disappears before our eyes. At one moment, politics comes front and centre, we must clarify our communist aims and tactics, nothing is foreclosed. At another moment, we are left to ‘read the tea leaves’ and ‘descry’ the activity of the working class, which is beyond us and about which we can do near-nothing but watch and interpret. Once laid out, as above, we see that Bernes’s arguments for this strange dance are historical: that communists are necessarily divorced from revolutionary proletarian self-activity up until such self-activity becomes, in fact, revolutionary, and the forms and direction of the real movement toward communism are revealed. Should communists intervene in favour of this or that measure, form, or organisation prior to such a moment, they simply engage in counterproductive sloganeering, which is at best a guess of future working-class activity.

But this argument ignores certain basic facts. Walk into any trade union meeting, any community centre where renters organise a march on their landlord; stand on the picket line as protesters shut down an arms factory: you will find communists and socialists, be they Marxist or anarchist. The ‘self’ of proletarian self-activity cannot be divorced from the organisation of communists as Bernes does so cleanly, and most especially not in the non-revolutionary periods, when Bernes sees the two as most separate. Today, in Britain at least, without the mass workers’ movement of the 20th century, you will often find worker-communist activists and their fellow travellers as sustainers of the structures of workers’ self-defence. This is not to say that the movement of communists and proletarian self-activity are synonymous, far from it. Nor is it to say that every resistance to work and life under the capitalist hell is carefully planned and organised by any party, let alone the communists. But what must be stressed is that the ‘self’ of ‘self-activity’ which Bernes has ‘selecting’ and ‘revealing’ forms and routes to a communist future, as if automatically, cannot be automatic. This ‘self’ is constituted only by workers themselves, not by some self-acting, self-sustaining Spirit out of Hegel’s notebooks. And communists and socialists make up a portion of that self… dare we say, a mentionable portion, however small.

With this acknowledged, surely political agency must surge back into the picture from the beginning. Bernes is right that to call for some particular communist political form would be an error; if communists call for soviets now, this is for lack of understanding of the present stage of the struggle, the specificities of the conjuncture and resistance being waged within it. However, while we should take seriously the call for inquiry, this does not mean that we cannot act as communists within the movement. We already are – in our workplaces, universities, and neighbourhoods. The political openness with which Bernes describes the revolutionary situation is already with us, constraints granted. The question of communist strategy – what is to be done – therefore remains and cannot be reduced to a semi-anthropological study of the other, the workers over there.

But agency, even in the revolution, sometimes takes on an uncanny quality in Bernes’s account. While strategy and policy seem to suddenly become urgent, open questions, Bernes has councils acting with a necessary ‘unanimity’ (as mentioned above). How is it that such a unity can form, seemingly automatically, on the basis of proletarian self-activity alone? And how can this hold while the political questions of communist construction come into view? How can these questions go without debate, if not within the councils, where delegates are bound to their decisions, then within every workplace and community? Bernes slips too easily into this millennialist mode, imagining that either the unfolding of revolutionary self-activity will resolve every question, or that all must end in defeat.

Despite this unsatisfying treatment of agency, Bernes still gets much right in his analysis of communist action. Beyond the focus on ‘unanimity’, his outline of the ‘conditions of insurrection’ is largely cogent and motivating, in particular his repeated insistence, with fruitful historical examples, of the necessity of the abolition of the armed power of the state, police and army. With this orthodox Marxist sensibility, Bernes pursues a good comradely critique of the George Floyd Uprising, where the call for ‘abolition’ became both potentially revolutionary (“not just the overcoming of the police but the long history of racial domination in the US, the unfinished work of the abolition of slavery—which is to say, the abolition of class society”) and a reformist crutch (“thus abolition comes to mean everything and nothing. […] Any reduction in prison is good. Any reduction in police violence is good, and thus all reforms are abolitionist.”)¹²

While insisting on a solid understanding of communist political agency and the democratic impulse to see it put to use, we can even commend Bernes’s central strategic call – for inquiry – without going the whole way. A fine-grain understanding, most preferably from within, of a workplace; of means of existing day-to-day resistance; and, building upward, of logistics networks stretching across borders, gives the worker-organiser a place to begin and a possible direction to take.¹³ And, in revolutionary moments as Bernes points out, this information will be vital for communist construction.¹⁴ This is a welcome counter to one tendency on the far-left: to call for radical action – a mass strike or boycott – and to ground such calls in quite temporary news-cycle-ish events, with seemingly no interest in the specifics of day-to-day experience and resistance of workers.

Bernes is right that, however much inquiry communists undertake, their strategies and politics in a non-revolutionary situation represent a ‘guess’, which may well misalign with a suddenly broadened movement in a period of uprising. Why, though, should this stop communists from making that guess, and from looking to merge their own movement with the broader workers’ movement to the extent that this is possible outside of revolutionary times? So long as such a project is realistic, never presuming itself to act as the whole class or believing that it can decree the precise hour and form of communist transformation, when moments of uprising do come, such a project could act as a vital element, both progressive and sustaining. Such a project of merger, of speculative party-building, surely only increases the odds of this. At its best, it could provide communists with the very networks of classed knowledge that Bernes emphasises; it could prefigure the combination of economic and political that Bernes has as necessary in communist construction, with a basic programme¹⁵, drawn from inquiry, democratically alterable as times change, and used as a basis for contestation at every level of society.

Just as Bernes insists on the necessity of communism’s positive element in the process of future revolutionary construction, we must equally insist on the positive element of communist strategy today, however speculative. If such an endeavour must be guesswork, then comrades, let us guess as best we can.

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1. Tim Barker, The Bleak Left: On Endnotes, n+1, 2017, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/the-bleak-left/. ↩︎
2. ‘Communization’ in American English. ↩︎
3. Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, Marxists Internet Archive, 2006, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm. ↩︎
4. Donald Parkinson, Nothing New to Look at Here: Towards a Critique of Communization, Libcom, 2015, https://libcom.org/article/nothing-new-look-here-towards-critique-communization-donald-parkinson. ↩︎
5. Callum F, The Five Years of Democratic Socialism Part 1: Reforms Without Reformism, Prometheus Journal, 2024, https://prometheusjournal.org/2024/09/30/the-five-years-of-democratic-socialism-part-1-reforms-without-reformism/. ↩︎
6.  Jasper Bernes, The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising, (Verso Books, 2025), 68 ↩︎
7. Ibid, 158 ↩︎
8. Ibid, 148 ↩︎
9. Ibid, 164 ↩︎
10. As any good organiser knows, there are weirdos in every workplace and apartment block. Establishing normality is for right-wing Labour focus groups ↩︎
11. Callum F, Reforms. ↩︎
12. Bernes, Future. 169. ↩︎
13. In the British context, the publication Notes from Below is our best example for a project to develop this understanding. ↩︎
14. Writing by Bernes’s fellow communisers on this theme have proved original and interesting. (In particular, Forest and Factory by Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez writing in Endnotes (2023) and Technical Expertise and Communist Production by Nick Chavez again writing for The Brooklyn Rail (2022)) ↩︎
15. Following others’ analysis in Prometheus, a mininum-maximum programme seems the more careful and grounded type, rather than the archtypal programme of a sect, with answers to every conceivable theoretical question. See Andreas Chari’s Towards a Mass Communist Party (2025). ↩︎

Callum F