Rental Partner: University of Washington Office of Public Lectures presents
John Jennings
The AfroFuture Now
Town Hall Seattle and Red May present
Whatever Happened To Revolution?
The Future of Revolution – Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising
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The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Hardcover)
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Whatever happened to the revolution? Back in the sixties (remember those days?), revolutions seemed to be everywhere—nations, groups, and guerilla movements all claimed the word. But now? Not so much. Not at all, really. Has the idea just changed names? Have we outgrown it? And what would a 21st-century revolution against class society even look like?
There’s a lot to discuss. It almost feels like we’re stuck in a Counter-Revolution—before a revolution has even happened.
Jasper Bernes’ The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising explores what revolution could look like in the twenty-first century. He reflects on the past, noting that many key revolutionary ideas—like the party, the union, the commune, the uprising, and the strike—come from the nineteenth century. The only truly new idea, he argues, was the workers’ council (or Soviet), which emerged in Russia during the 1905 mass strikes.
Now, in the twenty-first century, these old ideas resurface, sometimes disguised as something new. Bernes suggests that the future of revolution is waiting to be discovered—it can’t be fully imagined until it happens. But we can still outline the steps that will have been necessary to get there.
Joining Jasper in the discussion will be Idris Robinson, Professor of Philosophy, Texas State University; Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley; and Nikhil Pal Singh, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU. Philip Wohlstetter of Red May will moderate.
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Jasper Bernes lives in Oakland and teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. A regular contributor to the Field Notes section of the Brooklyn Rail, he is the author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization and two books of poetry, We Are Nothing and So Can You and Starsdown.
Idris Robinson is a philosopher and writer from the New York hinterlands. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University. He is the author of two forthcoming books: The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer, published by MIT press in the Semiotext(e) series; and Escritos desde la baldía, published by Irrupciónes Ediciones.
Colleen Lye is an Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Lye is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). Her book America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005) received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was named a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She has coedited numerous special journal issues on the topics of peripheral realism, Asian racial form, financialization, and the humanities and university struggles.
Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. His first book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004) was recognized as the best book in US civil rights history by the Organization of American Historians. Subsequently, Singh worked with legendary black freedom movement activist Jack O’Dell, gathering, editing and introducing O’Dell’s collected essays and movement writings in Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder (University of California Press, 2010). In 2014, Singh founded NYUs Prison Education Program, serving as its faculty director until 2023. His book, Race and America’s Long War (UC Press, 2017), is an examination of the relationship between race, war, and policing in U.S. domestic life and overseas conflict. Singh’s work has appeared in The Nation, The Intercept, Dissent, The New Republic, Salvage, The New Statesman, and Boston Review. He currently serves as a series editor for the American Crossroads book series at the University of California Press and is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, based in Washington DC.
Philip Wohlstetter is a writer. He is the founder of Red May and Invisible Seattle.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Red May.
