The Anti-Capitalist Transition

David Harvey on "Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition," a long and critical stocktaking of what "co-revolutionary" Communism would and should look like. Particularly good, as Mr. Harvey always is, on sketching a big-picture portrait of the geographical and temporal make-up of the present and the ongoing defunctness of its planned future. Also, his ending note is a striking one, for those of us who understand Communism not as a fixed political program but as the self-constitution of a nameless mass out of an increasingly unavoidable recognition that capitalism's direction of history is no direction at all. Just the endless spiraling production of more rope with which to hang us all.

Communists, Marx and Engels averred in their original conception laid out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party. They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings, and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power. Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends.