The Future of Revolution: Jasper Bernes with M. E. O’Brien

Image: The Reich Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils meeting in Berlin on December 16, 1918.

Today, the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism seems at once more urgent and more distant than ever before. Even as the dominant order grows more nakedly repressive and disastrous by the day, its defeat remains progressively harder to imagine. In his recent book The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso), theorist Jasper Bernes endeavors to fill this imaginative void by laying out rigorous criteria for what a “classless, moneyless, stateless society” might look like. Bernes proposes two yardsticks by which to measure revolutionary programs: the test of value and the test of communism, the subject of his April 2025 contribution to e-flux Journal. He sketches potential futures by looking to the past—from the history of workers councils in the twentieth century to more recent appraisals of those left communist traditions—even as he stresses that revolution tomorrow is unlikely to take the form it did yesterday. Join us for a presentation by Bernes, followed by a response from M. E. O’Brien. O’Brien writes revolutionary theory and speculative fiction, and currently works as a psychoanalyst in formation. The presentations will be followed by a general discussion and Q&A.

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 Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso, 2025) and The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford Univ. Press, 2019), along with two books of poetry, We Are Nothing and So Can You (Commune Editions, 2015) and Starsdown (‎In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, 2007).

M. E. O’Brien has two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, 2023), and a coauthored speculative novel entitled Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is a coeditor of Pinko, a magazine on gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish. Previously, O’Brien coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed her PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. She is a practicing psychotherapist, a clinical social worker, and in formation as a psychoanalyst.

For more information, contact [email protected].

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