The Paris Commune and ICE vehicles being pelted by chunks of concrete. The Egyptian Revolution and rows of self-driving cars engulfed in flames. The Spanish Civil War and crowds blocking a freeway blanketed with thick clouds of tear gas. These were among the juxtapositions which arose as I read through Jasper Bernes’ The Future of Revolution and received message after message about the revolts in Los Angeles from friends scattered across the globe, dispersed fragments of time colliding and sending sparks off of one another, signaling towards somewhere still unknown. Both the book and the revolts in the end pose a shared question, one in the language of theory and the other in the language of practice: how might we not only fully crash against the order of this world, but finally break through and reach what lies on the other side?

The Future of Revolution develops its response to this question by tracing the outlines of a communist future in the shape of a diversity of insurgent pasts. Taking as its object the global history of the workers council—navigating through its many theorizations and contradictions, its various defeats and still smoldering potentials—the book draws out the negative and positive features which remain integral to communist struggle, coming together in what Bernes conceptualizes as the test of communism:

This test does not aspire to dictate a precise sequence or course which uprisings must then obey, but rather to discern the necessary foundations of a struggle which understands its historical task to be the destruction of capitalist society and the construction of a communist one.

The Future of Revolution makes plain the need for insurrection as the form under which a break with capitalism will unfold. While Bernes is clear that we cannot know in advance “what a genuine destruction of the armed power of the state will look like, given modern armies and modern policing” and deduces that it will most likely follow from internal dissolution rather than militarized confrontation, he never wavers from the necessity of doing so.² As Joshua Clover also clarified in his work, the fact that the present world is organized on the basis of the state being always nearby and the economy remaining far away has scrambled the variables which have long informed debates concerning insurrection and revolution, showing that for communists the abolition of the state and the reclamation of society’s productive forces are simply two dimensions of a single revolutionary process.³ In light of this necessity, Bernes also describes what have now become the obvious limits of exclusively negative forms of abolition and insurrection:

There is little to disagree with in such an analysis, as all of the significant revolts of the 21st century have exhausted and burned themselves out on these terms, developing immense capacities for insurrection and destruction which in the end could not sufficiently spread nor sustain themselves, much less give durable shape to communist forms of living. At the same time, the inverse of course also remains true: abolishing class society cannot be imagined without the abolition of the police, nor is cultivating a form of life that could do without the police possible so long as the violent power of the police persists. The constructive and destructive capacities of uprisings in this sense remain fundamentally inseparable: bringing an end to capitalist society must simultaneously bring into existence a life beyond capital.

After evaluating the various forms and tactics that have arisen within and circulated between a range of insurrections in the 21st century—counterlogistical blockades, arson, building occupations, sabotage, autonomous zones—Bernes goes on to address the construction of communism under conditions of insurrection by speculatively envisioning the formation of abolition committees:

There is without question a need to map, diagram, and reimagine how all of the resources and technologies of the capitalist world might be reclaimed and reorganized by communists, or alternatively how they might need to be abandoned or destroyed.⁶ As Bernes makes clear, “every bit of the earth is now so intermixed and intermingled with so many human labors and forms of indebtedness and belonging,” a historical interweaving of lives and planetary systems which means that any revolution would also need to unfold at such scales.⁷ Much of contemporary communist thought has turned explicitly to such questions, exemplified in texts such as Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez’s Forest and Factory or Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency. However, these communist blueprints ultimately remain incomplete so long as they favor the positive and neglect the negative, seeing the insurrectionary capacity to abolish power and domination as perhaps the antecedent of a communist society but not as an essential feature of it. The Future of Revolution remains a valuable contribution precisely because it creates an opening for us to see how the destructive and constructive features of insurrection and revolution are irrevocably entangled. The form through which capitalist society will be negated is also the form through which any other possible society would be affirmed, a dynamic which must remain central to militant theorization and experimentation.

The destruction of capitalism is for Bernes synonymous with the destruction of value, the abstract form which ties the diverse splinters of capitalist society together: “The concept of value is nothing, for communists, if not a crosshair that flashes red when we need to smash something.”⁸ This insight laced throughout the book is then accompanied by a warning that simply because value may come to be destroyed, that does not prevent another form of society from emerging which could be just as rooted in domination as capitalism, but on different formal terms. Throughout his project, Bernes makes clear that destroying capitalism means little without a parallel construction of communism because they are not simple binary possibilities of our world, but rather are non-conjunctive: they cannot coexist as forms of society, but the absence of one does not necessarily entail the existence of the other. As Bernes describes:

The development of social credit systems, automated surveillance, and expansive AI projects should be enough to make clear that other forms of social organization remain possible which may one day prove capable of disposing of value altogether while preserving the forms of domination which characterize class society. In this sense, value should be seen as the principle form through which class society has come to be historically organized under capitalism and thus is precisely what must be destroyed in the present, but class society can nonetheless always be organized on a diversity of formal terms in the future which exist apart from value.

Here we can begin to read within the test of communism what we can call the test of anarchy. On Bernes’ terms, communist society necessarily contradicts capitalist society, but does not exist as its only possible alternative. It is because class and domination can be organized on terms other than the value form that communist society must contradict not only the forms which are specific to capitalist society, but also every other possible form of class society. To discern the test of anarchy within the test of communism is thus to see that if the destruction of capitalism is intertwined with the construction of communism, so too must the construction of communism remain intertwined with the destruction of every possible logic of domination in addition to value. As value is the differentia specifica of capitalism, Bernes’ project proposes that it can serve as the basis for clarifying both the positivity and negativity of communism: “(the) abolition of the law of value leaves a remainder, and it is from and against this remainder that communism must be made.”¹⁰ Anarchy however has no such formal principle to ground itself upon because what it aspires to negate is not specific to capitalism. The test of anarchy thus runs like a black thread throughout the history of capitalism but also through any possible history, seeing in each expression of domination the ineradicable potential and necessity of insurrection. If communism takes shape as a weapon sharpened particularly against value, anarchy must instead arise as a forge capable of producing new weapons in response to whatever domination takes hold.

Because communism emerges non-conjunctively with capitalism as it positively constitutes itself as a society in the negative image of value, the test of anarchy emerges alongside it as a form of non-conjunction whose aperture is by necessity infinitely wider, opposed to every possible form of society premised upon class and domination. The prison is afterall an institution deeply intertwined with as well as shaped by the history of capitalism, but carceral possibilities will remain present even absent of value, organized on the basis of any number of other formal terms. So too is it easy to imagine the existence of border regimes in future non-capitalist societies, especially as the climate crisis intensifies and various disasters and scarcities grow more intense and increasingly common. Novel forms of hierarchy, domination, and exclusion based upon race, gender, sexuality, ability, or any other criteria would surely continue to aspire to take hold over life after the destruction of capitalist society, just as they preceded it. While Bernes writes that he intends to “treat the theory of communist revolution from the vantage of eternity,” so too does the task of anarchy remain eternal just as its horizon will forever remain expanding, always unfolding anew in non-conjunction with domination.¹¹ Just as the birth of capitalism inaugurated a war against life which capitalism has never ceased waging, the arrival of communism will also mark the arrival of a perpetual anarchy waged against every emergent form of class society.

The anarchist currents of our time have largely directed their attention towards the question of destituent power, focussing not on the need to constitute a new society so much as the need to destitute and destroy the order of the present one. Such an approach has offered us a method of experimenting with and theorizing all of those forms and techniques which are required of insurrection, learning tactics and developing repertoires capable of dismantling and toppling power in all of the diverse forms within which it continues to be historically constituted. Anarchy is thus the destituent edge of what is constituted by communism, the persistent process of deactualization which lurks in the penumbra of communism’s actuality. In the opening pages of The Future of Revolution, Bernes quotes C.L.R. James’ insight that “the task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop spontaneity.”¹² Developing spontaneity is of course a counterintuitive formulation, but within the context of Bernes project takes on a combustive and explosive sense. Today our struggle is to see the spontaneity of communism and anarchy as it is developed as insurrection and as new ways of life, burning brightly as guiding stars in the long night of history and vanishing darkly into black holes formed in the negative geometry of what they are not.