According to the political theorist Alan Johnson, there has been a revival of serious interest in communism in the 21st century led by

Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek (, ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New Y ...

and Alain Badiou.

History

In 2009, many of these advocates contributed to the three-day conference, "The Idea of Communism", in London that drew a substantial paying audience. Journals such as ''Endnotes'', ''Salvage, Ebb Magazine'' ''Kites'' and '' Historical Materialism'' launched with communist outlooks, as well as news outlets such as

Novara Media Novara Media (often shortened to Novara) is an independent,F. Mayhew,The Media Fund offers 'democratic' alternative to billionaire press owners and BBC' (11/10/17) in Press Gazette left-wing alternative media organisation based in the United King ...

. Furthermore, internet culture and declining life prospects has led to a general rise amongst

Millennials Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the Western demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000 ...

and

Gen-Z Generation Z (or more commonly Gen Z for short), colloquially known as zoomers, is the Western demographic cohort succeeding Millennials and preceding Generation Alpha. Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth ...

in support for communism and socialism, in tandem with the rise of

left-populism Left-wing populism, also called social populism, is a political ideology that combines left-wing politics with populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric often consists of anti- elitism, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking for the "com ...

in the US and the UK. Explicitly left-wing contemporary artists, such as filmmakers, musicians, video-game creators and comedians have received widespread attention, such as the rapper/producer JPEGMafia, and a whole media-creator ecosystem has developed around the online left, known as BreadTube.

Contemporary communist theorists

Étienne Balibar Étienne Balibar (; ; born 23 April 1942) is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern Eu ...

Bruno Bosteels __NOTOC__ Bruno Bosteels (; born 1967, Leuven, Belgium) is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of ''diacritics''. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking worl ...

* Angela Davis *

Jodi Dean Jodi Dean (born April 9, 1962) is an American political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. She held the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professorship of the Humanities and So ...

Costas Douzinas Costas Douzinas ( el, Κώστας Δουζίνας; born 1951) is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities ...

* Mark Fisher * Silvia Federici * Anuradha Ghandy *

Agon Hamza Agon Hamza (born 1984) is a philosopher and a political theorist from Kosovo. Influenced by Žižek and his readings of German Idealism, Marx and Marxist tradition in general; his work develops further the Hegelian-Marxist concepts of state, reli ...

* Michael Hardt * John Holloway * Robin Kelley *

Andreas Malm Andreas Malm (born ) is a Sweden, Swedish author and an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University. He is on the editorial board of the academic journal ''Historical Materialism (journal), Historical Materialism'', and has been describ ...

* China Miéville *

J. Moufawad-Paul Joshua Moufawad-Paul is a Canadian academic and writer from Toronto, Canada. He is a professor of philosophy at York University. A Marxism–Leninism–Maoism, Maoist philosopher, Moufawad-Paul has written several works on the topic and regular ...

* Antonio Negri * Vijay Prashad *

Jose Maria Sison Jose Maria Canlas Sison (February 8, 1939 – December 16, 2022), also known by his nickname Joma, was a Filipino writer and activist who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and added elements of Maoism to its philosophy – which w ...

Kohei Saito (born January 31, 1987) is a Japanese philosopher. He is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. Saito works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective. His latest bestseller, '' Capital in the Anthropocene'', has bee ...

Alberto Toscano Alberto Toscano (born 1 January 1977) is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's ''The Century'' and ''Logics of Worlds''. He served as both editor ...

* Gianni Vattimo Other non-Marxist thinkers who have also had an effect on the 'new communists' include the revolutionaries Subcomandante Marcos and

Abdullah Öcalan Abdullah Öcalan ( ; ; born 4 April 1949), also known as Apo (short for Abdullah in Turkish and Kurdish for "uncle"), is a political prisoner and founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Öcalan was based in Syria from ...

, abolitionist

Ruth Wilson Gilmore Ruth Wilson Gilmore (born April 2, 1950) is Prison abolition movement, a prison abolitionist and prison scholar. She is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at T ...

, economist Frédéric Lordon, architecture journalist Owen Hatherley and the late anthropologist

David Graeber David Rolfe Graeber (; February 12, 1961September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books '' Debt: The First 5,000 Years'' (2011) and ''Bullshit Jobs ...

. Whilst these theorists come from a broad range of traditions, included but not limited to the Black Radical Tradition, Eco-socialism, Maoism, Neo-Marxism and post-Marxism, what they all tend to have in common is a critique of past socialist experiments, and a re-orientation of the revolutionary subject.

Notable works

''Empire'' was a major turning stone in 21st-century Marxist and communist thought. Theoretical publications, some published by Verso Books, include ''The Idea of Communism'', edited by

and Žižek; Badiou's ''The Communist Hypothesis''; and Bosteels's ''The Actuality of Communism''. The defining common ground is the contention that "the crises of contemporary liberal capitalist societies—ecological degradation, financial turmoil, the loss of trust in the political class, exploding inequality—are systemic; interlinked, not amenable to legislative reform, and requiring '

revolutionary A revolutionary is a person who either participates in, or advocates a revolution. The term ''revolutionary'' can also be used as an adjective, to refer to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor. ...

' solutions". In the introduction to ''The Idea of Communism'' (2009), Žižek and Douzinas also identified four common premises among the thinkers in attendance: # The idea of communism confronts depoliticization through a return to voluntarism. # Communism as a radical philosophical idea. It must be thought of as taking distance from economism and statism as well as learning from the experiences of the 21st century. # Communism combats neoliberalism by returning to the idea of the "common". # Communism as

freedom Freedom is understood as either having the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one's purposes unhindered. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving on ...

and equality. Equality cannot exist without freedom and vice versa. A rise in Marxist thought followed the financial crisis of 2007–2008, with the publishing of books including

G. A. Cohen Gerald Allan Cohen, ( ; 14 April 1941 – 5 August 2009) was a Canadian political philosopher who held the positions of Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Sou ...

's ''Why Not Socialism?'' (2009), Paul Paolucci's ''Marx's Scientific Dialectics'' (2009), Kieran Allen's ''Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism'' (2011), Terry Eagleton's ''

Why Marx Was Right ''Why Marx Was Right'' is a 2011 non-fiction book by the British academic Terry Eagleton about the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx and the schools of thought, collectively known as Marxism, that arose from his work. Written for laypeople, '' ...

'' (2011) and Vincent Mosco's ''Marx is Back'' (2012). ''The Communist Horizon'', published in 2012 by

, marked the beginning in a series of books from Dean which argue for the necessity of communist and Leninist politics. The most wide-read of these was Mark Fisher's (2009) '' Capitalist Realism.'' ''The Communist Necessity'', published in 2015 by

, also argues for the necessity of the communist party in radical social change. ''

Fully Automated Luxury Communism ''Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto'' is a book by Aaron Bastani first published by Verso Books in 2019. It argues that technology can be used to create a post-scarcity economy of widespread prosperity. Synopsis The book argues that ...

'', published in 2019, has helped normalise the term 'communist' within public discourse in the anglophone world. 2023 saw the publication of two significant books on the topic of communism: ''Marx in the Anthropocene'' by

, which developed a notion of a

degrowth Degrowth (french: décroissance) is a term used for both a political, economic, and social movement as well as a set of theories that critique the paradigm of economic growth. It can be described as an extensive framework that is based on crit ...

communism, and ''Communism and Strategy'' by

Isabelle Garo Isabelle Garo (born 5 September 1963), is a French philosopher specialising in the works of Karl Marx. Biography Garo's research focuses on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, put in their context and broached from both theoretical a ...

, which examines contemporary communist theorists in relation to Gramsci and Marx.

History

Contemporary communist theorists

Notable works

See also

References

Further reading