The title of this interesting but in the end unsatisfactory meditation upon the potential of our times to realise a world in which “genuine communism is not only possible but within our reach” demonstrates its strengths and weaknesses.

Its fundamental strength, which must commend it to any genuine revolutionary, is the explicit assumption that insurrectionary change is coming and that it will be violent in content if not specifically by force of arms.

But why are we promised one insurrection, in the singular? Is it suggested that all the lands in the world, in all their differing levels of development, will arise and throw off the chains of their enslavement simultaneously?

In its opening pages, the authors puncture the assumptions of what they call “democratic capitalism” which, they say, “has imposed itself as the ultimate, definitive form of social existence, not only in the ideology of the ruling class but even in the popular imagination.”

And in the ideology of the left, one might add, as supposedly communist organisations rebrand themselves as “democratic left” or some such nonsensical nomenclature.

Though the title of the book speaks of insurrection rather than revolution as such — and it is an important distinction, which it does not define — the R-word appears as early as the fourth page. But it is clear that the authors are not building on the experiences of 1381, 1640, 1789 or 1917 (though the Paris Commune of 1871 appears to inspire them more than any of these, with its decentralised structures).

They hold forth the utopian dream of “a new conception of life, a new tendency to joy.” But their vision of a world where “work” as such disappears “out of a desire to experience collective activity differently” is as old as William Morris’s News from Nowhere.

They promise “a kind of end without an ending, which no revolutionary or counter-revolutionary surge ever quite wraps up” as a consequence of “an infinite degradation of everything.” A permanent revolution in short.

But: “We put forward no programme,” they avow, “except to get our hands dirty and to investigate the strange mechanism of revolution.”

By the end of the book, I could not see that they had achieved this.

Review by Karl Dallas