bristol reading group 24th october: spaces outside capitalism

The next session of The Commune’s Bristol reading group on alternatives to capitalism will be looking at spaces outside capitalism. We will be discussing the value – or otherwise – of ‘autonomous zones’ and ‘co-operatives’ as a means of working outside the system.

From 6pm on Sunday 24th October at Café Kino, Ninetree Hill, Stokes Croft. Recommended reading below – email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info.

a communist revival?

by Nathan Coombs

One of the remarkable things about the manifesto of the recent University of California Santa Cruz student occupation, the Communiqué from an Absent Future, was the emphatic use of the word communism to describe their project to “demand not a free university but a free society”.

This re-appropriation of the word communism marks a new direction after numerous attempts to refigure a certain spirit, while avoiding the specific content, of communism under such concepts as “the common” or “communisation” in various brands of leftwing, post-cold war political activism. Communism itself had been more or less abandoned to the dwindling base of old far-left political groups and Maoist movements.