“The Kids Want Communism”
Joshua Simon
17 Feb → 25 Mar 2017

The Kids Want Communism is a new film-based exhibition curated by Joshua Simon.

Specters are haunting Earth – the specters of anti-communism. The recent political upheaval in the nations that exported globalization, the UK and the US, shows indebted tax-paying citizens opting for the nation, while bond-holder debtors are unable to sustain their model of globalization. With the two poles struggling, we seem unable to envision neither Earth, nor universality as potential points of departure for political projects with which to counter the nation and globalization.

The notion of the End of History, which reigned since the 1990s, implied the end of the future as well. We were doomed to the contemporary – the future was to be simply “more of now.” But as history returns, sometimes in the most horrific ways, the future returns as well. With it, we can imagine how communism might be introduced as a viable project yet again.

More than any other word, “communism” is the word that expresses the opposite of a reality that champions and celebrates exploitation and inequality. Wherever capitalism goes it brings communism with it as the possibility for its radical negation. Yet communism is not contented with merely describing the power relations and resulting class division of “us versus them”, but offers an additional axis – one where we are becoming the future. This axis runs parallel to us at every single moment and its guiding principle is that being-together precedes being, any being; biological, political, psychological, familial, social and so on.

Communism is a whole cosmos that was devoured by the black hole that is 1989-1991. This cosmos includes many communisms: the reestablishment of property-free communities, communal indigenous societies, real-existing socialism with its achievements and crimes, the long heroic history of anti-Fascist resistance and the defeating of the Nazis, a theology of equality, the Revolutionary Party, internationalism and the emancipation of nations from Imperial rule, gender equality and education for all, the abolition of capitalism through its internal dynamics and the un-exploitable pockets of resistance that cannot be appropriated by it, the already present humane solidarity and camaraderie shared by people everywhere, and the political proposal of the emotion called “love.”

Setting out from these realisations, The Kids Want Communism began as a yearlong program of exhibitions, talks, screenings, symposiums and seminars, marking the 99 anniversary of the October Revolution (1917). Marking this anniversary asks to contemplate more than the circumstances and consequences of twentieth century real-existing socialism in Europe and Asia; this date invites us to examine what almost happened, what did not happen, what could have happened, what should have happened, and what might still happen. Communism is neither a land nor a continent nor another planet; it is an entire constellation already in motion. It is a cosmos conceived with life itself. The Kids Want Communism.