Jasper Bernes, a professor in the English Department at UCLA, just published a book entitled The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising at Verso. The book aims to explore how a communist society can be created through a social revolution in the 21st century. As part of this, it discusses the different conceptions of economic planning, labour-time accounting and labour certificates that have been developed by Karl Marx, the left communists, the council communists, the communisation current and the anarcho-syndicalists in order to critically evaluate how they can contribute to creating a communist society through revolution today.
Here’s how the book is presented on the publisher’s page:
When Marx wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” he identified a principle that will remain true as long as capitalism and its class antagonism persist. Historical revolutions reveal essential features of our communist horizon, which would-be revolutionaries, then as now, must negotiate one way or another. In chapters that move from a critical history of the workers’ council to a reading of Marx’s theory of value as an inverted description of communism, Jasper Bernes synthesizes from a history of failure the key criteria for success. He defines for our present moment the urgent mission of the world proletariat.
You can get all the details and buy the book here: https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/977-the-future-of-revolution