Introduction

Abstract

Some time back, over a decade ago now, two closely placed encounters had me reflecting on the contemporary situation of communism, both of them on the terrain of that horribly ‘lost cause’, Palestine–Israel. The first occurred during a meeting at which the Australasian representative of the Palestine Authority spoke. At the conclusion of his talk, a communist from a small Trotskyist group stood up and demanded that the Palestinian Authority immediately ‘unleash the awesome power of the working class’ on the Israeli settler state. The only thought that came to my mind in response to this demand was a Simpsons episode in which executives from a company manufacturing energy bars sloganize that their product ‘unleashes the awesome power of apples’. Here, communism, socialism, Marxism would seem hopelessly out-of-time, exhausted and embarrassing, tediously and meaninglessly clichéd, a dead family of languages unable to speak to the present, let alone about the future.