Communism Actually

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 3 Communism Actually

In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we discuss Communist Ontologies with its authors Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Bruno Gulli, exploring their proposal that communism be understood not only as a political program but as a form of life. The conversation ranges across questions of political economy, ontology, and revolutionary subjectivity, considering how Marx’s critique of capitalism points toward the recovery of ways of living beyond the reduction of life to labor. Along the way we discuss the historical contingency of revolutionary subjects, drawing on figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Frantz Fanon, as well as movements like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, to think through how identities and forms of struggle emerge, transform, and sometimes dissolve. The discussion also reflects on the philosophical tension between being and becoming, the limits imposed by carceral systems, and the possibilities opened by imagining new forms of collective life – finding, in the spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois – that the struggle for freedom often begins in small practices of interdependence, imagination, and other ways of doing beyond the logics of capital.

Intro / outro music: Wukir Suryadi, playing the Minotaur of Titir

Image: Judgment of Midas, Unknown Flemish artist, imitator of Hendrik van Balen, late 16th century, via Hermitage Museum; King Midas, Andrea Vaccaro, 1670, via Dorotheum