In 2009, many of these advocates contributed to the three-day conference, "The Idea of Communism", in London that drew a substantial paying audience.[3] Journals such as Endnotes, Salvage, Ebb Magazine[4]Kites[5] and Historical Materialism launched with communist outlooks, as well as news outlets such as
Novara Media.[6]
Furthermore,
internet culture and declining life prospects[7] has led to a general rise amongst
Millennials and
Gen-Z in support for communism and socialism,[8] in tandem with the rise of
left-populism in the US[9] and the UK.[10] Explicitly left-wing contemporary artists, such as filmmakers,[11] musicians,[12] video-game creators[13] and comedians[14][15] have received widespread attention, such as the rapper/producer
JPEGMafia,[16] and a whole media-creator ecosystem has developed around the online left, known as
BreadTube.[17]
Empire was a major turning stone in 21st-century Marxist and communist thought.[45]
Theoretical publications, some published by
Verso Books, include The Idea of Communism, edited by
Costas Douzinas and Žižek;[46][19] Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis; and Bosteels's The Actuality of Communism. The defining common ground is the contention that "the crises of contemporary
liberalcapitalist societies—ecological degradation, financial turmoil, the loss of trust in the political class, exploding inequality—are systemic; interlinked, not amenable to
legislative reform, and requiring '
revolutionary' solutions".[1][46]
In the introduction to The Idea of Communism (2009), Žižek and Douzinas also identified four common premises among the thinkers in attendance:
The idea of communism confronts depoliticization through a return to
voluntarism.
Communism as a radical philosophical idea. It must be thought of as taking distance from
economism and
statism as well as learning from the experiences of the 21st century.
Communism combats
neoliberalism by returning to the idea of the "common".
Communism as
freedom and
equality. Equality cannot exist without freedom and vice versa.[46]
A rise in Marxist thought followed the
financial crisis of 2007–2008, with the publishing of books including
G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? (2009), Paul Paolucci's Marx's Scientific Dialectics (2009), Kieran Allen's Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism (2011), Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right (2011) and Vincent Mosco's Marx Is Back (2012).[47][48][49]The Communist Horizon,[22] published in 2012 by
Jodi Dean, marked the beginning in a series of books from Dean which argue for the necessity of communist and Leninist politics. The most wide-read of these was
Mark Fisher's (2009) Capitalist Realism.[50]
The Communist Necessity,[51] published in 2015 by
J. Moufawad-Paul, also argues for the necessity of the communist party in radical social change. Fully Automated Luxury Communism, published in 2019, has helped normalise the term 'communist' within public discourse in the anglophone world.[52]
2023 saw the publication of two significant books on the topic of communism: Marx in the Anthropocene by
Kohei Saito,[53] which developed a notion of a
degrowth communism, and Communism and Strategy by
Isabelle Garo, which examines contemporary communist theorists in relation to
Antonio Gramsci and
Karl Marx.[54]
^
abcBrincat, Shannon (2014). "Introduction - Communism in the 21st Century: Vision and Sublation". In Brincat, Shannon (ed.). Communism in the 21st Century. Vol. 1.
Praeger. pp. xxvii–xxviii.
ISBN978-1-4408-0126-6.