Bini Adamczak, Communism for Kids, MIT Press, 2017; pbk £10.95; $12.95.
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RATING: 90
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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This is a short note, rather than a full-length review, to recommend this charming book, nicely translated by Jacob Blumenfeld and Sophie Lewis. It was first published in 2004, and is available in the original German as Kommunismus: Kleine Geschichte, wie endlich alles anders wird (Taschenbuch). How it came to be published in translation by MIT Press (beautifully produced, incidentally, with a nice font and layout, and neat illustrations, in which girls rule throughout), I cannot say. But the fact that it has reactionary forces across the United States frothing at the mouth is reason enough to urge you to buy a copy, and give others to your friends. It is not, strictly speaking, just for kids - the first part adopts a 'fairy tale' format after some introductory discussion of key terms - communism, capitalism, work, the market, and crisis - and there is a very 'grown-up' epilogue on 'communist desire'. But in a sense it is 'for kids' throughout, in that it is clear, lively, imaginative, and jargon-free; and perhaps also in that it enjoins us to look at some old issues with new eyes.
There are some shortcuts in the early sections - princesses stand in for feudal lords and ladies, England's merchant fleet rules the waves a couple of centuries before it should, and factories appear from nowhere. But I can live with that degree of licence, as deeper truths are vividly and poignantly depicted. Adamczak takes us briskly through the rise of capitalism and its collapse into crisis, to a point where people decide to give communism a try, in circumstances in which 'since true communism has never existed in the entire history of humankind, no one has any clue what it looks like'. Things go awry, of course, in a series of 'trials' ('It seems that making communism is not so easy after all'), but people learn, and in the end take control of their own lives and futures, and begin to 'make their own history'. Whimsical? Perhaps. Utopian? Maybe, maybe not.
Spoiler alert! The epilogue reflects back on the six 'trials' through which people feel their way towards communism, critiquing the first five because they 'criticise capitalism from a latently capitalist standpoint', and appealing to Adorno's dictum that 'The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption' (90). Such a standpoint is not utopian, precisely because the 'inviolability of the future keeps us from thinking that our thinking is unconstrained by the present'; and the last 'trial' of the six accordingly avoids 'the fantasy that we can already know, here and now, what a liberated society looks like' (91). But the text concludes by challenging aspects of this position too. Needless to say, this is a deeply serious essay, which packs a lot of food for thought into a short text, and there is no better time for it, perhaps, than this, the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It persuades me, too, that Adorno is an author for our times.
As a tiny note, I'm enough of a pedant to prefer fewer peasants to less, and to regard criteria as the plural not the singular form; and I note that a small pot is best not called a 'potty'. But as noted at the outset, the overall standards of production and presentation are very high. This a lovely little book, and a timely one. And it made a perfect gift for my new grand-daughter, for whose future it is essential that hope should not give way to despair.
(There is an excellent interview with the author by Jacob Blumenfeld here: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/05/16/communism-for-everybody-an-interview-with-bini-adamczak-author-of-communism-for-kids/).
There are some shortcuts in the early sections - princesses stand in for feudal lords and ladies, England's merchant fleet rules the waves a couple of centuries before it should, and factories appear from nowhere. But I can live with that degree of licence, as deeper truths are vividly and poignantly depicted. Adamczak takes us briskly through the rise of capitalism and its collapse into crisis, to a point where people decide to give communism a try, in circumstances in which 'since true communism has never existed in the entire history of humankind, no one has any clue what it looks like'. Things go awry, of course, in a series of 'trials' ('It seems that making communism is not so easy after all'), but people learn, and in the end take control of their own lives and futures, and begin to 'make their own history'. Whimsical? Perhaps. Utopian? Maybe, maybe not.
Spoiler alert! The epilogue reflects back on the six 'trials' through which people feel their way towards communism, critiquing the first five because they 'criticise capitalism from a latently capitalist standpoint', and appealing to Adorno's dictum that 'The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption' (90). Such a standpoint is not utopian, precisely because the 'inviolability of the future keeps us from thinking that our thinking is unconstrained by the present'; and the last 'trial' of the six accordingly avoids 'the fantasy that we can already know, here and now, what a liberated society looks like' (91). But the text concludes by challenging aspects of this position too. Needless to say, this is a deeply serious essay, which packs a lot of food for thought into a short text, and there is no better time for it, perhaps, than this, the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It persuades me, too, that Adorno is an author for our times.
As a tiny note, I'm enough of a pedant to prefer fewer peasants to less, and to regard criteria as the plural not the singular form; and I note that a small pot is best not called a 'potty'. But as noted at the outset, the overall standards of production and presentation are very high. This a lovely little book, and a timely one. And it made a perfect gift for my new grand-daughter, for whose future it is essential that hope should not give way to despair.
(There is an excellent interview with the author by Jacob Blumenfeld here: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/05/16/communism-for-everybody-an-interview-with-bini-adamczak-author-of-communism-for-kids/).