The Kids Want Communism: Second Installment

Artists: Nir Harel, Ohad Meromi, Noa Yafe, Nicole Wermers, Jonathan Gold, Micah Hesse, Israeli Communist Party Archive, Praxis School, Nabil Maleh, Piyasiri Gunaratna, Nosratollah Karimi, Anna Lukashevsky (The New Barbizon), and Raanan Harlap.

Curator: Joshua Simon

Universalism is the thing that got lost with globalization. Globalization is the constant availability of all spheres of life for exploitation by capital. As the Marxist geographer David Harvey explains, on political, economic, and cultural levels, globalization is built on the reinforcement, anchoring, and exploitation of various geographical differences. This way, capitalism transfers every limit that it encounters from one geography to another, so that the limitation becomes a new financial opportunity.

The collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1990 was the moment when capitalist democracy triumphed over the socialist police state. Since then, we can see how two elements of these opposing forces joined together in creating a capitalist police state. Socialism and democracy was abandoned in view of a reality in which the Soviet Union no longer existed. In the absence of the persistent challenge presented by the very existence of the Soviet Union, the reality of the welfare state has worn thin. Now, the procedural democracies in which we live, suspend liberties at all times, and shed the liberalism they prided themselves on during the Cold War. This way, the split in the center of our political lives is shaped in light of the tension between capitalism and democracy.

One can see the 2011 Occupy movement protests around the world as an expression articulating this recognition, whereas the Brexit referendum is another example from a different political direction. What started before our very eyes with the collapse of real existing socialism comes to an end with the collapse of the neo-liberal arrangements. The intensity and the accelerated pace of the political events around us, should be considered in relation to the implosion of the Soviet Bloc and the shock therapy that the post-Soviet economies underwent.