Thought this longer article from our comrade Mark Kosman starting from the failures of governments with the latest pandemic and running through social revolts both recent and back to both the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution including a reference back to our earlier 'hunter gather' origins and a linked theme relating these to women's 'caring roles' was quite inspiring - a more positive take in these difficult times compared with some other communist assessments that I have recommended. Don't be put off by it appearing in the leftist 'Weekly Worker' Its here:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1339/in-the-era-of-pandemics/
Two other relevant 'Crisis of Civilisation' themed texts I've mentioned before are these:
https://libcom.org/library/crisis-civilisation-gilles-dauve and
https://libcom.org/blog/crisis-capitalist-civilisation-04082020
Edit: PS. the first part of this article from Mark is an extension of two other articles already available on libcom which are perhaps limited in their critical analysis of the Labour Party in relation to the pandemic but it's worth persisting in reading the whole article as it develops it's wider perspective.
Don't really agree with much
Don't really agree with much from the CPGB (or Dauve), but the Weekly Worker one is ok. I think I'd be a bit more cautious about demanding more out of capitalism than it can deliver, which is the reason for needing to overcome it. I haven't looked much into very early humans (the source there, Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, looks like something I might want to check out), but I'd maybe also be careful about romanticizing all nomadic hunter-gatherers throughout time, since they're really not all the same (or egalitarian). I think one important aspect of hunter-gatherer social formations is that their relations with one another were directly social, which is something that would be shared by a socialist/communist social formation, but under more technologically advanced terms and on a much larger scale. There wasn't some far away firm that could indirectly "put a tribe out of business" by producing baskets or whatever more cheaply, for example.
Not sure about the "era of revolution" part or providing an assessment on the current state of world capitalism, but a revolutionary era would certainly be nice...
Mark's article also now
Mark's article also now posted up on libcom by 'hedgehog' under the 'history' thread.
So I thought this more recent
So I thought this more recent CWO article was a good summary of where we are today that managed a brief positive reference within the usual left communist gloomy predictions in the absence of any renewed upsurge of class struggle:
https://libcom.org/blog/how-pandemic-revealed-real-health-nations-18092021