Fisher, Mark Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? Spufford, Francis Red Plenty. Olma, Sebastian In Defence of Serendipity. Note: This is the slightly edited transcript of a talk that Mark gave at the Luxury Communism conference that took place on 3 — 4 June in Weimar, Germany, as part of the Digital Bauhaus Summit series.
We are honoured to be able to include it — for the very first time in written form — in this issue of Making and Breaking as it addresses a number of crucial questions that closely relate to the theme of Communal Luxury. This is the video from which the transcript has been made. I came up with the phrase designer communism a few years ago partly as a way of reclaiming the concept, a pejorative term used to condemn those on the Left who were interested in the new semiotic and technological machineries that were being rolled out in the s.
The term designer socialism is a bit like luxury communism. The Left was caricatured as dreary, bureaucratic, backward-looking, and thus excluded at one and the same time from access to the new modernity and to what was exciting. To be Left was to be in a moralising position of resistance or objection. What I like about the concept of luxury communism is that it tries to put this right. It immediately puts us into another world, a world different from the one in which we now exist.
Oxymorons are related to paradoxes. Someone once said that paradoxes are emissaries from a world in which things are different, in which even logic itself runs differently. This is part of the power of luxury communism : it might not make sense in this world or in the current ideological framework but it gives us a sense of what another world would look like.
What I also like about it is that it gives us a different orientation. It gives us a different focus from anti-capitalism.
