Post-Soviet Anti-Communism and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia

In this talk, following a long term project The Kids Want Communism , Joshua Simon will invoke the history of leftist politics outside communism. This is what Lenin has called in 1920 “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder,” wherein leftism outside communism is described by Lenin as a childhood malaise. What is different in the formation of the Post-Soviet Anti-Communist left, is that – if we take the childhood malaise metaphor, then now that communism does not exist as a viable, immediate option (even in its flawed really-existing socialist formation of the twentieth century), this leftism-outside-communism is a childhood malaise, an infantile disorder, in an  age of anti-vaccine hegemony. Therefore, it seems like it is incurable. Reopening what one can call “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” maybe can help us recognize some of the potentials to reconnect to communism beyond our pointless leftism.

CV: Dr. Joshua Simon is curator and author based presently in Philadelphia, USA.  He holds a PhD from the Visual Cultures department, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. Simon is the author of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), and editor of United States of Palestine-Israel (Sternberg Press, 2011), Communists Anonymous (with Ingo Niermann, Sternberg Press, 2017), and Being Together Precedes Being: A Textbook for The Kids Want Communism (Archive Books, 2019). Recent curatorial projects include: The Kids Want Communism (MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam, Tel Aviv-Jaffa metropolitan area,  and Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Berlin, 2016-2017), and In The Liquid (PrintScreen Media Art Festival, Holon 2018, Israel).