The members of Communists Anonymous (COMA) share an extreme sense of empathy and justice, and therefore detest more or less any form of private property. COMA members restrain themselves from any effort to overcome capitalism before there is a new convincing model at hand of how to actually implement communism. The speculative self-help of COMA understands the historical incarnations of communism as substantially incomplete in thought and practice, and places communism where it originated—in the realm of fiction. Only as fiction can communism manifest itself again beyond doubt.
Solution 275–294: Communists Anonymous is a document of some imageries of communism and a testament to the current predicament of our political imagination. Atomized, privatized, and deprived of any infrastructure for solidarity—without any internationalist project, with moralizations compensating for the disappearance of political organization, with micro-politics replacing macro-politics—communists can only be anonymous in this world of ours. Edited by writer Ingo Niermann and curator Joshua Simon, this collection of essays and stories—written from the fields of art, literature, law, philosophy, activism, design, and science—proposes resolutions to current social contradictions, covering topics such as bacteria, bliss, immortality, queerness, interculturality, poetry, transportation, childhood and motherhood, and all-encompassing sensual love.
Contributions by HEATHER ANDERSON, ANN COTTEN, FIONA DUNCAN, ELFRIEDE JELINEK, METAHAVEN, MOMUS, INGO NIERMANN, DAVID PEARCE, ANTHONY DUNNE and FIONA RABY, SANTIAGO ALBA RICO, FRANK RUDA, GEORGIA SAGRI, GEORGY MAMEDOV and OKSANA SHATALOVA, JOSHUA SIMON, ALEXANDER TARAKHOVSKY, TIMOTHEUS VERMEULEN