This is not an essay that sets out to make an original point. Nothing written here will add anything new, and everything has been said before by better authors in much more depth. This is a simple call to action and a personal reflection on Nostalgia on the part of the writer.

Communism is a viscerally nostalgic worldview. On the Wikipedia page for Nostalgia, 5 of the entries in the ‘see also’ section are different forms of Nostalgia for past Socialist states. The themes of the famous 2019 game Disco Elysium can be roughly explained as Nostalgia plus Communism. We accuse right-wing conservatives of being stuck in the past, but there is truly nobody more nostalgic than the Communist, whether longing for the Soviet Union or replaying the protest waves of the 1960s again and again. There is a strong sense that history ‘went wrong’ at some point, that things fell off the track they were meant to be going on and we have been meandering around in circles since. Many would go as far to give a precise date and cause to when and why it all went bad; the death of Stalin & the secret speech, the death of Mao, Christmas 1991 and so on.

This feeling is not unique to Communists. We live in a society where few people long for the future. People either dread a dystopia or passively assume everything will be more or less the same as nowadays. Even the optimists are nostalgic retro-futurists; the techno-libertarian fascists lift the aesthetics of 1980s science fiction and attempt to recreate what they have read in classic science fiction from decades ago. Young people nowadays are nostalgic for the 1980s, over a decade before they were born. Spotify statistics show that 80s/90s songs are most popular amongst members of Generation Z.

We live in an aesthetically repugnant age. This has been going on for a few decades now, the early 2000s – while free of the scourge of mobile phones – were still the peak of degenerate reality TV, open acceptance of Paedophilia, and post-cold war nihilism. Some things have improved, some have gotten worse, but the all-consuming totality of mass media is greater than ever. Not many people are offline anymore, no one is free from the ‘discourse’. There may be ‘vibe shifts’, there will be waves of surface-level optimism when Trump inevitably loses his streak of good luck and is defeated in the midterms and/or the 2028 election. But the long-term trend will remain the same, more and more of life will be swallowed up by an auto-cannibalising capitalist system desperate to find whatever new markets it can to extract value from.

The toddlers of today in ten years will still be watching ‘80s nostalgia edits and longing for a time as far away from their own age as the 1980s was from the interwar period. And for some of them, they’ll be longing for the GDR.

We cannot let ourselves retreat backwards in time to escape the meaningless of the present. Communism is the past, but it is also the future. We need to wage an active struggle against defeatism, nihilism and pessimism and take up the cause of building an Avant-Garde proletarian culture from the ground up. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, but it must be guided towards the building of something new.

Death to the 1990s.