"Although not a prolific genre by Hollywood standards, pre-perestroika Russian sci-fi offers a fascinating body of films – a fantastic voyage from early constructivist epics to post-apocalyptic dystopias, taking in prophetic moon explorations, space-race propaganda, atomic war allegories and existential art cinema. An ideologically charged genre, Soviet sci-fi can be read as charting the rise and fall of communism behind the iron curtain, with the wide-eyed optimism of space fantasies made in the early years giving way to damning post-Chernobyl nuclear nightmares as the Soviet bloc crumbled from within."

The aesthetics of the communist space program as an anticedent to crisis of meaning on the left.

"What post-capitalism needs is an imaginary that intersects the above justifications with a positive vision of the future that capitalism has failed to deliver. And part of this means rescuing the most lasting merits of the Soviet experiment. For while everyone can agree that the USSR had many failings, it remains the case that the artistic, architectural and technological development it stood for was in many cases a widely recognized concrete achievement. No one can deny the quality of their space programme. Even recently in London there has been two major exhibitions showcasing some of futurist ambitions of Soviet communism: Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Red Skies season of Soviet science fiction at the British Film institute.  There is an element of aesthetics here as well as actual ambitions."

"None went as far as Huaxi in combining the strict political control of the ruling Communist party with the get-rich-quick economics of the market - and the results are being hailed as a model for the nation to follow. Each household's assets are listed in detail: size of the family, value of their property, average level of education, number of members of the Communist party, as well as how many cars, mobile phones, televisions, washing machines, computers, air-conditioning units, motorbikes, cameras, fridges and stereo systems they own… Xie'en says political stability is the base for rapid growth. "I think every era has a different formula for success. The most important thing is to be flexible and open to new ways to thinking. We must do whatever works," he says. "We are not communist. We are 100% shareholder owned." The burgeoning Chinese economy continues to evade the categories we in the west have for political philosophy. How do you define this odd suburb.

Pretty tough academic piece, but it rewards persistance. "But there has also been a growing recognition - and this is where Hardt and Negri have something important to say - that the commons is perpetually being produced. In Hardt and Negri's version, the turn to immaterial labor has radically increased the inadvertent but inevitable creation of an excess that is the commons. This commons is a field that the multitude is in a position to exploit, if only because it is impossible to exclude people from dwelling there. Capital has, in effect, lost control over the production of the common and has to rely on the multitude to produce it in order for capital itself to survive. The multitude is empowered in a way it has never been before. Hardt and Negri agree, therefore, with Rancière that "politics is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious.""

"The events of '89 are most often depicted as the failure of socialism. It's a powerful interpretation that has served to discredit alternatives to the capitalist system, which is said to have triumphed, and to bestow upon capitalism an aura of legitimacy based not only on a reading of recent history but also on assumptions about the natural order, not least human nature. Capitalism, it is proposed, is the normal state of human traffic in what people make and value and need... History, however, is always more complicated and messy than the moral and ideological tales it may be called to serve. The history of Eastern Europe in the 2nd half of the 20thC can be told as the story of two series of revolutions: the communist-led revolutions of the post-WWII years that ousted the former ruling elites and transformed largely rural societies into urban industrial ones; and the anticommunist revolutions of 1989... that overturned entrenched party regimes already weakened by political sclerosis."

Dense prose, but an interesting point. "Race is class - this is the point that won't go away. My cursory look at how the American race 'question' presents itself has always taken me toward two topics: class, and anticommunism. One cannot talk about class without talking about labour, and therefore about how labour is managed, stratified, waged, etc... When they said "Race Mixing Is Communism", they meant something important and relevant by it. It is manifestly wrong to think that 'race mixing' is identical with communism, but the claim was not just a ruse, nor was it blind panic. For such people, white supremacy was meritocratic. It reflected the innate, natural differences between people (and, as a corollary, the difference between the white labourer and the white owner was just as natural, if mitigated by blood solidarity). To attack the race system was to introduce a principle that was, to them, a state-sponsored attack on a well-maintained, meritocratic free enterprise society."