We’ve been receiving various feedback from readers regarding our “Read One, Gift One” campaign for The Second Coming. We are deeply grateful to readers for their generous sharing. Among the responses, many found it difficult to connect with the title, The Second Coming. Only those with a background in literature immediately recognised its origin.
The Second Coming is a reference familiar to literary readers, as it comes from William Butler Yeats’ poem of the same name. Yeats’ second coming is, of course, not an original concept; within in Christianity, it signifies the return of Christ, symbolising the arrival of a new heaven and earth—a vision of renewal and perfection.
However, Yeats did not employ this imagery in its original sense. Instead, he subverted it, crafting a poem about the collapse of social order and the disintegration of civilisation. In the book, Bifo quotes a passage from Yeats’ poem:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
After Yeats penned this poem, what arrived was not Christ bringing perfection and order but Hitler, ushering in the destruction of human civilisation.
Bifo extends the phenomenon of The Second Coming into the contemporary world. If Hitler’s Nazism a century ago was the “first coming,” then the global shift to the far-right today represents a deeper and more profound Second Coming. The global civil war that Bifo predicted a decade ago is no longer a prophecy but a stark reality. What he once referred to as the “apocalypse” is now sweeping the world with even greater intensity and speed.
After quoting Yeats, Bifo explains his purpose in referencing the poem:
“I read Yeats’ text from the perspective of today, and I want to interpret his words in a non-theological way: my second coming has a worldly sound. I’m trying to imagine how to break the spell of impotence and despair that overshadows the psychosphere of our time, and how to reinvent a future beyond the impending apocalyse and the trauma it is going to bring about. I call this prospect (no matter how unrealistic it may sound) the second coming of Communism.”
Bifo is well aware that the term “communism” immediately triggers extreme scepticism among modern readers due to its historical association with authoritarianism. Everyone knows we need better terminology to articulate the possibilities embedded in the present moment. However, the author’s choice to use “communism” is rooted in its opposition to the exploitative nature of capitalism.
Perhaps, in the future, we will invent more effective language to describe the political movements aimed at dismantling capitalism. For now, however, out of respect for the exploited, the author retains this term. The Second Coming of Communism that Bifo refers to is not some lofty ideology but rather a simple belief in the future: a commitment to breaking free from the fetishisation of capital accumulation and wage labour, paving the way for egalitarianism and the liberation of social time.
This is what the author describes as the emergence of a new “meme” capable of disentangling the social mind from the dominating force of the current prevailing memes.