happening. Even as specific occupations emerge from below rather than through a coordinated strategy, their common form—including its images, slogans, terms, and practices—links them together in a mass struggle.
The power of the return of communism stands or falls on its capacity to inspire large-scale organized collective struggle toward a goal. For over thirty years, the Left has eschewed such a goal, accepting instead liberal notions that goals are strictly individual lifestyle choices or social-democratic claims that history already solved basic problems of distribution with the compromise of regulated markets and welfare states—a solution the Right rejected and capitalism destroyed. The Left failed to defend a vision of a better world, an egalitarian world of common production by and for the collective people. Instead, it accommodated capital, succumbing to the lures of individualism, consumerism, competition, and privilege, and proceeding as if there really were no alternative to states that rule in the interests of markets.
Marx expressed the basic principle of the alternative over a hundred years ago: from each according to ability, to each according to need. This principle contains the urgency of the struggle for its own realization. We don’t have to continue to live in the wake of left failure, stuck in the repetitions of crises and spectacle. In light of the planetary climate disaster and the ever-intensifying global class war as states redistribute wealth to the rich in the name of austerity, the absence of a common goal is the absence of a future (other than the ones imagined in post-apocalyptic scenarios like Mad Max). The premise of communism is that collective determination of collective conditions is possible, if we want it.
To help incite this desire, to add to its reawakening force and presence, I treat “communism” as a tag for six features of our current setting:
1. A specific image of the Soviet Union and its collapse;
2. A present, increasingly powerful force;
3. The sovereignty of the people;
4. The common and the commons;
5. The egalitarian and universalist desire that cuts through the circuits and practices in which we are trapped;
6. The party.
The first two features can be loosely associated with the politics that configures itself via a history linked to the end of the Soviet Union as a state, as refracted through the dominance of the US as a state. What matters here is less the historical narrative than the expression of communism as the force of an absence. My discussion of these first two features highlights how the absence of communism shapes our contemporary setting.
In the sequence narrated as the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy, the communist horizon makes itself felt as a “signifying stress.” This is Eric L. Santner’s term for a way that reality expresses its non-identity with itself. As Santner explains, the “social formation in which we find ourselves immersed” is “fissured by lack” and “permeated by inconsistency and incompleteness.” The lack calls out to us. Inconsistency and incompleteness make themselves felt. “What is registered,” Santner explains, “are not so much forgotten deeds but forgotten failures to act.”7 The frenetic activity of contemporary communicative capitalism deflects us away from these gaps. New entertainments, unshakeable burdens, and growing debt displace our attention toward the immediate and the coming-up-next as they attempt to drown out the forceful effects of the unrealized—the unrealized potentials of unions and collective struggle, the unrealized claims for equality distorted by a culture that celebrates the excesses of the very rich, the unrealized achievements of collective solidarity in redressing poverty and redistributing risks and rewards. The first two chapters thus treat the gaps, fissures, and lack Santner theorizes as signifying stresses in terms of a missing communism that makes itself felt in the setting configured by its alleged failure and defeat.
The second two features of the present that communism tags are positive (rather than present as the force of the unrealized or absent): the people in their common political and economic activity. In these chapters, I grapple with the question of class struggle today. If Hardt and Negri are right (and I think they are) to argue that “communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime” (I use the term “communicative capitalism” to bring out this amplified role of communication in production), what are the repercussions for understanding class struggle? Does it make sense to continue to emphasize the proletariat? I argue that it does not, not if by “proletariat” one has in mind an empirical social class. More useful is the idea of proletarianization as a process of exploitation, dispossession, and immiseration that produces the very rich as the privileged class that lives off the rest of us. I offer the notion of “the people as the rest of us,” the people as a divided and divisive force, as an alternative to some of the other names for the subject of communism—proletariat, multitude, part-of-no-part.
How the people divide or how the non-coincidence of the people is inflected and qualified is a matter of politics. Political organizations respond to this division, construing and directing it in one way rather than another. Accordingly, I end this book by taking up the question of the communist party. Although actively calling for the reclamation of communism as the name for a revolutionary universal egalitarianism, Badiou insists on a communism disconnected from the “outmoded” forms of Party and State. Hardt and Negri likewise reject Party and State: “Being communist means being against the State.”8 They emphasize instead the constituent power of desire and the affective, creative productivity of the multitude as the communism underpinning and exceeding capitalism. This is not my view. I agree with Bosteels and Žižek that a politics without the organizational form of the party is a politics without politics.
Conceptualizing the party of communists in our contemporary setting is and must be an ongoing project. As Bosteels argues, “party” does not name an instrument for carrying out the iron laws of history but “the flexible organization of a fidelity to events in the midst of unforeseeable circumstances.”9 I’m tempted to use terms from complexity theory here: the party is a complex, adaptive system. Its end is proletarian revolution, that is, the destruction of the capitalist system of exploitation and expropriation, of proletarianization, and the creation of a mode of production and distribution where the free development of each is compatible with the free development of all. We don’t yet know how we will structure our communist party—in part because we stopped thinking about it, giving way instead to the transience of issues, ease of one-click networked politics, and the illusion that our individual activities would immanently converge in a plurality of post-capitalist practices of creating and sharing. But we know that we need to find a mode of struggle that can scale, endure, and cultivate the collective desire for collectivity. And we know that we can learn from the past and are learning from ongoing experiments in organization. I thus conclude by considering how occupation is or is becoming such an organizational form, a political form for the incompatibility between capitalism and the people.
The communist horizon appears closer than it has in a long time. The illusion that capitalism works has been shattered by all manner of economic and financial disaster—and we see it everywhere. The fantasy that democracy exerts a force for economic justice has dissolved as the US government funnels trillions of dollars to banks and the European central banks rig national governments and cut social programs in order to keep themselves afloat. With our desiring eyes set on the communist horizon, we can now get to work on collectively shaping a world that we already make in common.
Chapter One
Our Soviets
For people in the United States, the most conventional referent of communism is the Soviet Union. Displaced by four decades of Cold War, a war that shaped US-American policies and identities, aspirations and fears, the multiplicity of historical and theoretical communisms condense into one—the USSR.1 Rather than changing over time, including the international range of parties and movements, or acknowledging active communist movement in the US, communism is one, and this one is fixed as the USSR.
To make this referent explicit, though, leads to complications.
The USSR was never fixed or one. The unity imposed on it by the Cold War binary is false, undermined