The Communist Horizon. Jodi Dean
Union-Stalinism-collapse sets the parameters for the appeal to history that is characteristic of liberal, democratic, capitalist, and conservative attempts to repress the communist alternative. Responding to challenges regarding the exclusion of class struggle, proletarian revolution, collective ownership of the means of production, and the smashing of the bourgeois-democratic state from political theory, they invoke history as their ground and proof. History shows that the communist project is a dead end. Yet as Alain Badiou reminds us, “at bottom, it is always in the interests of the powerful that history is mistaken for politics, that is, the objective is taken for the subjective.”5 What, then, are the features of this invocation of history?
The first is objectivity. The product of a neutral, unbiased investigation, the history of communism is made to stand apart from the politics and struggles that comprise this history, as if it were but a collection of facts, information to be googled and accessed. These facts are specifiable points or objects, immune to interpretation, and impossible to dispute.
If we accept, for a moment, the possibility of such facts, and agree that they are crucial to our capacities to learn from previous struggles for communism, where will we find them? Michael E. Brown and Randy Martin argue persuasively that there is not yet a credible and established body of historical literature on communism, socialism, or the Soviet Union. Most of the histories we have were produced in the context of a hegemonic anticommunism.6 Brown and Martin point out that the methodological and conceptual defects in scholarly studies of the Soviet Union would have been scandalous in other academic fields. Since the field was primarily a propaganda apparatus for the foreign policy establishment, these defects seemed somehow without significance, with the result, for example, that it is still impossible to say which aspects of the Soviet system were intrinsic to it and which resulted from external pressures, or, to take another example, whether the Soviet Union was a completely distinct and unique state formation or instead shared attributes with the United States or Nazi Germany that make communism a subset of a larger totalitarianism. In short, the effects of pervasive anticommunism continue to outlive the Soviet Union. Brown and Martin write, “The Communist icon of the Cold War is now the negative ideal type against which an absolutely idealized capitalist market is both taken to be real and deemed the only sustainable paradigm for universal human organization.”7 Constituted out of the chain communism-Soviet Union-Stalinism-collapse, the invocation of history reinforces a Cold War binary instead of highlighting the challenges facing an organized society of producers.
A second feature of the history invoked to repress the communist alternative is its continuity and determinacy. Faced with an opponent who presents communism as a solution to the crises of capitalism, the invoker of history posits a necessary sequence, as if revolutions were shielded from contingency. He starts with a fact, a unique, specifiable object, and builds from the fact a series of consequences and effects. These consequences and effects are necessary and unavoidable: if Lenin, then Stalin; if revolution, then gulag; if Party, then purges. So even as some who appeal to history recognize the defects and dilemmas traversing the academic field, they nonetheless highlight specific facts and moments, perhaps from their own experience of betrayal in the compromises made by specific communist parties working in parliamentary contexts (as in France and Italy), as if these specific facts and moments were themselves indications of sequences of effects impossible to avoid. If it happened once, it will happen again, and there is nothing we can do about it. The oddity of this position is that communism is unique in its determining capacity, the one political arrangement capable of eliminating contingency and directing action along a singular vector. Communism becomes the exception to the dynamic of production, struggle, and experience that gives rise to it. Instead of the politics of a militant subject, communism is again an imaginary, immutable object, this time a linear process with a certain end.
As a consequence, history loses its own historicity. This is the third feature of the history invoked to repress the communist alternative. In this formation, history functions as a structure and a constant incapable of change and impenetrable by “external” forces. Any particular moment is thus a container for this essential whole—the Leninist party, the Stalinist show trials, the KGB, the Brezhnev-era stagnation. Each is interchangeable with the other as an example of the error of communism precisely because communism is invariant. In contrast with capitalism’s permanent revolution, historical communism appears as impossibly static. Only by supposing such an impossible, invariant, constant, unchanging communism can the appeal to history turn a single instance into a damning example of the failed and dangerous communist experience. And as it does, it disconnects communism from the very history to which it appeals, erasing not only communism as capitalism’s self-critique but also communism as capitalism’s mirror, ally, enemy, and Other.
Here, then, is the inner truth of the liberal, democratic, capitalist, and conservative appeal to history. The intent is not to inspire inquiry or stimulate new scholarly research. Rather, it is to preserve the fantasy that capitalism and democracy are the best possible economic and political arrangements. Excising communism from its history as the class struggle within capitalism, as the critique and revolution to which capitalism gives rise, this history without historicity derides communism for a necessity that it effectively reinstalls in a capitalism without alternatives.
The supposition of an eternal communism is not only the paradoxical effect of the attempt to derail the return of communism by appealing to a history seemingly immunized from change. Some at the forefront of communism’s return likewise make recourse to a communism that transcends history. Badiou treats history as the purview of the State and communism as an eternal political idea. Bruno Bosteels acknowledges the tactical benefit of such a move: “Given the depoliticizing effects of the call constantly to historicize, not to mention the even more damning effects of the invocation of some figure or other of the world-historical tribunal, it can indeed be argued that history in and of itself no longer possesses the emancipatory power it once had.”8 Nonetheless, Bosteels urges that tactical ahistoricism be dialectically conjoined with a new writing of history, a new history of popular insurrection that recalls the wide range of struggles and movements communism names. Rather than joining Badiou in sheltering communism in a philosophical Idea, Bosteels holds out the actuality of a communist politics that does not hypostasize past failures into permanent barriers to theorizing, organizing, and occupying party and state.
The best response to the appeal to history is to shatter the chain communism-Soviet Union-Stalinism-collapse and make a new one out of the rich variety of movements and struggles. This is a history of courage, revolt, and solidarity. It is also set in a communist present. If the end of the Soviet Union were the same as the end of communism, if 1991 marked a temporal horizon separating the validity of the Soviet experiment from the capitalist, liberal, democratic present, then communism would be past—like the Byzantine Empire. As a particular party-state formation, it would be an artifact to be analyzed and studied. Whatever gave it breath, made it real, would be gone. It would be a dead political language.
Yet communism persists. It is frequently evoked as a living presence or possibility, particularly in our current setting of global revolution and neoliberal crisis.
Chapter Two
Present Force
When the Soviet Union is the referent of communism, communism is thought as the descriptor of a specific political-economic arrangement. The adjective “communist” qualifies the noun of a party and/or a state. In the twenty-first century, Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other countries previously part of the Soviet bloc tend to be referred to as “post-Soviet” rather than as “new-capitalist.” For a while, particularly during the early years of forced privatization, the term “Mafioso capitalism” was heard a lot. Since the turn of the millennium, it has dropped from use. “Mafioso capitalism” hits too close to home, more fitting as a designator of neoliberalism’s brutal, extreme, winner-take-all version of capitalism than of the temporary shock treatment involved in the transition out of state socialism.
For a variety of groups and ideological persuasions, communism still names the alternative to the extreme inequality, insecurity, and racist, nationalist ethnocentricism accompanying globalized neoliberal capitalism. In the contemporary United States, “communist” exceeds the specificity of its adjectival confines to serve