The Communist Horizon. Jodi Dean
times it’s conjoined to fascism. (Too few Americans know the difference, a result of the ideological effects of the notion of totalitarianism as much as it is of a more general educational deficit.)
What is communist? National healthcare. Environmentalism. Feminism. Public education. Collective bargaining. Progressive taxation. Paid vacation days. Gun control. The movement around Occupy Wall Street. Bicycles are a “gateway drug” to communism. Web 2.0 is communist because it holds out “the seductive promise of individual self-realization” that Karl Marx evoked in “The German Ideology.”1
Who is communist? Anyone who protested US military aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anyone critical of the Bush administration. Anyone who wants to tax the rich, close corporate tax loopholes, and regulate the derivatives market. Anyone who supports unemployment insurance, food stamps, public education, and public sector workers’ rights to collective bargaining.
US President Barack Obama is labeled a communist—not to mention a Muslim, a Kenyan, and a terrorist. In January 2010, Victoria Jackson, a former cast member on the television show Saturday Night Live, released a video on YouTube called “There’s a Communist Living in the White House.” In April, Jackson performed the song at a Tea Party rally, where attendees joined in singing the chorus: “There’s a communist living in the White House.” Extensive commentary in the circuit of blogs, talk radio, and cable news followed, extending the “communist President” meme. Two years later, Florida Congressman Allen West alleged that as many as eighty members of the US House of Representatives were communists—he was referring to Democratic Party members of the Progressive Caucus.
It’s obvious enough that contemporary Democrats are not communists. Most support policies to the right of Ronald Reagan’s. The Democratic Party did not attempt to pass a single-payer public health insurance program (instead, people are required to purchase insurance from a private company). The Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis of 2008 focused on the finance sector (when it could have provided a massive jobs program). President Obama himself introduced the possibility of cuts to the last remaining components of the welfare state—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (all enormously popular programs). Evocations of an encroaching communist threat in the US could thus seem to be a not very creative return to the language of the Cold War and the Red Scare, a conservative retreat to a formerly effective rhetoric of fear.
Yet there is more to these evocations of communism than simply the dusting off of an old conflict. Gestures to communism and socialism make sense because the markets failed. When the US government bailed out the finance sector, the visibility of the state as an instrument of class power became undeniable. Of course, states have always been instruments of class power (that’s what states are). And the corporate and financial elite in the United States have long used the state to secure their particular interests (most recently by subverting unions, manipulating the tax code, avoiding regulation, and structuring competition to benefit themselves). But the bank bailouts shattered any remaining illusion that the democratic state serves and represents the people. They demonstrated in a spectacular and irrefutable fashion that the government intervenes in the economy and does so on behalf of a class.
The next move is conceptually easy: use the state for a different class; use it to destroy the conditions that create classes. Since this is the definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it’s no surprise that capitalists and conservatives evoke the threat of communism. The myth that the state has no role in the economy doesn’t convince anyone. The bailouts proved the possibility and necessity of using the state for the common interest of the collective people.
Also contributing to the climate wherein communism is a present threat is a meme that doesn’t use the word “communist” but focuses instead on the people as the source of excesses that must be eliminated or controlled. Conservative and mainstream media in the US, UK, and Europe blame the people for the debt and economic crises, and hence position cuts and austerity measures as the only viable solutions. In the US, the collapse in the derivatives and mortgage bond markets is attributed to poor people who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford, defaulted on them, and thereby caused global economic chaos. Likewise, the demands of public sector workers—such as teachers, civil servants, police, and firefighters—for job security, pensions, benefits, decent wages, and the right to bargain collectively are said to be unaffordable. In the UK, the rights of working class students to an education are presented as beyond the country’s means. Anyone who wants an education should be willing to pay for it. The Greek story is of people who refused to work enough, who wanted to retire early. Various capitalist governments tell the same story: the people’s excesses are the problem and the solution is to beat them back into submission.
The truth in this story of the people, a story that erases its own telling as a salvo in class war—that is, as a tactic used by the state as an instrument of the very rich in their efforts to extract every crumb of value from working people—is that the people are a political and an economic cause. The welfare states of Europe and the Keynesian arrangements in the US and the UK resulted from political struggle. They were achievements of the organized collective power of working people. Workers fought for wages, benefits, pensions, a measure of control over their conditions of employment. Workers made demands and for over thirty years, capital had to pay. Capital didn’t restrain itself. The people disciplined capital. The rhetoric of “we can’t afford it,” of deficits and cuts, of austerity and unpayable debts and all the rest, is the way capital expresses its refusal to pay anymore. Defaulting on loans is a problem more for lenders than for borrowers (a point that tends to remain hidden). Capital wants more and is demanding more—accumulation by dispossession.
One additional truth in the story that blames the people and in so doing treats them as a political and economic cause centers on the people’s demands. Yet because this story is capital’s story, it is inverted, backwards. The problem is with the people’s demands, but not that we’ve demanded too much. It’s the opposite: we’ve demanded too little. We haven’t been demanding enough. We haven’t followed up, refused, smashed, and taken more. The capitalist story presents precisely such a demanding, refusing, taking people. These are the people—a strong, massive, motley people—who the rich and their political agents talk as if they are fighting and who they target with excessive force at the slightest provocation (as the London riots in August 2011 made vividly clear, and as the tear gas and rubber bullets deployed by police in US cities against occupiers showed the following fall). These are the people they fear—the communist threat.
Slavoj Žižek argues that the ruling ideology wants us to think that radical change is impossible. This ideology, he says, tells us that it’s impossible to abolish capitalism. Perpetually repeating its message of no alternative, the dominant ideology attempts to “render invisible the impossible-real of the antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies.”2 Žižek’s description might have worked a decade or so ago, but not anymore. The end of the first decade of the twenty-first century has brought with it massive uprisings, demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and revolutions throughout the Middle East, EU, UK, and US. In the US, mainstream media remind viewers daily that radical change is possible, and incite us to fear it. The Right, even the center, regularly invokes the possibility of radical change, and it associates that change with communism.
Why communism? Because the gross inequality ushered in by the extreme capitalism of neoliberal state policy and desperate financialism is visible, undeniable, and global. Increasing in industrialized countries over the last three decades, income inequality is particularly severe in Chile, Mexico, Turkey, and the US, the four industrialized countries with the largest income gaps (Portugal, the UK, and Italy also make the top ten).3 Inequality in the US is so extreme that its Gini coefficient (45) makes it more comparable to Cameroon (44.6) and Jamaica (45.5) than to Germany (30.4) and the UK (34).4 The antagonism that cuts across capitalist countries is so apparent that dominant ideological forces can’t obscure it.
The US typically positions extreme inequality, indebtedness, and decay elsewhere, offshore. The severe global economic recession, collapse in the housing and mortgage markets, increase in permanent involuntary unemployment, trillion-dollar bank bailouts, and extensive cuts to federal, state, and local budgets, however, have made what we thought was the third world into our world. Contra Žižek,