The Communist Horizon. Jodi Dean
least the 1920s. We learn that more of our children live in poverty than at any time in recent history (20 percent of children in the US as of 2010), that the wealth of the very, very rich—the top 1 percent—has dramatically increased while income for the rest of us has remained stagnant or declined, that many of the foreclosures the banks force on homeowners are meaningless, illegal acts of expropriation (the banks can’t document who owns what so they lack the paper necessary to justify foreclosure proceedings). We read of corporations sitting on piles of cash instead of hiring back their laid-off workforce. Under neoliberalism, they lavishly enjoy their profits rather than put them back into production—what Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy call an explicit strategy of “disaccumulation.”5
In fact, we read that the middle class is basically finished. Ad Age, the primary trade journal for the advertising industry, published a major report declaring the end of mass affluence. As if it were describing an emerging confrontation between two great hostile classes, the report notes the stagnation of working class income and the exponential growth of upper class income: most consumer spending comes from the top 10 percent of households. For advertisers, the only consumers worth reaching are the “small plutocracy of wealthy elites” with “outsize purchasing influence,” an influence that creates “an increasingly concentrated market in luxury goods.”6
Admittedly, popular media in the US rarely refer to the super rich as the bourgeoisie and the rest of us as the proletariat. They are more likely to use terms like “Wall Street” versus “Main Street”—which is one of the reasons Occupy Wall Street took hold as a movement; people were already accustomed to hearing about all that had been done to save the banks. Sometimes, US popular media avoids a direct contrast between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, instead juxtaposing executive pay with strapped consumers looking for bargains or cutting back on spending. In 2010, median pay for the top executives increased 23 percent; the CEO of Viacom, Philippe P. Dauman, made 84.5 million dollars.7 CEOs from top banks enjoyed a 36 percent increase, with Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein from Goldman Sachs topping the list.8 Even CEOs of companies experiencing major losses and declines have been getting extreme bonuses: General Electric’s CEO, Jeffrey R. Immelt, received an average of 12 million dollars a year over a six-year period while the company had a 7 percent decline in returns; Gregg L. Engles, CEO of Dean Foods, took away an average of 20.4 million dollars a year over six years while the company declined 11 percent.9 Super high pay doesn’t reward performance. It’s a form of theft through which the very rich serve themselves, bestowing a largesse that keeps money within their class.
In a setting like the US where the mantra for over fifty years has been “what’s good for business is good for America,” the current undeniability of division is significant. Inequality is appearing as a factor, a force, even a crime. Every sector of US society views class conflict as the primary conflict in the country.10 No wonder we are hearing the name “communism” again—the antagonism cutting across capitalist societies is palpable, pressing.
The Right positions communism as a threat because communism names the defeat of and alternative to capitalism. It recognizes the crisis in capitalism: over-accumulation leaves the rich sitting on piles of cash they can’t invest; industrial capacity remains unused and workers remain unemployed; global interconnections make unneeded skyscrapers, fiber-optic cables, malls, and housing developments as much a part of China as the US. At the same time, scores of significant problems—whether linked to food shortages resulting from climate change, energy shortages resulting from oil dependency, or drug shortages resulting from the failure of private pharmaceutical companies to risk their own capital—remain unmet because they require the kinds of large-scale planning and cooperation that capitalism, particularly in its contemporary finance- and communications-driven incarnation, subverts. David Harvey explains that capitalists these days construe a healthy economy as one that grows about 3 percent a year. The likelihood of continued 3 percent annual growth in the world economy, however, is small. This is in part because of the difficulty of reabsorbing surplus capital. By 2030 it would be necessary to find investment opportunities for three trillion dollars, roughly twice what was needed in 2010.11 The future of capitalism is thus highly uncertain—and, for capitalists, grim.
Neoliberals and neoconservatives evoke the threat of communism because they sense the mortality of capitalism. We shouldn’t let the media screen deceive us. We shouldn’t think that the charge that Obama is a communist and peace is communist fool us into thinking that communism is just an image covering up and distorting the more serious politics of global finance, trade, and currency regulation. That politics is hopeless, a farce, the attempt of financial and economic elites to come to some temporary arrangements conducive to their continued exploitation of the work of the rest of us.
I’ve focused thus far on the Right’s relation to the communist threat, that is, on the assumptions underpinning anticommunist rhetoric and attacks on the people. What about the democratic Left? Whereas the Right treats communism as a present force, the Left is bent around the force of loss, that is, the contorted shape it has found itself in as it has forfeited or betrayed the communist ideal.
The contemporary Left claims not to exist. Whereas the Right sees left-wing threats everywhere, those on the Left eschew any use of the term “we,” emphasizing issue politics, identity politics, and their own fragmentation into a multitude of singularities. Writing in the wake of the announcement of the “death of communism,” and challenging the adequacy of that description of the collapse of the Soviet Party-State, Badiou notes, “There is no longer a ‘we,’ there hasn’t been one for a long time. The ‘we’ entered into its twilight well before the ‘death of communism.’ ”12 Over thirty years of unbridled capitalism made egoism and individualism the order of the day such that collectivity was already viewed with suspicion. The demise of the USSR didn’t kill the “we.”
The absence of a common program or vision is generally lamented, even as this absence is disconnected from the setting in which it appears as an absence, namely, the loss of a Left that says “we” and “our” and “us” in the first place. There are issues, events, projects, demonstrations, and affinity groups, but the Left claims not to exist. Left melancholics lament the lack of political alternatives when the real political alternative is the one whose loss determines their aimlessness—communism.13
Some on the Left view the lack of a common political vision or program as a strength.14 They applaud what they construe as the freedom from the dictates of a party line and the opportunity to make individual choices with potentially radical political effects. The 2011 occupations of public squares in Spain and Greece are prime examples.15 Opposing high unemployment and the imposition of austerity measures, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in a massive mobilization. Multiple voices—participants as well as commentators—emphasized that no common line, platform, or orientation united the protesters; they were not political. For many, the intense, festive atmosphere and break from the constraints of the usual politics incited a new confidence in social change. At the same time, the refusal of representation and reluctance to implement decision mechanisms hampered actual debate, enabling charismatic individual speakers to move the crowd and acquire quasi-leadership positions (no matter what position they took), and constraining the possibilities of working through political divergences toward a collective plan.
These same patterns reappeared in Occupy Wall Street. On the one hand, the openness of the movement, its rejection of party identification, made it initially inviting to a wide array of those who were discontented with the continued unemployment, increasing inequality, and political stagnation in the US. On the other, when combined with the consensus-based process characteristic of the General Assemblies (adopted from the Spanish and Greek occupations), this inclusivity had detrimental effects, hindering the movement’s ability to take a strong stand against capitalism and for collective control over common resources.
The disavowal of communism as a political ideal shapes the Left. Fragmented tributaries and currents, branches and networks of particular projects and partial objects, are the left form of the loss of communism. The “politics-of-no-politics” line seeking to trump class and economic struggle in the Spanish, Greek, and US protests wasn’t new. For over thirty years, many on the Left have argued that this partial, dispersed politics is an advance over previous emphases on class