Volume 27 Issue 3 July 2015
This issue of Rethinking Marxism opens with a symposium on the theme of “crafting communism,” which originated from a plenary discussion between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at Rethinking Marxism’s International Gala Conference, “Surplus, Solidarity, Sufficiency,” held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 2013. On behalf of the RM Editorial Board, Boone Shear invited Dean and Healy to publish their presentations and also several commentators to write short elaborations and responses to the exchange.
Jodi Dean’s “The Party and Communist Solidarity” opens the symposium with a reflection on the communist political party post-1989 and in the wake of the Left’s failure to respond to the 2008 economic crisis. At a time of working-class political defeat and with the continual advancement of neoliberal capitalism and intensifying inequality, austerity, and privatization, Dean takes issue with leftists who have argued that the political party, as an organization of struggle, is an outmoded form of political action that can (or should) be replaced with micropractices of creative postcapitalist economic alternatives. Expanding on the thesis of her book The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012), Dean argues that such practices, when not tied to militant organization, depoliticize anticapitalist politics, replacing solidarity and the struggle for political power with lifestyle choices that are absorbed into communicative capitalism. Overcoming capitalism, Dean argues, requires the organization of the working class as a party. As a solidary and voluntary political association, the party “cuts across workplace, sector, region, and nation,” producing a common political will capable of struggling for political power. She suggests that such a party could grow out of the alliance of radical left organizations, establishing a new field and discourse separate from capital. But given the absence of solidarity on the Left, Dean argues that the formation of a party must address ongoing forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia that have contributed to divisions, suspicions, and betrayals. Ultimately for Dean, if the anticapitalist Left wants to change the world by replacing capitalism with a nonexploitative system of production and distribution, it must address the question of the party form.
Dean’s notion of the “communist horizon” is the focus of Stephen Healy’s reflections in his “Communism as a Mode of Life,” in which he argues that the formation of a communist politics requires addressing the precarious economic and ecological conditions capitalism has produced. Employment is becoming increasingly precarious across the globe, and as a species we are living in uncharted conditions with global atmospheric CO2 concentrations higher than they have been in millions of years, producing increased food insecurity. “To be a communist” in these conditions, Healy argues, “should be to insist on a common solution to an economic system that marginalizes enormous numbers of people while laying waste to the commons—oceans, atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere.” Thus, the communist horizon for Healy entails abandoning one mode of existence and accepting another—one that is less competitive and more cooperative, less excessive and more sufficient. Drawing from J. K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies perspective, Healy shows how identifying the internal differences within capitalist relations and organization presents us with opportunities to develop noncapitalist enterprises, which brings into focus the postcapitalist horizon, offering viable alternatives to capitalism and providing the basis for a politics of collective action. In reference to the collaborative work of the Community Economies Collective, Healy documents several local initiatives across the globe that have implemented communal and collective approaches to production, resource management, and investing as examples of cooperative experiments that create new modes of existence. The development of communism could be achieved through the formation and expansion of solidarity economies, linking separate groups in an alternative system of production and exchange. The point for Healy is to build a new mode of life and existence that offers an alternative to capitalism and to the precarious conditions it has produced.
In their response to Dean and Healy’s exchange, entitled “The Question before the Communist Horizon,” Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar comment on Dean’s and Healy’s respective references to Lacan, noting that the communist horizon as a contingent and emergent conception of “being-in-common” is closely related to the Lacanian notion of “the Real.” Chakrabarti and Dhar point out that the politics of being-in-common in Dean and Healy’s exchange brings into focus different notions of transformation—political and social, both with limits and possibilities. Chakrabarti and Dhar suggest expanding the dialogue of the communist horizon with a discussion of transformation at the levels of the political, the social, and the self.
The existence of these possibilities that Chakrabarti and Dhar refer to becomes the thesis of the next commentary. In “The Party and Postcapitalist Politics: A Missed Encounter?,” Yahya M. Madra and Ceren Özselçuk argue that Jodi Dean’s ontological understanding of postcapitalist politics as depoliticized localism and lifestyle choice creates a false opposition between the formation of the party and the project of developing solidarity economies. Madra and Özselçuk consider the development of postcapitalist solidarity economies to be prefigurative formations that create ways to live in common “here and now” while also creating the conditions necessary for the formation of a political party that expands class struggle over the economy. In this sense, for Madra and Özselçuk, “class struggle is a political struggle over the economy.”
In a position similar to Madra and Özselçuk’s, Ethan Miller, in “Anticapitalism or Postcapitalism? Both!,” argues that the juxtaposition of an anticapitalist revolutionary political party and the advancement of postcapitalist communal practices presents a false choice and perhaps a trap. In his discussion of the exchange, Miller argues that anticapitalism and postcapitalism can be mutually reinforcing dynamics in the struggle to develop new modes of collective life. In his words, “myriad autonomous and organized connections of anticapitalist and postcapitalist practice can serve to render each other increasingly viable, potent, and durable.”
We observe living examples of these alternative modes of existence as they are being created in different parts of the world, including Europe. In “A Plurality of Communisms,” Justin Helepololei focuses on the activities of the 15M or Indignados movement in Spain. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, occupations of buildings—from apartments and unfinished libraries to former bank offices—proliferated across the country. Though occupations, as Helepololei points out, are relatively short-lived, they create spaces for new initiatives and collectivities to grow, such as cooperative networks and neighborhood assemblies. The anticapitalist party Podemos emerged out of the Indignados movement, winning 8 percent of the national vote in the 2014 European Parliament elections. Given the development of these separate autonomous collectivities, Helepololei questions, however, whether they should be asserted in the singular, universalistic terms implied in varying degrees in Dean’s and Healy’s presentations.
The theme of noncapitalist possibilities continues in Oona Morrow and Claire Brault’s “More-than-Capitalist Landscapes of Communist Becoming.” The authors agree with Dean’s definition of communism as “the expansion of voluntary cooperation” but disagree with her call for the creation of a communist party. Drawing from Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies perspective, Morrow and Brault point to different examples of collective enterprises and initiatives, such as urban homesteading, in which voluntary cooperation is already integrated into people’s everyday practices. They argue that such practices not only “represent a prefigurative politics that creates and nurtures communist habits and desires” but also put into practice cooperative relations now that will be necessary in a world without capitalism. They question why Dean considers the party a necessary vehicle for expanding voluntary cooperation.
The general optimistic tone and the emphasis of the commentators changes in Jim Igoe’s commentary, entitled “Communism ‘without Guarantees.’” Drawing from Stuart Hall’s notion of “Marxism without guarantees,” Igoe notes that the struggle for communism is one of uncertainty. In response to the actual fantasies of capitalism, Igoe posits a more questioning and pessimistic stance toward speculative political imaginaries. Yet he agrees with Dean’s notion that more work is required to make emancipatory social formations more effective. A positive move in this direction, according to Igoe, would be to cultivate ways of being different from capitalist modes of production, consumption, and communication, all of which alienate us from one another.
The questioning tone struck by Igoe is shared and transformed in Pem Davidson Buck’s commentary, which underlines the crucial theme of “difference.” In “Whiteness, Communism, and Possibility,” Buck raises concerns with respect to the white, middle-class nature of Dean and Healy’s exchange regarding strategy when, she argues, political change almost always originates from the lower classes. Following from this, she asks, “How would a communist party or a community-economy politics go about undoing white privilege in order to be able to undo capitalism?”
The idea of a communist party at the core of Dean’s work is picked up by Joseph G. Ramsey in “How Do Communists Party?,” which poses the question of what “communist partying” actually entails. Ramsey suggests that “party” can be understood as a verb rather than a noun in order to conceptualize “party” as a method of political praxis (a mode of being, acting, and organizing). Ramsey raises the question of how such a method can be put into practice in existing organizations and networks and across political spaces. From this Ramsey raises the question of what tasks a communist party needs to take up in Dean’s formulation. For Ramsey, such questions are necessary for such a party to have the potential to be gripped by the masses as a material force.
Following these commentaries on their exchange, Healy and Dean provide responses to one another and to the commentators. In “Parody, the Party, Politics, and Postcapitalism: Some Thoughts on a Shared Future,” Healy draws attention to Dean’s use of parody in her original conference presentation, which included a number of slides, one of which included a photograph of three people wearing T-shirts with the text “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens.” Healy suggests this represents a dismissal of the postcapitalist politics of the alternative food movement. Returning to Judith Butler’s 1996 discussion of Alan Sokal’s use of parody to criticize cultural politics, Healy suggests Dean’s use of parody may be missing an opportunity to politicize alternative economic collectivities. For Healy this brings into focus the question of what constitutes “the political” versus a “lifestyle choice” in Dean’s conception of the communist horizon. Healy suggests that equating the political with mass political movements may inform the belief that the current state of left politics is one of depoliticization, a belief he disagrees with.
For Dean, in contrast, as she articulates in “Red, Black, and Green,” it is precisely the valorization of the micropolitics of the self and DIY that inform her call for the return of the party. In her response she reiterates the point that an effective anticapitalist politics requires confronting the question of building and exercising political power. She conceives the formation of the party as a collective power drawn from a combination of communist, antiracist, and climate/environmentalist movements. She argues that if Greece and Spain can form parties of the radical Left, so can North America.
In important ways, this issue’s artwork by Thomas Hirschhorn poses questions and explores possible responses to the prevalent modes of artistic production, thus taking some of the questions of the previous symposium to a different realm. Flamme éternelle, which ran for fifty-three days (23 April to 23 June 2014) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, was Thomas Hirschhorn’s sixty-sixth art exhibition produced in a public space. Open each day from noon to midnight, with free admission, the exhibition created a public space within an institution. The installation included a bar, an Internet room, a small library of shared books, a video room with DVDs, workstations for art making, a daily journal, and continual lectures. Through presence and production, the artist sought to create the conditions of dialogue between himself, other artists, poets, philosophers, writers, and the public. Hirschhorn aims at a nonexclusive and open public: mostly people with time on their hands, the young and marginalized sections of the population. As a visual and participatory manifesto, the work confronts the public’s state of nonsatisfaction and the possibilities for the formation of new forms of public space. As the open public becomes part of the project itself, its state of nonsatisfaction—which it desires—becomes an act of resistance to all programmed forms of artistic production, which aim at an end. The project challenges and changes the accepted notions of art, artistic production, and consumption while reclaiming and creating new public spaces, which have been steadily shrinking under capital’s unabated attacks. In this sense, Hirschhorn’s Flamme éternelle can also be viewed as an artistic attempt at creating a noncapitalist space, a “common” that continues to unfold.
The communist horizon has always been part of the historical imagination of Marxism. Starting with Marx and Engels, and later on through generations of Marxists, a central part of this imaginary has been the emancipation of women. But the historical engagement of Marxism with feminism has often been fraught with bitterness. Contributors to the second symposium of this issue edited by Chizu Sato—organized around the book Class Struggle on the Home Front, edited by Graham Cassano—attempt another conversation between feminism and Marxism, starting from an antiessentialist class perspective and taking the discussion to another site: that of the household. The hope here, of rendering visible noncapitalist class processes within the domestic sphere and the relations between these and other processes within the broader society, not only carries the promise of a more fruitful dialogue between Marxism and feminism but also a clearer understanding of the resilience of structures perpetuating women’s oppression in contemporary society.
In her essay entitled “Unstable Feminisms: A New Marxian Class Analysis of Domestic Labor,” Drucilla K. Barker reflects on the book’s important axes—the valorizing of household labor, migrations and labor-market hierarchies, and the role of women’s participation in the paid labor force—all of which, she claims, have persisted in feminist theory from the beginning. Barker’s starting point is the general agreement she identifies in Class Struggle on the Home Front for the possibility of a noncapitalist logic in the household. Barker notes Gibson-Graham’s analysis of affective labor as labor that produces emotions and social networks and, thus, forms of community. But she makes another sharp observation, which forms part of the backdrop of her analysis, that women’s oppression does not necessarily end with the transition to communism. In her discussion focused on the second part of the book, Barker picks up other themes: the self-appropriation of Anatolian women in Germany as an alternative to feudal exploitation and wage labor, in the work of Esra Erdem; and the contradictory and changing nature of class processes in immigrant households in the comparative work of Maliha Safri. In these works and in that of Cassano, Barker attracts our attention to the importance of gender ideologies. She ends her commentary on a sobering note: decades after Friedan’s seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, in which the solution offered to women’s problems was joining the labor force, gender ideologies still seem slow to change, and the state of capitalism is more and more reminiscent of the 1930s. She tells us, going back full circle to her starting point, that we need to be ever vigilant and to struggle for the transformation of class relations in the household because women’s emancipation cannot be assumed, whether from being part of the labor force or with the increasing visibility of women in power positions in society. Neither, of course, can it be assumed in a communist context.
Barker’s criticism of liberal feminism is also one of the points that Cecilia Rio examines in her essay, entitled “The Magic of the Ouroboros: Reflections on Class Struggle on the Home Front.” Sharing a pessimistic assessment of the state of gender relations in contemporary society, where part of the feminist agenda has been co-opted into capital accumulation, she wonders (among other things) at the myth of work-family balance, which according to certain indicators seems to be more undermined now than it was a quarter of a century ago. Rio believes antiessentialist class analysis promises to provide some answers to such persistent questions, which require an overdeterminist understanding of the complexities of class processes both within the household and between the household and the larger social context. Going through the chapters of Class Struggle on the Home Front, she looks at how the different authors take on this task, including in Richard McIntyre and Michael Hillard’s work on the relation between the crisis in family life and capitalist accumulation and in Satya Gabriel’s analysis of single-occupied households in relation to the “neoliberal revolution” and its discourses of individualism and free choice, which are further confirmed in Hochschild’s analysis, in which every aspect of caring labor can be outsourced. Capital’s insatiable desire to conquer every part of our being has been given further impetus in the neoliberal era. The resilience of patriarchal ideologies is of central concern to Rio as well. She tries to look for answers in the “enigmatic unconscious,” drawing in particular from the work of James Hillman, who argues for the dismantling of the myth of the self as a unity. Such a gargantuan process, which is imperative for “reclaiming the feminine,” is of course not the work of the individual alone but is only possible with the formation of a political community.
In “The Happy Marriage of Antiessentialist Class Analysis and Feminist Exploration of the Household,” Harriet Fraad, as one of the contributors to Class Struggle on the Home Front, responds to the commentaries of Barker and Rio. Following up on Barker’s point about communism not being a guarantee for women’s liberation, Fraad embarks on a critical analysis of her commentary. Fraad argues that, while in some cases Anatolian women may indeed be engaged in self-appropriation, Erdem herself notes just how rare this is. And while self- appropriation may open a space for class transformation, it may also be conducive to monopoly capitalism. She notices in the work of Safri, Erdem, and Cassano the attention given to many different processes, all of which mutually constitute one another. Fraad points to the “uncharted territory” of the psyche, which Rio begins to explore and which Fraad considers to be extremely important for feminism since, as she says, there is still no unified analytic perspective that brings together the conscious and unconscious knowledge processes which evolve from and shape affective labor. She refers to this as the enormous “black hole” in Marxist-feminist theory and proceeds to give scientific evidence in support of Rio’s early steps in the realm of the psyche—the transformation of which requires a political community, a point that Fraad underlines. Fraad ends on an optimistic note, celebrating the fruitful and promising marriage of antiessentialist class analysis and feminism, examples of which she sees in this collection.
It is precisely in the context of Fraad’s celebration of this union between antiessentialist Marxism and feminism that the editor of and one of the contributors to Class Struggle on the Home Front, Graham Cassano, confirms the main commitment of the volume. In his response to the commentators, entitled “‘Not a Thing to Prophesy and Plead For’: From Determinism to Overdetermination in Marxism and Feminism,” Cassano first takes a historical journey back to the roots of the conversation between Marxism and feminism begun in the work of Marx and Engels. Engels envisions the emancipation of women in their participation in industry, and this economic determinist vision is shared by the early feminist critic of political economy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who like Engels believed that the transformation of gender relations is dictated by forces beyond agency. Cassano then brings us back to contemporary society, where the reality of increased participation of women in the labor force has not brought the emancipation of women, a point shared by all participants to this volume. In his response to the symposium contributors, he finds much to commend in a continuing dialogue between antiessentialist class analysis and feminism, through which we are able to “see” not only different forms of class exploitation in the household but also the cultural processes at work, which can go some way in explaining the intransigence of patriarchal mental frames.
The final contribution to this issue brings together several common threads that run through the two symposia, focusing on the concept of revolutionary subjectivity. In “New Forces of Resistance: Antiessentialist Revolutionary Subjectivity in Marxist Theory,” Brian C. Lovato returns to the work of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in order to articulate a Marxian notion of revolutionary subjectivity that addresses multiple forms of oppression. Lovato’s return to James’s and Dunayevskaya’s work is in response to Laclau and Mouffe’s characterization of the Marxian notion of subjectivity as class essentialist. Lovato points out that—in his analysis of the racial question in the United States, for example—James argued that racial oppression operated in an interrelated yet relatively autonomous domain from class oppression. As Lovato shows, James considered the black liberation movement as both an independent movement fully capable of transforming social life and also an integral component in the revolutionary struggle for socialism in the United States. James’s Hegelian Marxism, Lovato argues, proceeds from a dialectical conception of the social, which forces him to confront oppression and unfreedom in their multiple guises. Dunayevskaya, according to Lovato, addresses the question of revolutionary subjectivity from a similar ontological position. For Dunayevskaya, the women’s liberation movement could not be subsumed in the struggle to overcome class oppression and could not come after the socialist revolution, a position shared and pursued by the contributors to the symposium on Class Struggle on the Home Front. For her, the two struggles must occur alongside one another. Dunayevskaya’s focus on overlapping forms of oppression, Lovato argues, prefigures the concept of intersectionality developed in later feminist scholarship. The significance of James’s and Dunayevskaya’s nonessentialist Marxism, according to Lovato, is that they saw radical potential for transcending racialized, gendered capitalism. Complementing the insights of recent scholars such as Joel Olson, Theodore W. Allen, and Pem Davidson Buck, Lovato argues that James’s and Dunayevskaya’s Hegelian Marxism is capable of incorporating multiple struggles in the project of total human emancipation. As the responses to Dean and Healy reflect on the communist horizon, Lovato’s work reminds us that the transformative potential of revolutionary subjectivities lies in expanding this horizon to the extent that it recognizes and engages with processes of gender and race, neither of which should be reduced to class.
The contributions in this issue all address dimensions of possible alternatives to capitalist modes of existence, a pursuit that has become more visible and has acquired more urgency as the economic and social crisis unfolds without respite around us. Questions of the necessity or not of a political party; of alternative ways of producing and viewing art; of the necessary conversations between feminism and class analysis; and of the nature of modern revolutionary subjectivity are not only matters of academic and intellectual curiosity, but of practical exigency as we observe different political formations feverishly looking for answers as they emerge across the world.
—The Editors |
