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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 as a term of opprobrium. One would think the Cold War never ended. Sometimes communism blends in with socialism. Other 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, the division cutting across capitalist societies is more visible, more palpable in the US and UK now than it’s been since at 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 and militancy (indeed, this is perhaps the strongest legacy of 1968). Avoiding the division and antagonism that comes with taking a political position, they displace their energies onto procedural concerns with inclusion and participation, as if the content of the politics were either given—a matter of identity—or secondary to the fact of inclusion, which makes the outcome of political struggle less significant than the process of struggle. These leftists name their goal democracy. They envision struggles on the Left specifically as struggles for democracy, rather than as struggles for the abolition of capitalism, collective ownership of the means of production, and economic equality within an already democratic setting.

An emphasis on democracy is radical in some settings, like in the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the initial fight for political freedom that led to the Russian February Revolution, as well as in struggles against colonialism and imperialism, and even in opposition to the authoritarianism of the party-state bureaucracies of the former East. To stand for democracy was to stand against an order constituted through the exclusion of democracy. In contemporary parliamentary democracies, however, for leftists to refer to their goals as a struggle for democracy is strange. It is a defense of the status quo, a call for more of the same. Democracy is our ambient milieu, the hegemonic form of contemporary politics (which is yet another reason that the Right can use communism as a name for what opposes it). Left use of the language of democracy now avoids the fundamental antagonism between the 1 percent and the rest of us by acting as if the only thing really missing was participation.

Rather than recognizing that for the Left democracy is the form that the loss of communism takes, the form of communism’s displacement, radical democrats treat democracy as itself replacing communism. The repercussion of the sublimation of communism in democratic preoccupations with process and participation is acquiescence to capitalism as the best system for the production and distribution of resources, labor, and goods.

Although the contemporary Left might seem to agree with the mainstream story of communism’s failure—it doesn’t work, where “it” holds the place for a wide variety of unspecified political endeavors—the language of failure covers over a more dangerous, anxiety-provoking idea—communism succeeded. The Left isn’t afraid of failure. It is afraid of success, the successful mobilization of the energy and rage of the people. Leftists really fear the bloody violence of revolution, and hence they focus on displacing anger into safer procedural, consumerist, and aesthetic channels. As Peter Hallward emphasizes, the legacy of anti-Jacobinism is a preference for the condemnation of some kinds of violence but not others: leftists join democrats, liberals, and conservatives in denouncing the revolutionary Terror while they virtually ignore the “far more bloody repression of the 1871 Commune.”16 Even those who see themselves as part of some open and varied constellation of the Left condemn the violence of the people against those who would oppress them. State violence and the force of counterrevolution is taken for granted, assumed, cloaked in a prior legitimacy or presumed to be justified in the interest of order. Hallward writes, “From the perspective of what is already established, notes Saint-Just, ‘that which produces the general good is always terrible.’ The Jacobin terror was more defensive than aggressive, more a matter of restraining than of unleashing popular violence. ‘Let us be terrible,’ Danton said, ‘so that the people need not be.’ ”17 What is voiced on the Left as opposition to top-down organizing, vanguards, and elites, then, may well be the form taken by opposition to the unleashed fury of the people.

Why would leftists fear a party in which we participate, rather than, say, understanding our participation as influencing the shape, program, and actions of such a party? Do we fear our own capacity for violence? Or do we fear the uncontrollable force of the people mobilized against the system that exploits them, a force that university gates are incapable of blocking? Perhaps by recognizing this fear, leftists can concentrate it into strength, that is, toward a confidence in the collective power of the people to wipe out and remake.

The relation to collective power is the fundamental difference between Right and Left. The Right emphasizes the individual, individual survival, individual capacity, individual rights. The Left should be committed to the collective power of the people. As long as it restricts itself to the conceptual vocabulary of individualism and democracy inhabited by the Right, as long as it disperses collective energy into fleeting aesthetic experiences and procedural accomplishments, the Left will continue to lose the battle for equality.

The mistake leftists make when we turn into liberals and democrats is thinking that we are beyond the communist horizon, that democracy replaced communism when it serves as the contemporary form of communism’s displacement. We don’t see, can’t acknowledge, our own complicity in class struggle, in capital’s advances over the rest of us as working people. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that political struggle is an irreducible dimension of capitalism—capital doesn’t cease pursuit of its own interests out of the goodness of its cold and nonexistent heart. Capitalism always and necessarily interlinks with conflict, resistance, accommodation, and demands. Refusal to engage in these struggles, rejection of the terms of these struggles, affects the form that capitalism takes. Absent the discipline of unionized workers and an organized Left, capital—particularly its strongest and most vicious corporate and finance sectors—subsumes, appropriates, and exploits everything it can.

Consider Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s analysis of changes in management language from the sixties to the nineties.18 They document the dismantling of a class-based approach to work and the assembling of a new vision of work in terms of individual creativity, autonomy, and flexibility. Personal benefits came to outweigh collective action, thereby strengthening the position of employers. The resulting shift of responsibilities from organizations onto individuals undermined previous guarantees of security. The actuality of flexible employment was precarity—temporary work, subcontracting, project-based employment, multi-tasking, and opportunities contingent on personal networks. What matters here is the change in the understanding of work, a change from an emphasis on its class, group, and collective dimension to a view of work as a personal choice, endeavor, and locus of meaning. An idea of individual work displaced the sense of work as a common condition, thereby contributing to the liberation of capital from the constraints it encountered when it had to deal with workers as a collective force.