we see it everywhere. The fantasy that democracy exerts a force for economic justice has dissolved as the US government funnels trillions of dollars to banks and the European central banks rig national governments and cut social programs in order to keep themselves afloat. With our desiring eyes set on the communist horizon, we can now get to work on collectively shaping a world that we already make in common.
Chapter One
Our Soviets
For people in the United States, the most conventional referent of communism is the Soviet Union. Displaced by four decades of Cold War, a war that shaped US-American policies and identities, aspirations and fears, the multiplicity of historical and theoretical communisms condense into one—the USSR.1 Rather than changing over time, including the international range of parties and movements, or acknowledging active communist movement in the US, communism is one, and this one is fixed as the USSR.
To make this referent explicit, though, leads to complications.
The USSR was never fixed or one. The unity imposed on it by the Cold War binary is false, undermined by the actual historical relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. This relationship disturbs the easy equation of communism with the USSR insofar as communism becomes an element of US self-identity. The two regimes, sometimes allies and sometimes enemies, were deeply interconnected. They were symbolically identified in that each provided the other with a standpoint from which to see and evaluate itself. Each reminded the other of its failure and potential. Seeing themselves from the standpoint of the other, they made the other a component of their understanding of themselves.
Imagining itself in the eyes of the Soviets, the US never seemed equal enough. Segregation, Jim Crow, and severe poverty appeared all the more shameful when put in relief against the Soviet system’s project of collective ownership and avowal of equality. Our biggest rival seemed to be doing better by its citizens than we were doing by ours. A key impulse to progress in civil rights and social welfare, then, stemmed from the US government’s desire not to look bad when compared to the USSR.
The distorted US treatment of consumer items as markers of equality resulted from this same structure—capitalist excess came to be not merely justified in the name of democracy but the very definition of it. Susan Buck-Morss describes the “parable of the Democracy of Goods” that advertisers proffered and the US government supported. She writes, “The United States government joined the capitalist class in its ideological commitment to the expansion of consumption without limits. Similarities of consumer styles came to be viewed as synonymous with social equality, and not merely as a compensation for its lack. Democracy was freedom of consumer choice. To suggest otherwise was un-American.”2 Who was the merging of consumer goods and democracy for? Not Americans. US-Americans have long valued individual freedom more than democracy. We didn’t need some kind of compensation for the inequity and inadequacy of capitalist democracy. Consumer goods are attractive and pleasurable enough on their own without the ideological element; they don’t need a democratic supplement. The treatment of consumer goods as markers of equality and indicators of democracy was for the Soviet other before whose judging gaze the US imagined itself.
Whose citizens were better off? Symbolic identification with the USSR made the US consider this question in terms of equality. Anxiety over equality animated American ridicule of communist laziness and lack of private property, of the unbearable uniformity of Soviet ways of life, and of the emptiness of the store shelves and the unending lines. Highlighting the wealth of the few, the US obscured the poverty of many of its citizens. At the same time, it attempted to evade its own concerns with its shallowness as a society, its tendencies to allow consumerism and private life to substitute for grand struggles and ideals. Viewing itself from the Soviet perspective, the US saw itself as lacking, as failing to secure for its own citizens what communism secured for Soviet citizens.
From the US perspective (as imagined by the Soviets) the measure of communist success depended on productivity. Who was all the heavy industry for? Before which gaze is it imagined? Not the suffering Soviet people. Rather, the gaze was American. One need only recall the Soviet goal of “catching up and overtaking” the West. Buck-Morss notes how the fantasy of productivity, opened up by symbolic identification with the US as über-producer, structured Soviet art and culture as well as politics and economics. Poets and artists celebrated machinery. Films and novels were devoted to steel production and the construction of factories. Precisely because the Soviet Union adopted “the capitalist heavy-industry definition of economic modernization,” socialism remained caught within a very specific capitalist model of economic development. The Soviets did not reconstruct American capitalism. They glorified it. (Indeed, for some Soviets, Henry Ford was as close to a saint as one could get.3)
The (reciprocal) symbolic identification of the US and the USSR shaped their senses of who and what they were such that democracy could morph into commodity consumption and production could become a utopia in and for itself. The real divisions of class and race in the US as well as of ethnicity and privilege in the USSR could sometimes be covered over by the ideals of productivity and equality for which each was admired. The US may not be equitable, but it is productive. The USSR may not have been productive, but it was equitable. Imagining themselves before the gaze of the other, they secured—for a time—fantasies of unity that depended on the repression of their identification with the ideology of the other.
The place of communism within the self-understanding of the US is not the only complication that arises when we begin to question and specify the referent of communism. The differences among parties, places, factions, and times that the unifying imaginary of Cold War communism tries to suppress also start to leak back into the history of Soviet communism. For example, the Soviet Union did not claim to have achieved communism, although its ruling party called itself a communist party. As is the case with any party or political system, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union changed over time, most drastically by moving from a revolutionary party to a governing bureaucratic party. As a governing body the Party experienced further changes, changes that were sometimes violent, sometimes incremental, often paid for with the lives of Party members themselves. Insofar as it was a political party, and for most of its history the only recognized political party, the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union was a locus of struggle and disagreement over a host of issues from art, literature, and science to economic development, foreign policy, and internal relations among the various republics. To be sure, efforts were made to present a unified front, to downplay the presence of disagreements within the Party. Yet a significant effect of these efforts was the amplification of ostensibly superficial differences: small divergences became signs of deeper conflict. Soviet citizens, allies, and enemies alike learned to discern in the distinction between a “frank” and a “comradely” exchange of opinions major shifts in political direction. In short, the Soviet Union isn’t a very stable referent of communism.
US-Americans don’t worry about that very much.
US-Americans are sheltered from anxiety over wobbly reference by the (fantastic) stability accompanying the proper name “Stalin.” A legacy of the Cold War more than of critical inquiry into Soviet history, “Stalinist” tags practices of monopolizing and consolidating power in the Soviet party-state bureaucracy. In this circumscribed imaginary, communism as Stalinism is linked to authoritarianism, prison camps, and the inadmissibility of criticism. Just as communism as the Soviet Union overshadows a wide array of other communisms—from China, through Yugoslavia, to Cuba and Nepal, to the US, UK, and Europe, and from parties coexisting within parliamentary state formations to revolutionary fighters operating under various names and in various degrees of legitimacy—so does the Soviet Union as Stalinism eclipse post-Stalinist developments in the Soviet Union, particularly with regard to successes in modernizing (including a highly successful space program) and improving overall standards of living. Tariq Ali quotes the Soviet dissident Zhores Medvedev writing in 1979: “There is no unemployment, but on the contrary a shortage of labour—which creates a greater variety of
