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
