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
