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The Party and CommunistSolidarityJodi DeanPublished online: 16 Jul 2015.

To cite this article: Jodi Dean (2015) The Party and Communist Solidarity,Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 27:3, 332-342, DOI:10.1080/08935696.2015.1042701

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The Party and Communist Solidarity

Jodi Dean

This essay, based on a talk given at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism InternationalConference, defends the idea of the party by setting out the conditions that makeit necessary. Rather than imagining a national, mass-electoral party, it envisionsa solidary, militant, international organization. Against left realists who claimthat the party is an outmoded or fully saturated political form and that we arerelegated to momentary acts of resistance or small reforms that leave the capitalistsystem intact, our conditions push us to rethink and renew that form of politicalorganization through which communists think collectively about political power, acttogether in order to generate it, and inspire one another to use it for the collectivedetermination of the world we produce in common. Capitalism pushes us apart. Leftpolitics, instead of emphasizing difference, should assert and build commonality.The party is a form for this assertion.

Key Words: Communism, Communist Party, The Left, Occupy, Politics

In this essay I defend the idea of the party by setting out the conditions that make itnecessary. I am not imagining a national, mass-electoral party but rather a solidary,militant, international organization. Against left realists who claim that the party isan outmoded or fully saturated political form and that we are relegated tomomentary acts of resistance or small reforms that leave the capitalist system intact,I argue that our conditions push us to rethink and renew that form of politicalorganization through which communists think collectively about political power, acttogether in order to generate it, and inspire one another to use it for the collectivedetermination of the world we produce in common. Capitalism pushes us apart. Leftpolitics should not do the same. Instead of emphasizing difference, it should assertand build commonality. The party is a form for this assertion.For over two decades, scholars associated with Rethinking Marxism have developed

new ways to think about economic activity, production, distribution, and accumula-tion. They have investigated multiple micropractices in a variety of domains,expanding our sense of what is economically possible.1 Yet whom is the work for? Ido not mean this cynically. My point is not about getting tenure or rising in theacademy. In my experience, most of us doing radical, Marxist, and communist workare disciplinarily marginal. I ask whom the work is for because it appears to me to befor anyone who wants it, for anyone who wants to try something new. Creativeeconomic alternatives are rendered as choices for small groups, initiatives some

2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

1. See, for example, Gibson-Graham (2006).

Rethinking Marxism, 2015Vol. 27, No. 3, 332342, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042701

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might take. They are thereby depoliticized into lifestyle choices and are thereforedifficult to disentangle from a fetishization of the local that, in its repression ofcommonality, is simply a lower-cost version of the 1 percents privatization,personalization, and enclaving. There are good ideas on the Left. When they aredisconnected from organized militant politics, however, they become absorbed intothe flows of communicative capitalismin Mimmo Porcaros (2012, 94) words, intoan indeterminate mass of contradictory affirmations. They are not oppositional;they do not provide an alternative. Without political power behind them, they arejust possibilities without possibility, just something else for consumers to choose.Over the last thirty odd years (at least since 1989), a left realism has taken hold

of a certain northern, western, U.S.-European Left. At the site of a rethoughthumanist, culturalist, and poststructuralist post-Marxism is the foreclosure ofrevolution and the reduction of politics to critique, resignification, subversion,reform, resistance, and work on the self. Underlying continued aspirations forequality and real opposition to imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia is thesense that our working class is privileged, included, complacent. Radical politicsinvolves other places, other subjects. Thus, during the same period that neoliberal-ism consolidated itself as a political-economic formation (or in Foucaults terms, agovernmentality), most activists and intellectuals associated with the Left rejectednot just specific Communist parties but the very idea of the party as a form forradical political action.2

Although some of these rejections repeat arguments against centralism foundalready in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as part of a councilist orultraleft political current, others situate themselves in a line of criticism prominentin the late sixties and early seventies. Rightly frustrated with a system whosecomponents buttress rather than undermine capitalism, various voices on the Leftbegan to amplify one another as they targeted their critical energies on themediating institutions of capitalist society: family, union, party, university. Insofaras these institutions made capitalism possiblethat is, secured for it an adequateworkforce and compliant citizenrytheir abolition made seeming sense as arevolutionary goal. The party is but one of the institutions through which politicalenergies are co-opted into the maintenance of the status quoa critique leveled atthe Communist Party USA during the years of the Popular Front and also directedtoward the French Communist party in 1968, to give but two examples.Now, in the second decade of the new millennium, the mediating institutions of

civil society have changed significantly. More people live alone than in any time inU.S. history (Henderson 2014). Fewer U.S. children live in two-parent families(Livingston 2014). Because of decades of antisexist and antihomophobic struggle,even the mainstream accepts a wider array of living arrangements than werepermitted thirty years ago. Union membership in the United States is at its lowestlevel in a century (Greenhouse 2013). Wages have correspondingly stagnated anddeclined, decreasing the likelihood that blue-collar, service-sector, and minimum-wage jobs can lead to a middle-class standard of living. Left political parties have

2. On neoliberal governmentality, see Foucault (2008). For an example of rejection of the party,see Hardt and Negri (2000).

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either collapsed or compromised. Max Elbaums (2002, 293) account of the newcommunist movement of the seventies tells this story particularly well as itdocuments the setbacks facing U.S. party builders at the time, with their inabilityto regroup in the eighties and the broadly demobilizing effects of the end of statesocialism on activists who had been anchors of popular movements. The situation ofthe university is less easy to summarize, although it is clear, first, that as politicalcommitment to public education (education as a recognized social good) hasdeclined, student debt has soared, and second, that education is a key front intodays class war.Our current conjuncture differs from that of the sixties and early seventies in that

individuals are now more likely to encounter state and market directly, without theprotections of mediating institutions. Instead of what liberalism renders as the forceof law, individuals encounter force as law, whether directly as police or directly asmarket. Communicative capitalist ideology presents this immediacy as directconversations between individual and company, as entrepreneurialism, as flexiblecontract-based work. It mystifies immediacy as personal responsibility, choice, DIY,prosumption (the producer as consumer), and as the opportunity for creativeinput.3 Privatization, offshoring, precarity, and the decline of unions have contrib-uted to the loss of working-class jobs capable of sustaining a middle-class quality oflife. An effect has been the dismantling of the wide array of associations formerlypart of working-class culture. Not only is the working class not a revolutionary class,in the United States it is barely conscious of itself as a classa result, paradoxically,of the success of organized labor in fighting for collective bargaining and higherwages.U.S. culture is no longer mass culture. From personalized networked media to

eight-hundred-channel cable television to the proliferation of sub- and microculturalconsumption opportunities in the long tail of music, video, and writing available onthe Internet, communicative capitalist culture offers multiple and innumerablepossibilities for expression, increasingly few of which register to any significantdegree (Dean 2009). Our politics is likewise no longer mass politics. Mainstreamelectoral politics focuses so exclusively on fundraising that the more poor peoplesupport a policy the less likely their representatives are to support it (Hacker andPierson 2011, 111). Left politics has also shed the mass dimension of the twentiethcentury. Configured through contemporary capitalisms push to customize, specify,and individuate, left issue and identity politics reduces action to raising awareness inthe hope of generating an emotional response intense enough to inspire people tofind out more for themselves, get involved, and make their opinions known. The Lefthas mimicked and repeated in its politics the fragmentation, localization, andpluralization crucial to neoliberalisms dismantling of the welfare state. Even ascapital has consolidated its class power and pursued a long-term strategy hostile tothe rest of us, the Left has accepted and augmented its own dispersion intosingularized individuals. The few categories that make belonging explicit haveattempted at the same time to disavow collectivity: the consumer over theproducers, the taxpayer over the public.

3. For a discussion of communicative capitalist ideology see Dean (2002).

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Commenting on a text he wrote with Flix Guattari in the mideighties, AntonioNegri notes that the new organization of capitalist production in the late seventiesproduced a subjectivity locked in an insuperable contradiction, for socialcooperation was more and more violently in opposition to the structures of capitalistcontrol (Guattari and Negri 2010, 104). He observes as well that even as he andGuattari recognized the importance of new technologies in networked communica-tion, they didnt push their analysis far enough, and they should have detected newpossibilities for rebellion. I would add that they should have identified new forms ofcapture and subjection (see Andrejevic 2007). Social media resolves and displaces thecontradiction between social cooperation and capitalist control. Interacting throughpersonalized, ubiquitous media, we leave traces that can be archived, searched, soldto advertisers, and turned over to security forces. We can connect with others, shareour hopes and dreams, and reinforce capitalist control with the same clicks and links,likes and shares. We can be networked revolutionaries, courageously forwardingvideos to all our friends. We can work on-demand from home. Our mediated socialityaffirms the structures of capitalist control more deeply and completely than theinstitutions of civil society ever didespecially under circumstances that amplifyinjunctions to individuality.Rather than the mythic rugged individualism of American frontier ideology,

individuality is an economic element of communicative capitalism. Getting a job, acontract, or an opportunity requires that one demonstrate that one is uniquelyqualified in what one knows to be a dense and competitive field (Lane 2011). As themarket for middle-class jobs contracts, one has to stand out from the pack, show thatone is both a team player and capable of thinking outside the box, creative yet oneof us. This entrepreneurial relation to self (as well as to others whom we see in theidea of social entrepreneurs) enhances the likelihood of education-related debt aswell as credit card debt accrued in order to look the part, to project the appearanceof success, and to support work done for free (internships, volunteering). Capitalismscontradictions are interiorized in the form of the unique individual who is one of amultitude of singularities.Mainstream culture describes the structural effects of this amplified competition,

which underlies the injunction to uniqueness, as the winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the new economy, as the 80/20 rule, or (inversely) as the long tail.The basic idea is that any system characterized by free choice and preferentialattachment will generate extreme inequality. Moreover, the larger the system, thelarger the inequality (the lottery is a good example: the bigger it is, the less thelikelihood of any one ticket to have the winning number). The stimulation of theproduction of uniqueness, of individualities, produces the field in which the individualdissolves so that a one, a winner, can emerge to claim the prize or get the job.4 Andeven as there is a long tailthat is, a vast majority of losers (those who are muchcloser to each other than they are to the one)communicative capitalism producesthese losers not as a mass but as a multitude of singularities, each holding on to itsdifference as its most valuable attribute despite its fundamental devaluation withrespect to the system.

4. See my discussion in The Communist Horizon (Dean 2012).

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The genius of the slogan We are the 99 percent is that it grasps this basic fact,names it, and occupies it. The 99 percent is an idea that recognizes the winner-take-all character of contemporary capitalism and makes it a crime, a wrong. In the faceof dispersion, it asserts collectivity. Rather than the continuation of a left politicspremised on cultivating a wide variety of issues and perspectives and then buildingaffinities between them, Occupy asserted the economic division between the 99percent and the 1 percent as the basis for a new movement.5

Although the amplified individualism of communicative capitalism is a change froma society of mediating institutions, it isnt new. Marx and Engels (1994, 142) notealready in The German Ideology that competition isolates individuals, not onlybourgeois but even more the proletarians, despite the fact that it brings themtogether. It takes a long time before these individuals can unite. Rosa Luxemburg(1999) similarly observes that the problem of social democracy in Russia was theatomized condition of the proletariat. Bourgeois society hadnt instilled in theworking class the rudiments of political solidarity. It hadnt provided the workingclass the proper raw materialthat is, the institutions, capacities, and expectationsthat would enable workers to combine politically. Our conditions are also atomized,but differently. Ours is atomization as personalization, the atomization of the mobile,singular, and uncollected. In some ways we have a surplus of raw materials fororganization: rights to free speech and assembly, communication technologies, amodicum of literacy. The cost of the overproduction of the means of communicationhas been a foreclosure of solidarity in the sense that too many of us seem to thinkthat solidarity is neither desirable nor necessary. In the United States, we cling toindividualism even as our ongoing proletarianization solidifies the gap between the 1percent and the rest of us. We have individuality without political subjectivity (whichcan only ever be collective).In 2008, the Left failed. There was a major crisis of capitalism inviting urgent

response, but the Left was a no-show. The consequence has been more than bankbailouts and austerity. Its been the rise of the extreme Right as the most visibleopponent of neoliberal governmental policies. The same crisis continues to deepensuch that in the United States, UK, and EU there is now both a new normal ofintensifying inequality and a fundamental uncertainty as to the terms and conditionsof this new normal. We dont know what this new condition that exceeds thepolitical-economic settlements of welfare state and neoliberal state will be like, butthis nonknowledge, this openness, is the opportunity for action, the space where wecan push for one future over another if we have the collective political will to do so.Is our setting one that can only produce ongoing cuts and austerity? Risingimmiseration, reactive protest, and intensified police violence? Or can there be acollective steering of a world we create, use, and inhabit in common?The crumbling of capitalist realismthat is, the conviction that there is no

alternativehas enabled ever more of us to see capitalism as a system of productionthrough exploitation for the benefit of the few. But then what? It now seems that itseasier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is an organized Left. Left realists insistthat collectivity is undesirable and impossible. Its undesirable because it excludes

5. See my essay, Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong (Dean 2011).

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possibilities, effaces difference, and enforces discipline. Its impossible because weare so individuated, so singularized in our needs and ambitions, that we cant evercome together; coming together, we are told, is itself an illusion, a myth some use tomanipulate others into fighting for their interests. Thus, today, amid the uncertain-ties of late neoliberalism, even when we are fully conscious of our own exploitationand the deep inequity of the system in which we find ourselves, we either dont feellike we can do anything about it or we find ourselves participating in individuated,localized, or communicatively mediated activities without momentum, duration, or acapacity for political memory. People are immiserated and proletarianized andpractically confront this immiseration and proletarianization alone.We have to keep in mind, though, that isolation, immiseration, and political

disorganization also characterized the early decades of radical socialist movement.Marx, Engels, and Luxemburg all emphasize how competition means that workerstend to remain isolated, to lack solidarity, and to take a long time uniting. Leftrealists one-sidedly emphasize the objective dimension of our capitalist setting,failing to acknowledge the subjective dimension always part of the Marxist tradition.There are nonetheless significant differences between our time and that of the

early years of revolutionary socialism. Rather than a period of working-class advance,ours is one of defeat. In our extreme capitalist setting, the rollback of theachievements of organized political struggle means austerity and privatizationparticularly privatization accompanied by increases in brutality and exemption, aspractices formerly under public authority are turned over to personal power and themarket. For us, authoritarianism is less that of centralized state power than it is ofpower decentralized, dispersed, and extended via private contracts, interbank andinteragency cooperation, and the extensive network of treaties, agreements, andprovisions enabling capital flow and global trade. National states act as the policeforce protecting the global capitalist class. So we encounter the fragmentation,dissolution, and decomposition of some elements of the state and the concentrationand intermeshing of other elements of states and markets, as with finance, security,and media. Capital as a class has worked to smash the bureaucratic state machine forus, to convince us that it is useless, even as it strengthens parts of that machine forits own ends.We confront an uneven mix of centralizing and decentralizing forces in various

combinations of state use of the market and market reliance on the state. The statesoperation as an instrument of class rule is tempered less by concessions forced on itby working-class struggle than it was forty years ago (although the social-democraticclass compromise was itself not without political cost). Capital, resurgent, hasreclaimed a great deal of ground, but that doesnt erase the fact of the priorstruggles. Indeed, our situation is particularly difficult because there has been a timein which basics such as housing, education, health, food, and work were understoodand treated as rights. Unfortunately, now is not that time.Although the Left failed in 2008, new possibilities emerged as academics and

activists turned again to the idea of communism. These possibilities have beenamplified by the new cycle of struggles weve seen in Wisconsin, Canada, Egypt,Spain, Greece, Turkey, and with the Occupy movement. Part of the new appeal of theidea of communism is that communism is the one word we have that bodes no

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compromise with capital and that also asserts a powerful alternative. Linked to classstruggle, the smashing of the bourgeois state, and the abolition of capitalists as aclass, communism is more than social-democratic compromise, poststructuralistpluralization, and anarchist insurrection. Instead of a politics thought primarily interms of resistance, playful and momentary aesthetic disruptions, the immediatespecificity of local projects, and struggles for hegemony within a democratic milieu,the horizon of communism impresses on us the necessity of eliminating capitalism andcreating global practices and institutions of egalitarian cooperation. It turns us awayfrom lifestyle changes, general inclusion, and momentary calls for awareness andtoward militant opposition, tight organizational forms, and coordinated strategies forsecuring the peoples control of the means of production. In contrast with anarchismsinsistence on individuality, communism prioritizes solidarity.For Marx, proletariat names capitalisms self-creation of what destroys it. This

what that destroys capitalism is a collective subject, a force no longer dispersed inindividual and local acts of smashing, sabotage, and disruption but concentrated insolidarity. But how does this collective subject abolish capitalism? It cant be throughdestruction alone. The normal operation of the capitalist system is characterized byuncertainty and instability, a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity,over-production, crisis and stagnation (Marx 2008, 275). Contemporary capitalismhas refined its capacity for wealth destruction: over $34 trillion of market value waslost in the financial crisis of 2008. In the course of the recession that followed, therich got richer and the poor got poorer: the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of theincome gains made between 2009 and 2011 (Kavoussi 2013). Not only was the 1percent better able to weather the crisis than the rest of us but it was also able toincrease its share.According to Marx, the capitalist cycle of creative destruction is brought to an end

by the proletariat, but not by the working class organized as workersthey arealready organized as workers in the factory, which enables them to become consciousof their material conditions and the need to combine into unions. The abolition ofcapitalism depends on the organization of the class as a party, a solidary politicalassociation that cuts across workplace, sector, region, and nation. The working class,as a class, is implicated in the success or stability of capitalism; capitalism configuresits struggles with the bourgeoisie. The party, however, takes as its horizoncapitalisms superseding by communism. The party is necessary because class struggleis not simply economic struggle; its political struggle.Consider the famous passage from The German Ideology: We call communism the

real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs (Marx and Engels 1994,120). How should we understand this? Not as immediate insurrection or asprefiguration but rather as the expansion of voluntary cooperation. I say this becauseMarx explains that the conditions of this movement [we call communism] result frompremises now in existence. The premises he is discussing involve the multiplicationof productive force through the cooperation of different individuals as thiscooperation is determined by the division of labor and not as an effect of peoplesown united power. Abolishing determination by the division of labor is a matter ofself-conscious collective action wherein cooperation is not forcedis not out of ourcontrolbut is instead willed commonly. Cooperation and concentration become

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self-conscious and willed rather than unconscious and determined. As the movementthat abolishes the present state of affairs, communism expands voluntarycooperation.In capitalist society this expansion of voluntary as opposed to compulsory

cooperation happens through the party. An organization premised on solidarity, theparty holds open a political space for the production of a common political will, a willirreducible to the capitalist conditions in which the majority of people findthemselves forced to sell their labor power. Where work is obligatory anddetermined, membership in the party is voluntary, the willed formation of unitedpower. Among its members, the party replaces competition with solidarity.That class struggle is political means that it exceeds the affirmation of people as

workers with particular interests and extends to the critical assessment of thisposition as itself the result of inequality and exploitation. Differently put, theworking class is a subject of capitalism. It is constrained within a field or discourseconfigured by and for capitalists as a class; it gets its position from within this field.So it might refuse and resist, sabotage and strike, but all these actions are stillconfined within a field given by capital, configured for its interests and on its behalf.To be another kind of subjectthe subject of another field, discourse, or politicsrequires a break or twist, a shift to another field, the field of the party.6

The party is more than an outgrowth or extension of labor unions (this much atleast should be uncontroversial, given the importance of the peasantry in Communistparties as well as the wide variety of groups founded by Communist parties). Theparty is a form for abolishing capitalism and ushering in communism; it occupies theplace of division, holding it open for a new collective political subject (for classicalMarxism this was the proletariat; in The Communist Horizon I argue for the peopleas the rest of usin each instance, though, subjectification is a possibility,not an empirical given). At different points over the past hundred years, the partyhas attempted to abolish capitalism and usher in communism in various ways: bythe revolutionary seizure of the state, participation in parliamentary processes, thetraining of cadres, and the education of the masses in order to be prepared whenthe time comes. The Communist party has never been an organization for simplyachieving a set of economic reforms aimed at restraining capitalisms extremes andproviding workers with welfare guarantees. That this is the case is clear when wenote the justified sense of betrayal voiced by communists when their parties havecompromised and retreated. They feel betrayed because the party gave way oncommunist desire.The party is necessary because the people are split. We are split by the way we are

givenpositionedwithin capitalism. We are situated within a field that tells us whowe are and what we can be, that establishes the matrix of our desire (ieks

6. Alain Badiou (2009, 8) has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notesthe internal split in the working class between its true political identity and its latentcorruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices. He writes, The practical (historical)working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of its specificbourgeois inversion This unity of opposites is determined by the general bourgeois space(9). Also, The bourgeoisie makes a subject the subjective effect of their force lies in thedivided people (42).

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definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle.7 Theparty asserts this truth: it speaks from the position of this truth and offers anotherfield of possibilities, a discourse for another subject (iek 2002, 1879). In contrastand in opposition to capitalist desire, the party opens up a terrain for the desire ofanother subjecta collective, political subject. The party doesnt know everything;it provides a form for the knowledge we gain through experience and that we analyzefrom the perspective of the communist horizon.This is rather abstract and probably pretty unsatisfying to people who want to know

what the kind of party I have in mind will look like, how it will be organized, and howsuch organization could in any way be adequate to our circumstances, given the wayglobal capitalism is organized as a global financial system. Leo Panitch and SamGindin (2013) are helpful here, as they make explicit the inextricably politicaldimension of our current tasks: we cant change the world without taking politicalpower. All we can do is pursue small experiments, the left version of the 1 percentsgating themselves off. We cant take political power if we lack political form. For themost part, our problem is less one of organizational details than it is solidary politicalwill. As the will emerges, people will figure out the structure in light of thechallenges we face: expanding militant pressure in ways that inspire and educatecadres while at the same time straining the resources of the state and breaking theconfidence of the financial sector; abolishing private property and the capitalistbanking system while advancing international coordination in an uneven environ-ment; increasing popular support and developing a program for addressing commonconcerns over the environment, health, transportation, communication, food,housing, and education. A five- or ten-year plan for getting from here to there couldbe helpful. An alliance of the radical Left or, better, a new Communist party couldgrow out of the concentrated forces of already existing groups, from militants skilledat direct action to artists adept with symbols and slogans to parties experienced atorganizing to issue groups knowledgeable about specific areas of concern. Such aconcentration would provide people who want to be engaged in radical politics butwho arent sure what to do with a place to go, a place to start.At a minimal level, if we are to have a chance of taking power, of reformatting the

basic conditions under which we live and work, we have to share a name in commonas a fundamental marker of division. If not, our names will be given to us by capital,which will seek to fragment and distract us. In the movements of the last few years,weve seen recognitions of the power and the need for a name in common as a markerof divisionOccupy is a clear example, yet across the spectrum of the Left, peopledisavow it.In addition to needing a name in common, we need to know whom we can trust,

and we need to extend the bonds of trust beyond local ties and small networks. Anabsence of solidarity may be the biggest challenge right now insofar as withoutsolidarity a common will cannot emerge. Defeat, betrayal, and fear as well asongoing patterns of sexism, racism, and homophobia have made us deeply suspicious.One way a party helps deal with this is by explicit criteria for membership and byexpectations for its members. Another way is through a cellular structure that

7. See my discussion in Zizeks Politics (Dean 2006).

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ensures that each person is connected to a known group of others to whom she or heis accountable. And still another way is to acknowledge different skills and expertiseby delegating taskswe dont each need to know what every other person is doing.Trusting others skills and knowledge is essential if we are to form ourselves into apolitical force capable of addressing global capital. This suggests the utility ofworking groups in multiple locales and issue areasgroups with enough autonomy tobe responsive and enough direction to carry out a common purpose, which itselfwould have to be hashed out and to which all would have to be committed.I have suggested a name in common and some basic structural components

involving a membership organized in cells, the delegation of tasks, and the followingof a common purpose. The idea behind this rudimentary sketch is that the party is apolitical form of commitment, a solidarity that requires of members a willingness toput aside endless self-assertion and to admit that pulling together is more importantthan insisting on ones own uniqueness.To conclude, here are questions that the party form forces us to answer:

1. How do we imagine the world? Are we doomed to continue down a pathdetermined for us? Do we take refuge in a left realist view that tells us the timeis not right? Do we conform to communicative capitalisms promise that anotherworld is possible through a cool new app? Or do we embrace uncertainty and dothe impossible, with recourse not to pure voluntarism but to the recognition ofthe ultimately open character of the world in which we participate?

2. How do we imagine politics? Do we take for granted the political systems we haveand position ourselves within them, repeating time and again the small momentsof rebellion that let us sleep at night?

3. What do we want? Do we want an end to exploitation, the abolition of privateproperty, a system of shared responsibility for production and distribution? Orhave the last thirty years sunk in too deep, filling us with doubt and making ussuspect that, yes, its true, there is no alternative to capitalism, lets just make itnot so bad for people like us?

4. What is the relation between means and ends? What is the relation between theactions we design, the events in which we participate, the texts we write andcirculate, and the world we want to bring into being? What is the plan, the endgame, the relation between actions over space and time?

5. Do we dare to avow power, to enact a political association that does not imagineitself as the whole of community or as idealized friendship but that instead restson fighting side by side for an emancipated and egalitarian political, economic,and social formation?

References

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AbstractReferences