Oona Morrow & Claire Brault - More-than-Capitalist Landscapes of Communist Becoming

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Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

More-than-Capitalist Landscapes of CommunistBecoming

Oona Morrow & Claire Brault

To cite this article:Oona Morrow & Claire Brault (2015) More-than-Capitalist

Landscapes of Communist Becoming, Rethinking Marxism, 27:3, 371-374, DOI:10.1080/08935696.2015.1042689

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042689

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

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More-than-Capitalist Landscapes ofCommunist Becoming

Oona Morrow and Claire Brault

This commentary responds to Jodi Deans call to bring back the Communist party

and Stephen Healys call to practice communism as a mode of life, as seen in their

exchange at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. Employing

Gibson-Grahams diverse economies perspective, we reframe communism as abundant

and everyday rather than the property of a particular party. Drawing on examples

of collective self-provisioning in our activist and research practices, we argue that

everyday communist practices are critical for creating a better world in the present

as well as for sustaining oppositional struggles for a better future.

Key Words: Diverse Economies, Communism, Everyday Life, Political Economy, Self-

Provisioning

Jodi Deans and Stephen Healys thought-provoking talks raise many questions about

the times, spaces, and social formations necessary for economic and social change.

Here we reflect on the resonance and dissonance between Deans project and

our own.1 We wholeheartedly agree with Deans definition of communism as the

expansion of voluntary cooperation.At the same time, we do not wish to accept the

authority that Dean would grant to a party to police the boundaries of communism

and exclude seemingly less militant practices like collective provisioning. Like Healy

(2015, 353), we are interested in encouraging everyday habits and practices in which

we answer the question of how to live in common.

We argue that everydaycommunist class processes, such as cooperative food provisioning, play an important

role in creating the conditions of existence and the desire for communism. We are not

holding these up as blueprints for life after capitalism but rather as sites of embodied

learning, for feeling, doing, and desiring communism as a mode of life. Using a

diverse economies approach, we seek to help communist practices and imaginaries

proliferate by recognizing them in landscapes of daily life rather than in an ever-

receding horizon. To conclude and illustrate this position, we apply our approach by

2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

1. We are writing as two individual members of the Community Economies Collective (CEC). Ourcomments here are not intended to represent the CEC as a whole. Each time the pronoun weis

used in what follows, it will refer to the way the two of us position ourselves with respect to the

Dean/Healy debate. Precisely because the CEC is not a party like the one Dean calls for and does

not have one ideological line that various members must adhere to, we are glad to express our

own voices as two researchers and activists.

Rethinking Marxism, 2015

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examining spaces of collective provisioning in our own research and activist

experiences.

Dean (2015) asks a number of engaging questions that offer opportunities to ground

communist politics in lived feelings, everyday practices, and action research. Sheasks how we may embrace uncertainty and do the impossible, with the recognition

of the ultimately open character of the world in which we participate(372) and how

we can practice collective action wherein cooperation is not forcedis not out of

our controlbut is instead willed commonly(338). These questions are among those

that resonate most with us, yet the party is not the answer we propose. We are

interested instead in an approach that creates economic possibility by describing

economic difference. Through action research and collective action, we strive to turn

diverse economic possibilities into a postcapitalist politics of possibility. With activists

and researchers, we work to create situations where solidarity and cooperation can

be learned and practiced. Through participating in cooperative enterprises, we are

learning how commons are negotiated and how surplus is collectively produced and

distributed. In other words, it is by making communist class processes more visible

and accessible that we hope to create the conditions for communism.

Dean (2015, 341) also asks about the relation between the actions we design, the

events in which we participate, the texts we write and circulate, and the world we

want to bring into being. There is an ontological politics to research, writing, and

world making (Law and Urry 2004). Research and activist practices can either help

make communism realizable or place it still further out of reach. Gibson-Graham and

Roelvink (2010, 331) depart from the time-honored but often paralyzing question of

what is to be donein order to marshal examples of what is already being done.

Seeing these examples, as Healy (2015, 350) emphasizes, allows others to politically

organize around communism as something sensible, desirable, practical, and already

here, immanent to our experience.

InThe Communist Horizon Dean uses the term horizon to designate a dimension of

experience that we can never lose.While Dean (2012, 2) insists that the horizon is a

necessary dimension of our actuality and the fundamental division establishing

where we are,she also concedes that we can never reach it.Situating ourselves in

relation to a communist horizon can mean overlooking landscape features wherecommunist practices and desires already exist. Using a diverse economies approach,

we can see communist class processes as part of our actuality and as a significant

feature in our economic landscape. We are interested in thinking about where we

are but also what we are becoming. We are learning to see the horizon and also

the communist landscapes that are already emerging.

At the 2013 Rethinking Marxism conference, Deans talk was accompanied by a

succession of arresting images, among them a photograph of a person wearing a

T-shirt with one of her statements, Goldman Sachs doesnt care if you raise

chickens, printed on it. Although Goldman Sachs can affect our lives in myriadways, their capacity to careis not the metric by which we measure the value of our

lives. We will not join a party that reifies the authority of Goldman Sachs (or of

capitalism) in order to discredit alternatives and dictate where our affective

investments belong. We prefer to care for our chickens and contribute to a

generative, rather than solely reactive, politics of communism. For us, this approach

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offers many more opportunities for the expansion of voluntary cooperation than a

party does.

Gibson-Grahams(2006, 16) research has underscored the ways in which capitalist

economies coexist with diverse economies, including those characterized by com-munist class processes through which surplus is communally produced and collec-

tively distributed. Community-economy scholars explore communist (as well as

other) class processes in household, community, and cooperative enterprises. For

example, Oonas research on urban homesteading (UH) uses a diverse economies

approach to highlight the expansion of voluntary cooperation in food provisioning.

The UH movement promotes self-provisioning practices such as gardening, food

preservation, and chicken and beekeeping (Morrow 2014). For Dean (2015, 333),

these practices are depoliticized into lifestyle choices and represent a lower-cost

version of the 1 percents privatization.

Urban homesteaders have no illusions of becoming self-sufficient, of bringing down

Goldman Sachs with chickens, or of composting their way out of capitalism. When

done in common, their practices represent a prefigurative politics that creates and

nurtures communist habits and desires. UH practices also create a commons of shared

trees, animals, kitchens, gardens, and plants that supports a variety of communist

class processes and enterprises. Cooperative forms of self-provisioning are performed

in community kitchens and shared gardens, in yogurt-making and chicken-keeping

cooperatives, and in canning and harvesting collectives. These collective forms of

provisioning are necessary for living well, now, and they will be necessary in a world

without capitalist economies. They are not forms of privatization but forms of

cooperation. To dismiss chicken keeping and the like as neoliberal, bourgeois, and

individualizing overlooks their necessity and suggests that there is no room for

communism or collective action in quotidian spaces. What is communism for if not to

improve our everyday lives?

It is not only in backyards and community kitchens that communist class processes

are flourishing but also in spaces of public protest and opposition. In these spaces we

see communal processes occurring within and alongside an oppositional politics that

does not call for the authority of a party. For example, during the student strikes in

France (20025), Claire participated in weeks-long campus occupations. Theseoppositional occupations were able to persist for as long as they did because Claire

and others performed collective self-provisioning. They created autonomous univer-

sities with student-run debates and seminars, DIY public dry toilets, walls of free

expression on public squares, and communal cooking and gardening. Practices of

collective provisioning and care are essential for the daily and long-term reproduc-

tion of oppositional politics. These practices of collective provisioning and care were

equally important to sustaining oppositional politics at Occupy Wall Street (Safri

2011). In other words, we dont see an incompatibility between oppositional politics

and cooperative economies.But while we share Deans desire for the expansion of voluntary cooperation,we

are skeptical that the party, with its cadres and cells and claims of speaking the

truth, is the best vehicle for getting there. First, because there is already here:

communist class processes are flourishing in urban commons, cooperative enter-

prises, sites of protest, and egalitarian households. Second, because the party Dean

CRAFTING COMMUNISM 373

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proposes risks closing down the possibility for practicing communism as a mode of

life.Rather than pretending that either the party or, for that matter, the CEC has all

of the answers, we prefer an approach that empowers communities to practice and

examine communist and other class processes in their daily lives. We believe thatpopular education (e.g., tools like Take Back the Economy), action research,

cooperative enterprises, and diverse social movements can make communism more

accessible, visible, and desirable to a wider variety of people than any single party

can. We would like to know where Dean sees communism in our present landscape

and why the party is, in her view, the best vehicle for expanding voluntary

cooperation.

References

Dean, J. 2012. The communist horizon. London: Verso.

. 2015. The party and communist solidarity. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3):

33242.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Gibson-Graham, J. K., and G. Roelvink. 2010. An economic ethics for the Anthro-

pocene.Antipode 41 (1): 32046.

Healy, S. 2015. Communism as a mode of life. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 34356.

Law, J., and J. Urry. 2004. Enacting the social. Economy and Society33 (3): 390

410.Morrow, O. 2014. Urban homesteading: Diverse economies and ecologies of provision-

ing in greater Boston. Ph.D. diss., Clark University.

Safri, M. 2011. Globalizing Zuccotti. Occupy Gazette, 19 October, 15.

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