7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 1/10

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrmx20

Download by: [University of Liverpool] Date: 07 October 2015, At: 07:02

Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

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

Red, Black, and Green

 Jodi Dean

To cite this article: Jodi Dean (2015) Red, Black, and Green, Rethinking Marxism, 27:3, 396-404,DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2015.1042694

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042694

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 95

View related articles

View Crossmark data

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 2/10

Red, Black, and Green

 Jodi Dean

This essay responds to the commentaries on the talks Stephen Healy and I delivered 

during the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, as well as to Healy ’s 

own talk. Rather than persisting in an understanding of left politics that is little more

than a liberal emphasis on individual choice, participation, and pluralization,

communists need to think and act in terms of building and exercising political power.

Fortunately, we are seeing left political advances as ever more segments come

together in a struggle for political power. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and 

other efforts indicate that the party remains a viable form for thinking and acting

 politically. It’s time to take up the challenge of actively constructing a political

collectivity with the will and mass to fight for an egalitarian world. The party doesn’t

 prefigure this world but shows the gap between the world we have and the world we

can desire.

Key Words: Communism, Communist Party, Division, Politics, Struggle

In   “The Party and Communist Solidarity,”   I urge communists to take up again thepolitical form of the party. Rather than persisting in an understanding of left politicsthat is little more than a liberal emphasis on individual choice, participation, andpluralization (and arguably   less than   this, insofar as liberals at least recognize therole of law and the state), communists need to think and act in terms of building andexercising political power. For too long, left politics in the United States, UK, and EUhas mirrored neoliberal economics, urging decentralization, flexibility, and innova-tion. Even the neoliberal push to privatize is reflected in left politics: not only do wehear ad infinitum that the personal is political, but the micropolitics of self-transformation and DIY takes the place of building and occupying institutions withduration. In this vein, some on the left have abandoned social change entirely. Waryof   “totalizing visions”   (Helepololei), they cede society and the state to a capitalistclass that acts as a global political class intent on extending its reach into andstrengthening its hold over our lives and futures.

Fortunately,   here and now , we are seeing left political advances as ever moresegments on the left come together in a struggle for political power. The success of Syriza in Greece, the rise of Podemos in Spain, and the efforts of Die Linke in

Germany and Left Unity in the UK indicate that the party remains a viable form forthinking and acting politically. Indeed, these achievements attest to the vitality of the party form as a site of political experimentation. Stathis Kouvelakis describesSyriza as   “a hybrid party, a synthesis party, with one foot in the tradition of the GreekCommunist movement and its other foot in the novel forms of radicalism that have

© 2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

Rethinking Marxism, 2015Vol. 27, No. 3, 396–404, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042694

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 3/10

emerged in this new period”   (Budgen and Kouvelakis  2015). Far removed from therigid, unitary fantasy to which some in this symposium remain fearfully attached (seeMiller 2015), the party is a flexible organization of political struggle.

Mimmo Porcaro (2012), Jan Rehmann (2013), and Peter Thomas (2013) offer varyingbut related theses regarding this creative dimension of the party.1 An insight theyshare concerns the party’s reemergence in the context of the limits of movementsand how movements themselves reformat the party. The party returns as a questionwhen the Left realizes that neither resistance nor prefiguration nor multiplication issufficient for breaking the hold of capitalist state power and producing a newemancipatory egalitarian social arrangement. No class simply relinquishes power. Andno assortment of disconnected enterprises—no matter how communal—convergesautomatically into communism. Whatever poses a threat to capital and the state can

expect to encounter absorption or repression or, most likely, both. How, then, shouldthe Left respond? Through scattershot initiatives that leave the basic structuresintact while hoping for some kind of magical convergence? Or through organizedaction that connects multiple efforts into common struggle? I emphasize the partybecause the party pushes communists to strategize: what does winning look like, andwhat does it take to win?

A defining characteristic of capitalism is the differentiation between state andeconomy.2 More than an economic system for the production and circulation of value,capitalism refers to a form of society (Marx   2008, 14). In contrast with, say,feudalism, capitalist society relies on the differentiation of the economic systemfrom the political system. That state and economy are differentiated does not meanthat they are separate from one another. States are deeply involved in economic life:they issue and maintain currencies, create and preserve property and markets, deviseand extend the policy infrastructure of global trade, and so on. The differentiationbetween state and economy also does not imply complete independence, as if statesthemselves were not economic actors with, for example, massive purchasing,employing, and investing power. Rather, under capitalism the differentiation betweenstate and economy points to different relations to capital accumulation, with thestate focused generally on the terms and conditions of accumulation and theeconomy focused on the circulatory processes of accumulation itself.

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012, 4) speak of the   “relative autonomy” of capitaliststates. Political logics, rationalities, or governmentalities (to use Foucault’s term) areirreducible to economic considerations. Capitalist states have capacities to act onbehalf of the system as a whole—capacities anchored in an array of institutions, laws,and policies. At the same time, they are constrained by their dependence on capitalaccumulation. States secure and reproduce capitalism, whether by protectingcapitalists from themselves through taxes and regulatory oversight, protectingcapitalists from the people through aggressive policing and surveillance, or protecting

people from capitalists in those increasingly frequent emergency responses that havetaken the place of planning and social welfare.

1. See also the debate between Gavin Walker and Jason E. Smith in  Theory & Event 16 (4).2. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012, 3) provide a clear explication of this obvious althoughfrequently overlooked point.

CRAFTING COMMUNISM 397

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 4/10

The state—particularly in its contemporary extended, decentralized, and net-worked form—gives capitalism its durability. It responds to capitalism’s inevitablecrises, keeping the system running even when its components break down. Under

globalized capitalism, an international policy architecture aimed at securing capitalflow provides massive advantages to multinational banks and corporations. Thestructural adjustment policies and austerity measures imposed by the IMF, WorldBank, European Central Bank, and U.S. Treasury determine (although not fully orexclusively) the lives of billions of people, impacting basic social structures such aseducation and medical care, property, markets for agricultural products, transporta-tion, currency value, energy, and the availability of potable water. The viability of communism, as an egalitarian political and economic arrangement anchored in thesovereignty of the people and in production based on need, depends on seizing,

dismantling, or redirecting this system.Naomi Klein (2014, 66–9) tells a story that illustrates the limits the global tradearchitecture imposes on local actors. In 2009, the Canadian province of Ontarioannounced the Green Energy and Green Economy Act. Its goal was to shift Ontarioaway from dependence on coal. As Klein explains,   “The legislation created what isknown as a feed-in tariff program, which allowed renewable energy providers to sellpower back to the grid.”   A key element of the plan was ensuring that   “localmunicipalities, co-ops, and Indigenous communities could all get into the renewableenergy market” (67). This was to be achieved by a provision requiring that a certainpercentage of materials and workforce come from Ontario. Although there werevarious setbacks and complications, after several years the legislation seemed tohave been largely successful. That’s when Japan and the EU went to the World Bankwith the complaint that the local materials and workforce requirement discriminatedagainst equipment producers outside Ontario. The World Bank agreed; the buy localprovisions were illegal.

The absence of a powerful Left enables the political Right (in part by shifting whathad been the center). The intensified inequality of the last forty years of neoliberalism testifies to the impact of left political defeat.3 Neoliberalism’ssubjection of all of society to its economic criteria of efficiency and competitivenesshas been carried out as a political project.4 The political system has been theinstrument through which neoliberalism has dismantled the achievements of thewelfare state, installed competition in ever more domains, expanded the financesector, and imposed austerity.

This is the setting, then, for my appeal to the Left to assemble itself into a party.Key determinants of our lives occur behind our backs—currency valuations, monetarypolicies, trade agreements, energy concessions, data harvesting. To insist on apolitics focused on isolating and archiving singular micropractices abstracted fromtheir global capitalist context obscures the workings of state and economy as a

capitalist system, hinders the identification of this system as the site of ongoing harm(exploitation, expropriation, and injustice), and disperses political energies that

3. A   “melancholic loser’s slump,” as Ramsey (2015) terms it.4. Some of the most compelling versions of this story come from David Harvey (2005), GérardDuménil and Dominique Lévy (2004), and Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (2011).

398 DEAN

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 5/10

could be more effective if concentrated. More fundamentally, in treating economicpractices as the primary locus of left politics, such an insistence effaces the gapbetween politics and economics such that questions of strategy, of how to win, are

displaced. Morrow and Brault supply a striking example of this effacement when theyask,   “What is communism for, if not to improve our everyday lives?”   Communism,which previous generations rendered as the world-historical struggle of the prole‐tariat, diminishes into yet another option for individual self-improvement; theabolition of exploitation, expropriation, and injustice replaced by economic deter-minations of immediate satisfaction. As Ramsey rightly notes, Healy similarlysubstitutes economic alternatives for political antagonism.

1

Two ideas voiced in the present discussion impress the urgency of the need for a leftparty oriented toward communism: racism (Buck   2015) and the Anthropocene(Healy 2015).

Given anthropogenic climate change, the stakes of contemporary politics are almostunimaginably high. They range from the continued investment in extractive industriesand fossil fuels constitutive of the carbon-combustion complex (see Oreskes andConway 2014), to the dislocations accompanying mass migration in the wake of floodsand droughts to the racist response of states outside what Christian Parenti (2011, 9)

calls the   “Tropic of Chaos” (the band around the   “belt of economically and politicallybattered post-colonial states girding the planet’s mid-latitudes,” where climate changeis   “beginning to hit hard”), all the way to human extinction. That one city, state, orcountry brings carbon emissions under control—while certainly a step in the rightdirection—may be irrelevant from the standpoint of overall warming. Perhaps itscarbon-emitting industries were shipped elsewhere. Perhaps another country chose toexpand its own drilling operations. Climate change forces us to acknowledge that wecan’t build new worlds (Helepololei). We live in one world, the heating up of whichthreatens humans and other species. Not all communities, economies, or ways of life

are compatible. Those premised on industries and practices that continue tocontribute to planetary warming have to change significantly, and soon. Forcing thatchange is the political challenge of our time.

Given the persistence of racialized violence and the operation of the state as aninstrument for the maintenance not only of capitalist modes of production but alsoand concomitantly of racialized hierarchy, the challenges of organizing politicallyacross issues and identities are almost insurmountably daunting. No wonder the Leftresorts to moralism and self-care instead. It’s easier to catalog difference than it is tobuild up a Left strong enough to exercise power, especially given the traversal of 

state power by transnational corporations, trade, and treaties. It’s also easier to goalong with the dominant ideology of individualism, which enjoins us first andforemost to look after ourselves, than it is to put ourselves aside and focus onformulating a strategy for using collective power to occupy, reconfigure, and redirectinstitutions at multiple levels. Here again, not every vision of community iscompatible with every other. Those premised on fantasies of racial, religious, ethnic,

CRAFTING COMMUNISM 399

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 6/10

or linguistic purity directly oppose those premised on diversity. Those premised onreproducing structures of class hierarchy directly oppose those insisting on equality.

If something like a party of the radical Left can stretch beyond Greece and Spain, if 

it can be imagined in North America, it will only be possible as a combination of communism, antiracism, and climate activism. I use   “red, black, and green”   as aheuristic for the coalition of concerns necessary for such a party. I invoke theheuristic here to double down against critics who prefer a thousand alternatives tothe party form. A thousand alternatives (see Healy 2015) is no alternative. It leavesthe political system we have—the one that puts all its force behind the preservationof capitalist class interests—intact. Some ideas need to be chosen, systematized intoa program, and defended.

Consciously reiterating the colors of the Black Liberation Flag, the red, black, and greenheuristic positions itself within the histories of communist, people’s, and anticolonialstruggles. Left Unity in the UK uses red, black, and green in their logo to suggest a similarconstellation. The colors don’t have a fixed meaning; they have appeared differently inthe histories of emancipatory egalitarian struggle. In recent struggles, red suggests apolitics against debt, austerity, and corporate personhood and allies with anticapitalismand communism as well. Black pays tribute to the IWW, anarchists, black power, andmovements against aggressive policing, incarceration, and the murder of AfricanAmericans. Green points to climate justice, an approach to climate change that exceedscapitalist emphases on carbon markets and green commodities to encompass thedismantling of the carbon-based economy and the global redistribution of wealth.

The three colors should not be read as three separate issues or groups. They shouldrather be understood as a kind of mutually supporting and inflecting scaffold. Anequitable response to the changing climate, for example, is incompatible with thecontinuation of capitalism. A communism anchored in extractive industry is incom-patible with the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Antiracism directsour attention to those most likely to be exploited and sacrificed in market-drivenschemes to address climate change. It also marks the fact of the history of divisionswithin the Left that have stood in the way of our forging collective counterpower.

Here and now, movements are pushing the organizational convergence of 

communist, climate, and race politics. Moral Mondays, the ongoing protests in NorthCarolina, bring together an array of political concerns around racial justice, cuts topublic services, and the environment. These protests include marches and acts of civil disobedience. The heartbreaking reminder that   “Black lives matter” calls for theabolition of structures of institutionalized power that continue to impoverish,imprison, and kill black people everywhere. Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in thewake of the murder of Michael Brown, have turned the spotlight on the militarizationof the police and the buildup of state forces for the defense of the wealthy and whiteagainst the proletarianized—poor, brown, and black. Similar buildups of police

borders in the United States and abroad attempt to push back the many on the movein response to the  “catastrophic convergence” of decades of violent expropriation andclimate change (Parenti 2011). The demand for climate justice places the economicinequalities accompanying and constitutive of capitalist   “development” at the centerof global discussions of climate change. Images from New Orleans after HurricaneKatrina and terms like   “sacrifice zones”   help articulate the two. Every time an

400 DEAN

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 7/10

activist reminds us that issues can’t be considered in isolation or every time a studentrepeats the mantra of intersectionality, the Left is instructing itself to makeconnections and formulate a politics capable of grasping complexity and of changing

the world. The party is a form for that connecting. It provides a location where wesee and relate to ourselves as comrades, as solidary members of a fighting collective.

2

In the rest of this response, I address division.First, Healy’s close engagement with the idea of the communist horizon is not close

enough. He omits the key element of my rendition of   “horizon”: namely, division

(Dean 2012). The party is a political form that occupies and maintains the divisionthat establishes where we are. I emphasize   “occupying” division to mark the  political

aspect of the party form. Here I agree with Carl Schmitt’s notorious characterizationof the political in terms of the intensity of the divide between friend and enemy. Incontrast to Schmitt, however, I reject the presumption of a   “unified, homogeneouspeople as the precondition of a nonpartisan form of constituent power,”   insistinginstead that division goes   “all the way down”   (Bargu  2014, 725). Division itself iscommon, a universal and irreducible feature of our condition.5 The communist partymaintains division as it keeps open the gap of collective desire for collectivity. This iswhat distinguishes the communist party from other parties (and what explains thedeep sense of betrayal Communists have felt when their parties have failed).

Second and consequently, the locus of disagreement between me and Madra andÖzselçuk is not whether there is division in communism—we all agree that there is,that antagonism is fundamental; the question is whether that division is reducible to astruggle over the surplus. This strikes me as far too narrow to encompass theantagonism that will persist under communism, and it also presumes in advance toknow which antagonism will present itself as primary. On the one hand, given thatcommunism should involve the abolition of the value form,   “surplus” will likely need tobe rethought. On the other, given the press of climate change, it seems that a whole

slew of other questions would force themselves on even those already committed toemancipatory egalitarian social arrangements: What should be done for those whosehabitats become uninhabitable? Do occupants have exclusive claim to the land theyoccupy? Which resources may be claimed as commons and how far does this claimextend? More important, though, is the status of this disagreement. Given the defeatof communism at the end of the 1980s, worry about the division that persists undercommunism is misplaced. What matters here and now is organizing against capitalismsuch that we are in a position where the answer to this debate will actually matter.

Third, I want to take up Ramsey’s call to associate the party with a   “new and

emancipatory division of labor”   and to understand this division as the necessaryeffect of the party on its activists, the work of division back upon us as we engage incollective struggle. The perspective of the communist party, then, is the perspective

5. See James Martel’s (2014) discussion of this element of my account in   The Communist

Horizon.

CRAFTING COMMUNISM 401

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 8/10

of collectivity as it cuts through the individuality capitalist society demands. Thecommunist party doesn’t know what this perspective is; it doesn’t fill it in withsubstantial content. Rather, it maintains this perspective as a gap.

Psychoanalysis helps explain the idea. In his seminar on the four fundamentalconcepts of psychoanalysis, Lacan associates the Freudian unconscious with a gap: agap where something happens but remains unrealized (Lacan 1998, 22). It’s not thatthis something is or is not there, that it exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, the unrealizedmakes itself felt; it exerts a pressure. The party is a political form for this press of theunrealized, enabling it to be concentrated and directed in one way rather than another.

For example, the party presses forward the opening produced by movements. It maydo this by having personnel in place that can turn a movement’s opening to legislative orpolicy advantage. The party may do this via writers and commentators pressing a

specific interpretation of the movement. At any rate, that the subject of politics is thecollective people means that its actions cannot be reduced to those associated withindividual agency, actions like choice or decision. Instead, the collective subjectimpresses itself through ruptures and breaks and the retroactive attribution of thesebreaks to the subject they express.6 The punctuality of the subject could suggest that itis only evental, only disruptive, utterly disconnected from any body, creation,institution, or advance and thus without substance or content. But this would ignorethe persistence of the subject in the press of the unrealized. This persistence needs abody, a carrier. Without a carrier, it dissipates into the manifold of potentiality.Nevertheless, with a carrier some potentiality is diminished; some possibility iseliminated; some closure is effected. This loss is the subject’s condition of possibility,the division constitutive of subjectivity. Political forms—parties, states, guerrilla armies,even leaders—situate themselves within this division. Although they can be and oftenare fetishized (positioned so as to obscure the loss or perfectly remedy it), the fact of fetishization should not deflect from the prior condition of the gap and its occupation.

The history of communism in the United States supplies an example of the work of division. In the early 1930s, a publication of the Communist Party USA, the   Party 

Organizer , filled its pages with articles on how to recruit and retain new members.Month after month the writers—many anonymous, many district-level organizers—

expressed excitement about gains in new members and dismay over the party’sfailure to retain them. They worried that their meetings were too long, that theydidn’t start and finish on time, that they weren’t   “snappy enough”  (CPUSA 1931b,16–9). They advised one another on the best design for a party meeting: no more thantwo hours, not to exceed two and a half hours, three hours at the absolute limit.District organizers were advised to pick up members at their houses and bring them tomeetings. Members were reminded to talk to new recruits. The CPUSA organizerswriting in the magazine sensed the   “enthusiasm and earnest desire of the workers”but blamed themselves for the fact that workers dropped out:   “The recruit comes

into the average unit of the Party and finds there a group of strangers speaking ajargon which he does not understand. No one pays much attention to him and he istherefore left very much to himself   …  enthusiasm cools, he becomes discouraged,loses his enthusiasm and finally drops out of the Party” (17).

6. I develop this point in my essay   “Commune, Party, State” (Dean 2014).

402 DEAN

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 9/10

“Jargon”   is a symptom of the problem.   “Jargon”   means that the people and theparty are not speaking the same language. It marks a division between workers andparty members, even when party members are workers. The language that members

share, the ideas that enable them to see the world in terms other than capitalism’s,

enhance and also hinder a sense of belonging at the same time. The very activitiesthey pursue as Communists—reading, discussing, meeting, leafleting, organizing,training—separate them from the workers. What makes them Communists, whatseparates them from capitalism’s constraints as it provides them with politicalcapacity and conviction, inscribes a gap in the givenness of economic belonging. Theyare not just economic producers trying to improve their everyday lives; they arepolitical producers creating collective power.

One recommendation for overcoming this division is imagining oneself as a

comrade, not a professor (CPUSA 1931b, 18). Organizers are advised to speak   “notas a soap boxer or a seasoned Communist theorist”   but rather to   “be one of theworkers, which indeed you are”   (CPUSA   1931a). Other recommendations includebetter development of cadres and more effort at education. Still others highlight akind of transferential relation that can arise from  “visiting the workers at least two orthree times a week, getting to know them by name and their individual problems, andhave them call you by name and feel you are one of them”   (Tate   1932, 6–7).Imagining oneself as a comrade, particularly when accompanied by instructions to dowhat one would normally do, involves a reflexive turn toward the everyday as one

looks at what one does from the party perspective.The same desire that leads people to join the party separates them from their

everyday practices of provisioning. Once they have become Communists, they seethemselves and the world from the perspective opened up by the party. They look atthe world differently from how they did before. Yet they also have to continue toimagine themselves as the workers they are, bound to the economic struggle, andhence the advice:   “Little by little from the conditions in the shops go on to the speedup, wage cuts, unemployment and then to the need for organization. Don’t appear tooinsistent at first” (1931a, 19). The organizer has to begin from the perspective of the

worker and guide the worker to a shift in perspective, to seeing from a different place.Healy speaks of envisioning possibilities and recognizing possibilities. Who is

envisioning and recognizing? My claim is that this   “who”   is the party: the unstatedpremise of left attention to previously overlooked practices or to the production of new knowledge is that there is some body, association, or group that will see, know,and act differently, who will put the insights to work. Without this collective body,seeing, knowledge, and acting remain individual. Moreover, antagonistic relationsescape from view, displaced by a multitude of possibilities.

For over thirty years, the party has been extracted from the aspirations and

accomplishments it enabled. Even as dogma has been uniformly qualified with“party,”  dispersed yet ubiquitous left dogmatism has turned the so-called obsoles-cence of the party form into the primary tenet of its catechism. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, and reimagined, except forthe communist party. It’s time to put this nursery tale aside and take up the challengeof actively constructing a political collectivity with the will and mass to fight for an

CRAFTING COMMUNISM 403

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5

7/24/2019 Red, Black and Green - Jodi Dean

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/red-black-and-green-jodi-dean 10/10

egalitarian world. The party doesn’t prefigure this world but impresses upon us thegap between the world we have and the world we can desire.

References

Bargu, B. 2014. The predicaments of left-Schmittianism. Special issue,  South Atlantic

Quarterly  113 (4): 713–28.Buck, P. D. 2015. Whiteness, communism, and possibility.  Rethinking Marxism 27 (3):

378–80.Budgen, S., and S. Kouvelakis. 2015. Greece: Phase one.   Jacobin, 22 January.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/phase-one/# .CPUSA (Communist Party USA). 1931a. Examine our factory work. Party Organizer ,no.4

(June), 19.———. 1931b. Retaining and developing new members of the party.  Party Organizer,

no. 14 (November), 16–19.Dean, J. 2012.   The communist horizon. London: Verso.———. 2014. Commune, party, state.   Viewpoint, 9 September.  https://viewpoint-

mag.com/2014/09/09/commune-party-state.Duménil, G., and D. Lévy. 2004.   Capital resurgent. Trans. D. Jeffers. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press.Hacker, J. S., and P. Pierson. 2011. Winner-take-all politics . New York: Simon and Schuster.Harvey, D. 2005.  A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Healy, S. 2015. Communism as a mode of life.  Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 343–

56.Helepololei, J. 2015. A plurality of communisms.  Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 368–70.Klein, N. 2014.   This changes everything. New York: Simon and Schuster.Lacan, J. 1998. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.  Seminar XI. Trans.

A. Sheridan, ed. J.-A. Miller. New York: W.W. Norton.Madra, Y. M., and C. Özselçuk. 2015. The party and postcapitalist politics: A missed

encounter? Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 360–63.Martel, J. 2014. Division is common.   South Atlantic Quarterly  113 (4): 701–12.Marx, K. 2008.  Capital. Abr. ed. Ed. D. McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Miller, E. 2015. Anticapitalism or postcapitalism? Both!   Rethinking Marxism  27 (3):

364–

67.Morrow, O., and C. Brault. 2015. More-than-capitalist landscapes of communistbecoming. Rethinking Marxism  27 (3): 371–74.

Oreskes, N., and E. M. Conway. 2014.  The collapse of Western civilization. New York:Columbia University Press.

Panitch, L., and S. Gindin. 2012.  The making of global capitalism. London: Verso.Parenti, C. 2011. Tropic of chaos: Climate change and the new geography of violence.

New York: Nation Books.Porcaro, M. 2012. Occupy Lenin.  Socialist Register , no. 49: 84–97.Ramsey, J. G. 2015. How do communists party?  Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 381–84.Rehmann, J. 2013. Connective party or return to a  “war of maneuver”? Bullet, no. 865

(16 August). http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/865.php.Tate, S. 1932. Experiences of neighborhood concentration.   Party Organizer , no. 5

(August), 6–7.Thomas, P. D. 2013. The communist hypothesis and the question of organization.

Theory & Event 16 (4).

404 DEAN

   D  o  w  n   l  o

  a   d  e   d   b  y   [   U  n   i  v  e  r  s   i   t  y  o   f   L   i  v  e  r  p  o  o   l   ]  a   t   0   7  :   0   2   0   7   O  c   t  o   b  e  r

   2   0   1   5