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Rethinking MarxismA Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

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

The Party and Postcapitalist Politics: A MissedEncounter?

Yahya M. Madra & Ceren zseluk

To cite this article:Yahya M. Madra & Ceren zseluk (2015) The Party andPostcapitalist Politics: A Missed Encounter?, Rethinking Marxism, 27:3, 360-363, DOI:10.1080/08935696.2015.1042704

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The Party and Postcapitalist Politics:A Missed Encounter?

Yahya M. Madra and Ceren zseluk

This essay articulates a disagreement with Jodi Deans assessments of postcapitalist

politics as initially formulated in her book,The Communist Horizon(Verso, 2012), andmore recently in her conversation with Stephen Healy on Crafting Communism at

the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. Contrary to Deans alignment

of postcapitalist politics with a depoliticized individuation, this commentary argues

that postcapitalist politics is necessary for constructing the called-forth party as an

organization that expands class struggle over economy, produces economic solidarity,

and reactivates desire for communal economies while also addressing the irreducib-

ility of class antagonism. This disagreement with Dean is largely shaped by the

different respective ontological stances we assume toward the constitution of

economy.

Key Words: Class Antagonism, Community Economy, Diverse Economy, IntellectualDifference, Postcapitalist Politics

Ontological speculation provides the matrix through which one devises politicalstrategies and then implements them. In her conversation on Crafting a Conversationon Communismwith Stephen Healy, Jodi Dean (2015; see also2012, 37) has alignedpostcapitalist politics with depoliticized localism, individuation, and voluntarismand has opposed it to the communist horizon of party politics. Since Dean (2015, 343),when she looks at the world, sees only an all-encompassing capitalism that

fragments, isolates, and individualizes each and every one of us, the postcapitalistpolitics of constructing community economies can only appear as depoliticized lifestyle choices, a lower-cost version of the 1 percents privatization, or somekind of cool new app purveyed by communicative capitalism. This, in our view,creates a false opposition between the communist horizon of party politics and thecommunist horizon of postcapitalist economic politics operating in a diverseeconomy.

Proceeding from a sharply contrasting ontology of the social, we have a verydifferent understanding of postcapitalist politics which, for us, entails strategicallyoperating in a heterogeneous field of diverse economies (that is, a field of capitalistand noncapitalist forms and of different property regimes, mechanisms of distributionand transaction, and forms of labor and remuneration) with an eye toward building

2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

Rethinking Marxism,2015Vol. 27, No. 3, 360363, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042704

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community and solidarity (in short, communal) economies here and now.1 Postcapi-talist politics does not presume in some cynical manner that capitalist relations donot matter; rather, its working hypothesisis that capitalist relations neither exhaust

nor are able to synthesize the economic field under one consistent logic. Unless thisworking hypothesis is properly recognized and registered, conditions for a productivedialog cannot be obtained. Yet we believe that such an encounter would be valuablefor the communist cause, as there is something that postcapitalist politics can offerfor enriching what we find to be the three important interventions that Dean makesin her essay.

First, Dean (2015, 338) pronounces that class struggle is not simply economicstruggle; its political struggle. She makes this proposition because by economicstruggleshe refers to the compromised struggle between labor and capital along the

wage-profit frontier. But if we take a different and not so narrowly definedconceptualization of the economy and class, we might reverse the formula and writethat class struggle is not simply political struggle; its also economic struggle. Orbetter yet, we might insist that class struggle is a political struggle over theeconomy.

This reformulation necessitates understanding class struggle not in terms of a clashbetween two opposing groups over wage-profit distribution but rather as a process ofstruggling over the question of how to organize the performance and the diverseflows of surplus labor (among which the performance and flows of capitalist surplusvalue is one dominant form). Because attempts to achieve a harmonious institution ofthe diverse flows of this social surplus are constantly disrupted and derailed by aconstitutiveantagonism, class struggle over economy is a permanent process with noultimate instance of resolution. What this notion of class antagonism implies forcommunism is nicely summarized by Stephen Healy (2015, 343) as the constitutiveimpossibility of providing a final answer to the question of how to live in common.In this sense, if communism is not to be yet another imposture of giving a final shapeto the unending conflict over how to organize the economy(343), then we see it asa desire not only for an expansion of voluntary cooperationto use Deans(2015,338) own description of the communist horizonbut also for instituting critical and

material practices, mechanisms, and metrics (see Gibson-Graham, Cameron, andHealy2013) that foreground and patiently encircle the constitutive impossibility offixing once and for all the organization of the appropriation, production, anddistribution of surplus labor. (Capitalism, in contrast, operates through domesticatingand occluding this constitutive impossibility). This latter definition of communismdiffers from that of Deans because it locates antagonism not only between capitalismand communism but also within communism itself.

Such a redefinition of communism also bears implications for Deans (2015, 339)second point: that is, her emphasis on the party as a site for the production of a

common political will,which extends to the production of solidarity in a sustainedmanner and to the cultivation of momentum, duration, [and] a capacity for politicalmemory(337) for the oppositional movements that aim to provide an alternative

1. For a sustained discourse on the differences and similarities between community economiesand solidarity economies as well as for prospects of alliances between them, see Miller (2013).

CRAFTING COMMUNISM 361

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(333). If the party is, as Dean puts it, a site of production that extends to theproduction of solidarity, then the irreducibility of antagonisms that pertain not onlyto the organization of surplus labor flows but also to the various forms of division of

labor would divide the production of solidarity as well.To concretize our point, let us take a closer look at Dean s own suggestions

regarding the organization of production in the party. When she speaks of the basicstructural components involving a membership organized in cellsthat will acknow-ledge different skills and expertise by delegating tasks (Dean 2015, 341), whichbalances the need for autonomy with the need to follow a common purpose, she risksoccluding the constitutive antagonism pertaining to intellectual difference thatrenders class relation impossible.2 Postcapitalist politics in this instance requires theforegrounding of this constitutive antagonism if it is to address the persistent problem

of its domestication through the institutional hierarchy of the governing and thegoverned, which the system of delegation can easily reproduce.3

Yet a postcapitalist politics of the party should not only focus on the partysinternal organization; it should also extend its focus to the diverse economies thatform the constitutive outside of the party. If a communist party is an organism thatextends beyond its limits, it must take on both the difficult task of negotiating thediverse economic forms (capitalist as well as noncapitalist) that coexist with oneanother in sometimes explicit and often unacknowledged relations of mutual support(but also in contradiction and conflict) andalso the task of organizing itself through

these forms with an orientation toward widening the domain of solidaristic self-governance of communities. Without taking a risk to organize itself in an expansive-form4 through such a community economywhich furnishes the party not only witha distribution from its economic surplus but also a concrete economic network withinwhich its constituencies are constituted through the many economic flows of labor,goods, cooperation, and care (Diskin 2013, 477)the party will inevitably (as itgrows and aggregates into a broader populist front) find itself caught in capitalisteconomic networks, reproducing the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state form.

2. In his reading of Marx, tienne Balibar (2007, 49) refers to a broader notion of intellectualdifference, including the division not only of labor but also of activities in general. And ratherthan taking intellectual difference as a class difference that can be finally superseded, he likensit to the equally fundamental, irreducible, and irresolvable sexual difference (50), echoingJacques Lacans formula: There is no sexual relationship.3. See the critical remarks of Louis Althusser (1978) on the French Communist partyprogressively reproducing in its internal organization the structure of the bourgeois state bycombining the model of parliamentary democracy with the military model of partitioning(through a three-tier system of delegation). And see DeMartino (2013) and Madra and zseluk(2015) for two recent expositions on how diverse/community economies might be addressing thequestion of intellectual differencein the organization of its own research practice and in the

construction of community economies.4. In his reading of Gramscis formulation of the Modern Prince,Peter Thomas (2013, 78, 2)regards the expansive party-formnot as a new political form dominating over social contentbut as a dynamicand broaderprocess that gathers and organizes the partial collective willsalready in motionand that generates the motor of its totalizing developmentby respondingto and valorizing the contradictions and demands immanent in the struggles of social groups andsocial movements.

362 MADRA AND ZSELUK

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And finally, Dean (2015, 339) argues that what defines the Communist party is acommunist desire; in opposition to the capitalist matrix that establishes our desire,that tells us who we are and what we can be, the Communist party opens up a

terrain for the desire of another subject

a collective, political subject.

We agreewith this definition that communism is first and foremost about the reactivation ofdesire rather than its overcoding in the closed circuits of drive. Yet precisely becausecommunism is about the reactivation of desire, the question of the production of acommon political will in and through the party has to involve more than a call forvoluntary collaboration and the invention of pedagogical methods to address theanxiety generated both by divestment from capitalist relations and the encounterwith the groundlessness of desire.

This question necessarily brings about the issue of practices that are needed to

support the traversal of the fantasy that would unleash desirethe traversal not onlyof the fantasy of the One qua the unique individual, as Dean rightly suggests, but alsothe fantasy of the One qua the totalizing and cohering capitalist economy thatcaptivates desire, as Healy poignantly points out.

References

Althusser, L. 1978. What must change in the party? New Left Review I/109 (May

June): 19

45.Balibar, . 2007. The philosophy of Marx. Trans. C. Turner. London: Verso.Dean, J. 2012. The communist horizon. London: Verso.. 2015. The party and communist solidarity. Rethinking Marxism27 (3): 33242.DeMartino, G. 2013. Ethical economic engagement in a world beyond control.

Rethinking Marxism25 (4): 483500.Diskin, J. 2013. How subjectivity brings us through class to the community economy.

Rethinking Marxism25 (4): 46982.Gibson-Graham, J. K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy. 2013. Take back the economy: An

ethical guide for transforming our communities. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.

Healy, S. 2015. Communism as a mode of life. Rethinking Marxism27 (3): 34356.Madra, Y. M., and C. zseluk. 2015. Creating spaces for communism: Post-capitalist

desire in Hong Kong, the Philippines and western Massachusetts. In Making otherworlds possible: Performing diverse economies, ed. G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin, andJ. K. Gibson-Graham, 12752. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Miller, E. 2013. Community economy: Ontology, ethics, and politics for radicallydemocratic economic organizing. Rethinking Marxism25 (4): 51833.

Thomas, P. 2013. The communist hypothesis and the question of organization. Theoryand Event 16 (4). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v016/16.4.thomas.html.

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