Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon
Those who suspect that the inclusion of liberal democrats in a set with capitalists and conservatives is illegitimate probably are democrats. To determine whether they belong in the set of those who fear communism, they should ask themselves whether they think any evocation of communism should come with qualifications, apologies, condemnations of past excesses. If the answer is yes, then we have a clear indication that liberal democrats, and probably radical democrats as well, still consider communism a threat and so belong in a set with capitalists and concerns. They all are anxious about the forces the desire for communism risks unleashin
Bicycles are a “gate-way drug” to communism.
But in parliamentary democracies, for leftists to refer to their goals as a struggle for democracy is strange—it’s not like they are fighting for rights to vote and organize. Democracy is our ambient milieu, the hegemonic form of contemporary politics (which is yet another reason that the right can use communism as a name for what opposes it). For the left to use the language of democracy now is thus even stranger, a way of avoiding the fundamental antagonism between the top one percent and the rest of us by acting as if the only thing really missing was participation.
Rather than recognizing that for the left democracy is the form that the loss of communism takes, the form of communism’s displacement, radical democrats treat democracy as itself replacing communism (and on this point share the neoliberal position regarding the victory of capitalism). Political repercussions of the loss of communism as a name for left aspirations include a corresponding turn away from militant opposition and toward generalized inclusion as well as an abandonment of tight organizational forms like the party, the council, and the cell in favor of broad, thin, and momentary calls to become aware of an issue and change one’s lifestyle.
More fundamentally, the repercussion of the sublimation of communism in democratic preoccupations with process and participation is acquiescence to capitalism as the best system for the production and distribution of resources, labor, and goods.
The mistake leftists make when they turn into liberals and democrats is thinking that we are beyond the communist horizon, that democracy replaced communism rather than serving as the contemporary form of communism’s displacement.
They don’t see, can’t acknowledge, their own complicity in despotic financialism: if political struggle is always an irreducible dimension of capitalism and capitalism always interlinked with conflict, resistance, accommodation, and demands, then refusals to engage in these struggles, rejections of the terms of these struggles, will affect the form that capitalism takes.
The point I want to emphasize is that a primary factor in the changes in capitalism over the past thirty to forty years has been a change in the understanding of work, a change from an emphasis on its class, group, and collective dimension to a view of work as a personal choice, endeavor, and locus of meaning. Individual work displaced work as a common condition, freeing capital from the constraints in encountered when it had to deal with workers as a collective force.
Left appeals to democracy thus look a lot like the Lacanian notion of drive. For Lacan, drive, like desire, describes the way the subject arranges its enjoyment, jouissance.
– In the economy of desire, enjoyment is what the subject can never reach, what the subject wants but never gets—oh, that’s not it.
In the economy of drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal; it’s what the subject gets, even if it doesn’t want it. It’s that little extra charge which keeps the subject keeping on. The subject’s repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach its goal become satisfying on their own.
Democracy for the left is drive: our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. We talk, complain, and protest. We make groups on Facebook. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox. Activity becomes passivity, our stuckness in a circuit, which is then lamented and mourned as the absence of ideas or even the loss of the political itself and then, yet again, routed through a plea for democracy although it doesn’t take a genius to know that the real problem is neoliberal capitalism and its extreme inequality. What leftists call the loss of the political is the fog they muddle around in because they’ve lost sight of the communist horizon.
In the contemporary networks of communicative capitalism, drive is a feedback circuit that captures our best energies. Invigorating communism as a political alternative requires amplifying the collective desire that can cut through these affective networks. Fortunately, that desire is already there.
As Foucault makes clear, the limiting of the people as a common force turns them from active agents of power into a passive population. Here they are active only as individuals, little entrepreneurs or enterprises. What appears as the freedom of the market, then, is a certain foreclosure of the collective power of the people in and as a common. The power that matters, to affect the basic conditions in which they live, is displaced onto an economy that they are told they cannot govern because they cannot know. What do the people get instead? Representative democracy—the form of their passivity.