a spectre is haunting communism? (draft)
The perennial adage still persists: ‘What is to be done?’ Political organisation across the pro-communist left is in crisis. It seems at present that just as the misery and anger of the multitude is on the rise, the wealth of ideas and the nous of those who should be propagating them are in free-fall. We find ourselves in a perverse but familiar place: an organisational quagmire somewhere between the hackneyed bogeymen we’ve come to know as the ‘Leninist party-form’ and ‘horizontalist networks’. The problem isn’t that we aren’t organising ourselves. The problem is that our activity seems to stop here. Rather than tackle head-on the challenges which prevent us from successfully disseminating our ideas across wider society, we instead dwell on making our immediate environments a heaven on earth, either through obsessing over the intricacies of our processes or by descending into puritanical purges of vast swathes of our associates. While it’s possible to have a healthy sense of due process and collective accountability within political groups, our compulsion and sanctimony towards these issues demonstrates the poverty of ideas within the ‘movement’. The results can be seen in both the stagnation of political activity and the alienation of those on the peripheries of our milieu and beyond.
It might sound daft, but it’s easy to forget what communism means. Sometimes, our self-identification as ‘communists’ refers not to our political and economic convictions, but rather indicates the social milieu to which we belong. ‘Communism’ becomes an easy watchword to mark out ‘people-like-us’ from everybody else. In this sense, constant proclamations of our communist credentials are both self-affirming and self-indulgent. As with our political organisations, form is nothing without content, which must have precedence. Much has been said and written about what form political organisation should take, and how we synthesise the useful aspects of both the party and network forms. But let us be frank: this is not the essence of the crisis we are seeing in political organisation. Our crisis instead pertains to the gulf separating us as self-defined political actors and the rest of the multitude: how do we make our ideas take root among the mass?
We do not make the conditions we find ourselves in. We are thrown into a capitalist society with a self-perpetuating complex of problematic and difficult social relations. The philosophical and practical challenge of communism is to establish from within the values we wish to see percolate and take root; to rekindle the social vector of communism. In this sense, we must view communism as a process, not as a prize or an end goal. This process, communisation, must be situated in the present conditions: the secular crisis of capitalism. While our strategies should seek to play on and exploit these contradictions being played out within capitalism, not to mention the rapidly-growing disenfranchisement from the mainstream parties and parliamentary process, they must also seek to meet the class (the multitude) where we find it. Communism seeks the establishment of a classless society. Necessarily this requires the inclusion of all, at the same time as the abolition of the identities which establish difference. Inclusion is not an easy project. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine that acts which are deemed inclusionary to one group are in effect exclusionary to another. This is an inevitability wherever we seek to establish and operate in terms of identity alone. The communist project must instead seek to establish a generosity towards those we see as Other through a conviction in our professed political beliefs. The very idea of a classless society beyond the present system assumes apodictically that people are capable of change. It is with this in mind that we must carry out the difficult project of communisation.
What is certain is that a ‘pure’ community with the veneer of being situated beyond the boundaries of class-based, sexist, racist society will not (as the individualists often propose) come to outgrow the present condition. While the secular crisis is analytically terminal, it does not necessarily present a terminus, a way out. As Friedman correctly said, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” There should be no doubt that we are living in the end times, that all is to play for. The millions who are living in anger and misery are not ignorant to the present situation, they are painfully conscious of it. It is at this moment that we should be connecting with those people for whom we claim to desire communism, situating ourselves among them – making our alternatives alive – instead of feathering the nests of our ideologically-pure, procedurally-perfect cliques. To do so represents nothing short of a poverty of ideas.
What kind of communisation should we be looking to? I would argue that rather than the Tiqqunian notion of abandonment, we should be doing the precise opposite by developing a wholly socially-engaged praxis through which we can offer the tools of mutual aid and confidence through solidarity, in order to aid the struggles present in different communities or build them where there is such a desire. This is a fundamentally reciprocal process; we cannot profess to have all the answers ahead of our genuine engagement. Rather, we should recognise and respect that people have their own subjectivities reflecting different forms of life, and that these should inform our continued praxis and the development of our ideas as ‘political’ actors. In this sense, the sort of genuine social engagement we must seek in order to overcome this crisis of influence and ineffectualness should be approached in the spirit of solidarity and generosity if we seriously intend any form of communisation or societal transformation.
Author's note: I have revised some of the positions here upon further reading, particularly in engaging further with "communisation" discourse. As such, this draft article exists here only for reference purposes.
