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The Party and Post-Capitalist Politics: A Missed Encounter?†

Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselçuk

Abstract:

This essay articulates a disagreement with Jodi Dean’s assessments of post-capitalist

politics formulated initially in her book, The Communist Horizon (2012), and more

recently in her conversation on “Crafting Communism” with Stephen Healy (2013).

Contrary to Dean’s alignment of post-capitalist politics with a de-politicized

individuation, we argue that post-capitalist politics is necessary precisely in order to be

able to construct the called-forth party as an organization that expands the class

struggle over the economy, produces economic solidarity, and re-activates desire for

communal economies, while constantly addressing the irreducibility of class

antagonism. We also think that our disagreement with Dean is largely shaped by the

difference in the respective ontological stances we assume towards the constitution of

economy.

Keywords: Post-capitalist politics, Party-form, diverse economies, community

economies, class antagonism, desire, intellectual difference.

† A shorter version of this essay will appear in Rethinking Marxism Vol. 27, No. 3 as a response to an exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy that took place at Surplus, Solidarity, Sufficiency Conference of Rethinking Marxism at UMass-Amherst, September 2013.

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Let us begin with our disagreement. In her conversation on “Crafting Communism”

with Stephen Healy (2013), as well as in her book, The Communist Horizon (2012), Jodi

Dean aligns post-capitalist politics with (de-politicized) localization, individuation, and

voluntarism. This, however, does not correspond to our understanding of post-

capitalist politics. For us, post-capitalist politics entails strategically operating in a

heterogeneous field of diverse economies (e.g., capitalist and non-capitalist forms,

different property regimes, mechanisms of distribution and transaction, different

forms of labor and remuneration) with an eye towards building community and

solidarity (in short, communal) economies.1 Post-capitalist politics does not presume in

some cynical manner that capitalist relations do not matter; rather, its working

hypothesis is that capitalist relations neither exhaust, nor are able to synthesize the

economic field under one consistent logic. With an awareness of the limitations that

the capitalist relations may impose upon them, post-capitalist politics aims to produce

economic emancipation strategies towards building communal economies here and

now. But let us assume for a moment that Dean allows us this crucial working

hypothesis. We believe a productive dialogue can only emerge under such a scenario.

Indeed, we argue that there is something that post-capitalist politics can offer in

enriching what we find to be the three important interventions that Dean makes in her

call for the construction of a collective political subject in the form of a party that

“provides a form for the knowledge we gain through experience and analyze from the

perspective of the communist horizon” (2013, 13).

1 For a sustained discourse on the differences and similarities as well as prospects for alliances between

community economies projects and solidarity economies, see Miller (2013).

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First and foremost, Dean pronounces that “class struggle is not simply economic

struggle; it’s political struggle” (11). Dean makes this proposition because with

“economic struggle” she refers to the compromised struggle between labor and capital

along the wage-profit frontier. Beginning from such a narrow definition of the

economy, as well as class, one cannot help but agree with her emphasis on the political

dimension of class struggle that moves beyond the merely economic. Yet, if we have a

different (and not-so narrowly-defined) conceptualization of the economy and class,

we must also reverse the formula and write “class struggle is not simply political

struggle; it’s also economic struggle.” Or better yet, we must insist that “class struggle is

a political struggle over the economy.”

We understand class struggle not in terms of a clash between two opposing groups

over the wage-profit distribution, but as a struggle over the question of how to organize

the performance and the diverse flows of surplus labor (among which the performance

and flows of capitalist surplus value is one dominant form). Struggle over class is a

permanent process as the attempts to achieve a harmonious institution of the diverse

flows of this social surplus and to organize a harmonious economy are permanently

disrupted and derailed by a constitutive antagonism. What this notion of class

antagonism implies for communism is nicely summarized by Stephen Healy as the

constitutive impossibility of providing “a final answer to the question of how to live in

common” (2013, 1). In this sense, if communism is not another imposture of giving a

final shape to the “unending conflict over how to organize the economy” (1), then we

see it as a desire not only for an “expansion of voluntary cooperation” (to use Dean’s

own description of the communist horizon) but also for instituting practices,

mechanisms, and metrics (as suggested by Healy and his collaborators in Take Back the

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Economy (2013)) that foreground the constitutive impossibility of fixing for once and all

the organization of the appropriation, production and distribution of surplus labor.

This latter definition of communism differs from that of Dean’s because it doesn’t

locate the antagonism only between capitalism and communism, but also within

communism itself. In fact, a more precise definition of our notion of communism

would be the critical and material practices of ceaselessly encircling the impossibility

of class relation. Capitalism, in contrast, operates through domesticating and

occluding this constitutive impossibility.

What could be a better form than the communist party for enacting such an

understanding of communism? Indeed, and this is her second point, Dean offers a

notion of the party as a site for a kind of production, “production of a common political

will” (2013, 12) and makes suggestions regarding how this production can be organized

“through a cellular structure” and involve a degree of division of labor (“acknowledge

different skills and expertise by delegating tasks” (15)) that balances the need for

autonomy with the need to follow a common purpose. Dean’s emphasis on the party as

a site of production extends to the production of solidarity in a sustained manner, to

the cultivation of “momentum, duration, [and] a capacity for political memory” (8-9)

for the oppositional movements that aim to “provide an alternative” (2).

If the party is a site of production, an economic site, then shouldn’t we treat it also as a

site of class struggle and an object of post-capitalist politics? If party is, as Dean puts it,

a site of production that extends to the production of solidarity, then the irreducibility

of antagonisms that pertain not only to the organization of surplus labor flows, but also

to the various forms of division of labor would divide this production of solidarity as

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well. To concretize our point, let us take a closer look to Dean’s own suggestions

regarding the organization of production in the party. When she speaks of the “basic

structural components” that involve “memberships organized in cells” and that

“acknowledge different skills and expertise by delegating tasks” (15), she risks

occluding the constitutive antagonism pertaining to “intellectual difference” that

renders class relation impossible.2 In contrast, post-capitalist politics in this instance

requires the foregrounding of this constitutive antagonism, if it is to address the

persistent problem of its domestication through the institutional hierarchy of the

governing and the governed which the system of delegation can easily reproduce.3 We

have argued elsewhere that this could be done through mechanisms that not only

periodically redistribute jobs so that abilities can be redistributed over time, but also

that create new “spaces of encounter” among different class habituses in order to

2 In his reading of Marx, Étienne Balibar (2007) argues how, for Marx, communism is unthinkable without

doing away the division of manual and mental labor that “overdetermin[es] class difference in its

successive forms” (49-50). Though, rather than the division of the mental and manual labor, Balibar prefers

to refer to a broader notion of “intellectual difference,” including the division not only of labor but also of

activities in general (49). And rather than taking intellectual difference as a class difference that can be

finally superseded, he likens it to the equally fundamental, irreducible and irresolvable sexual difference

(50), echoing Jacques Lacan’s formula: “There is no sexual relationship.”

3 See the critical remarks of Louis Althusser (1978) on the (French) communist party, progressively

reproducing in its internal organization the structure of the bourgeois state by combining the model of

parliamentary democracy and the military model of “partitioning” (through a three-tier system of

delegation).

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displace the dominant aesthetic regime that assigns abilities to their “proper places”

(Madra and Özselçuk 2014).4

Yet post-capitalist politics of the party should not only focus on its internal

organization; it should also extend towards the diverse economies which form the

constitutive outside of the party. If a communist party is an organism that extends

beyond its limits, it must take on the task of negotiating a diversity of contradictions

and conflicts that constitute a heterogeneous field of the social, including the

economic. As Healy puts it, this calls for the rethinking of economy as a space of

diverse economic forms that coexist with one another in sometimes explicit and often

unacknowledged relations of mutual support but also in contradiction and conflict.

The economic politics of a communist party in our contemporary conjuncture,

therefore, must always work with a wider and messier field saturated with diversity of

capitalist as well as non-capitalist formations (e.g., past and present solidaristic forms

needing to be rendered visible and valorised, forms that alliances can forged with, and

forms that are opponents and adversarial) and organize itself through them with an

orientation towards widening the domain of solidaristic self-governance of

communities. Without organizing itself in an “expansive-form”5 through such a

4 See also DeMartino (2013) for a recent exposition on how diverse/community economies might be

addressing the question of “intellectual difference” in the organization of its own research practice as

“hybrid research communities.”

5 Peter Thomas (2013) writes on the “expansive party-form” which he elaborates in relation to his reading

of Gramsci’s formulation of the Modern Prince (7). Thomas regards the “expansive party-form” not as a

new political form dominating over social content, but as a “dynamic” and “broader” process that gathers

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community economy (that generously furnishes the party not only with a distribution

from its economic surplus, but also a concrete economic network within which its

constituencies are constituted through the “many economic flows of labor, goods,

cooperation, and care” (Diskin 2013, 477)), the party will inevitably (as it grows and

aggregates into a broader populist front) find itself caught in capitalist economic

networks and reproducing the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state-from.

And finally, Dean argues that what defines the communist party is a communist desire;

in opposition to the capitalist matrix that established our desire, “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” (2013, 13). To a certain extent, we agree with this

definition in that, we also think that communism is first and foremost about the re-

activation of desire, rather than its overcoding in the closed circuits of drive. Yet,

precisely because communism is about the re-activation of desire, the question of the

“production of collective will” in and through the party has to involve more than a call

for “voluntary collaboration” and invent (pedagogical) methods to address the anxiety

which the divestment from capitalist relations and the encounter with the

groundlessness of desire generate. And so this question necessarily brings about the

issue of those practices which are necessary to support the traversal of the fantasy that

would unleash desire—the traversal not only of the fantasy of the One qua the unique

individual as Dean rightly suggests, but also the fantasy of the One qua the all

and organizes the “partial collective wills already in motion,” (8) that generates the “motor of its totalizing

development” (2) by responding to and valorizing the contradictions and demands immanent to the

struggles of social groups and social movements.

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totalizing and “cohering” capitalist economy that captivates desire as Healy poignantly

points out.

Let us return to our fundamental disagreement. One’s ontological speculation provides

the matrix through which one devises political strategies and implements them. Since

Dean, when she looks at the world, only sees an all encompassing capitalism that

fragments, isolates and individualizes each and everyone of us, community economies

can only appear as “depolicitized […] lifestyle choices,” “a lower-cost version of the one

percent’s privatization” (1-2), or “some kind of cool new app” (16) purveyed by

communicative capitalism. Dean creates a false opposition between the communist

horizon of the party politics and the communist horizon of the post-capitalist

economic politics operating in a diverse economy. The way she casts the problem, by

drawing the frontier between the drive of a homogenizing and totalizing capitalist

economy and the desire for a voluntary and solidary communist will (and by

attributing in this way too much of a telos to drive and too much of a positive content

to desire) makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for her to see how post-capitalist

politics is integral in conceptualizing the communist party as an “expansive-form” that

extends beyond its limits and organizes itself across all the fields of the social,

including the economic.

References

Althusser, L. 1978. What must change in the party? NLR I 109 (May-June): 19-45.

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Balibar, É. 2007 [1995] The philosophy of Marx. Trans. C. Turner. London and New York:

Verso.

Dean, J. 2012. The communist horizon. London and New York: Verso.

Dean, J. 2013. The party and communist solidarity. A conversation on Crafting

communism with Stephen Healy. Rethinking Marxism. The eight international conference

on Surplus, Solidarity, Sufficiency. September 19-22. University of Massachusetts

Amherst.

DeMartino, G. 2013. Ethical economic engagement in a world beyond control.

Rethinking Marxism 25 (4): 483-500.

Diskin, J. 2013. How subjectivity brings us through class to the community economy.

Rethinking Marxism 25 (4): 469-82.

Gibson-Graham, J. K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy. 2013. Take back the economy. An ethical

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Madra, Y. M., and C. Özselçuk. 2014 forthcoming. Creating spaces for communism:

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University of Minnesota Press.

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