Rethinking Marxism

A 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 Missed

Encounter?
Yahya M. Madra & Ceren zseluk
To cite this article: Yahya M. Madra & Ceren zseluk (2015) The Party and
Postcapitalist Politics: A Missed Encounter?, Rethinking Marxism, 27:3, 360-363, DOI:
10.1080/08935696.2015.1042704
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042704

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

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Date: 27 September 2015, At: 20:06

Rethinking Marxism, 2015

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

The Party and Postcapitalist Politics:

A Missed Encounter?

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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), and
more 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 irreducibility 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, Intellectual
Difference, Postcapitalist Politics

Ontological speculation provides the matrix through which one devises political
strategies and then implements them. In her conversation on Crafting a Conversation
on Communism with Stephen Healy, Jodi Dean (2015; see also 2012, 37) has aligned
postcapitalist politics with depoliticized localism, individuation, and voluntarism
and 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 postcapitalist
politics of constructing community economies can only appear as depoliticized
lifestyle choices, a lower-cost version of the 1 percents privatization, or some
kind of cool new app purveyed by communicative capitalism. This, in our view,
creates a false opposition between the communist horizon of party politics and the
communist horizon of postcapitalist economic politics operating in a diverse
economy.
Proceeding from a sharply contrasting ontology of the social, we have a very
different understanding of postcapitalist politics which, for us, entails strategically
operating in a heterogeneous field of diverse economies (that is, a field of capitalist
and noncapitalist forms and of different property regimes, mechanisms of distribution
and transaction, and forms of labor and remuneration) with an eye toward building

2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

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CRAFTING COMMUNISM

361

community and solidarity (in short, communal) economies here and now.1 Postcapitalist 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. Unless this
working hypothesis is properly recognized and registered, conditions for a productive
dialog cannot be obtained. Yet we believe that such an encounter would be valuable
for the communist cause, as there is something that postcapitalist politics can offer
for enriching what we find to be the three important interventions that Dean makes
in her essay.
First, Dean (2015, 338) pronounces that class struggle is not simply economic
struggle; its political struggle. She makes this proposition because by economic
struggle she refers to the compromised struggle between labor and capital along the
wage-profit frontier. But if we take a different and not so narrowly defined
conceptualization of the economy and class, we might reverse the formula and write
that class struggle is not simply political struggle; its also economic struggle. Or
better yet, we might insist that class struggle is a political struggle over the
economy.
This reformulation necessitates understanding class struggle not in terms of a clash
between two opposing groups over wage-profit distribution but rather as a process of
struggling 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). Because attempts to achieve a harmonious institution of
the diverse flows of this social surplus are constantly disrupted and derailed by a
constitutive antagonism, class struggle over economy is a permanent process with no
ultimate instance of resolution. What this notion of class antagonism implies for
communism is nicely summarized by Stephen Healy (2015, 343) as the constitutive
impossibility 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 shape
to the unending conflict over how to organize the economy (343), then we see it as
a 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, and
Healy 2013) that foreground and patiently encircle the constitutive impossibility of
fixing once and for all the organization of the appropriation, production, and
distribution of surplus labor. (Capitalism, in contrast, operates through domesticating
and occluding this constitutive impossibility). This latter definition of communism
differs from that of Deans because it locates antagonism not only between capitalism
and 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 sustained
manner and to the cultivation of momentum, duration, [and] a capacity for political
memory (337) for the oppositional movements that aim to provide an alternative
1. For a sustained discourse on the differences and similarities between community economies
and solidarity economies as well as for prospects of alliances between them, see Miller (2013).

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MADRA AND ZSELUK

(333). If the 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 the production of solidarity as well.
To concretize our point, let us take a closer look at Deans own suggestions
regarding the organization of production in the party. When she speaks of the basic
structural components involving a membership organized in cells that will acknowledge different skills and expertise by delegating tasks (Dean 2015, 341), which
balances the need for autonomy with the need to follow a common purpose, she risks
occluding the constitutive antagonism pertaining to intellectual difference that
renders class relation impossible.2 Postcapitalist 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
Yet a postcapitalist politics of the party should not only focus on the partys
internal organization; it should also extend its focus to the diverse economies that
form the constitutive outside of the party. If a communist party is an organism that
extends beyond its limits, it must take on both the difficult task of negotiating the
diverse economic forms (capitalist as well as noncapitalist) that coexist with one
another in sometimes explicit and often unacknowledged relations of mutual support
(but also in contradiction and conflict) and also the task of organizing itself through
these forms with an orientation toward widening the domain of solidaristic selfgovernance of communities. Without taking a risk to organize itself in an expansiveform4 through such a community economywhich 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, reproducing the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state form.
2. In his reading of Marx, tienne Balibar (2007, 49) refers to a broader notion of intellectual
difference, including the division not only of labor but also of activities in general. 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 Lacans 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 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 the
question of intellectual difference in 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-form not as a new political form dominating over social content
but as a dynamic and broader process that gathers and organizes the partial collective wills
already in motion and that generates the motor of its totalizing development by responding
to and valorizing the contradictions and demands immanent in the struggles of social groups and
social movements.

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And finally, Dean (2015, 339) argues that what defines the Communist party is a
communist 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 subjecta collective, political subject. We agree
with this definition that communism is first and foremost about the reactivation of
desire rather than its overcoding in the closed circuits of drive. Yet precisely because
communism is about the reactivation of desire, the question of the production of a
common political will in and through the party has to involve more than a call for
voluntary collaboration and the invention of pedagogical methods to address the
anxiety generated both by divestment from capitalist relations and the encounter
with 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 only
of the fantasy of the One qua the unique individual, as Dean rightly suggests, but also
the fantasy of the One qua the totalizing and cohering capitalist economy that
captivates desire, as Healy poignantly points out.

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