14. Communism

Abstract

Chapter Fourteen ("Communism"): The global economic crash of 2007-08—as well as the subsequent government bailouts of the dominant bourgeois institutions responsible for it and their continued commitment to a program of social austerity in its wake around the world since—has dramatically revealed what is normally hidden behind the everyday glare of consumerism in the global North: capitalism systematically sacrifices the livelihood of the many to serving the interests of a privileged few. Suddenly millions were forced to confront the fact that capitalism is failing in exactly the way Marx and Engels predicted in The Manifesto of the Communist Party because it is "incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him" (495-6). As more and more people are finding that capitalism is unable to "assure their existence" even in the midst of the superabundant wealth of the western democracies, it is no surprise to see that "class" has once again returned to the popular lexicon and there is a renewed interest in Marx, Marxism, and communism as workers begin to struggle to make sense of their immiserated lives and to investigate why the political means to address these conditions is so severely delimited (Barker). However, as I will explain, the contemporary engagement with Marx is predominantly "writerly" as it reinterprets class as a spectral presence in the circuits of the daily, rather than a serious engagement with the "speecherly" truth of class found in Marx, i.e., class as a matter of how "the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life" (Preface to Contribution, 263). What will be of particular importance in the contemporary encounter with the intellectual and political legacy of Marx today, I argue, is to engage with Marx's speecherly theory of communism found in his speeches on the Paris Commune of 1871. This is because it is in them that Marx focuses his critique of the Commune on what he calls the "infantile" communism of the anarchists, whom he holds as largely responsible for its defeat because of how their doctrine of the "equality of classes" led them to support class collaborationist policies and to subvert the international solidarity required for the arrival of communism. Keywords: communism; Paris Commune; Marx; Marxism; Barthes; Badiou; Rancière; Lukács; readerly; writerly; speecherly.