Red, Black, and Green

Abstract

This essay responds to the commentaries on the talks Stephen Healy and I delivered during the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, as well as to Healy's own talk. Rather than persisting in an understanding of left politics that is little more than a liberal emphasis on individual choice, participation, and pluralization, communists need to think and act in terms of building and exercising political power. Fortunately, we are seeing left political advances as ever more segments come together in a struggle for political power. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and other efforts indicate that the party remains a viable form for thinking and acting politically. It's time to take up the challenge of actively constructing a political collectivity with the will and mass to fight for an egalitarian world. The party doesn't prefigure this world but shows the gap between the world we have and the world we can desire.

Key Words:

• Communism
• Communist Party
• Division
• Politics
• Struggle

Notes

1 See also the debate between Gavin Walker and Jason E. Smith in Theory & Event 16 (4).

2 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012, 3) provide a clear explication of this obvious although frequently overlooked point.

3 A “melancholic loser’s slump,” as Ramsey (2015) terms it.

4 Some of the most compelling versions of this story come from David Harvey (2005), Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (2004), and Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (2011).

5 See James Martel’s (2014) discussion of this element of my account in The Communist Horizon.

6 I develop this point in my essay “Commune, Party, State” (Dean 2014).