[D66] The Communist Horizon (2)

[Antid Oto]

http://ri-ir.org/2012/10/05/the-communist-horizon-by-jodi-dean/

The Communist Horizon by Jodi Dean
POSTED BY SIMONSAYSMAKEREVOLUTION ⋅ OCTOBER 5, 2012	 ⋅ LEAVE A COMMENT
[This text comes from a talk given by Jodi Dean at the Brecht Forum in 
New York.  A video of the talk is available here.  Reposted from Kasama 
Project.]

The term “horizon” marks a division.

With respect to politics, the horizon that conditions our experience is 
communism. I get the term “communist horizon” from Bruno Bosteels, who 
gets it from Alvaro García Linera, vice president of Bolivia. Garcia 
Linera was the running mate of Evo Morales on the ticket Movement to 
Socialism-Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples 
(MAS-IPSP). He is the author of multiple pieces on Marxism, politics, 
and sociology, at least one of which was written while he served time in 
prison for armed uprising (before becoming Vice President of Boliva, he 
fought in the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army).

Bosteels quotes García Linera’s response to an interviewer’s questions 
about his party’s plans following their electoral victory:

“The general horizon of the era is communist.”

García Linera doesn’t explain the term. He invokes the communist horizon

“as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

Assuming it as an irreducible feature of the political setting, he says:

“we enter the movement with our expecting and desiring eyes set upon the 
communist horizon.”

Some on the US left think the communist horizon is a lost horizon. This 
is a mistake that capitalists, conservatives, and even liberal-democrats 
don’t make insofar as they see the threat of communism everywhere, 
twenty years after its ostensible demise. To think further about how 
this communist horizon manifests itself to us today, how we feel its 
force, how it formats our setting, I treat communism as a tag for six 
features of our conjuncture:

1. a specific state formation that collapsed in 1991;
2. a present, increasingly powerful, force;
3. the sovereignty of the people;
4. the force of the common and commons;
5. the collective desire for collectivity; and
6. the actuality of revolution.

My goal is to highlight the actuality of communism as an ideal for us, 
one worth fighting for in a struggle that is ever more urgent and necessary.


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