Whither Thou, Communism?

Although communists continue to comprise a significant portion of the anti-capitalist left's population in Canada and the United States, ever since the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the flurry of anti-communism that triumphed with the capitalist end of history, the existence of communist organizations and individuals has largely been seen as anachronistic by the non-activist mainstream.  In the Western Hemisphere's centres of capitalism, these nightmare fortresses of advanced capital, the common discourse of communist failure and supposed atrocity––all the cold war propaganda that has been victorious since the end of the Soviet Union and the free marketization of China––has helped produce the misconception that communism and communists are a thing of the past.  And even when the typically myopic western mind is able to admit, with grudging confusion, that communism might be an ongoing reality over there, it generally is unable to comprehend the persistence of communist ideology amongst the populations in its own hemisphere.

If you speak to people outside of the normative activist terrain about communism the response is often one of bemusement.  There is a general confusion and curiousity about the very concept, a deep-seeded belief that you might be speaking about something that happened half-a-century ago and might not be relevant to the contemporary era.  The fact that there are still a lot of communist groups and individuals, that they form a significant portion of the activist left, really doesn't matter to the majority of the people you encounter on an everyday basis; the majority of the population is not activist and largely unaware of the vicissitudes of activist life.

There is a significant problem, in my opinion, that communist organizers have persisted––that new commie groups are born every five years––but that the general population is most often confused about this persistence.  Most disconcerting is the fact that the proletariat, that working-class that is not to be found in the labour aristocratic trade unions, has been largely unaware of communism and communist organizations.  If communism is about organizing the masses, specifically the most exploited ranks of these masses, then the fact that it can continue to thrive in activist spaces and yet remain largely unknown in proletarian spaces is extremely telling.  If it is only organizing students, academics, and those of us who have grown out of our anarchist phase, then it is not organizing as it should be organizing: this is not the communism that means class struggle, but the communism that means an ideological club of fashion activists and ivory tower academics.

So despite the fact that there are a lot of us communists out there, we have tended to accept the capitalist imaginary regarding the end of history and often chosen to be blanquist about our politics.  The argument is that the people aren't ready for communism, that in this uber-capitalist reality people are overly hostile to communism, and that we should never talk openly about our politics––we have to hide what we believe, pretend to be trade-unionists, submerge ourselves in the nebulous realm of movementism, or degenerate into tiny and dogmatic groups who preserve a "pure" communism.  When the people one day "wake up", the scales magically dropping from their eyes by the grace of God, they will suddenly say "oh yeah, communism, I think I like that" and go out shopping for whatever communist group, all of which have been hiding more or less in the shadows, best fits their new political desires.

When I look back on my activist life and try to make sense of how I gravitated towards communism, I'm struck by the absence of communist organizers in my pre-political phase.  Like many young people who are just becoming interested in anti-capitalism, I defaulted on anarchism because I simply assumed that communism was dead end, due to the failures of actually existing socialism, and I was not aware that anyone thought differently.  It wasn't until I started to become involved in activism that I realized, with surprise and confusion, that there were a hell of a lot of communists out there, maybe as many as the anarchists I assumed were the normative activist reality, and at first I could not help but see them as an anachronism.  And yet my story is one of student privilege: I was part of that population who, moving through the ranks of the radical student movement, was even able to enter the activist terrain.  I was not a worker who did not possess the same access to radical ideology––these days, in this part of the world, anti-capitalist ideology and anti-capitalist agitation tends to be limited to privileged sites of organization.

The point is that, for a long time, communists have chosen to accept the limits imposed by the end of history narrative and, fearing the hostility of their traditional social base, retreat into the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie.  And because of this retreat, either in limited activist circles or in parliamentary politics, the very people they claim to speak for, the most exploited and underprivileged of this society, started to forget that communism was a viable political commitment.

One of the justifications for this retreatist blanquism is that, because of the failures of communism and the propaganda connected to these failures, communism has become an ugly word and the masses will be hostile to any mention of a communist revolution.  And yet, even if this is a universal truth, we must ask how the masses will stop being hostile if the actually existing communist groups continue to hide within privileged spaces.  Maybe if we stop calling communism communism, and come up with other names and categories that are just a rebranding of the old names and categories, we can circumvent this supposed hostility… But this is assuming that people are stupid and won't figure out that we're talking about the same thing they supposedly hate.

A more important question to ask, however, is whether or not this hostility is as widespread and normative as we are told it must be.  Certainly there are people hostile to communism, but there were always people hostile to communism––even in the days before the Russian Revolution.  These days, when I speak about communism with people outside of the traditional activist milieu, I'm struck more by the bemused curiousity than the outright hostility.  When we held a teach-in about communism at a public library several months back, for example, the only person present who was hostile was someone who believed that the Illuminati and the Free Masons controlled the world––the type of person who would be hostile to all politics that did not fit his conspiracy theory categories.  If hostility is still present, it is the hostility that will always be present against communism: the hostility of those committed, in some shape or form, to capitalism––social democrats, the petty bourgeois, are more hostile to communism than the people communists are supposed to be working to organize.  This is the point.  So why are we hiding our politics from those we are supposed to organize, yet sharing these very same politics with a class filled with people who often are outrightly hostile to the idea of communism?

This refusal to be principled about our politics has become a normative and ingrained practice for communists.  Take, for example, the march a briefly described in the previous post where a bunch of people decided to start singing the Canadian national anthem (amongst other things) as an expression of their politics.  As it turns out, there were other communists at the march who did not think it was worth intervening in this expression of pro-imperialism because (I'm assuming) an intervention would be "alienating."  Although I was annoyed that the national anthem was sung, and was willing to confront it with my comrades and allies, I understand that in the pre-political space of this #occupy movement there are people who are still caught within the discourse of Canadian nationalism.  I am less annoyed, therefore, with the people singing the national anthem than the communists who should know better who thought it would be okay to just accept this expression of colonial-capitalism.  By refusing to intervene, by keeping their supposed principles to themselves, no one would even know that they were communists; they might as well have been social democrats also yearning for a return to the "good old days" of Canadian capitalism.  They might as well have been saying, in a different context, "boys will be boys"––we know that this is an excuse, an acceptance of anti-people politics.

The people deserve better than a "people will be people" attitude to problematic behaviour.  It is condescending and patronizing to fail to intervene in those pre-political spaces, to fail to push the people who want something more towards an actually liberating politics, but when we continue to hide our politics we can be nothing more than patronizing and condescending.

I will end this post by referencing the recent statement of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada regarding how we as communists should approach spaces such as the #occupy movement:

A revolution does not just happen, nor does it triumph by chance. A revolution is the product of a conscious and long-term struggle led by thousands of proletarian people, people that are as ordinary as they are heroic. People who make the first decisive action to engage in the struggle. Some proposals we can uphold right now are:

1) To discuss and share our collective problems and to convince those around us of the necessity of class struggle in order to radically transform society. We need to combat systems of oppression, such as sexism, racism, and all forms of chauvinism aimed at dividing the camp of the people.

2) To organize in our workplaces, our schools and our neighborhoods by establishing committees for socialist revolution. Such committees could serve as the basis for circulating revolutionary ideas: by distributing newspapers and leaflets, by organizing events and actions, for example denouncing public services cuts, acting in solidarity with strikers, occupying a factory, responding to racial profiling by the police and ‘justice’ system, acting against a polluting industry, etc.

3) To build the revolutionary organization capable of uniting the proletariat and leading the fight for socialism.