[lbo-talk] Jodi Dean on The Communist Horizon

[Bhaskar Sunkara]

I just watched the presentation and I have a great affinity with her talk of
organization, as well. Her yearnings for a "capital P" party are also ones
that I've echoed in the same terms in my Zapatista piece and elsewhere. All
fairly uncontroversial points, I would think, among Marxists.

But I think Joanna's spot on in her assessment here. I also get the sense
that Dean's understanding of "democracy" is built in the same terms as
Badiou's, which is unfortunate.

I've been in some contact with Jodi and I plan to write something up on the
longer version of her lecture notes soon.

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 10:55 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> I also thought her criticism of "maximizing  difference" anarchy and
> localism to be spot on. But the discussion about the proletariat was very
> muddy, and I think most of the muddiness had to do with how ignorant most
> academicians are about non-academic labor.
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ferenc Molnar" <ferenc_molnar at hotmail.com>
>
> Dean, using a lot of Zizek's ideas and even hand gestures, argues that
> anarchism with its focus on the individual against the collective, the
> Democratic Party, and liberalism has rendered the left unworkable.  She
> argues for a return to a communist party structure that embraces discipline.
> This would be done with a critical eye focused on both the successes and
> failures of 20th century communism.  Old ideas would be used for new
> situations. "The Sovereignty of the People" rather than "The Dictatorship of
> the Proletariat".
>
>
> In the audience, someone asks what the uprisings in Egypt mean in this
> context, having occurred more or less without a vanguardist leadership or a
> party structure.  The discussion then turns into a search for the
> proletariat.  What is the proletariat?  Can one be a member of the
> proletariat if one is a digital user of facebook who contributes free labor
> to a social media corporation?  Is the proletariat even represented in the
> room among the well-spoken, shabby genteel Brooklyn audience, one person
> asks?  The gap between the intelligentsia and the working class has grown so
> wide in this country. I believe that there's a sincere longing in that room
> to reach over that gap to embrace one's brothers and sisters but is the
> vehicle of a communist party that can't even locate the proletariat the way
> to begin?
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