Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

Communism without Guarantees

Jim Igoe
To cite this article: Jim Igoe (2015) Communism without Guarantees, Rethinking Marxism,
27:3, 375-377, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2015.1042690
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042690

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

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Date: 27 September 2015, At: 20:02

Rethinking Marxism, 2015

Vol. 27, No. 3, 375377, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042690

Communism without Guarantees

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Jim Igoe
This essay responds to the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy that took
place at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. The concept of
communism without guarantees, following Stuart Hall, acknowledges the exceptional
difficulty of forming potentially emancipatory social formations in our current
historical moment. This situation suggests that, when it comes to how we engage
with paradox and uncertainty, we need to cultivate ways of being that are different
from those to which we have been culturally conditioned. We need to maintain
healthy skepticism while also daring to imagine. We also need to take seriously
ecologies of emergence and the power of intersubjective communication as a
reciprocal process of telling and listening. Key to these transformations will be the
cultivation of friendship as a revolutionary mode of being and the thoughtful
emulation of others who have tried before us.
Key Words: Ecology, Emergence, Friendship, Imagination, Positive Dialectic

Reading Jodi Deans and Stephen Healys essays back to back set my thoughts and
emotions spinning. I appreciate (and endeavor to imagine) the enormity of what the
authors have tackled, both in terms of sketching out current crises and offering
possibilities for desiring and actualizing communist futures. Uncertainty, it seems, is
the only certainty we have left. As Stuart Hall (1986) incisively framed it, ours is a
Marxism without guarantees. Such an inherently paradoxical undertaking is a
profoundly uneasy one for those of us brought up with modernist illusions of certainty
and the quotidian dalliances of consumer culture. We need to cultivate ways of being
that are different from those to which we have been culturally conditioned,
particularly when it comes to paradox and contradiction.
One of my conditioned responses to the world, thanks in large part to capitalist
fantasies, is pessimism. As part of this pessimistic stance, I feel bound to dismiss just
about anything that seems even remotely imaginary. In Magical Marxism, however,
Andy Merrifield (2011, 15) notes that the stock market is a fantasy that organizes
global capitalist activity to the extent that it becomes materially real. He calls for
similarly singular fantasies to organize global other-than-capitalist activity, to the
extent that it becomes real. This has prompted me to rethink my position on
speculative imagination. In the modernist binary, pessimism, in the form of selfimportant critique, faces down speculative imagination, in the form of uncritical
positivism, and never the twain shall meet. Deans and Healys essays, in contrast, are
full of healthy pessimism (e.g., of the liberal fantasy that cultivating diversity will
bring about equality and of the orthodox Marxist fantasy that capitalism is a unified
2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

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376

IGOE

reality) as well as potentially liberating imaginaries (e.g., of militant biopolitical

alternatives and of the Communist party as the site of a new collective political
subject).
We can never finally resolve the pitfalls and tensions of pessimism and speculative
imagination, but we can learn to deploy them sincerely and strategically in the course
of articulating and actualizing communist desires. With respect to such work, I will
not hesitate to say that Michel Foucault was onto something with the care of the self
and especially with friendship. Over the past decade I have noticed the systematic
ways in which communities of knowledge producers are conditioned to experience
themselves and relate to others (see Igoe 2013). Marx and Foucault both noted that
capitalist modes of production, consumption, and communication alienate and
appropriate human affective and intellectual capacities, which then seem to confront
us as a seemingly external force that directs our desires and actions. Foucault argued
that friendship holds the potential for redefining human affective and intellectual
capacities according to other loyalties and values. And I am fairly certain that
cultivating friendships is one of the most revolutionary things we can do.
With that said, I am under no illusion that we are simply free-willed actors
operating outside of history. We are in the midst of what Gramsci called a war of
position, and it isnt going very well. With the demise of legible social classes in
many contexts, it has become exceedingly difficult to determine what kind of
potentially emancipatory social formations actually exist, let alone what their
positions might be. I am very much in agreement with Jodi Dean that much work
needs to be done to define potentially emancipatory social formations with the goal
of making them more effective. I am open to the possibility that parties might be one
path by which this may be achieved, though I myself would be reticent to be part of
anything called The Party. Its just too singular for me. In this day and age, I reckon
there is more to be gained by learning from the multiple ways that diverse,
situational, and potentially emancipatory social formations come into existence.
On that point I am in agreement with Healy, that there is an ecology to this that we
need to take very seriously, which means working and playing at cultivating modes of
sentient intersubjectivity that have been deeply harmed by our current neoliberal
situation(s). Ursula K. Le Guin (2004) describes intersubjective communication as a
reciprocal process of telling and listening. This reciprocity forms the basis of
empathy, trust, and embodied synchronicity, which are essential to the emergence
of common identity and purpose along the lines of what Sue Ruddick (2008) calls a
dialectic of the positive (as opposed to positivism).
So what might this mean for a community of knowledge producers in the middle of
a bewildering and discouraging war of position? First, it is important to remember
that we are in fact producers (aka workers). Minimally, we should learn to identify as
workers in solidarity with each other, as well as with other workers. We should also
learn to remember that what we produce is very important. The academy figures
prominently in the current war of position for a reason: its a crucial site of social
reproduction. And yet academics somehow seem to believe that (a) we are not
workers and (b) even if we are, where we work is not relevant to achieving communal
values and social formations.

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CRAFTING COMMUNISM

377

Of course, academics have no monopoly on knowledge production, and I agree with

both Dean and Healy that we should foster alliances with other producers (of
knowledge, etc.). At the same time, however, it is important to remember the
example of other intellectuals (in the Gramscian sense) who have contributed
significantly to counterhegemonic social awareness. For instance, I think it is worth
revisiting the work of anthropologists like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth
Benedict in thinking about the potential of cultural critics as public intellectuals.
What of the challenges they presented to prevailing race and gender ideologies in the
twentieth century, and how might these be similarly applied to prevailing neoliberal
capitalist ideologies in the twenty-first century? As for strategies of engagement in a
long-term war of position, there is a great deal we can learn from the collaborative
efforts of Stuart Hall and others to catalyze counterhegemonic social formations in
the face of Thatchers dictum that there is no society. Of course, as Hall often
noted, we need to be constantly mindful of how our contexts are continuously
changing and what that might mean for our alliances and strategies.
Finally, I am inspired by possibilities I have glimpsed via initiatives related to this
symposium, and particularly by Shear and Burkes (2013) Anthropology of and for
Non-Capitalism. I look forward to continued involvement with the positive dialectic
of these emergent formations and to discovering their potential in the coming years.

References
Foucault, M. 1994. Ethics. New York: New Press.
. 2005. Hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1981
1982. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hall, S. 1986. The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. Journal of
Communication Inquiry 10 (2): 2844.
Igoe, J. 2013. Whats so important about friendship, self-care, and potentia? Paper
presented at Grabbing Green: Questioning the Green Economy, University of
Toronto, 179 May. http://www.niu.edu/ngold/docs/ngo_conference_materials/
igoe_friendship.pdf.
Le Guin, U. K. 2004. The wave in the mind. Boston: Shambala.
Merrifield, A. 2011. Magical Marxism: Subversive politics and the imagination. New
York: Palgrave.
Ruddick, S. 2008. Towards a dialectics of the positive. Environment and Planning A 40
(11): 25882602.
Shear, B., and B. Burke. 2013. Anthropology of and for non-capitalism. Anthropology
News, 10 January.