The Communist Horizon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In a further essay, “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin uses Kästner as the exemplar of the “new objectivity,” a literary movement that Benjamin argues “has made the struggle against poverty an object of consumption.” --The Communist Horizon - page 159, Jodi Dean |
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The Communist Horizon (2012) is a book by Jodi Dean.
In the first two chapters, Jodi Dean surveys the contemporary political landscape and writes that the persistence of anti-communist rhetoric more than twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She says that capitalists, conservatives, liberals, democrats, social democrats, and “radical democrats” all embrace the idea that 20th century experiments with communism were an unqualified failure, and in doing so, limit the ability to discuss political alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets (a fusion of democracy and capitalism that Dean calls “neoliberalism”). Dean asserts that when people think of capitalism, they do not think only of its worst excesses (war, imperialism, slavery, robber barons, the Great Depression, the global financial crisis, etc.). The history of capitalism is allowed to be dynamic and nuanced. By contrast, Dean writes, if one utters the word “communism,” there is no dynamism or nuance. A single story emerges, which links the word “communism” with a fixed and simplistic historical narrative.
Dean argues that “communism”, for most people, equals the Soviet Union. Communist experiments in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin American are never mentioned. Second, Dean asserts that the entire seventy-year history of the USSR is collapsed into the twenty-six years of Joseph Stalin’s rule. Third, Stalin’s violence – the purges, the great famines, the Gulags – are the only events allowed to represent the ideal of “communism,” ignoring the modernization of the economy, the successes of Soviet science (including the Soviet space program) or the general increase in the standard of living for the once predominantly peasant society. Fourth, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets, follows directly from the totalitarian nature of Stalinism and its political and economic rigidity. Thus, the singular experience of Stalinism in the Soviet Union becomes the basis upon which all discussions of alternatives to neoliberalism are silenced. Stalinism serves as the “proof” that communism can never work in practice, because any challenge to the political status quo will inevitably end with purges and the Gulag.
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