Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

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

More-than-Capitalist Landscapes of Communist

Becoming
Oona Morrow & Claire Brault
To cite this article: Oona Morrow & Claire Brault (2015) More-than-Capitalist
Landscapes of Communist Becoming, Rethinking Marxism, 27:3, 371-374, DOI:
10.1080/08935696.2015.1042689
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042689

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

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Date: 27 September 2015, At: 20:05

Rethinking Marxism, 2015

Vol. 27, No. 3, 371374, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042689

More-than-Capitalist Landscapes of
Communist Becoming

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Oona Morrow and Claire Brault

This commentary responds to Jodi Deans call to bring back the Communist party
and Stephen Healys call to practice communism as a mode of life, as seen in their
exchange at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. Employing
Gibson-Grahams diverse economies perspective, we reframe communism as abundant
and everyday rather than the property of a particular party. Drawing on examples
of collective self-provisioning in our activist and research practices, we argue that
everyday communist practices are critical for creating a better world in the present
as well as for sustaining oppositional struggles for a better future.
Key Words: Diverse Economies, Communism, Everyday Life, Political Economy, SelfProvisioning

Jodi Deans and Stephen Healys thought-provoking talks raise many questions about
the times, spaces, and social formations necessary for economic and social change.
Here we reflect on the resonance and dissonance between Deans project and
our own.1 We wholeheartedly agree with Deans definition of communism as the
expansion of voluntary cooperation. At the same time, we do not wish to accept the
authority that Dean would grant to a party to police the boundaries of communism
and exclude seemingly less militant practices like collective provisioning. Like Healy
(2015, 353), we are interested in encouraging everyday habits and practices in which
we answer the question of how to live in common. We argue that everyday
communist class processes, such as cooperative food provisioning, play an important
role in creating the conditions of existence and the desire for communism. We are not
holding these up as blueprints for life after capitalism but rather as sites of embodied
learning, for feeling, doing, and desiring communism as a mode of life. Using a
diverse economies approach, we seek to help communist practices and imaginaries
proliferate by recognizing them in landscapes of daily life rather than in an everreceding horizon. To conclude and illustrate this position, we apply our approach by
1. We are writing as two individual members of the Community Economies Collective (CEC). Our
comments here are not intended to represent the CEC as a whole. Each time the pronoun we is
used in what follows, it will refer to the way the two of us position ourselves with respect to the
Dean/Healy debate. Precisely because the CEC is not a party like the one Dean calls for and does
not have one ideological line that various members must adhere to, we are glad to express our
own voices as two researchers and activists.
2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

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MORROW AND BRAULT

examining spaces of collective provisioning in our own research and activist

experiences.
Dean (2015) asks a number of engaging questions that offer opportunities to ground
communist politics in lived feelings, everyday practices, and action research. She
asks how we may embrace uncertainty and do the impossible, with the recognition
of the ultimately open character of the world in which we participate (372) and how
we can practice collective action wherein cooperation is not forcedis not out of
our controlbut is instead willed commonly (338). These questions are among those
that resonate most with us, yet the party is not the answer we propose. We are
interested instead in an approach that creates economic possibility by describing
economic difference. Through action research and collective action, we strive to turn
diverse economic possibilities into a postcapitalist politics of possibility. With activists
and researchers, we work to create situations where solidarity and cooperation can
be learned and practiced. Through participating in cooperative enterprises, we are
learning how commons are negotiated and how surplus is collectively produced and
distributed. In other words, it is by making communist class processes more visible
and accessible that we hope to create the conditions for communism.
Dean (2015, 341) also asks about the relation between the actions we design, the
events in which we participate, the texts we write and circulate, and the world we
want to bring into being. There is an ontological politics to research, writing, and
world making (Law and Urry 2004). Research and activist practices can either help
make communism realizable or place it still further out of reach. Gibson-Graham and
Roelvink (2010, 331) depart from the time-honored but often paralyzing question of
what is to be done in order to marshal examples of what is already being done.
Seeing these examples, as Healy (2015, 350) emphasizes, allows others to politically
organize around communism as something sensible, desirable, practical, and already
here, immanent to our experience.
In The Communist Horizon Dean uses the term horizon to designate a dimension of
experience that we can never lose. While Dean (2012, 2) insists that the horizon is a
necessary dimension of our actuality and the fundamental division establishing
where we are, she also concedes that we can never reach it. Situating ourselves in
relation to a communist horizon can mean overlooking landscape features where
communist practices and desires already exist. Using a diverse economies approach,
we can see communist class processes as part of our actuality and as a significant
feature in our economic landscape. We are interested in thinking about where we
are but also what we are becoming. We are learning to see the horizon and also
the communist landscapes that are already emerging.
At the 2013 Rethinking Marxism conference, Deans talk was accompanied by a
succession of arresting images, among them a photograph of a person wearing a
T-shirt with one of her statements, Goldman Sachs doesnt care if you raise
chickens, printed on it. Although Goldman Sachs can affect our lives in myriad
ways, their capacity to care is not the metric by which we measure the value of our
lives. We will not join a party that reifies the authority of Goldman Sachs (or of
capitalism) in order to discredit alternatives and dictate where our affective
investments belong. We prefer to care for our chickens and contribute to a
generative, rather than solely reactive, politics of communism. For us, this approach

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CRAFTING COMMUNISM

373

offers many more opportunities for the expansion of voluntary cooperation than a
party does.
Gibson-Grahams (2006, 16) research has underscored the ways in which capitalist
economies coexist with diverse economies, including those characterized by communist class processes through which surplus is communally produced and collectively distributed. Community-economy scholars explore communist (as well as
other) class processes in household, community, and cooperative enterprises. For
example, Oonas research on urban homesteading (UH) uses a diverse economies
approach to highlight the expansion of voluntary cooperation in food provisioning.
The UH movement promotes self-provisioning practices such as gardening, food
preservation, and chicken and beekeeping (Morrow 2014). For Dean (2015, 333),
these practices are depoliticized into lifestyle choices and represent a lower-cost
version of the 1 percents privatization.
Urban homesteaders have no illusions of becoming self-sufficient, of bringing down
Goldman Sachs with chickens, or of composting their way out of capitalism. When
done in common, their practices represent a prefigurative politics that creates and
nurtures communist habits and desires. UH practices also create a commons of shared
trees, animals, kitchens, gardens, and plants that supports a variety of communist
class processes and enterprises. Cooperative forms of self-provisioning are performed
in community kitchens and shared gardens, in yogurt-making and chicken-keeping
cooperatives, and in canning and harvesting collectives. These collective forms of
provisioning are necessary for living well, now, and they will be necessary in a world
without capitalist economies. They are not forms of privatization but forms of
cooperation. To dismiss chicken keeping and the like as neoliberal, bourgeois, and
individualizing overlooks their necessity and suggests that there is no room for
communism or collective action in quotidian spaces. What is communism for if not to
improve our everyday lives?
It is not only in backyards and community kitchens that communist class processes
are flourishing but also in spaces of public protest and opposition. In these spaces we
see communal processes occurring within and alongside an oppositional politics that
does not call for the authority of a party. For example, during the student strikes in
France (20025), Claire participated in weeks-long campus occupations. These
oppositional occupations were able to persist for as long as they did because Claire
and others performed collective self-provisioning. They created autonomous universities with student-run debates and seminars, DIY public dry toilets, walls of free
expression on public squares, and communal cooking and gardening. Practices of
collective provisioning and care are essential for the daily and long-term reproduction of oppositional politics. These practices of collective provisioning and care were
equally important to sustaining oppositional politics at Occupy Wall Street (Safri
2011). In other words, we dont see an incompatibility between oppositional politics
and cooperative economies.
But while we share Deans desire for the expansion of voluntary cooperation, we
are skeptical that the party, with its cadres and cells and claims of speaking the
truth, is the best vehicle for getting there. First, because there is already here:
communist class processes are flourishing in urban commons, cooperative enterprises, sites of protest, and egalitarian households. Second, because the party Dean

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proposes risks closing down the possibility for practicing communism as a mode of
life. Rather than pretending that either the party or, for that matter, the CEC has all
of the answers, we prefer an approach that empowers communities to practice and
examine communist and other class processes in their daily lives. We believe that
popular education (e.g., tools like Take Back the Economy), action research,
cooperative enterprises, and diverse social movements can make communism more
accessible, visible, and desirable to a wider variety of people than any single party
can. We would like to know where Dean sees communism in our present landscape
and why the party is, in her view, the best vehicle for expanding voluntary
cooperation.

References
Dean, J. 2012. The communist horizon. London: Verso.
. 2015. The party and communist solidarity. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3):
33242.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K., and G. Roelvink. 2010. An economic ethics for the Anthropocene. Antipode 41 (1): 32046.
Healy, S. 2015. Communism as a mode of life. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 34356.
Law, J., and J. Urry. 2004. Enacting the social. Economy and Society 33 (3): 390410.
Morrow, O. 2014. Urban homesteading: Diverse economies and ecologies of provisioning in greater Boston. Ph.D. diss., Clark University.
Safri, M. 2011. Globalizing Zuccotti. Occupy Gazette, 19 October, 15.