///What’s Holding Us Back? On Capitalist Realism and Communist Desire///
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why people, particularly self-identified progressives, maintain moderate political positions in the face of the maddening extremity of our present situation.
As I write this, we are just over a year on from the events of October 7th. In the three hundred and seventy five days that have passed since, Israel has dropped more explosives on Gaza than were dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during World War II. The Israeli military have conducted numerous acts of terror, recently placing explosives in pagers and detonating them in densely populated areas in Lebanon. IDF warplanes have dropped bunker-buster bombs on apartment complexes, on sleeping families and their children. IDF soldiers have mocked Palestinian civilians as they pick through the remnants of their homes and belongings, uploading these reprehensible moments to social media. There are numerous reports of mass systemic rape in Israeli prisons, of targeted humiliation and severe abuse of prisoners. Multiple Israeli hostages have been killed by IDF personnel, the most egregious example involving hostages visibly holding a white flag before being gunned down. Israel has assassinated leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah during negotiations aimed at a ceasefire, sabotaging hopes for diplomatic resolution. At this moment, Israel is expanding its genocidal aggression into Lebanon, striking Syria and Yemen, and attempting to pull Iran and therefore the United States into a full-scale regional war. A year on, there are no signs of willingness from the corrupt Israeli government to end the conflict, and the rhetoric from key officials calling for extermination of the Palestinian people and further colonial conquest is only intensifying.
This brutality is being conducted with the full material support of core Western imperial countries. The United States alone has spent a record 17.9 billion dollars providing military aid to Israel since October 7. The military support from these imperial powers has provided Israel with significant technological, logistical, and financial advantages, ensuring its continued ability to inflict genocide on the Palestinian people and escalate its aggressions into the wider region. There are clear benefits, economic and geopolitical, that these countries accrue from their support of Israel. US Secretary of State General Alexander Haig described Israel as “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk.” US President Joe Biden is on record saying that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” Hundreds of Western corporations profit from trade agreements and contracts with Israeli businesses. The military industrial complex, corporate “security providers” such as G4S treat Israel’s occupation of Palestine as a weapons testing range, a zone of research and development for the advancement of the means of murder and methods of mass killing. Despite performative denunciations of Netanyahu, modern imperialist capitalism is fully invested in the expansion of its interests across the surface of the globe, utilising the most brutal and inhumane methods it can produce.
An ongoing genocide in and of itself should be enough to radicalise us into action and smash our complacency, but it is far from the only crisis that we face. As the richest individuals and corporations see their share of the wealth created by workers increase exponentially, the cost of non-discretionary goods and services skyrockets. It is now more expensive for working people to afford food, a roof over our heads, and the basic necessities of life, than at any time in recent memory. Governments and reserve banks around the world are inflicting harsh austerity measures, hiking interest rates, and running defence for a few hundred billionaires, while billions of everyday people struggle to make ends meet. Class war on the behalf of the capitalist few is in full swing, with no expense spared in ensuring profits continue to flow unhindered. The vast resources of the state and the capitalist-owned media are being mobilized around the clock to facilitate the greatest vertical transfer of wealth in human history.
On top of our material deprivation, we face the increasing frequency and intensity of climate catastrophe. More than three million people are without power in Florida, as hurricane Milton causes widespread damage and loss of human life. Stories are emerging of businesses outrageously demanding that their workers show up for shifts by driving through floodwater and raging winds to ensure no profits are lost. In Australia, record-breaking floods in Lismore have left thousands without homes and belongings, with little to no assistance from the government. Loved ones have been lost, lives irreversibly uprooted. Here in the “lucky” country, we are facing another summer of extremes. The question is no longer whether or not we’ll face climate impacts, it’s a matter of degree. As the mercury climbs ever above the 1.5C mark, our political representatives approve coal mines and fracking wells, open massive fields of oil and gas for extraction, and funnel billions of dollars in public money to the fossil fuel industry; while criminalising peaceful protest and jailing those brave enough to take a stand.
Despite the existential horror of these converging crises, many of us in progressive spaces maintain a dogged commitment to political positions and forms of political action that are, at best, slightly left of the neoliberal doctrines of the major parties. We write petitions to members of parliament who are busy attending caviar dinners with billionaire donors. We campaign to elect parties and candidates chiefly on the basis of selecting the lesser of two evils. We pour our hearts and souls into reformist campaigns aimed at slight modifications to legislation, which might temporarily slow a fracking well or a coal mine. Our theories of change are seemingly mired in a swamp of civility and moderation, wedded to an unexamined acceptance of liberal, “democratic”, capitalism as the only viable political and economic system. Radical politics are somehow still off the table, despite the severity of these crises, and the short timeframes we have in which to solve them.
Why, with such a high degree of understanding of these factors, do we hold tightly to a politics of concession, petition and reform? Where are our redlines? At what point do we say, this is too much? Will it be when Israel launches a nuclear strike on a neighbouring nation? When the United States makes a first strike at China? Will it be when our own home is flooded or burns to the ground; or when acute economic dysfunction comes to our door? There is a stark absence of clarity within our movement around just how bad things have to get before we’ll consider a more radical political platform. And make no mistake: they are that bad, and worse, now. If genocide is not our red line, I hate to think what is.
So why, in the face of such deep suffering and injustice, staring down the barrel of extinction, do we cling to shallow forms of political thought and action that don’t fundamentally address root causes? Why do we persist with activity that leaves the foundational social and economic relations behind these crises untouched, despite the ineffectiveness and strategic failures therein? Why, with our hearts breaking open, are we not mobilising in our thousands and our millions this very moment to shut this shit down?
Considering the stakes, it’s an important moment to explore our problem of complacency and moderation. I think there are many reasons why even this catastrophic level of upheaval hasn’t yet proved sufficient to radicalise us beyond relatively standard liberal positions. In truth, there are as many reasons as there are people engaged in the struggle, more than we can cover in one sitting. But we tend not to talk about this in our movement because it feels impolite, even offensive, to seek answers to these kinds of questions. We talk plenty about holding politicians to account, less so about turning that same accountability inwards, on ourselves and our organisations. There’s often a stifling atmosphere in our broad tent around getting down to the basics and putting it all out on the table in this way. But that helps no-one, least of all us. Our aversion to confrontation and good faith political disagreement is a form of complicity, conscious or not, with the dominant systems of power responsible for our present crises. Confusion and imprecision serves the ruling classes of this world, not us or the people to whom we pledge our solidarity. So I’d like to invite us to practice stopping and deeply looking, like we discussed in the last article in this series, and to turn our attention to what holds us back. Time for some mindful walking in the garden of fear.
I want to open a conversation with you all about some of the ways that fear shows up in our movement, and speak to a few of the ideological pressures that shape our political imaginary. It’s going to be messy and incomplete, but I think it’s also important and generative and hopefully ought to provide some relief to comrades who feel similarly that something doesn’t quite add up about our current predicament. Fear is, of course, not the only factor moderating our politics: there are issues around political literacy, historical understanding, conflicting class interests and so on, more than we can cover in this article alone. So, for the time being, let’s zoom in a little on fear and how it structures the contours of our political consciousness.
Living as we do in a culture of white supremacy, in the settler-colonial capitalist project we call Australia, fear is something we’re immersed in and acculturated to from the time we’re old enough to stand. It’s the water we swim in, hard to see properly, and harder still to separate out which fears “belong” to us and what aspects of our fear are conditioned in us due to the benefits they confer to dominant structures of power and the classes that wield them. As Christina River Chapman points out, “white supremacy needs me to be afraid that I have everything to lose if I interrupt it; that if I speak truth to power, or fail to sufficiently revere the status quo, then I could lose my job, my life, my relationships.”
I believe fear is one of the core structuring processes behind why we moderate our politics so deeply, why we avoid radical action even in the face of extreme conditions. We fear the consequences of taking radical positions, even if they’re consistent with our deep feelings, our lived experiences, and our truth. We’re anxious that we might alienate supporters or donors, that we might offend or upset colleagues, or that we might attract criticism from external detractors. We fear that if we adopt positions perceived as radical we might lose our employment, or face repression from the state. And on some level, whether we consciously admit it or not, I think many of us fear collective power — what might happen if the will of the people were really unleashed.
Fear is not inherently a bad thing, something to be repressed or ignored. Fear exists to tell us something about ourselves and our environment: it is our body’s way of alerting us to potential danger and readying us to protect and take care of ourselves. But we know fear is not always rational, or grounded in accurate perceptions of reality. Many of us fear things which can’t hurt us. We inherit superstitions from our parents and our cultures. We often jump at things we think we’ve seen out of the corner of our eye. I think all of us have fears whose negative effects on our lives outweigh any protective benefit they might confer. Looking deeply at our fears can help us relate to them more healthily and constructively. So, for the next little while I’d like to invite us to do just that, and to have a deeper look at a handful of fears which play significant roles in moderating our politics and our movements. We can use this time to practice a kind of meditation together, stopping and slowing things down, getting stable and grounded so that we can let the muddy water of our busy minds settle and clear. That way, we should be able to see more clearly what’s tugging at our senses, what’s really there at the edges of our perception.
In progressive organisations, we pride ourselves on creating safe spaces for a broad range of people to come together and work with shared values towards common goals. We value inclusivity and kindness, and try our best to help others feel comfortable and to encourage their contributions. And we do accomplish this in significant ways. Of all the workplaces I’ve encountered, from kitchens to call centres, not-for-profits have been the spaces where I’ve felt the most like I’m being treated as a human being. There’s a degree of respect, openness and trust here that’s rare to find elsewhere, and I think it’s reasonable enough to say that on average, we’re better at navigating diversity and ethics than say, Coles or McDonalds are. We don’t always get it right, but we try, and there’s something in that worth praising.
That said, precisely because of our values and our attachment to feeling like we’re the good guys fighting the good fight, we can engage in some very sophisticated and subtle forms of discrimination. I think we’re afraid to get it wrong, and that perfectionism leads to us repressing those situations where our actions don’t align with our values. Oftentimes, in order to uphold the image of an inclusive and broad church, we exert subtle pressures on those who speak up and critique elements of the way we work together, structure our workloads and internal processes, and choose our positions and campaigns. These good-faith critics, often women, people from marginalised communities and people of colour, are scapegoated, their views characterised as undermining social cohesion. The legitimate problems with our systems and structures that they raise are routinely turned back on them and indvidualised. This culture of papering over the cracks only weakens our movement, by muscling out the very diversity of opinions and perspectives that constitutes progressive politics. It cuts short actually existing potentials for solidarity, and reproduces the same exclusionary and supremacist logics that we consciously set out to uproot and transform in our societies.
We do a very similar thing with radical politics. Because radical left politics tends to focus on class and class conflict, many people in our movement tend to view it as exclusionary and therefore inherently problematic. It is exclusionary, but not arbitrarily so. Class society is the society we live in, and class interests are the primary driver behind the crises we’ve been discussing. The ongoing genocide in Palestine is not primarily a matter of religious or cultural difference, it is first and foremost a result of the dynamics of class society, dynamics with deep roots in the colonial expansion of the British Empire, and the subsequent aspirations of bourgeois Zionists. The oppression of the organised left and trade unions in Israel is a symptom of these class antagonisms, as are the broader actions of Israel in the region and its participation in the imperial ambitions of countries like the United States. The global rise of the far-right is in large part a reaction of elements of the capitalist class to the growing contradictions in the world economic system and the effects these have on their national contexts. Climate breakdown is a product of class society, of a capitalist system which exploits labor and the natural world for the purposes of producing profit for a small but powerful owning class; and our present difficulty in resolving the climate crisis is primarily a result of class interests blocking rational solutions and poisoning the well of discourse with disinformation. Wealth inequality speaks for itself.
When those of us on the radical left raise the issue of class and class interests, it’s not out of prejudice: it’s because these are real and material factors that complicate our ability to solve problems. If, for example, I own investment properties, it is in my interest to ensure I can continue to receive that financial benefit, and so I am significantly less likely to fight to abolish the commodification of housing. If I am the owner of a supermarket, then I have little material interest in ending hunger, because food as a commodity is the source of my wealth. Because we are unwilling to face these contradictions, out of fear of offending people or making people with these class interests feel uncomfortable, we deeply compromise our ability to resolve them. As Marx noted, we have a choice to make between socialism, that is, the dissolution of class society, or the common ruin of the contending classes. As a Buddhist, a Communist, and as a human being, the latter is not something I think we should lend our efforts toward, consciously or no. Contradictions cannot be willed away or simply ignored: they constitute our society whether we like it or not. The sooner we address our fear of surfacing them, the sooner we can get to the work of developing tangible solutions to the problems of our time.
Our concern to avoid these discomforts also extends beyond our walls to our participation in public discourse. As organisations dependent on external funding for our existence, we are constantly navigating the challenge of appealing to broad audiences consisting of numerous contradictory class interests, historical and geographic backgrounds, and political identifications. Ostensibly radical positions, such as taking a clear stance on the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, or speaking up about the contradictory interests of the three quarters of Labor party politicians who own investment properties, are primarily perceived in terms of risk: risk to our brand, risk of members unsubscribing, risk of cancelled donations and major donors pulling funding, and risk of burning bridges in high places.
Our response, or lack thereof, to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people is a particularly clear example of this problem, and therefore worth drilling down into. Progressives working in the justice space are, more likely than not, to be aware of the extent and severity of the situation in Gaza. Comprehension of the history of occupation and the political and economic dimensions of the ongoing genocide is higher than in the wider population. Our moral understanding of the situation cannot be said to be lacking on account of a lack of information — we know what is happening now, what has happened, enough to know that it is unjustifiable.
Many of us also understand the material links between our countries and Israel. In Australia, our government routinely sends significant aid to Israel, including so-called dual-use exports, such as software and cybersecurity technology including surveillance systems, encryption software, and data-gathering technologies that can be used for civilian and military purposes. Australia exports drones and heavy machinery, ostensibly for civilian use but with clear military and colonial applications, able to be repurposed by the Israeli military or settler industries. Israeli defence company Elbit Systems has contracts with the Australian Department of Defence to provide advanced military technology, such as Battle Management Systems (BMS), drone technologies, and other defence equipment. These contracts support both Australian defence capabilities and Israeli military-industrial activities. Multiple Australian companies produce parts for F35 fighter jets, which Israel uses to conduct its genocide in Gaza and its aggression further afield.
Folks in our movement are also no doubt aware of the recent ICJ ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly constitute genocide, and that there are numerous legal responsibilities under international law that member states are obliged to adhere to. Knowing this, and understanding that the situation is morally unjustifiable, legally untenable, and that there are significant points of leverage that an organised, grassroots movement could engage with to slow or stop the ongoing genocide, it is remarkable that our primary concern seems to inexorably gravitate toward brand reputation and the possible financial flow on effects from a potential backlash. As progressives, we talk a good shop about our values, but how do our values stack up in this situation? Where are our oft-professed values of solidarity? Are they genuine values if we abandon them due to criticism, or when money enters the picture?
There are legitimate concerns with regards to funding. After all, donations pay for our work and without that income, our organisations cannot exist. But what good are organisations that increasingly can only exist within the narrowly defined contours of capitalist realism, when that realism dictates complicity with genocide? What progressive purpose can organisations serve, if they consistently compromise necessary and just positions of solidarity out of fear of alienating one or another section of society? And how far does this process go? If today we compromise on Palestinian life for a few thousand dollars, what will be our price tomorrow to abandon First Nations here in Australia? I can’t help but wonder if it would be such a great loss after all, should organisations incapable of taking a principled stand on the worst crimes of our generation fall into obscurity. Perhaps the vacuum left in their wake would create space for new political formations, new alliances, and new vehicles capable of the kinds of revolutionary transformation necessary to overcome the crises of our time.
Regardless, brand reputation and funding cannot be our primary and only concern at all times if we are to be able to honestly call ourselves progressives, and stand for progress on issues of human rights and justice. Contrary to the dominant logic of capitalism, which sublimates all other factors to profit, our moral compass and political clarity should in fact steer us into troubled waters when it is right and honest to enter them. Because of the contradictions inherent in class society, it is inevitable that these tensions will arise in the course of our advocacy. We should be willing to weather some criticism, to take some heat, for standing up against imperialist aggression and ongoing genocide, for challenging the vested interests of rent-seekers, and for demanding a just system for people and planet. It is really the least that we can do, considering what is at stake.
When we act out of fear of what we think we can lose, we lose something far more important. We lose our integrity, our connection to each other, and we lose a part of ourselves. In the words of TriContinental Institute director Vijay Prashad, “the fact is, you have to stand for what you believe in. And if you continue to make compromises with your own beliefs, you will disappear.” Tema Okun, who writes in detail on the characteristics of white supremacy culture, helps us understand that “white supremacy, white supremacy culture, and racism are fear-based. White supremacy uses fear to disconnect: disconnect us from each other across lines of race, disconnect us from each other within our racial groups, disconnect us from ourselves, disconnect us from the earth, wind, and sky, and all the creatures that roam the earth, disconnect us from source, god, creativity, or whatever you call the wisdom we carry inside us.” We lose that connection which is at the heart of our humanity, which informs the world we want to build with one another. And we lose our clarity, the more we moderate the clarity of our hearts to align with the confusion of the capitalist system.
By benchmarking our understanding of what is politically possible to what’s considered reasonable in a society that excels at producing compliant forms of subjectivity, we restrict ourselves to a politics of reformism. We back ourselves into a corner where we find ourselves painting minor modifications to the capitalist system as examples of deep systemic change, where we characterise moderations of its worst excesses as real and tangible alternatives to capitalism. This unwillingness to posit a real alternative to capitalist social relations is transparent to many people both within and without our movement, and I would contend that it is a core reason why the Western left has stalled and lost momentum over the last decade, while the right and their fascist alternative has gained ground both overseas and here in Australia.
This brings us proper to capitalist realism. As the saying goes, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Coined by cultural theorist Mark Fisher in the mid-2000’s, capitalist realism describes the pervasive, difficult to articulate feeling that capitalism is the only viable political and economic system. Francis Fukuyama famously wrote in 1989, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In the cancelled future that we now inhabit, alternatives to capitalism are seen as unrealistic, as utopian dreamings untethered to the material realities of a globally dominant market liberalism. Historical examples of socialist and anarchist alternatives are retroactively determined to have failed on their own terms, unable to compete with a uniquely functional capitalist system. All forms of critique and resistance that posit alternatives are seen as infantile or illegitimate. In terms of our affect, capitalist realism manifests in feelings of resignation, passivity and an inability to imagine and envision transformative systemic change and a post-capitalist world. Sound familiar?
That ideology subconsciously structures our political imagination is not exactly a new idea, but the generalised feeling that capitalist realism describes is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon. Marx wrote in The Germany Ideology that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” In Marx’s time, feelings of resignation, passivity and the inability to imagine an alternative were counterposed by a burgeoning socialist current and an ascendant trade unionism. In our own era, the tragic historical dissolution of socialist projects, the rise of individualism ushered in on the wave of neoliberal reforms, and the decline in the membership of the unions has eroded much of that consciousness of collectivity and narrowed the dimensions of our political imagination. We find it difficult to imagine what our lives might look like beyond the narrow configurations of the present exploitative social relations of owners and workers, to imagine a world beyond prison industrial complexes and imperial wars.
Absent-mindedly foreclosing the future in this way, while simultaneously naturalising and universalising capitalist relations, has us doing much of the ideological work of capitalism on its behalf. Our fears of alienating supporters and donors are deeply intertwined with the structuring forces capitalist realism exerts on the public imaginary. Why ruffle feathers if there’s nothing to be gained? After all, if there is no realistic or workable alternative, what sense does it make to talk about abolishing exploitative social relations? What could it even mean to talk about deep systemic change in specific terms, when the only viable system is apparently the one we already have? And furthermore, when we “know” that every other system is by comparison brutal, authoritarian, violent, and repressive?
In order to combat capitalist realism, we need first to be able to identify it. Our movement takes a great deal of liberal, bourgeois thought as a priori valid, justified, and true. We scarcely stop to ask whether the ways we’re framing issues or the background context in which they arise are factual and evidence based, or simply the common-sense version implicitly communicated through the many systems of intellectual production owned and utilised by the ruling classes. We don’t think in terms of capitalist realism, and as a result we reproduce it unconsciously, allowing it to structure our political ideals, our theories of change, and the upper limits of our political imaginations. The utility of theory, of conceptual frameworks like this is in their ability to help us see clearly the hegemonic ideological forms that subconsciously shape our worldviews, to identify them and hold them up to scrutiny; in other words, to double-check before acting on our assumptions. Building this kind of shared theoretical clarity is an incredibly important and largely overlooked form of left praxis, a project in dire need of further investment. Whether out of fear or dismissal, when we avoid co-creating collective forms of sensemaking outside of those handed to us by the ruling classes, we ensure our own co-option.
And we know in our bones that capitalist realism is bullshit. How many great depressions and once-in-a-lifetime financial crises do we need to experience before the faux-optimism wears thin? We are in a sixth mass extinction thanks to this one-of-a-kind system that just works where all others fail. And, if capitalism is so self-evidently functional, why the need to ruthlessly murder and destroy every attempt at building something different? Shouldn’t the system easily succeed on its own merits, without having to prove wrong all others with bullets, bombs, sanctions and poison pills? If there is no alternative, why are the loudest voices in the room scaremongering about communism and the radical left also the most committed capitalists and their courtiers in the press? It just doesn’t add up, and on some level I think all of us know it.
So what happened to the left to bring us here? How did we fall into capitalist realism, and lose sight of the horizon of possibility that lies beyond polluted industrial lots, burning rainforests and crowded slums? That, dear friends, is a story for another time. Next time, we can unpack some of the other facets of this problem I mentioned when we began our walk together, in particular, our fear of us, the anxiety many of us hold around what might happen if collective power was realised. But I have already gone on long enough, and I want to finish our wander in the garden of fear by taking us up on the hill for a proper look at that horizon.
I began this series by talking about communist desire. As we round the top of this hill and look outward into the distance, you’ll notice that, as always, there is a horizon. The horizon, as Jodi Dean writes, is a dimension of experience we can never lose, even if, lost in a fog or focused on our feet, we fail to see it. Jodi writes that “with respect to politics, the necessary and unavoidable horizon that conditions and curves our experience is communism.” Whether we recognise it or not, the promise of a world beyond capitalism still animates us. It is this desire, this pull towards a life on the other side of capitalism that moves us into political action. Why do we do this difficult, laborious, and often thankless work day in and day out? Because on some level, we know that a better world is there waiting for our hands to build it. We have a deep yearning for a different way of being in the world and relating to each other, rooted in equality and collective ownership of the things we need to reproduce our lives. And moreover, we know such a world is possible, that the conditions for its realisation already exist in embryonic form in the societies we now inhabit. Jodi states, “the triumph of capitalism is that it transforms every challenge into a confirmation of its own invincibility.” The facade of invincibility that capitalist realism constructs is precisely what communist desire can help us break through, by affirming our true and properly human belief that another world is not only possible, but necessary.
Communist desire names our collective longing for solidarity, the common good, and the dismantling of hierarchical power structures. It is that fire in us which demands not simply the amelioration of exploitation, of prisons, borders, police and bosses, of gendered and racialised forms of violence, of the commodity form, but their abolition altogether. It is our desire for us, our collective desire for collectivity. It is a kind of love for all of us, for our species, our planet, and for the as-yet unrealised futures we have been taught to foreclose. It is tenderness and care for the little ones, for the mosses and the lichens, for the small creatures, the great rivers, and the silent mountains. It is yearning, yearning for truth and beauty and togetherness and peace, yearning for a world where we can truly be ourselves, without fear. Our dearly departed comrade Mark Fisher spoke often and in beautiful detail about the ways that capitalism manipulates affective life, instilling anxiety, depression, and a sense of hopelessness that makes communist desire feel out of reach. For Mark, the challenge was always to revive our latent revolutionary imaginations and breathe new life into communist desire, energising us to break out of the confines of capitalist realism and envision and create a world based on cooperation, solidarity, and shared human and more-than-human flourishing. Once again, it is not only possible, it is necessary.
As we look out on the communist horizon with fresh eyes, it is this desire, this yearning, this beautiful and human feeling in us which I want to encourage to grow and flower. We are astonishing creatures, capable of such brilliance and such kindness. It would be an unspeakable shame to allow a system less than five hundred years old to define for us who and what we are capable of becoming. So I want us to dream again, together. I want to invite you, dear reader, to allow your desire for a better world some room to flourish.
Communist realism, then? Let’s take some deep breaths and let go of some of that fear, and begin once more to imagine the myriad futures that have not yet been realised. Let’s, for a change, allow ourselves to envision the “not-yet” of history, and to give free rein to our longing for a world that fulfils our deepest human needs for justice, freedom, and equality. Communist desire isn’t a childish fantasy or a utopian reaction. It is a vital, energetic, creative force that can shape history, if we want it to. It is an expression of something fundamentally mature in us, something that belongs not only to our bodies but to those yet-to-be-born.
Our desire for us. What’s that saying again? We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Postscript
In the wake of the election of Trump for a second term, and the abject failure of liberal politics to prevent his ascension to power or to mobilise the working class, it seems more relevant than ever to ask the question that prompted this piece: “what’s holding us back?”
Liberalism is dead. Become a communist. Fight for justice and peace, build solidarity, build the alternative.
While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand,
I am in the mountains, amid falling
snowflakes,
with other gods or
without any gods at all,
without a family, without
a father or a mother, with nature.
“What does my father want? Can he offer me
more than that?
Impossible. Leave me in peace.”
Everything is a living being
Celestial beings, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine beings,
all of
them
connected to my body
I
thought that it must be a feeling of
endless bliss
to be in contact with
the profound life of every form, to
have a soul for rocks,
metals, water,
and plants, to
take into myself, as in a dream,
every element of nature,
like flowers that breathe
with the waxing and waning of the moon
