Hardt and Negri turned left defeat into an opportunity to reimagine communist politics. This reimagining needs to go further. It can go further by highlighting division, antagonism, and political organization. Nearly forty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the wide array of politicized issues and identities enables a communism that, more fully than ever before, can take the side of the oppressed, indeed, that can make the multiple struggles of the oppressed into a side. It’s imperative that multiplicity not replace class but be understood as a class characteristic. Let me explain.
The vision of a multitude of incommunicable struggles theorized by Hardt and Negri and held up in appeals to democracy replaces the antagonism of class struggle with pluralization, creativity, and becoming, thereby flattening out and immediatizing the terrain of struggle. Such a rendering of each strike as equivalent obliterates differences in resources, histories, and opportunities, effacing the uneven development of capitalism. It obscures the dimension of time, as if struggles occurred in discreet bursts rather than building, unfolding, advancing, and retreating. And it disavows the tensions within struggles, as if histories of oppression left no trace on those who organize to dismantle the arrangements of power that continue them. In effect, the goal becomes, as in communicative capitalism itself, the production of the many, the multitude of singularities. The political effect is a failure to build a concentrated political force with the sustained capacity to confront and replace the capitalist mode of production. Instead, there are small battles, policy options, and cultural interventions, victories that can be absorbed and defeats that can be forgotten (when they aren’t fetishized as yet another instance of inevitable left failure). To the extent that pluralization—and the moves to fragment and individuate that accompany it—is a left political priority, politics becomes passionately attached to the small and weak. This gives us the shape of the Left we have in the long tail of micro-initiatives.
The new cycle of struggles has demonstrated the political strength that comes from collectivity. Common names, tactics, and images are bringing the fragments together, making them legible as many fronts of one struggle against capitalism. Where the proliferation of issues and identities disperses and weakens us—inciting the snark that glorifies itself as critique even as it undermines solidarity—the crowd events of the last decade are forcing a new sense of collective power. They have pushed expectations of multiplicity into experiences of collectivity. The question that emerges from these experiences is how they might endure and extend, how the momentary discharge of equality that crowds unleash might become the basis for a new process of political composition.
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