RW: Though he may have been its most celebrated interlocutor, one of Marx’s most enduring contributions to revolutionary thought arguably consists in his sustained polemic against rival theories of communism (those of Cabet, Dézamy, Weitling, Fourier, Proudhon) that existed during his time. So would you say that Marx’s critical intervention into the history of communist discourse is irreducible? Or is this legacy of immanent critique of other leftists dispensable?

JD: I don’t think this legacy is dispensable. It just shouldn’t be a fetish-object, right? It shouldn’t be some kind of “all or nothing.” My friend James Martel has a trilogy of books on Walter Benjamin. In the first of these, Textual Conspiracies, he criticizes what he calls “idolatry,” using Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire. James is an anarchist, and we disagree there, but his critique of idolatry as a mode of left attachment is really good. So as to your question, it doesn’t need to be one thing or the other.

RW: More broadly, what is the relationship between Marxism and communism? Does one have priority over the other?

JD: I think they have to go together.

RW: Is it still possible to imagine the creation of a communist society with a pre- or post-Marxist lens?

JD: Communism without Marxism can become weird primitivism. Some of the anarchist approaches to sustainability seem to have in mind something positively prehistoric in their rejection of anything that could be a city — even medieval cities, which didn’t require everyone to live in a subsistence mode of existence. Marxism recognizes that important things happened with industrialization, and communism comes out of — or has to be dragged out of — a particular kind of capitalist development.

RW: Oppositely, what is Marxism without communism as its goal, as with Bernstein or Kautsky? Or, as with Badiou, without the revolutionary implementation of the state as its means?

JD: Marxism without communism loses its radical goal and direction. That is what the problem with “socialism” is. Let me say a little more about this: I wasn’t sure at the beginning about “communism.” In the United States, it made sense from the 1990s through the first half of the last decade to think in terms of socialism. For us, socialism would be an amazing achievement, given the hideous trend of neoliberalism. However, I became more favorable to communism after reading the critiques of European social democracy, and I recognized it was a sellout to capitalism that sacrificed Marxism’s revolutionary edge and, in fact, had betrayed the revolution. Of course, I feared that the same could be said for parties claiming to be “communist,” such as the Italian Communist Party, which has co-opted and betrayed revolutionary Marxism just as much as some of the social-democratic parties of Europe. But in the contemporary political and intellectual turn, “communism” is important because it says “Look, we’re not sanguine. We think social-democracy sold out, that socialism is accommodationist. That approach has to be rejected.” Another reason for “communism” comes from the American context. No other word symbolizes anti-capitalism like communism. And that’s reason enough to claim it, hold onto it, and organize around it.

I disagree with Badiou on his rejection of the state and of the party, which is tantamount to a rejection of power, and results in a bizarre condemnation of communism as some weird mental attitude. His book, The Communist Hypothesis, ends up promoting communism as the contemplation of this Ideal Form. We have to think in terms of a state and of a party. We need to push ourselves to imagine different forms and modes of organization and realize them differently. We can’t think that every possibility has been used up.

RW: On the subject of the state, you propose a state guided by “the sovereignty of the people” rather than “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Can you explain the reasoning behind this terminological shift?

JD: There are a couple of reasons I argue for “the sovereignty of the people” instead of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The reason I moved to “sovereignty” from “dictatorship” is not simply because “dictatorship” has a bad reputation or that it’s a difficult political position to organize people around (though these are good reasons, too). It is because “dictatorship” connotes a provisional form, whereas “sovereignty of the people” lets us know that we must always be collectively governing ourselves. We have to always be steering ourselves, always mindful of a struggle against those who would attempt to oppress, exploit, or expropriate us.

RW: Does your notion of “the sovereignty of the people” allow for Lenin’s (and Engels’) doctrine of “the withering away of the state”?

JD: No, I don’t think so. I am not sure if it makes sense for us. What makes sense for us is to think of different modes of power that we continue to exert over ourselves. Here is how I would put it: I am interested in the different modes and different ways in which we can be self-sovereign. For Lenin, there is a lot of “withering away,” which means that with everyone getting new skills and being able to do the same things bureaucratically, the state apparatus will become unnecessary. In some ways I think that is right. We might think of that today in terms of various distributive forms of government or governance, but overall the language of “withering away” doesn’t capture how we would continually need forms through which to steer or govern ourselves in complex societies.

RW: Insofar as Marx, Engels, and Lenin characterized the modern state as expressing the domination of one class over all others, doesn’t the continued existence of the state suggest that classes continue to exist? Does this imply that a classless society is impossible?

JD: It depends on how we understand the state and how we understand classes. I want to defend an idea of communism against a bunch of the common-sense criticisms that are given, the kind raised by democrats and progressives. They tend to criticize it along the following lines: “Oh, you communists think that you’ll get to an end of history where there’s no more politics, and everything is just wonderful, touchy-feely unity.” Laclau also has a version of this critique. The reason they have that criticism owes to the language of the withering away of the state, as if we could have forms of human sociality that would be completely without violence or oppression. We shouldn’t be utopians in the sense that we believe in a classless society there will be no more conflict. There won’t be class conflict, but there’ll be different kinds of conflict, and we will need the state in some form in order to abolish capitalism, in order to take things and redistribute them.

RW: Besides sovereignty, the other component in your reformulation of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as “the sovereignty of the people” is “the people.” Following Hardt and Negri and Badiou, you distance yourself from the classical Marxist notion, elaborated by Lukács, of the proletariat as the “subject” of communism or history. Instead, you “offer the notion of ‘the people as the rest of us,’ the people as a divided and divisive force, as an alternative to some of the other names for the subject of communism — proletariat, multitude, part-of-no-part” (18–19). How does this amendment to the traditional concept of the “subject” of communism or history help to improve Marx’s theory, or at least bring it up to date?

JD: One of the ways it brings Marx’s theory up to date is really pragmatic. When you’re talking to a bunch of people today, almost no one says that he’s a member of “the proletariat.” They may say they’re part of “the people.” (This, even though Marx and Lenin are very clear that “the proletariat” is not an empirical category). The term “proletarianization” is still accurate and useful, however, so I think it’s important to keep that concept and think of “the people” as “the proletarianized people.” For folks in the US, “proletariat” suggests factory labor too strongly. There are many people who don’t feel like they’re proletarians, even as they might recognize their existence as proletarianized, especially today because we’ve lost so many manufacturing jobs. There are so many precarious workers, fragile workers, so many non-workers — widespread unemployment, people who are underemployed. It’s hard for those folks to think of themselves as “the proletariat.” The sense of “the people” as a divided group better encompasses our own time. Frankly, I also think it includes more of the “reserve army” of the unemployed, the Lumpenproletariat that classical communism had mistakenly abandoned.

Now I don’t mean this in any way as a rejection of the category of the worker. Recognizing “the people” as a revolutionary subject also brings communist theory up to date, because in Russia and in China there were discussions of alliances between the proletariat and the peasantry, both as segments of the revolutionary people. There was a realization in Russia and China that the category of the “the proletariat” risked being too narrow and exclusive and wouldn’t account for a huge segment of the people. Both Lenin and Mao had ideas of “the people” as a revolutionary grouping and both used this language. Lukács is very clear in his book Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought how Lenin evolved the notion of “the people” to give it this revolutionary, divided, and divisive sense. So there are good Marxist reasons to make this rhetorical move in emphasizing “the people” rather than “the proletariat.” They recognized the utility of a militant account of “the people,” not as a totality or unity, but as a divided group.

RW: How does your category of “the people as the rest of us” work to address the problem of revolutionary consciousness? What would something like “false consciousness” look like in this model?

JD: This is where Žižek is very helpful. In Žižek’s account, ideology is not a matter of what we know but what we do. So “false consciousness” isn’t the problem. The problem is what you’re doing, and how your actions repeat. We all know capitalism is a system that exploits the many for the benefit of the very few, and yet we continue in it. It’s not like we are deluded about it. Our contemporary problem is not that we are unaware that capitalism is unjust and wrecking the lives of billions. The problem is that we either don’t have the will to get out, or aren’t quite sure how to do so. It’s not a matter of changing people’s minds. It’s about changing their actions.

RW: I would like to go over your rejection of democracy in the name of communism. This may just be tactical, given the political vocabulary today. Taking a broader historical purview, however, didn’t Marx and others view communism as simply a higher realization of the democratic principle?

JD: That is because they didn’t live in democracies. They were struggling for democracy. They didn’t have universal suffrage, democratic governments, and so on. So it makes sense that they thought they were for that. Maybe not toward the end of his life, but Marx for the most part believed that once there was a workers’ party and universal suffrage you could possibly install an elected version of something like communism. That seems likely in some of his writings. But that view is ridiculous. The bourgeoisie is not going to give up without a fight. That is why I think Lenin is so much better. In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder Lenin argues that democracy is the highest form of bourgeois government — it is a vehicle for bourgeois rule.

We need to ask ourselves: What is the attachment to democracy? What does that mean in left-wing discussions these days? I think it’s a failure of will, and even an attachment to the form of our subjection. Why do we keep arguing in terms of democracy when we live in a democracy that is the source of unbelievable inequality and capitalist exploitation? Why are we so attached to this? It makes no sense. Of course, it’s not like we should have a system where nobody votes. The most fundamental things — namely, control over the economy — should be for the common, in the name of the common, and by the common (without being determined by something like voting). It should be known that there is no private property. Everything we own and produce is for the common good, and that is not up for grabs, it is a condition for the possibility of democracy. It shouldn’t itself be subject to democracy, the same way that any kind of revolutionary moment or transition to communism can’t be understood as a democratic move. If we can get twenty percent of the people, we could do it. But it’s not democratic. Eighty percent of people don’t care. Badiou is brilliant when he asks, “Why are people so intrigued by the so-called ‘independent voters?’ Why are people without a political opinion even allowed to decide, when they don’t even care?”