The aff’s focus forecloses effective anti-capitalist politics – rejecting individualist fantasies is crucial to a collective future.

Some might object to my use of the second-person plural "we" and "us"-what do you mean "we"? This objection is symptomatic of the fragmentation that has pervaded the Left in Europe, the U K, and North America. Reducing invocations of "we" and "us" to sociological statements requiting a concrete, delineable, empirical referent, it erases the division necessary for politics as if interest and will were only and automatically attributes of a fixed social position. We-skepticism displaces the performative component of the second-person plural as it treats collectivity with suspicion and privileges a fantasy of individual singularity and autonomy. I write "we" hoping to enhance a partisan sense of collectivity. My break with conventions of w1iting that reinforce individualism by admonishing attempts to think and speak as part of a larger collective subject is deliberate. The boundaries to what can be thought as politics in certain segments of the post-structuralist and anarchist Left only benefit capital. Some activists and theorists think that micropolitical activities, whether practices of self-cultivation or individual consumer choices, are more important loci of action than large-scale organized movement-an assumption which adds to the difficulty of building new types of organizations because it makes thinking in terms of collectivity rarer, harder, and seemingly less "fresh." Similarly, some activists and theorists treat aesthetic objects and creative works as displaying a political potentiality missing from classes, parties, and unions. This aesthetic focus disconnects politics from the organized struggle of working people, making politics into what spectators see. Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress capital as they circulate political affects while displacing political struggles from the streets to the galleries. Spectators can pay (or donate) to feel radical without having to get their hands dirty. The dominant class retains its position and the contradiction between this class and the rest of us doesn't make itself felt as such. The celebration of momentary actions and singular happenings-the playful disruption, the temporarily controversial film or novel-works the same way. Some on the anarchist and post-structuralist Left treat these flickers as the only proper instances of a contemporary left politics. A pointless action involving the momentary expenditure of enormous effort-the artistic equivalent of the 5k and 10k runs to fight cancer, that is to say, to increase awareness of cancer without actually doing much else-the singular happening disconnects task from goal. Any "sense" it makes, any meaning or relevance it has, is up to the spectator (perhaps with a bit of guidance from curators and theorists). Occupation contrasts sharply with the singular happening. Even as specific occupations emerge from below rather than through a coordinated strategy, their common form-including its images, slogans, terms, and practices-links them together in a mass struggle. The power of the return of communism stands or falls on its capacity to inspire large-scale organized collective struggle toward a goal. For over thirty years, the Left has eschewed such a goal, accepting instead liberal notions that goals are strictly individual lifestyle choices or social-democratic claims that history already solved basic problems of distribution with the compromise of regulated markets and welfare states – a solution the Right rejected and capitalism destroyed. The Left failed to defend a vision of a better world, an egalitarian world of common production by and for the collective people. Instead, it accommodated capital, succumbing to the lures of individualism, consumerism, competition, and privilege, and proceeding as if there really were no alternative to states that rule in the interests of markets. Marx expressed the basic principle of the alternative over a hundred years ago: from each according to ability, to each according to need. This principle contains the urgency of the struggle for its own realization. We don't have to continue to live in the wake of left failure, stuck in the repetitions of crises and spectacle. In light of the planetary climate disaster and the ever-intensifying global class war as states redistribute wealth to the rich in the name of austerity, the absence of a common goal is the absence of a future (other than the ones imagined in post-apocalyptic scenarios like Mad Max). The premise of communism is that collective determination of collective conditions is possible, if we want it. To help incite this desire, to add to its reawakening force and presence, I treat "communism" as a tag for six features of our current setting: 1. A specific image of the Soviet Union and its collapse; 2 . A present, increasingly powerful force; 3 . The sovereignty of the people; 4. The common and the commons; 5. The egalitarian and universalist desire that cuts through the circuits and practices in which we are trapped; 6. The party. The first two features can be loosely associated with the politics that configures itself via a history linked to the end of the Soviet Union as a state, as refracted through the dominance of the US as a state. What matters here is less the historical narrative than the expression of communism as the force of an absence. My discussion of these first two features highlights how the absence of communism shapes our contemporary setting. In the sequence narrative as the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy, the communist horizon makes itself felt as a "signifying stress." This is Eric L. Santner's term for a way that reality expresses its nonidentity with itself. As Santner explains, the "social formation in which we find ourselves immersed" is "fissured by lack" and "permeated by inconsistency and incompleteness." The lack calls out to us. Inconsistency and incompleteness make themselves felt. "What is registered," Santner explains, "are not so much forgotten deeds but forgotten failures to act. "7 The frenetic activity of contemporary communicative capitalism deflects us away from these gaps. New entertainments, unshakeable burdens, and growing debt displace our attention toward the immediate and the coming-up-next as they attempt to drown out the forceful effects of the unrealized-the unrealized potentials of unions and collective struggle, the unrealized claims for equality distorted by a culture that celebrates the excesses of the very rich, the unrealized achievements of collective solidarity in redressing poverty and redistributing risks and rewards. The first two chapters thus treat the gaps, fissures, and lack Santner theorizes as signifying stresses in terms of a missing communism that makes itself felt in the setting configured by its alleged failure and defeat.