Jodi Dean (USA), Tomislav Medak (UK), and Petar Jandrić (Croatia) are the authors. Translated by Liu Shuhui.

Jodi Dean is the Donald R. Harter Chair Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She received a B.A. in History from Princeton University, and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. Dean's research interests center on the interaction between contemporary media technology and left-wing politics. Her works include Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, The Communist Horizon, and Crowds and Party. In 2018, she was interviewed by Petar Jandrić of the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences (Croatia) and Tomislav Medak of Coventry University (UK). She responded to and answered questions on what communicative capitalism is, the crisis of democracy in the era of communicative capitalism and its solutions, the importance of Marx, the new communist horizon, forms of anti-capitalist struggle, and the modes of interaction between the masses and the party.

I. Communicative Capitalism Against Democracy

Jandrić and Medak: Communicative capitalism is one of the primary concepts in your work. May we ask, what is communicative capitalism? How does it differ from earlier capitalism?

Dean: Communicative capitalism refers to a new form of capitalism in which communication has become central to capital accumulation. This means that communication plays a different and more fundamental role in the production, consumption, and circulation of commodities and natural resources. Due to the rise of networked media, informatization, and global communication networks, communication has become the resource, means, and tool of accumulation. Some refer to this form as the Information Age or cognitive capitalism, but I believe understanding it as communicative capitalism is most accurate and carries the greatest political value. This allows us to see how the communicative processes that previous generations called the core of democracy have now been completely captured. Communication drives the development of capitalist productive forces in a way that is more significant than ever before. For example, if we view communication as a resource, then Big Data becomes interesting because every communicative interaction generates metadata in this way, consisting of location data, different layers of social relations and networks, and the links between them. Currently, all of our social content can be encapsulated, analyzed, and sold.

Jandrić and Medak: Clearly, information and communication technologies are key elements of communicative capitalism. In your words, they have facilitated connections and participation that were fundamentally unthinkable within the democratic imagination. That is to say, they replaced democratic assumptions of representation, accountability, and legitimacy with a different set of values. Here, we emphasize subsidiarity, multi-stakeholderism, expertise, and reputation management, though this list is constantly changing and incomplete. In the era of communicative capitalism, what happens to democracy?

Dean: Norms associated with democratic interaction, such as inclusion, participation, and reciprocity, become the primary drivers of capital production and circulation. Inclusion is not merely political; or worse, political inclusion is the same thing as capital inclusion, because incorporating more people now means transforming the communicative information of more people into resources, forming consumer data supermarkets and information data providers. "Participation" once had a certain political impact, but now it provides more personnel for the circulation and production of capital. People become providers and consumers of content. This leads to critique losing all its targets and becoming entirely amorphous, like steam. Why is this? Because critique is just another piece of content, another thing that can be shared and spread. Thus, debate becomes a function of capital, and critique loses its capacity to achieve its goals.

I like to use Marx’s concepts of use-value and exchange-value to think about this problem. Communication usually refers to a message sent from a sender to a receiver. We could say that the use-value of the message is what the receiver is able to do with it and what they can understand. Today, the use-value of a message has been replaced by its circulation value—or rather, the message’s ability to be forwarded, shared, and distributed, and its circulation value has nothing to do with the content. A message can be a lie, a fact, or both, as long as it can be shared. Thus, we have realized a shift from the use-value of discourse to its circulation value.

Jandrić and Medak: This rewrites the concept of communicative rationality and the view that democratic society is a reflexive structure. In this structure, social learning processes unfold through the medium of communication.

Dean: My early work was developed within the Habermasian framework. I was a firm believer in discourse ethics and understood communicative rationality as pointing to communication as a means of problem-solving, reaching consensus, and so forth. My second book was about alien abduction. When I interviewed scholars and others who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, these people were steadfastly committed to the truth-claims of their statements. Here, the democratic and critical exchange between speech and belief, as well as the normative defense of mutually opposing claims to legitimacy, were fully accepted. However, from the perspective of mainstream conceptions of reality, everyone in the UFO community appears to be completely mad and wrong. There is no middle ground! Now, the fact is that they are neither idiots nor have they been deceived, but they do have a completely different view of reality, and they support their views through peer-reviewed research, conferences, methods, and discussion of evidence. Consequently, I began to think that if we are dealing with mutually opposing concepts of reality, then Habermas's communicative solution to the conflict between mutually opposing claims to legitimacy makes no sense.

Traditional liberalism is about mutually opposing concepts of the Good, but behind it there also exist mutually opposing concepts of reality. Therefore, the democratic-liberal version has a serious problem. Deliberation depends on a certain common background and norms—that is, standards people can use to evaluate validity, a common reality. But what happens when this reality itself is deeply fractured? Democracy cannot contain its own foundation. So, there are conceptual limitations to communicative rationality. Today, in the environment of communicative capitalism, we encounter a deeper problem: communicative exchange plays an increasing role for capital. Now, communicative rationality appears to be a thin ideological cloak for communicative capitalism, wherein all communicative norms are increasingly embedded in the process of capital accumulation and are inseparable from this process.

Jandric and Medak: Some scholars argue that a solution to the current crisis of democracy might be more democracy, often radical democracy. However, in the book Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, which you co-authored, you argue that radical democracy is insufficient to meet the challenges of communicative capitalism. So, what is better?

Dean: It’s quite simple—it’s communism. It is also simple to say, but let us step back and talk about what it means in practice. First, when the Left considers democracy to be its research horizon ^[1], they make a massive mistake because this fails to grasp the fundamental problem of capitalism. Democracy cannot accurately articulate the political horizon of the Left; it can only articulate "more of the same" of what we already have. This is also true under the conditions of communicative capitalism. The social environment of every radical leftist is characterized by the fact that all solutions are a website, an app, a better database, or some kind of pilot voting system. "Let's make an app for democracy, and we’ll somehow solve the problem!" But that is not the case. The Left must be divisive, articulating antagonism, naming antagonism, and fighting on the path of antagonism. We live in a democratic environment; we cannot simply repeat the conditions of that environment! This is why radical democracy is not enough.

Jandrić and Medak: More than a decade ago, you wrote: "Despite the many major changes brought about by information and communication technologies, the image of the nation-state continues to shape thinking about politics." In your view, what role does the nation-state play in communicative capitalism? What should its role be in the future?

Dean: I do not believe the dominance of the nation-state today is as strong as this question suggests. Regional institutional arrangements like the European Union extend beyond the scope of the nation-state, and they seem to be important (for example, in Greece). Various complex trade agreements, arms agreements, and environmental agreements cross nation-states, providing a larger framework than the nation-state itself. This shows once again that if we think solely from the perspective of the nation-state, we may miss something important. There is also something else that makes the nation-state different from its dominant form of 100 years ago: world communication, global trade, and multinational corporations with headquarters in many countries. At the same time, conservative counter-revolutionary forces are everywhere: they are the main force behind Brexit and developments in the Netherlands, Hungary, and the United States. On the basis of nationalism, we see the bourgeoisie asserting the political form of the nation-state to preserve its own power. Under communicative capitalism, the nation-state is clearly a site of struggle. In many struggles surrounding borders, refugees, migrants, and trade agreements, we see the fragility and instability of the nation-state... Clearly, the nation-state now is a power apparatus different from that of the 20th century, but it has not died out.

Jandrić and Medak: We would like to point out an interesting contrast between state-monopoly capital and global monopoly capital. In the 1970s, we used to have globally competitive markets; now we have global monopoly markets, and the status of the nation-state as a regulator has been weakened. Today’s democracies cannot formulate economic policy—one need only look at the Trump administration's inefficiency in implementing a national economy-driven agenda to see this.

Dean: This is a very important point. Democracy is insufficient because it has almost nothing to do with what happens at the level of national democratic elections. Nation-states operate within the global capitalist market, and they are not as sensitive to challenges as they once were. I am reminded of the water protests in Bolivia and the Cochabamba Water War. Even if they achieve victory at one level, they will run afoul of trade agreements at a higher level. In the book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Naomi Klein discusses a legislative victory in Ontario, Canada, that provided some protections for local renewable energy companies, but was ultimately defeated in the realm of international trade. So, you are right: the state is losing its ability to act as an intermediary. Meanwhile, what is the primary rhetoric existing everywhere? It is democracy. Does this rhetoric mean we hope to reclaim the processes over which we have lost control? Or does democracy function ideologically through the following rhetoric: "Hey everyone, go out and vote! Hey everyone, put your opinions online! Be active, you can do it!" I cannot find any mechanism that makes the former look credible, so I believe it is the latter.

II. Marx in the Era of Communicative Capitalism

Jandrić and Medak: In the year 2000, Richard Barbrook published "Cyber-Communism"...

American How-to Replace Capitalism in Cyberspace," which claimed that cybernetic communism was actually supported by cyber-capitalism. Although Barbrook himself claimed this argument was an ironic joke, some theorists took it very seriously. What is the potential of digital technology in creating a non-capitalist future?

Dean: Cybernetic communism seems to be premised on technical means as a way to avoid political struggle and the formation of a collective will. It jumps straight to "imagine how we will organize everything in a cybernetic sense" while completely ignoring the political struggle required to get there. I am more concerned with political struggle and the formation of collective will. How do you motivate people to such an extent that you can make all this happen?

What strikes me is that we now possess the technology to support participatory centralized planning. We have multiple ways to replace the market and find good distribution mechanisms without relying on things like prices. We do this online all the time; many things circulate online without any consideration of price mechanisms, thereby bypassing the market. We have the technical conditions for cybernetic communism, but we lack the political conditions, and technology can never provide those for us. So, that is where we need to focus and where we need to invest our energy.

Jandrić and Medak: Within the digital potential for creating a more just world, a key factor is the principle of net neutrality. Therefore, it is no surprise that net neutrality is a site of ongoing struggle between the people and big capital. Let us imagine that big capital succeeds in abandoning net neutrality and all internet traffic becomes commodified. What impact would this scenario have on the nature of communicative capitalism?

Dean: At a general theoretical level, I think net neutrality is primarily a struggle between different factions within capitalism. I do not remain neutral between these factions. I think it is terrible for some providers to dictate the dominance of content based on factors like the ability to pay. This is a struggle within capitalism, but its outcome could leave us more or less stuck. If the decision against net neutrality stands, what happens next? Is this an opportunity to build a better public infrastructure?

Before the internet became a tool for private enterprise, people were promised a more responsive, more distributed, more horizontal, more equal, and more networked infrastructure. Paradoxically, five years from now, we might say: "Oh, the end of net neutrality was also the end of Facebook, and everyone eventually moved to this better, more distributed technology." I don't usually take an accelerationist ^[2] position, but in this case, I hope there would be a silver lining. But I'm not convinced. If this were possible within the capitalist world, it should have happened long ago.

Jandrić and Medak: To some extent, net neutrality allows the internet to function in a way that is almost indistinguishable from anarchy. However, since Bakunin split from Marx in the First International ^[3], communist and anarchist thought have developed along very different paths. In the era of communicative capitalism, should we strive to reconcile anarchism with communism, or continue to insist on the differences between the two? Can you point to the potential contributions of communicative anarchism in replacing communicative capitalism?

Dean: As long as the capitalist economy remains dominant, capitalists will enclose and devour anything we create. I believe that even if we managed to develop a new "people's internet," it would be devoured. Therefore, I think the important questions relate to organizing the people for political struggle. If we do not want capitalism to constantly take everything away, we must get rid of capitalism. The horizon of anarchist horizontalism is still unable to contend with the power laws that constitute complex networks. Albert-László Barabási, in his book Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, points out that complex networks are not flat or horizontal at all; rather, they are characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. These three characteristics generate "hubs," and their links are distributed according to a power law, where the top (the hub or most popular node) has twice as many links as the next, which has twice as many as the one after that, and so on.

So, the top is one, and the bottom is many. The horizontal processes favored by anarcho-liberals create the very conditions for the hierarchy they oppose. It's as if they see the "long tail" rather than the hierarchy—the steep curve. Dismantling this structure requires greater organizational force. Once one understands the structure of complex networks, it is not surprising that communicative capitalism produces monopolies; that is what its dynamics release.

Jandrić and Medak: Network effects...

Dean: Exactly. That's what pains me. Why do these tech-savvy anarchists never consider network effects?

Jandrić and Medak: Today, more and more people are working to revive Marx in the era of communicative capitalism. What are your thoughts on these efforts? What relevance does Marxist theory, developed at the start of industrial society, have for our current digitally saturated environment?

Dean: Now, Marx is more important than he was 200 years ago. Why is that? Because of the intensification of capitalism. Specifically, there are three reasons. The first reason is proletarianization and the intensification of the labor market. In the Global North, the collapse of the systems and structures of the welfare state has produced a labor market that is more volatile and competitive than it was in the mid-20th century. We have less security, have become more vulnerable and precarious, and have a 24/7 labor market. In Capital, and especially in the Communist Manifesto, Marx predicted the intensity of capital that we now see from a global perspective.

The second reason comes from Marx's understanding of accumulation by dispossession ^[4]. This mode of accumulation is achieved through taking and enclosing (rather than through exploitation). One of the primary ways communicative capitalism operates is through the enclosure of communicative commons. Marx's famous discussion of primitive accumulation in Part Eight of Capital is essential for understanding this enclosure. Now, even just walking down the street, our activities are enclosed in a dataset; information about my whereabouts is now someone else's property.

The third reason is Marx's political writings. Most people only see Marx's economic works, but living in the America of the Trump era, Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is more important than ever. As we see in the new alliance between the disgruntled petty bourgeoisie and the working class, Marx's political writings resonate loudly in the contemporary context.

Jandrić and Medak: If Marx is as important as ever, why propose the concept of communicative capitalism? What is wrong with the concept of capitalism as presented in Marx's works?

Dean: Communicative capitalism skips or alters the commodity form. It is the way capital transforms into a form of exploitation that moves directly into the social substance without making that substance take the form of a commodity. Instead, the processes of enclosure, capture, storage, archiving, and searching transform all the data we generate and discard into a resource that can be used algorithmically for pattern mining. These algorithms produce commodities for sale (such as data about specific purchasing patterns). Through daily communicative activities, people provide raw materials—"natural" resources.

So, we can use Marx's theory to understand the process of exploitation, using it as a foundation, and then recognize that production does not proceed in exactly the same way. Industrial production still exists, and remnants of the industrial layer still exist to some extent, but other layers are piled on top: the network layer, the information layer, and the communicative layer have other functions. This is a new series of puzzles. The difficulty is not scarcity, but that there are many things that cannot be monetized, so we now face the question of how to pay for this type of labor. How do these laborers get food and survive while providing material, content, and inputs (which evade the commodity form and are not monetized in the same way)? Marx provides us with the basis to carry out this research.

III. The Communist Horizon in the 21st Century

Jandrić and Medak: In the Trump era, your book Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace has become increasingly important.

Dean: I'm glad you asked about this because in this book, published 20 years ago, I diagnosed what Trump calls "fake news" and others call "post-truth." In that book, I talked about how conflicting concepts of truth undermine the possibility of democratic debate. This isn't a question of whether news is true or false; there is no foundational reality that determines whether a story is false or true. To be clear, this doesn't mean there is no foundational reality, but that there is no way to resolve these oppositions, which lead people to have different perceptions of reality.

In the book The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Žižek proposed a great term—the decline of symbolic efficiency—which I have been using. It signifies the lack of a common set of symbols, norms, and overarching concepts; a lack of shared meaning. When I go on long drives, I sometimes listen to right-wing radio because I want to know what the enemy is thinking. Yesterday, when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh, someone called into the show and asked: "In today's age of fake news, what is the most objective source of news?" He replied: "There isn't one. The only thing you can do is look at several things and then decide for yourself." I was surprised, but he also agreed that there is no shared symbolic layer, only individual determination. The individual decides for themselves what is correct and what is true. Strangely, Limbaugh has common ground with liberal relativists who believe the individual is the basis of all things.

Jandrić and Medak: You once quoted Langdon Winner as saying that in Western technological society, the primary orientation toward the world is religious rather than scientific. What are the main problems with religious-based political thought and practice?

Dean: In the United States, the primary problem is that the prominence of religious thought prevents Congress from addressing climate change. Many conservatives, particularly evangelical Christians in the conservative coalition, deny climate change science. This stems from their belief in creationism and rejection of evolution. From a very practical perspective, this has global significance because the carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases emitted by the United States account for a large proportion of total global emissions.

If we think less pragmatically and more theoretically, I start to worry: Am I a secret liberal? Am I just repeating liberal views on the separation of church and state? Perhaps not; perhaps I can look to Marx’s On the Jewish Question for an answer. Marx pointed out: "The existence of religion is the existence of a defect." Thus, I can happily say that I am not a secret liberal; I merely recognize, as Marx did, the continued existence of the defects of the bourgeois liberal state.

Jandrić and Medak: Marx pointed out: "Religion is the opium of the people." However, despite the obvious benefits of scientific reasoning, religion seems to be inscribed in human nature. Should we oppose capitalism by insisting on atheism/agnosticism? Do we need a new (communicative) communist religion?

Dean: In the United States, we face a serious opioid problem. Life expectancy in the U.S. has now decreased for two consecutive years, partly due to the opioid crisis. This crisis is occurring in areas with high religious populations, so religion does not seem sufficient to stop people from using opioids. If we favor tolerant drug policies, then should we also favor tolerant religious policies?

The issue of opioids should not play a role in political debate, and religious disputes should not obstruct the development of science. In what I consider an ideal communist society, we would not exclude religious people or put them in concentration camps. People can be allowed to be religious, as long as it is ensured that religious disputes are not political disputes.

I also do not advocate for a religion of communicative capitalism. This reminds me of the perspective Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed in The Social Contract, namely that some kind of civil religion must be established. I believe we should set aside religion and let people do what they want in that sphere. If we ensure economic and political equality, we need not worry about other things, such as religion and sexuality; we will leave space for people’s beliefs and loves, provided they do not infringe upon basic equality.

Jandrić and Medak: We suspect there are elements of Alain Badiou’s political theory in yours; so far, we must look from commitment back to reality. What do you think of the theology in political theory that Badiou mentions in his book Saint Paul?

Dean: Does theology hold a monopoly on hope for things that do not yet exist? I do not think theology is the only way to conceptualize hope; what about philosophy, art, or science? I was born in South Carolina and grew up in a Southern Baptist family where religion was discussed constantly. We went to church three times a week. Regarding communism, one thing that has always resonated with me is its close relationship with Acts 4:35: "and it was distributed to each as any had need." Undeniably, there may be a theological element here, but I want to maintain the theoretical point that theology is not the sole source of such thinking. Badiou’s Saint Paul is far from a theological figure; he is a brilliant militant who allows us to see fidelity as a correct political orientation. This is not only the political orientation of a believer but also that of a comrade.

Jandrić and Medak: In the late 20th century, communists and Christians (primarily in Latin America, but also elsewhere) reconciled Marxism and Christianity in the form of Liberation Theology. What is your view on Liberation Theology? Is it a positive step toward forming a stronger Left alliance, or is it sleeping with the enemy—or something in between?

Dean: It is a positive step toward establishing better connections with the Left and a model for infiltrating other structures. The Left is always worried about how to draw people out, how to get more people to do this or that, while the church remains an institution that can regularly get people out! People come here every day or every Sunday... can you imagine if the Left were as strong as churches throughout the world? It would be amazing! I see Liberation Theology as a way for the Left to take over the Catholic Church and a way to reach people who have been alienated by the Left in other regions.

Jandrić and Medak: Let's return to space travel. In Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, you claim: "The US space program was designed to attract an audience. People at home and abroad saw its achievements as a sign of the success of the democratic project. Anyone could look up at an American walking on the moon. Through the space program, the US created a narrative of freedom and progress that would constitute a universal understanding of truth and subjectivity." What are these understandings? Who was intended to benefit from them?

Dean: The standards of truth and subjectivity were formulated according to a very specific American exceptionalist, masculinist, and colonialist perspective on what freedom is, what victory is, and how capitalism and democracy will always produce the best results. This vision of truth and subjectivity is only a small part of the American fantasy. The only way to correctly think about the US space program is to recognize its position in the Cold War. It could not have gotten off the ground were it not for the Cold War. This is why Kennedy was so worried about the launch of the manned space program. The audience for the entire moon landing program was national and international. The US space program aimed to build national confidence because, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, our rockets kept crashing, and the US felt defeated on a technological level... it was truly embarrassing that the US struggled to launch any decent rocket while the Soviet Union was so successful. Globally, the US space program aimed to tell others that Americans possessed the technology and the will for space travel, thereby demonstrating the superiority of capitalism and democracy.

Jandrić and Medak: The era of space travel, especially its heroes, helped strengthen Americans' (and Russians' on the other side of the world) pride in their own achievements, which naturally reinforced a sense of nationality. However, the era of digital technology has brought a very different feeling; some Americans may be proud of Silicon Valley’s achievements, but digital citizenship is transnational or even global. So far, this has only facilitated the rise of global corporations and even exacerbated harsher forms of capitalism; internationalism, traditionally a key factor in proletarian struggle, now seems to have turned against it. Is there any way to return internationalism to a position that supports the contemporary Left?

Dean: After the failure of the former Soviet Union and the socialist states of Eastern Europe, the Western Left turned into liberals. They have been in the process of becoming liberals since 1968; by 1991 or 1992, the Left conceded that socialism had been defeated and recognized capitalist democracy as the most worthy of attention. After that, the only vision of internationalism was a combination of global trade, capitalism, and human rights. Within the ideological structures of the Global North, it must be recognized that human rights discourse is a substitute for genuine proletarian internationalism. This allowed the Right to take over the space where the resentment and anger of the working class—those struggling in global trade—could be expressed, and to mobilize them using things like nationalism and patriotism.

I believe that confidence in Silicon Valley is not part of American patriotism. It might be the mindset of the tech elite, enthusiasts, and some kids, but it is actually more of a coastal mindset than a nationwide one. In middle America, the carriers of patriotism are country music, the flag, and weird cultural practices, like wearing ugly "Make America Great Again" style hats, eating fast food, and claiming that drinking a 64-ounce soda is our right. This is a reactive patriotism targeted at the elites associated with Silicon Valley—elites who do technical work that people in middle America do not understand and who have taken away their jobs. Intellectuals are internationalists, but the working class is not. Consequently, we can see a rather small and not necessarily effective national and global Left that is primarily liberal. We need to link it with political economy (the analysis of finance, production, debt, circulation, and logistics) and an expanded consciousness of working-class struggle (where struggles for education, health, and the environment should be understood as class struggle).

Jandrić and Medak: Your historical analysis indicates that "prior to the space program, the US rarely explicitly identified itself as a colonial power, although expansionism had become a constitutive part of its self-understanding." However, in the second half of the 20th century, governments and researchers adopted Vannevar Bush's metaphor, comparing science and technology from space travel to the field of computing to an "endless frontier" (Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1945). These days, we have learned that the "endless frontier" was a scam designed to promote what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron call the "Californian Ideology." We understand that in the era of the Anthropocene, there is no such thing as an endless frontier. Clearly, the struggle against communicative capitalism is not just about changing social systems; more importantly, it involves internalizing the fact that colonialism cannot last forever. How do you deal with this issue?

Dean: I was born in 1962. When I was a child, my father served in the Air Force. We lived near the base, and the space program was a big part of the imagination. Watching the moon landing and people walking on the moon was fantastic and so exciting! Then, in the early 1990s, the space program had almost no funding, people were no longer enthusiastic about it, the Challenger exploded... space travel was no longer an exciting field one wanted to develop; all the excitement and direction of development revolved around the internet. This signified a shift in the imagination, and I think its shift from outer space toward human interaction on Earth is very significant.

So what happened to the Left? The Left no longer holds a long-term vision, no longer carries out a global struggle against capitalism and for communism, but instead began to worry about internal relations. The Left turned its gaze inward to reflect on its own development. This is the same kind of shift. I don't think it's a question of colonial versus decolonial, or progress versus non-progress, but a question of where people see the scope of political possibility and the scope of struggle. If we once turned toward a grand vision, we can turn toward it again. I don't entirely know how to make this shift, but I believe it will be realized through constant active struggle.

IV. The Many Faces of Anti-Capitalist Struggle

Jandrić and Medak: We have slowly but surely entered the era of precarious employment. Precarity is not a new concept, but its current manifestation is more profound and widespread than ever before. With the emergence of capitalist online platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, information technology seems to be adding fuel to the fire. What can be done to counterbalance this brutal network capitalism? Is the platform cooperativism movement, led by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, a possible direction for development?

Dean: I attended several of their events at The New School, and I do not think platform cooperativism is a way to transcend precarity under the conditions of communicative capitalism. Uber, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo, and other platforms are all tools for exacerbating this instability; simply saying that these platforms will be cooperatively owned does not change the basic structure. I believe moving forward requires rebuilding and revitalizing labor unions (as US union membership is currently at a historic low). This is another reason why Marx is important today. The Communist Manifesto was written at a time when the labor movement had not yet achieved significant successes, labor organizations were emerging, and efforts were being made to establish unions and organize the working class into political parties. This is also the situation currently faced by precarious contract laborers. People are scattered across different workplaces, so organizing this labor force is the only way—but not through methods like platform cooperativism.

Jandrić and Medak: How do you view users understood as workers, such as the "Wages for Facebook" movement?

Dean: On online platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk ^[5], there is nothing emancipatory; people do trivial work for pittance—it’s just another form of "junk labor." However, the Wages for Facebook movement can be understood as similar to the Wages for Housework ^[6] movement of the 1970s; it is a thought experiment designed to push for more radical politics. If we look at the Wages for Facebook movement in this way, we can see that it points to the strange fact that these platforms rely on unpaid labor; they treat us as a natural resource for capital, just as women’s unpaid domestic labor was treated as a natural resource for capital. Therefore, this movement is useful. Maria Mies’s Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale...

Women in the International Division of Labour discusses how colonization, nature, and domestic labor were treated as resources. The "Wages for Facebook" movement is a useful way to think about how labor in communicative capitalism is treated as a resource. But the following version of "Wages for Facebook" is useless: I work on Facebook for eight hours a day, so I should get eight dollars in wages. There must be a more emancipatory vision here.

Jandrić and Medak: The "Wages for Facebook" movement points to the fact that communication and social relations are prerequisites for communicative capitalism, just as the "Wages for Housework" movement pointed out that social reproductive labor is hidden but essential for the reproduction of capitalist relations.

Dean: Absolutely. That is why there is such a great resurgence of interest in social reproduction theory right now.

Jandrić and Medak: The struggle against communicative capitalism is being waged on many different fronts simultaneously. One such development is the degrowth movement, which envisions an economic and political future that is not based on growth. Such a future is in direct opposition to the logic of capitalism. How do you view the potential of the degrowth movement in the struggle against communicative capitalism?

Dean: Degrowth feels a lot like a "neo-peasantization." Instead of advocating for better, cleaner use of industrial processes and resources, it suggests cutting them off entirely. I like flying; I think penicillin and public health are good things; and I do not like working in the garden. Degrowth hopes to re-establish social relations rooted in the land. As a symptom of and reaction to global urbanization, this makes sense. But for most of the world’s people, it has not slowed the pace of urbanization. When combined with movements centered on the city like urbanism, this neo-peasantization turns into a form of neo-feudalism. Thus, you get cities and places like Silicon Valley with cool cultural activities surrounded by a peasant hinterland engaged in high-intensity labor who then go home and play online for a while. I believe we need a vision that does not pretend we can abandon industry, but rather makes industry develop better. We have already experienced the development of industry; now we need to overhaul industry from ecological, economic, and political perspectives. This means collectivizing industry and subjecting it to political decisions regarding whether it is needed and how it should be organized.

Jandrić and Medak: What do you think of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s critique of localism and horizontalism?

Dean: I agree with many of their points; they drew a lot from Kathi Weeks and Shulamith Firestone. Feminists had already made these arguments, yet Srnicek and Williams received a lot of the credit for them. It’s a bit annoying: men stealing credit from women once again! The part about Full Automation is what I dislike most, because it serves as a justification for pushing so many people out of the labor market without providing any guarantee for their livelihoods during the transition.

Jandrić and Medak: Whether we like it or not, today’s technology is beginning to destroy more jobs than it creates, and this trend is likely to continue (at least) in the near future. How should we respond to the rise of technological unemployment? Perhaps implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the way forward?

Dean: I oppose Universal Basic Income because it individualizes the causes, the problems, and the solutions. It is just another excuse to implement the Neoliberal processes of privatization and individualization, in which public goods—schools, healthcare, parks, nature, forests, etc.—inevitably disappear. UBI only concerns the individual and their consumption needs. It is no surprise that Silicon Valley types support UBI, because it produces exactly what they want: more consumers.

Jandrić and Medak: Recently, Russian President Putin announced massive investments in robotic soldiers. This particular form of technological unemployment could save many lives; it also leads to the abstraction of war, where the ability to win a war may become a question of who has better equipment. What do you think of this abstraction? What kind of (imaginary) future does it bring?

Dean: Your question immediately makes me think of the Obama administration’s drone warfare, which resulted in massive civilian deaths in Syria and also caused the American public to long for a war-free existence. This is even worse than traditional war because it is removed from any form of critique or response. But the people who die are real. I believe a military future based on robots and gadgets is apocalyptic. It is The Terminator.

V. The Crowds and the Party

Jandrić and Medak: Please describe the way the crowds and the party interact with each other.

Dean: Online and offline, we see the power of numbers—such as the number of people in the streets. These quantities are the power of the crowd, and they possess a certain intensity for the crowd. Right now, intensity is almost everything the crowd has. They do not have political programs: when you see a trending hashtag on Twitter, you don’t understand its political stance until you have interpreted a vast amount of information. The "Party" is the political form that politicizes the crowd or finds politics within the crowd. A Communist Party sees "the people" (人民) ^[7] within the crowd. That is to say, it defends the standpoint of class struggle—seeing the oppressed rising against the oppressor in popular uprisings. The party does not see a small section or a specific population with its own particular grievances, but the people of the whole world. This interaction between the crowd and the party recognizes the power of numbers and believes that this power is distinct from politics; politics comes from a political form like the party, which responds to collective events and regards "the people" as the cause or subject of those events.

Jandrić and Medak: Some have mentioned that the internet is communitarian. To a large extent, it truly is. Everything has its own community, which helps to abstract away the idea that "society" exists. What are your views on the issues of collectives and organization?

Dean: After Trump was elected, the liberal media complained that it happened because people were stuck in their own cyber-bubbles—in "echo chambers"—talking only to the like-minded without actively reaching out to other viewpoints. I disagree with this diagnosis. Actually, I think we need more cyber-bubbles, especially regarding the Left. The Left must emphasize the divide between us and the capitalists; these bubbles and "echo chambers" help us realize that we are actually a force. This is not about community, but about society: society is fundamentally split, characterized by fundamental antagonisms. We must fight for this antagonism. This means we need to make ourselves into a fighting force by sharpening the divide and strengthening our alliances. My discussion of the crowds and the party stems from this emphasis on fundamental antagonism.

Jandrić and Medak: The internet turns employment into a reputation game—for journalists, the number of Twitter followers is more important than the quality of their articles (in fact, bad articles often seem to attract more clicks). For academics like us, being cited and receiving speaking invitations often seem more important than the content of our work. On the road to opposing communicative capitalism, how should we handle reputation?

Dean: I believe the problem within capitalism is that reputation is linked to economic gain and utility. Therefore, we must ensure that reputation does not bring economic benefits. Structurally speaking, it is almost impossible to escape reputation; all you can do is escape the platforms that depend on and stimulate the production, measurement, and comparison of reputation, and try to build modes of interaction that make reputation increasingly unimportant.

Jandrić and Medak: This also involves the question of the vanguard.

Dean: The "vanguard" are the innovators and early adopters. Of course, when people who are not the vanguard claim to be so, we criticize them as a false vanguard. In the tech world, if you call someone an innovator, everyone gets excited. But in politics, if an innovator is called a vanguard, everyone hates them. I think we need to stop the old-fashioned 1960s critique of the vanguard, and also stop the critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. By the way, given their influence and the extent to which their views are widely cited, they are actually vanguards themselves. The idea that one can do without a vanguard is a myth. We must move past this myth and acknowledge vanguards; if we don't like them, we can dismantle them because of the specific nature of their politics, not because of the fact that they are a vanguard. 在 In my book The Communist Horizon, I argue that Occupy Wall Street was a vanguard—everyone in the world followed the original occupiers. We do not condemn a movement simply because it does something new; rather, we admire and follow it.

Jandrić and Medak: You also define the party according to an "affective infrastructure" and define the expression of this structure as the vanguard. Whether individualized or not, the party requires everyone to act together toward a single goal.

Dean: The affective structure of the party embodies how the party is held together. A party is not a top-down command from a central committee to a group of followers, but a series of interpersonal relationships between comrades. In a psychoanalytic sense, these relationships are "transferential"; they are colored by projections, intensity, expectations, and guilt. We must always remember that party membership is voluntary. People choose to join and become part of a political collective. As a collective, the party functions as a new symbolic order for its members. The more it functions in this way, the more it can influence "fellow travelers" outside the party.

Jandrić and Medak: In the early days of internet development, people paid a lot of attention to "crowd wisdom." Please evaluate the epistemology of online crowd wisdom.

Dean: Yes, in my book Crowds and Party, I also thought of Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, which stems from that book’s understanding of crowd knowledge and crowdsourcing. His views are shared and extended in James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. What Surowiecki is particularly clear about is that crowd knowledge or "crowd wisdom" has nothing to do with the crowd itself. It is actually using the crowd as a generator or producer of knowledge that can be utilized and controlled by owners or corporations. In fact, the configurations referred to as "the crowd" in this literature are not even real groups that interact with one another. They are merely datasets. Thus, what we call "crowd wisdom" here is a construct generated from an individualistic perspective. It takes the form of: "I have a problem I want to solve, so I try to create an audience that will solve it." It is merely an operation launched for one’s own solutions, not a group that truly creates knowledge or does anything.

Jandrić and Medak: What about Wikipedia?

Dean: Wikipedia is very interesting as a distributed form of knowledge registration, recording, and archiving. It does not produce new knowledge. Those who write entries need to prove their entries are valid or correct by citing the work of others. Of course, this is not the same thing as crowd wisdom.

Jandrić and Medak: How do you handle knowledge when defining the crowd? What do you think is the epistemology of the crowd?

Dean: I wouldn't say the crowd produces knowledge; the crowd produces intensity. My main theoretical basis for thinking about the crowd in this way comes from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power.

Masses can be piles of grain, oceans, mountains, or money. "The masses" should not be understood primarily as a cognitive or epistemological intensity; it is an abstract intensity generated through the aggregation of people and things.

Jandrić and Medak: In order to combat a powerful enemy such as communicative capitalism, the contemporary Left should unite. However, as you wrote in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics: "We have an ethical sense. But we lack a coherent political stance, largely because we remain attached to our current values." Which values did you have in mind? In your view, what are the primary reasons for the fragmentation of the contemporary Left?

Dean: The values I had in mind in that book are technology, free trade, and democracy—values that configure determination as individual intuition, ethics as liberal acquiescence, and certainty as psychosis. The fundamental cause of the fragmentation of the Left is the collapse of the former Soviet and Eastern European bloc. To unite the Left into the Left we need, our political goal should be to make the vision of communism clearly visible.

Jandrić and Medak: For you, the political party is the fundamental form of political struggle. Why?

Dean: I do not believe the party is the fundamental form of political struggle, but I do believe it is an effective form of political struggle that we need at present. In so-called advanced capitalist parliamentary societies, the political form for contesting state power is the party. The party can function at local, regional, national, and international levels. It is a political instrument that transcends national boundaries, bringing people together to fight for a specific political vision. This is why we need the party now more than ever—it is the vision of a militant collective ^[8] dedicated to changing the world.

(Jodi Dean: Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA; Tomislav Medak: Coventry University, UK; Petar Jandrić: Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Croatia; Liu Shuhui: Editorial Department of Marxism Studies ^[9], Institute of Marxism Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends ^[10] Issue 5, 2020