Anticapitalism or Postcapitalism? Both!

Abstract

The exchange of ideas between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, taken together, presents a seemingly either/or choice between a communist politics of anticapitalist militancy subsumed under the unity of the party and a politics that eschews critique and antagonism in favor of emergent postcapitalist alternatives. Such a dichotomy eclipses myriad possibilities for autonomous, organized forms of opposition and creation. This commentary appreciatively challenges postcapitalist scholar-activists to engage more robustly with a critique of capital and with forms of decentralized militant organization in order to constitute a politics in which anticapitalism and postcapitalism can become mutually reinforcing dynamics in struggles to build new modes of collective life.