e flux lectures Keti Chukhrov “What Makes Communism Unbearable"

It is traditionally thought that the demise of the project of communism was due to the bureaucratization of the commons, i.e of communism. The libertarian interpretation instead defines communism itself as the language of ideology, imposed on society from above. In both cases the distinction is between the falseness of communism as an ideology and the genuine empirical dimension of the commons as movement. Such an interpretation prevails in the work of Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and others. This, however, does not evade the classical construct of bourgeois modernity which divides society into negative apparatuses and subversive liberating acts, and that remains seminal since Althusser’s and Michel Foucault’s analyses of ideology.Boris Groys was the first to allege in his book "The Communist Postscript" that communism was not a futurist utopia, that failed —rather, it had already taken place. Paradoxically then, the demise of communism was due to the excess of its components, rather than to their insufficiency and lack. Can it be then, that amidst capitalism, communism has always functioned as an abstract “deity”? And, that the historical socialist experiment of embodying such a “deity” could not but fail amidst capitalism's libidinal quest for power, instead of the need in common good?