_{^{Yolanda Diaz, the popular Communist Minister of Labor in Spain, a nationally admired figure in the country | Press pool photo}}

Spanish Communist Yolanda Díaz presently serves as minister of labor and social economy in the coalition government headed by Pablo Sanchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE). It includes the United Podemos (UP) formation, with which Díaz’s own Communist Party of Spain (PCE) is associated. (Podemos is “Yes, we can!)

UP leader Pablo Iglesias in early 2021 resigned from his post as the government’s second deputy prime minister – also referred to as “second vice-president.” Díaz replaced him there and also as leader of the UP.  Polling suggests that Díaz now is “Spain’s most highly regarded politician.”

Yolanda Díaz is in the news.  She recently criticized the strong-arm tactics of government security forces in confronting an eventually successful strike in Cadiz involving 20,000 metalworkers. “The key role of the UP in the government in blocking repression and confronting liberal sectors of the PSOE” was clear, according to the PCE’s Mundo Obrero news service.

Díaz on November 13 joined four other political leaders, all women, before an audience in Valencia. They were exploring what they called “Other Politics.” She told listeners that, “We are you,” [and we] … “know that my country wants to move, advance and guarantee equality.” Her appearance prompted enthusiastic applause and, in reference to her political future, shouts of “President! President!”

As labor minister, Díaz has gained recognition for leading negotiations aimed at repealing or reforming anti-worker labor laws. She has worked with unions and business groups to secure furloughs and monetary support for workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She resists Iglesias’s preference for early national elections, an idea opposed by Prime Minister Pablo Sanchez.  She states that, rather than deal with elections, she wants “to govern, to govern, to govern.”  She is angling for an electoral coalition, a broad front, that would eventually include the PSOE.

Díaz speaks out. Pablo Casado currently heads the rightwing People’s Party (PP), which has long served as the main conservative force opposing the PSOE in national elections. On November 20, Pablo Casado attended a mass celebrated at Granada’s Cathedral for dictator Francisco Franco, who died on that day 46 years ago.

Responding, Díaz told reporters that “Casado must immediately provide explanations  and rectify what he has done,” adding that, “Catholics and believers in this country do not understand this type of performance.”

Conservatives have castigated Díaz since the publication in mid-September of a new edition of The Communist Manifesto that contains a prologue she authored. (It appears below in English translation). The PCE republished the Manifesto as part of its centennial celebrations.

The People’s Party bench in the Chamber of Delegates called upon the PSOE government to take responsibility for Díaz’s prologue.  PP spokesperson Edurne Uriarte denounced Díaz’s portrayal of the Manifesto, pointing to her reference to a “magical and timeless book” and her praise for its “impassioned defense of democracy and freedom.”

Defending Díaz, former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias noted that “the PP was founded by seven ministers of the dictatorship.”  He suggested that “the PCE and [the workers movement] have a lot more democratic credentials than does the Spanish right.” The socialist government of Pablo Sanchez has evaded the issue.

After her legal education, Díaz studied urban planning, labor relations, and human resources. She worked as a labor lawyer, was a municipal councilor, and served in Galicia’s parliament. Since 2016, voters have repeatedly returned her to Spain’s Chamber of Deputies. From 2005 to 2017, she coordinated the Galician federation of the United Left. She served as an advisor for Pablo Iglesias when he formed Podemos in 2012.

Díaz’s current role as tribune of Spain’s radical left is no accident. At age one, she was held in the arms of her imprisoned father Suso Díaz. As a Communist Party member necessarily working underground, he had resisted measures of the Franco dictatorship. Suso Díaz and his brother Xosé were prominent Galician labor leaders, and Suso has remained such. Suso Díaz remarked recently that people used to refer to Yolanda as “the daughter of Suso.” Now he is “the father of Yolanda.”

Yolanda Díaz’s prologue accompanying The Communist Manifesto:

The thinking of Karl Marx appears to have been written, in indelible ink, on the wind of history. It always resurfaces in a context of social and economic crisis, with all of its clarity and its capacity for stimulating reflection. His look at the mechanisms of capitalist production still illuminates and helps us understand the major problems of our world and our time.

There are many Marxisms in Marx, many dissenting views, many rescues. There are post-colonialist viewpoints and orthodox views, condemnations of his patriarchal leanings, and celebrations of his affinity with nature and the environment. Whatever the case, as social theorist Marx disrupted the ideologic framework of the bourgeoisie, of capitalism. He pulled apart the seams and pitfalls of their language and, at the same time, their capability for dominating.

In Galicia, we use the expression “moving the boundaries” in referring to how we get angry, as if it were treason, at the practice of, in the dead of night, changing boundary lines and physical markers that enclose tracts of land or an agricultural section. Sometimes these markers no longer physically exist – the stone, the tree, the little stream bordering the property that dried up. But this ancestral knowledge of boundaries survives in memories of the spoken word, almost in our collective consciousness.

Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto have shifted the invisible boundaries of western thought, doing so in broad daylight, with the world watching. Together they began a new conversation that, with an optimistic and revolutionary spirit, shook up conventions and denounced prehistoric injustices.

Marx has been caricatured and over-simplified innumerable times. The very language he used for dismantling things played a big trick on him. The translations from the original German carried out over many years, for example, have introduced phrases and clichés – “dictatorship of the proletariat being one of them – that don’t correspond to the real core of his thesis. The metaphors of Marx and Engels also, on occasion, obscure the categories they are referring to.

The Communist Manifesto, we must not forget, is a political text, is propaganda. And yet its literary soul, clear and assertive, is surprising. It’s brilliant that way; the four hands of the two friends intertwine their judgments and their preferences. It’s a text for brotherhood, not only for its accessible style but also for its essence as an open letter to humanity, to people at the grassroots level.

Marx, who was a scholar speaking several languages, regularly read Homer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Dante also. He could recite entire passages of The Divine Comedy, a passion for which he shared with Engels, who paid homage to that poet in the prologue of the Italian edition of the Communist Manifesto in February 1893. There, Engels asks, “Are we offering Italy a new Dante who is announcing the birth of the proletarian era?”  And Marx certainly admired Balzac’s capacity for exploring the depth of the human soul and the social transformations of his time.

Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, author of that visionary essay “The Right to Laziness,” once mentioned old Karl’s predilection for Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, a story where the philosopher of Trier miraculously finds reflections of himself. Lafargue says: “In this work, a brilliant painter is so tormented by his determination to reproduce things exactly as they appear in his mind that he continually works on his paintings and retouches them to the point that he ends up with a formless mass of colors. Nevertheless, with his blurred vision, it represents a most perfect rendition of reality.”

Perhaps from this same viewpoint, that of a work perpetually growing and being transformed, it may be quite appropriate today for us to approach our reading of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto this way: not as static, impassive, and monochromatic dogma, anchored in its own frame of reference, but as a key for interpretation, as sketchy as it is exact, allowing us over and over again to sharpen and tinker with our visions of the world and its affairs.

In this sense, The Communist Manifesto is one of those magical and limitless books, born to last, that succeeds in portraying reality and, at the same time, transfiguring it. I believe that Marx and Engels themselves were conscious of the transformational nature of their work, or at least of the unforeseeable variability of the equation presented there which, in the name of communism and of a revolutionary ideal, gets resolved through invalidating eternal truths and achieving true democracy. This process is also reflected in the different prologues of the international editions of the book. Taken together, they are like a set of Russian dolls that, inside, hide the sub-texts and the para-texts making up its content.

To approach this genealogy of different interpretations with my own prologue is both a responsibility and a source of pride stemming from my profound respect and admiration for the voices and contributions of those responsible for the edition and the translation: Marta Sanz, Wendy Lynne Lee, José Saramago, Santiago Alba Rico, Iván de la Nuez and José Ovejero.

In 1872, José Mesa y Leompart, editor of La Emancipación — a weekly magazine in Madrid with which Pablo Iglesias de Ferrol, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party founder, was involved— translated the first version of The Communist Manifesto to be published in Spain. This was a translation not from the original German but instead entered our language by way of the English and French versions of The Communist Manifesto.

The editorial offices of El Socialista on Calle Hernán Cortés in Madrid, #8, was where in 1886 another of the early editions of The Communist Manifesto was published. That building no longer exists. And nothing exists on this narrow street, perpendicular to Calle Fuencarral, that commemorates Marx and Engels’s declaration of worker solidarity. Reclaiming such memory is a political task, something apparently unthinkable in a capital troubled by amnesia. Its municipal authorities didn’t think twice about removing plaques in a public space honoring the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero [Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War].

There’s poignance in thinking about those first copies: sheets of paper moving from hand to hand. They are there hidden in rows, like gold over cloth, under someone’s work clothes, or in the folds of a skirt.  These are words imprinted for a lifetime in a student’s mind, and in the hearts of those men and women whose hopes we must respond to today. After all, their hopes are, first and foremost, our hopes too.

The “now-moment,” declared Walter Benjamin, is that specific moment in which the past collides with the present. It reappears there — like a great wave taking shape far from the shore, where we cannot see it, in the middle of the sea, and then breaking on the rocks under our feet. Now.

In this sense, the new installment of the Manifesto is an act of memory and redemption that, happily, joins the celebration this year of the centennial of the Communist Party of Spain. The PCE, founded in 1921, has suffered wars, repression, exile, and underground existence throughout its troubled life.

The programmatic character of the Communist Manifesto has continued to develop according to the rhythm of a century full of global economic crises and great revolutions. Capitalism has always been in charge in all of the century’s diverse and voracious mutations, ready to swallow up, corrupt, and disintegrate the very reality on which it was built. But it has never been able to escape the theories of Marx and the transforming power of this text. This is a book that speaks to us of utopias coded into our present existence, our being, in which pulses, today and yesterday, a vital and impassioned defense of democracy and freedom.

_{^{Source: https://aaymca.com/este-es-el-prologo-que-escribio-yolanda-diaz-para-el-manifiesto-comunista-ideas/}}

_{^{W.T. Whitney Jr. translated.}}

_{Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.}

_{Source: People’s World, November 29, 2021, https://peoplesworld.org/article/communist-playing-a-leading-role-in-spains-governing-coalition-gains-attention/}

_{Image: Bob Fitch photograph from a Stanford University exhibit of his work (Martin Luther King at Communist Training School) as the headline; The Bob Fitch Photography Archive at Stanford}

Transcript:

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Charisse Burden Stelly and I am a professor of Africana studies in political science and also a member of The Black Alliance For Peace. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t be there in-person today, but I do want to offer just a few remarks on anti-communism, especially as it relates to imperialism, to give some sort of broader context for what you all will be discussing today. And so the first thing I’ll say is that anti-communism is more than a political culture or a set of foreign policy concerns or even a brief period of hysteria. But more accurately, especially the context of the United States, it’s a durable mode of governance. And as my work attests to, it’s also rooted in what I call The Black Scare and The Red Scare and how those two enunciate a counter-subversive political tradition that constitutes U.S racial capitalism.

So just briefly, The Black Scare can be understood as historically and contextually situated debasement, distortion, criminalization, and subjection of Blackness rooted in fear-mongering about Black social equality, political domination, and economic parity on the one hand, and with displacement, devalorization, and devaluation of whiteness on the other hand. It’s also the characterization of Black agitation protests, unrest, or descent as dangerous, as antithetical to the interests of the United States, and/ or as spurred by or susceptible to foreign or outside influence or agitation. So The Black Scare has historically been a means of maintaining what we might call the “badge of slavery”, that has legitimated the economic, social, and ideological denigration of Blackness. And this is particularly important because, especially in the context of the United States really irrespective of ideology, Black assertion is considered to be a form of radicalism because it is a fundamental challenge to the white supremacy that is foundational to and constitutive of the United States.

In terms of The Red Scare, I understand this as a criminalization and condemnation of anti-capitalist ideas, politics and/or practices through discourses of radical takeover, of infiltration, and disruption of the American way of life as a means of maintaining a society organized along class and race lines and dominated by a majority white capitalist elite. After 1917, The Red Scare was prominently articulated through the specter of the communist or the Bolshevist and the fellow traveler (so one who didn’t necessarily belong to a party, but who espoused those ideas). The Red Scare is a process by which a fear, hatred and obsession with communism and with radicalism writ large help to mold the United States into what it became throughout the 20th century (and even extending into 21st century) and whereby militant challenges to the status quo came to represent a danger to the nation attributed to agitators or plotters or traders or conspirators.

And so governance aimed at managing and criminalizing racial and political others who threatened to upend or transform the racialized class order actually stoked white supremacy and cross-class collaboration among white folks that has obfuscated economic exploitation in the interests of the ruling class. So this is the basis of the anti-communist mode of governance which includes all three branches of government (also state and local governments) and has been maintained through repressive action, intentional inaction, and also stifling reaction. So anti-communism as a mode of governance uses public authority and societal self-regulation to diffuse throughout society penalty for (and the marginalization regulation and criminalization of) ideas and beliefs that because they challenge racial capitalism and its foundations (not least racial hierarchy, economic inequality and class antagonism) are rendered communist and therefore antithetical to, or threatening or dangerous to “true Americanism.”

So a public authority is manifested in legislation, federal and supreme court decisions, surveillance by government agencies, presidential executive orders, and also ubiquitous federal and state congressional investigative committees. And so these were especially prominent during the era of what we might call the first cold war, at this point, because we’re probably barreling toward another, if not already firmly in one. So anti-communist governance is facilitated through an anti-radical state apparatus that encompasses all three branches of government. And then of course, public authorities aimed to eject, punish, and neutralize communists and their fellow travelers and sympathizers. And those were broad designations that included anybody who criticized or sought to transform a racial capitalist society. And this includes peace activists, civil rights leaders, dissident artists, and progressive labor organizers of all types.

So that is to say that anti-communism is not just about communists, it’s about people who are challenging some aspect of the status quo, who could then be red-baited as communist to protect racial capitalism against the threat of radical transformation. In effect, anti-communist governance as a product of two world wars and numerous revolutions that reflected a failure of the United States to adjust to power, political or revolutionary ramifications that confronted the 20th century world (and now the 21st century). In other words, anti-communist governance is a backlash to these phenomenons. As such, anti-communism imposes a uniformity on communism and all that is said to be linked to it, positioning them as a preeminent threat to U.S. national security and societal organization. And that then encourages an international strategy of military containment and rollback. Domestically, rigid and repressive opposition to change an imposition of adherence to the status quo allows for the vehement attack and discrediting of even reformist ideas and policies (historically, this is like The New Deal) and the eraser of any distinction between act, intention, and ideas. And importantly, through this regime, property becomes conflated with sort of life or human life such that an attack on a property takes on an enormous challenge to the state.

Disloyalty, danger, and subversion also become these mutually reinforcing charges that uphold the discipline and punishment that emanates from anti-communist governance. In addition to public authority, anti-communist governance is practiced through societal self-regulation or soft power insofar as the mere existence of anti-radical laws or restraints cast a shadow far beyond the literal reach. So hundreds of thousands of individuals live in fear and hold their thoughts and opinions to themselves because the atmosphere of freedom is poisoned by the fact that repressive laws are passed.

So for example, people might not want to join a March or protest or might feel that they need to speak out against something that is characterized as communist or radical like Black Lives Matter, for example, simply because laws and policies exist that repress them. So the soft power of anti-communist governance means that racially, politically minoritized people are forced to genuflect to the status quo less they’d be marginalized, excluded, criminalized, physically attacked or worse. Likewise, ordinary citizens under the influence of anti-communist governance are conditioned to be hostile to and prejudice against communities and other communists, and other political militants, and to enact private anti-communist actions. These individuals include landlords, private employers, book publishers, those working in mass media, teachers, all around people espouse this rhetoric about communism or socialism that they know nothing about, but this is because they’re conditioned by the extent society.

And of course the persecution of communists (and those deemed communists or red-baited) and their right to free speech has especially dire consequences for Black people for whom the right to dissent and disagree is essential to challenging white supremacy and specific annunciations of anti-Black racism. And so while the cold war atmosphere (assisted by ways of repressive laws and congressional investigative committees) victimized hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are communist and anti-communist alike, it was actually entry into world war one that sacralized anti-radicalism and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, that incited radicalism to become increasingly identified with communism.

So the counter-subversive political tradition, that I mentioned earlier, after that moment became governed through anti-communism and then bolshevism became the sort of preeminent boogeyman and so far as, at that moment, the United States found itself confronting a large potentially powerful nation governed by communist committed to an ideological position hostile to bedrock American values. And that fear of an ideologically alien foreign power linked with a subversive domestic movement suddenly seemed grounded in reality. So in other words, 1917 is sort of this takeoff moment for the ubiquity and entrenchment of anti-communism.

And though some laws are indeed addressed exclusively toward communism, the long history of U.S. anti-radicalism means that the anti-communist mode of governance also targets a wide spectrum of political beliefs in association, especially those committed to racial and economic justice and internationalism. Anti-communist governance therefore exceeds the so-called imperative of managing a small minority of communists from attempting to ostensibly overthrow the U.S. government by force or violence and from eroding the American way of life.

In reality, what anti-communism does is transform anything counter-hegemonic or nonconforming into subversion, foreignness, or disloyalty by punishing it as communist, communist inspired, or communist infiltrated and therefore illegal, illicit or criminal. As such, U.S. racial capitalism in the society that engenders is one of the most repressive of all western countries. It has adopted legislation and practices that actually represses democratic liberties more so than any other country in the west. It has refused to accommodate not only communism, but dissenting thoughts and actions of all kinds. And this is relatively— it’s not that it’s only the United States, but it’s relatively unique to the United States. And the United States actually has imported those policies abroad through its practices of imperialism. So, the United States government legitimates repressive domestic and interventionist foreign policy through aggressive rhetoric, coercion of loyalty, grilling people on whether or not they are communists. And if they are considered to be communist or have been communist or socialist or whatever, they’re sort of hampered from holding leadership positions. And then there’s also widespread prosecution and persecution.

So anti-communist governance means that those who are accused, inicted, or found guilty of violating the wide array of anti-communist legislation, policy, and practice, are subjected to severe restriction and enormous penalty not least harassment, ostracism, loss of work and livelihood as well as income. It also calls into question who is deserving of and who can be denied rights and liberties based on beliefs. And that’s provided a path— anti-communism just provided a powerful check on the ostensible freedoms we’re supposed to hold like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, due process and protection against self-incrimination. So this red scare logic, which informs and is informed by The Black Scare, is foundational to the passage of repressive legislation that helps the U.S. to sweep racial militancy, worker agitation, and progressive policy into a sort of dragnet of repression or condemnation. And we see this, for example, with Critical Race Theory.

And just to wrap it up, anti-communist governance is especially, though not exclusively, top-down in its character. In other words, it’s popular, but not populous and emanates from the upper echelons of society (namely the federal government) and is dispersed downward. And so support for anti-communist governance is garnered through the harnessing of anti-reform and sentiment to concerns about national security. Federal anti-communism in turn gives rise to derivative anti-communist politics at the state and local levels not least because organizations that lobby for and support federal anti-communism writ large are also active at those other levels. Likewise, state and even some municipal legislators respond very closely to the force of the federal law to implement new or reinvigorate old anti-radical legislation that has been molded from federal legislation or that which is in use in other states, as well. For example, we see this with these anti-protest laws that are popping up in places like Florida.

And so what we need to understand is that this legislation is very much in place, which is why I emphasize that anti-communism as a mode of governance, it’s not just about communism. We still see these logics operating very much today in targeting Black Lives Matter, which is by no means a communist organization. And we see this happening internationally with attacks on Venezuela, attacks on Cuba, attacks on North Korea. And so anti-communism as a mode of governance as a way of sort of implementing rule over society both domestically and internationally is very strong and very ubiquitous. It has a very long history and it still continues into the present. And so I hope these kind of brief remarks have helped to provide some framing to your overall panel and I thank you all for listening to me today.

_{Author: Professor Charisse Burden Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and historical sociology. I pursue a research program that encompasses two complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. racial capitalism, anticommunism, and antiblack structural racism. https://www.charisseburdenstelly.com/}

_{Source: MRonline, November, 23, 2021, Originally published: Hood Communist (November 21, 2021, https://mronline.org/2021/11/23/anti-communism-anti-blackness-and-imperialism/}

_{Spain’s Minister of Labor, Yolanda Diaz, (Politico.eu)}

_{Yolanda Diaz currently serves as Spain’s Labour Minister. Now one of the most popular politicians in the country, she appears to building a new political movement in a bid to take power at the next general election.}

Spain’s rising political star is Communist Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz, who has won over employers and voters and is now trying to carve out a new space on the far left before the next general election.

Little known two years ago, polls show the 50-year-old labour lawyer is Spain’s most highly regarded politician, ahead of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and the leaders of conservative parties.

Conservative daily newspaper ABC has called her Spain’s “most powerful female politician” and on Facebook fan pages her supporters dream she will become the nation’s first woman PM.

A card-carrying member of the Spanish Communist Party, Diaz entered Sanchez’s coalition government with far-left party Podemos in January 2020.

Her profile rose further in May this year after the charismatic but polarising leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, passed the reins of the far left to her after he decided to quit politics.

She was appointed to the post of second deputy prime minister in July.

With her permanent smile, she cultivates a friendly and conciliatory image that contrasts with Iglesias’ often angry tone which has been welcomed by business leaders.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Spain, Diaz negotiated with unions and business associations the terms of the country’s furlough scheme, which offered financial aid for hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs were hit by the health crisis.

She is also responsible for a law protecting delivery workers and is now in talks to reform the country’s labour laws which has led her to clash with Socialist cabinet members.

With her popularity surging, Diaz was one of the main drivers of a meeting on November 13 of leftist activists dubbed “Other Politics” in the eastern city of Valencia.

The gathering was widely seen as a first step towards creating a new far-left platform that will stand in the next general election due in two years time.

“This is the start of something that is going to be wonderful,” she said as she was surrounded by leftist women politicians.

Cristina Monge, a political scientist at the University of Zaragoza, said Diaz “does not talk of parties” but instead of a “different organisational model” that puts the emphasis on civil society.

The strategy aims to “expand the space” occupied by the left with a focus on “feminism, environmentalism and social justice” at a time when Podemos has slumped in the polls.

“Diaz is aware that Podemos is no longer in its moment of glory,” Monge told AFP.

Diaz was born into a family of trade unionists in the same region of Galicia in northwestern Spain where former right-wing dictator Francisco Franco hailed from.

Her father was a member of the Communist Party during the dictatorship when the formation was illegal and she entered municipal politics in Galicia in 2003.

Her pride in her political affiliation led her to get married decked out in red, and she likes to tell of how when she was aged four she received a kiss on her hand from the historic leader of the Spanish Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo.

As her profile has risen, Diaz has changed her style, dyeing her hair from brown to blonde and dressing more elegantly, a change that analysts say makes her more appealing to more centrist voters.

Podemos, however, will seek to position itself clearly on the far left and ensure it continues to lead this part of the political spectrum, said Monge.

Most polls currently put the main opposition conservative Popular Party on top in voting intentions, slightly ahead of the Socialists.

The Socialists are “watching closely” to see what Diaz does as they are aware that they will need the support of the far left again to continue to govern after the next election, Monge added.

_{^{Source: AFP, 20 November 2021, https://www.thelocal.es/20211120/who-is-the-communist-shaking-up-spanish-politics/}}

Félix Vallotton, ‘Landscape at Sunset’ (1919)

Reclaiming colour, light and life itself

The communist idea would have little chance of succeeding if it was concerned only with needs and reductions. We also need to remember that the goal of politics is to improve life. Certainly, a ‘salary for life’ (1) (offering protection against the uncertainties of life and material distress), the sovereignty of associated producers (abolishing relations of pure subordination) and the right to leisure time (as part of disarming the productivity imperative) are all gains that would make life incomparably better than under capitalism.

But perhaps more should be said to remove the negative associations with which abandoning capitalism, and the word ‘communism’ itself, have been saddled — collective housing, a diet of potatoes and sausages, grey cars, grey coffee grinders, grey clothes, grey walls, grey cities.

In our imaginations, capitalism has a monopoly on colour, light, and even life itself. That must change, as it is destroying absolutely everything: the planet, homes (of all but the rich), physical health (except that of the rich), mental health (that of the rich too, though in a different way). If communism is ever to be viable, conceptually and politically, it must reclaim all this. It even needs to stake a claim to luxury — since lux is light. And that is what it’s all about: light in our lives.

In one of the many grotesque and shameful acts of which advertisers are guilty, after ‘concept’ and ‘creativity’ (to the chagrin of ‘creatives’ everywhere), they have set their sights on ‘the city’, its ‘lights’ and its ‘colours’. The idea that ads make the city more beautiful is the kind of moronic rubbish those bearded ad-folk in flip-flops and thick glasses are happy to peddle. Remove advertising, and you go back to Tirana, or East Berlin before the Wall came down.

The reality is rather different: if we take down the JC Decaux signs and hand our cities back to graphic designers, street artists and indeed everyone else, we’ll see an explosion of shapes, colours, ideas and slogans. we can hold competitions to decorate those gigantic tarpaulins that cover buildings under construction, sure of seeing something other than photos of watches, perfumes or mobile phones blown up to 20x10m. But perhaps we should not blame the advertisers: as zombies themselves, lost in a false world of commercial images, how could they spot the difference between the living and the dead? We know, in any case, that they’d be prevented from causing harm: obviously, advertising would come very high on the list of things to be abolished. Shutting down the advertising industry would set an example of new priorities in the division of labour.

Human beings want to make things

Advertising’s mistakes are a concentrated version of capitalism’s: to have confused a desire for material goods with desire itself, then to have concluded that, without those goods, desire would vanish from the world — and colour and light with it. With a little hindsight, it’s a scam of shocking magnitude. Everything today, especially street photography, contradicts this big lie, and speaks to a surge in our desire to make, paint, design, write, build, create — but this time for real. That is to say, outside the concept of currency values?? and demands of capital. One could even say that the premise of Friot’s well-founded, almost anthropological proposition is exactly that: human beings want to use their abilities. It may sound silly, but it is still true, and profound: human beings want to make things.

Capitalist luxury reserves the most beautiful things for the rich, while communist luxury can emerge from conditions totally other than purchasing power

The configuration of social structures at a given time forces this urge to fit pre-established forms, and humans to use their abilities in a certain way — most often one that corresponds with the aims of those in charge and serves their interests. But release individual abilities from this trap, and they’ll be used more. This is the ultimate justification for Friot’s salary for life: people will make things, and those things will contribute to social life.

Of course, people ‘making things’ in and of itself does not automatically constitute a division of labour that will meet all the needs of collective material life. Some part will still be subject to coercion. But which part? Many employees know how, and like, to make things that fit perfectly into the division of labour, but are forced to make them in conditions that are degraded by capitalism and its demands of competition and shareholders. Yet these degradations are exactly what the system of a salary for life frees workers from, leaving intact a fully functional division of labour and the possibility of making things well.

The beginning of luxury

The desire to make things means a desire to make them well, and even the best we can, because when we are making them for ourselves, we put all of ourselves into them. For certain things, to make them well is ipso facto to make them beautiful. This is the beginning of luxury.

We may already see a little more clearly what ‘luxury’ will be about, and especially what it will not be about: certainly not the solid gold bidets of those who have got rich on neoliberalism or the accumulation of stuff: as well as exploiting human beings, the logic of quantity — that of capitalist value — is wrecking the planet. It is strange — in fact, absurd — that the word ‘communism’ is embedded in Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a sort of technologist prophecy based on 3D printers, ubiquitous photovoltaic cells and the conquest of space, promising solutions to the climate and energy crises and ‘abundance’ for all. That is more or less the prospectus of a barely reconstructed capitalist vision.

Well, no; the numbers of objects that surround us and their rate of renewal will fall — they must. The idea of luxurious communism, then, must mean rejecting the idea that this reduction would mean a loss of beauty in our material life — because we will still have one. And, to be more precise, the aim will be to maximise the beauty of the minimal number of objects that we will keep.

The beauty of objects, beyond quantity and hype, is the first difference between communist and capitalist luxury. The second is the way they are accessed. Capitalist luxury reserves the most beautiful things for the rich, while communist luxury can emerge from conditions totally other than purchasing power: the freedom of producers to make things according to their desires, which will most often be to make them well and beautifully. In other words, freedom from all the constraints of capitalist production, which cause producers to make things badly.

These constraints express an overarching logic: capital always tries to remunerate work as little as possible, thereby creating demand among those with little money, who need goods at a low enough price; that means they will be made under conditions that doom them to be badly made by mistreated and poorly paid employees, so completing the cycle. Only the richest of the rich escape this junk loop. The few who hold most of the wealth then find a supply that substitutes the ‘poor quality/productivity’ blend of the mass markets for a ‘good quality/high price’ formula.

The system of salaries for life breaks the inevitable junk loop by uncoupling activities from remuneration. When people are protected by a salary for life and can devote themselves to an activity and make things without this having the slightest impact on their remuneration, they do so under completely different conditions: according to their desire, which is to say well. Here again, we must overturn the capitalist axiom that, left to their own devices and freed from the ‘healthy spur of having to earn a living’, people do nothing — that they are essentially lazy. The opposite is true: ‘left to their own devices’, that is to say freed from the violence of being made to work under capitalism, people make things, they never stop making things, and they even make them better and better, for they are beings of desire and activity.

For example, a farmer can produce for the satisfaction of producing well, supplying healthy and good quality products, when he is no longer held back by the straightjacket of supermarkets and their requirements on price, and therefore on productivity, which mean using chemicals. Or when he ceases to be held back by the debt incurred by investing in mechanisation, imposed by the logic of high yields and low prices — all things he can break with under a salary for life. He will probably produce them in smaller quantities, but many more people will want to go into agriculture if it is satisfying, uncoupled from capitalist demands and released from economic uncertainty.

In a capitalist system, it is manufacturers outside the mass market who provide gourmet dining, at very high prices. This is, in turn, caught in a similar debt trap when it comes to its facilities and, by the same logic, quality suppliers (of furniture, crockery etc), which means high prices. According to the capitalist adage, ‘you have to pay for quality’. But this is not true. Quality doesn’t have to ‘come at a price’. Capitalism has put the idea in our heads that quality is always linked to a quantity of money, otherwise we would only have access to junk. This is a lie. Quality comes from conditions that allow people to produce as they wish, that is, without depending on it for their survival. It’s obvious straightaway that quality is the immediate corollary of this freedom, and always for the same reason: people do something well, the best they can even, when they do it for themselves, to present their labours for social recognition, provided that this does not take the form of a monetary price to which their material reproduction will be attached. The conditions are then met to ensure that, without piles of money being exchanged, the best standards of production spread as far as possible, and becomes the rule rather than the exception.

The aesthetic vocation of communism

If communism is a grey idea, it will not capture imaginations. But it doesn’t have to be — quite the opposite. There is no contradiction in arguing that it can, and should, be luxurious. That is to say, it can shine the light of beautiful, well-made things all around, because everyone will have been placed in conditions in which they can make them beautifully and well — receiving a salary for life. Here we see how critically important it is to maintaining the greatest possible freedom of expression for private creators. Division of labour is necessary in some cases, and enough has been said about that, though it is not a subject that can be ignored. But division of labour in no way contradicts the idea that the necessary objects that come out of it are beautiful and good. But for that to happen, their production must be freed from the tyranny of capitalist value, and not regimented by top-down planning.

‘Remember East Germany and the Soviet Union, how ugly they were, and how beautiful and classy things are here? Well, that’s capitalism.’

Then, the sovereign associated producers will give their best, because they will be doing what they love. In this communist form, private initiatives will offer us good food and beautiful furniture, perfumes and clothes, in short, beautiful things, which make for an aesthetic life. Design will no longer be capitalism’s capture of aesthetics, as today — because, from the skylines of metropolises to the metallic shine of cell phones to the styling of cars, everything is currently calculated to invite us to contemplate the material power of capitalism. To plant in our heads, most often unconsciously, this unbreakable link between the ‘beauty’ of objects and the capitalist system of objects, and make us think, ‘Remember East Germany and the Soviet Union, how ugly they were, and how beautiful and classy things are here? Well, that’s capitalism.’

Communism will lose the battle for imaginations, then the political battle, if it locks itself in the austerity and ostentatious disinterest of critical intellectuals, and their contempt for objects and for the life of the senses, especially for domestic life. ‘Let us think above all of developing our minds’, ‘let’s be pure of mind’, ‘we are indifferent to objects’, ‘we are above material needs, ‘these things are unimportant’. What a mistake. They have considerable importance.

In a surprising, though perfectly logical ‘dietetic’ scholium, Spinoza, who in matters of intellectual development was hardly a small player, recommends surrounding oneself ‘with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theatre, and other such things , which anyone can use without injury to another’ (2). Aesthetics must be applied everywhere in life, from its etymological meaning (of an appeal to our senses) to those elevated practices where stimulating the senses can lead to the deepest meditative states — as discussed by Pierre Gagnaire and Ryoko Sekiguchi in a conversation on the culinary arts, or in the arts of perfumes and flower arranging, or the Japanese tea ceremony.

Naturally, the highest achievements are also the rarest, so only a limited number of people will have access to them. The capitalist criterion for selection is well known: money. A visit to Pierre Gagnaire’s website lifts the spell he casts by displaying the reality of his prices: dinner for two in his restaurant costs a month’s minimum wage… We had assumed the criterion of money would no longer apply. Yet we will need another in its place, since the promise of having ‘the rarest things within everyone’s reach’ is flawed logic — at least when it comes to the kind of goods economists call ‘rival’. Some kind of lottery? Why not?

In reality, the most important thing is not to be found in these very exceptional experiences. It is now clear that that by ‘luxury’, we should understand not so much the absolute rarest things reserved for the few, but beautiful, well-made things that are universalised and put within reach of the many. Luxury is also the presence of fewer but more beautiful things in everyday life, both as a habit and an education, which eventually prepares us for the most elevated experiences. And it is the desires of free producers that will make communism luxurious.

_{^{(1) A ‘salary for life’ is a proposal made by Bernard Friot as an alternative to Universal Basic Income in his book Émanciper le travail, La Dispute, Paris, 2014.}}

_{^{(2) Baruch Spinoza, Ethics IV, Proposition 45 (scholia).}}

_{Author: Frédéric Lordon is an economist and author of Et la vertu sauvera le monde… Après la débâcle financière, le salut par l’éthique? (Raisons d’agir, Paris, 2003)}

_{Source: Le Monde diplomatique, 8 November 2021, https://mondediplo.com/outside-in/luxury-communism}

_{Philippe Rio, Communist mayor of Grigny, France, was voted the world’s best mayor. (J. Paquier / Flickr)}

Philippe Rio from Grigny, south of Paris, has been voted the world’s best mayor. He told Jacobin about the local social programs that have made his Communist administration a global success story.

Grigny isn’t often in the news for good reasons. The poorest city in France, this banlieue south of Paris is marked by massive unemployment and abandoned housing estates. For much of French media, Grigny is the very image of a “no-go zone”: one of its sons, Amedy Coulibaly, murdered four people at a Kosher supermarket in the 2015 terrorist attacks.

Yet there is also a fight to save the city from its plight — led by local mayor Philippe Rio, a member of the French Communist Party. In 2017, he organized the “Appeal from Grigny,” signed by hundreds of other mayors calling for investment in the banlieues. His innovative social programs and a COVID response based on locally issued emergency food vouchers this year saw him handed the biennial “best mayor in the world” award.

The prize given by the World Mayor Foundation hadn’t gone to a Communist before (and even this time around it was co-awarded to Rotterdam’s mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, a member of the Dutch Labour Party). But Philippe Rio’s administration has also had a wider impact in his homeland, especially through its lifelong education programs and its success in geothermal energy production, which has slashed residents’ bills.

Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to the mayor about life in Grigny, his political engagement, and the lessons of French municipal communism.

DB
You’ve been named the world’s best mayor after being nominated by Grigny residents and other elected officials. What does this recognition mean for you — and the city you represent?

PR
First, we had the surprise to be recognized among thirty-two cities, including Washington, Milwaukee, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and New Delhi, as a city that had taken a lot of action during COVID-19 and in fighting poverty — both themes the London foundation focused on. Then, to be elected the world’s best mayor — well, that was something we never dreamed of.

We’re one of those areas that some wrongly call “no-go zones,” but which in truth express this country’s extreme inequalities. France has many billionaires, but Paris also has pockets of deep poverty and social and spatial segregation. In Grigny, half the population is under thirty and half the population is below the poverty line. This is France’s poorest city.

During the lockdown, we did what every town hall in France had to do — we reacted. And I emphasize the “we.” A mayor isn’t a superhero — we acted collectively to serve the public. During the onset of the pandemic, we built up a barrier against the incoming tsunami. Here the health care crisis immediately meant a social crisis; whenever there are economic setbacks, it’s us who suffer it quickest, and it takes time to pick ourselves back up again. It was the same with the 2008 subprime crisis: we’ve recovered from it somewhat, but we still aren’t at the level of before.

So, faced with an abrupt shock, we simply did our job: distributing masks, being in contact with the population, dealing with the food crisis.

Areas like ours are always at the heart of French political debate, and always being mistreated by the media — Éric Zemmour’s always banging on about the banlieues, security, and immigration. But it’s communities like ours that are building France’s future. So folks who live in Grigny suffer these fascist politicians’ messages that seek to exclude whole sections of the population.

When there’s Olympic champions or actors from the banlieue who make it in the United States, people clap. But as for the rest, we’re insulted and mistreated. So this award lifted our hearts, people called me up saying we’re the world champions. Life is hard here. But we’ve succeeded in our efforts and been recognized for them internationally. Even if the French media present us negatively, what they say about us isn’t true. That’s a tribute to Grigny as a working-class city, but also to the banlieues more generally. They, too, can be proud of our success.

You’re a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) and, before becoming mayor, you were active defending tenants locally, in the Grande Borne housing estates. How did you get involved?

PR
I’ve been a member of the PCF since 1995 — since the last century. I’m often asked what it means to be a Communist. But I remember why I joined the party back then — and looking at France, today I’d have twice as much reason to join a movement whose guiding star is indignation against injustice.

I am myself a product of municipal-level communism. I’ve never been around what’s happening at the “top” of society, but rather the work of all those invisible activists — blue-collar workers, employees, and public servants — who devote their free time to helping others live better. It was they who trained me up in the life of associations, first of all on the sports field, which is about the people who give their time and money to helping you play in a football match.

In this context, you experience magnificent things, even if you come from a poor background like mine. My dad was an unemployed worker, my parents experienced the downgrading of the working class, and sometimes there wasn’t even much to eat. So I had the food aid and the Secours Populaire [a grassroots solidarity initiative], including from the Communist town hall.

We were almost evicted ourselves. And in our Grande Borne housing estate, the people who mobilized to stop others being kicked out of their homes were in the National Housing Confederation and the Tenants’ Aid. That included Communist militants, though not only them.

But I understood that the collective action being done by these invisible militants could change peoples’ lives. I found Communist activists because they were basically the only ones who were — are — still in the working-class estates. Not as much as in the past, but they were still around. So here I am, the product of that.

DB
As you said, Grigny has a very young population, but it’s also an area in which a lot of people don’t get qualifications. So what can you do, as a city hall, on education?

I like that line from Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.” I believe that very much.

Some context: In Grigny, 50 percent of pupils leave the public school system without a diploma. This confirms another reality: the PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] rankings tell us that French schools are extremely unequal — and each successive study shows the gap’s growing. The republican school is meant to be egalitarian, in our land of liberté, égalité, fraternité. But that’s a state lie — for only half as many resources are given to a school in Grigny compared to the average in France in general. So the state is shaping people’s lives from the youngest ages. Our first act, in terms of what we can do in city hall, is to denounce these inequalities.

But as I said, I am the product of municipal communism. And part of this is the programs that Communists have built at the local level, even across very diverse territories. That means health care. That means the right to leisure, to holidays. Grigny is one of the progressive cities using local powers to achieve social emancipation.

The novelty of our educational approach — also inspiring other cities in France — is that for us, education also means culture and sport. So we have three tools at our disposal. We must do more and better schooling. We must do more and better culture. And we must do more and better sport. We might think that being hyperconnected through smartphones would allow us to talk to each other. But the loss of human contact means we need to weave the ties of community again.

Children’s success may be academic, sporting, or cultural, but the adult world is responsible for creating an atmosphere conducive to that. We’re aware that not all children will end up in the Grandes Écoles [elite higher education]. But there must be a platform for them to be full citizens. That’s also about providing lifelong learning. In Grigny, we have three schools, including one we created, which allows young adults, indeed all adults, to train when they don’t have a diploma. And the results are quite extraordinary.

We’re lucky to have a great chef, Thierry Marx, who has come to Grigny to create training schools for people who don’t have a diploma. We have an adult education center with five hundred trainees a year coming through who learn French, who train, who gain know-how, then go on into employment. We have another education center for health and social assistance.

We are inventive and innovative because we have no choice. The system is not made for us, and the answers provided from above do not correspond to our needs. So, as well as calling for more resources, we are obliged to create a side route, to change people’s prospects in life.

DB
You mention this problem of resources, and while you are a Communist mayor in Grigny, the regional and national governments are in the hands of politically very different forces. What can you do to get funding from them, especially when it comes to long-term investment?

PR
In our working-class neighborhoods we need to invent a new political narrative. I mentioned the scapegoating of whole areas — telling us that if France is going badly, it’s because of places like this. The events of January 2015 were an electroshock in France because the perpetrators of the attacks came from this country and grew up in the republican schoolroom.

For decades, mayors of different political persuasions, but who were in contact with the population, had been sounding the alarm. That’s our responsibility as elected representatives of the banlieue. To say “Wait a minute!” That whatever happens, these districts can’t be ignored, because we are the youth of France and will shape its future.

So, after the shock of the attacks, there was an important moment on October 16, 2017, with the Appel de Grigny for working-class neighborhoods, supported by associations and mayors of all parties — though not with the Front National, which was excluded — and with Jean-Louis Borloo, a recognized statesman in France, and two current candidates for the presidency, Anne Hidalgo [mayor of Paris] and Valérie Pécresse [president of the regional council].

They came together with a common republican demand, as the summer just before the Macron government had senselessly cut our already meager credits and, even worse, cut funding for neighborhood associations. That meant getting rid of forty thousand public-subsidized contracts overnight, on budgetary grounds, though it didn’t solve France’s budgetary problems.

So we made a national plan for the suburbs called Vivre en grand — living together, living large in the Republic. We want to reconcile the suburbs with the rest of France, because otherwise we’ll have a catastrophe. We made nineteen proposals. President Emmanuel Macron threw this report in the bin, but, for six months, the media allowed us to explain another story. The last time we’d talked about the suburbs in France for six months was during the 2005 riots. So local mayors and associations were sounding the alarm for a problem facing the whole country.

But then, last November 14, France announced the post-COVID recovery plan. Money was distributed everywhere — in rural areas, overseas territories, etc., but we had to ask, when is it going to be our turn, in working-class districts? It seemed the recovery train had passed without stopping in our station. But it’s in areas like this where the health and social crisis is worst. So we had to say stop. And the strength of this movement is that there were more than two hundred of us mayors writing to the president, both from the banlieues and even charming cities that have working-class neighborhoods, like Albi, Agen, or Cahors.

Then we had some meetings with ministers and the senior administration to make proposals, and, at the end of January, the prime minister came to Grigny, and eventually we managed to get them to release another €2 billion for urban renewal. So we’ve gone from sounding the alarm to getting solutions. We have a government that at first sometimes stubbornly refuses to listen to us — and I have huge differences with Emmanuel Macron. But at times like this, we have to rebuild the foundations of the Republic.

DB

You mentioned the stigmatization of areas like Grigny, which also fits with the obsession with identity and security in the buildup to the 2022 election. But, even if we don’t accept talk of “no-go zones,” there clearly is real violence and the state reaching certain areas as a purely repressive force. What can be done to change that?

PR

There’s no consensus on any issue in France, but policing is a cause of deep division. There is police violence, cases like Adama Traoré [a twenty-four-year-old who died in police custody in 2016] — reprehensible police actions against categories of French society. And I haven’t forgotten the police killed in their own homes. But the media debate is hysterical because it’s polarized only in terms of violence against the police or police violence, but they don’t talk about the other 90 percent of the issue — public policy, justice, community policing.

We got a police station in 2007, but in 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy closed it down for the sake of reducing public spending. Mr Sarkozy posed as the man of security but cut ten thousand police jobs, and his decisions also broke the intelligence services. This, too, had its consequences for what we’ve experienced in France. There are terrible testimonies of former intelligence officials who explain that they had to stop following Mohamed Merah [an Islamist terrorist who murdered seven people in 2012] because they no longer had the financial means to do so.

France is the fifth-leading economic power but has the thirtieth or fortieth justice system in the world. The youth justice system is a disaster. For years, there has been a left-right debate, community policing versus RoboCop police, where police only intervene to restore order, but in real life that doesn’t work. And today the French police, without saying so, are in the process of redoing community policing, but after a delay of fifteen or twenty years.DB

The region around Paris has an important history of municipal communism, and Grigny has been Communist-led for decades. But the party has also had setbacks in recent years, losing Saint-Denis in 2020. Since these city halls were first won back in the 1930s, there have clearly been huge changes in the world of work and the social profile of the banlieues, and Grigny has grown a great deal since the postwar decades. But, as “best mayor in the world,” what can you do to rebuild this kind of rooted presence for your party in the life of the local population?PR

The Communist Party has its victories and defeats. Life’s like that — there are no strongholds and no election wins are guaranteed. We have to pick ourselves up and continually reinvent ourselves.

It’s true — today the working class has changed. But I can assure you, the poor are still here. When people ask me, what’s the difference, Philippe, between when you lived in Grande Borne forty years ago and today, I say it’s that then there was 5 percent unemployment and now the figure is 50 percent. With its renewed hunger to capture wealth, liberal society is also creating poor workers.

In France, mayors are the most respected politicians. People have a more positive image of us than MPs, whether they vote for us or not. So we have a special responsibility as a last defensive dam of the Republic, in a moment where people no longer believe what the president or national representatives say. That’s also why we’re working on proposing national solutions, to answer the questions people are asking me face-to-face. That means confronting the challenge of the social transition, but also ecological transition. As a nice line by Nicolas Hulot puts it, that means connecting the problem of the end of the world to the problem of how people can make it to the end of the month.

Here, too, we’ve had to take responsibility. The Grigny 2 housing trust — with five thousand dwellings and seventeen thousand inhabitants — had its heating and hot water cut off because there were unpaid bills. It relied on natural gas, which depends on fluctuations in world prices, just like how it’s going up today. We couldn’t control anything. So we made an alternative, geothermal project, which is 100 percent publicly owned. We got heat from two kilometers under our feet. We cut the bills by 25 percent and saved the planet fifteen thousand tons of CO₂ in one year. Well, I’m a Communist. And at the same time, saving the planet at my level. We like to joke that Grigny has ratified the Paris COP agreement.

Romain Rolland said that even in a hopeless situation, to fight is already hope. I have mayor friends governing populations who are having difficulties but are also rich. It’s a little easier to do socialism in those conditions than with a population suffering like ours is. We don’t exactly have oil to tap. But we do have geothermal energy, and we do have a totally different vision of how education should be.

I draw great inspiration from what’s happening elsewhere in the world — in Latin America, in Spain, but also mayors in North America and elsewhere in Europe, and all these invisible activists working for the general interest. But as we can see [with the divided field for] the French presidential election, this political family — the humanist forces of social transformation — have to talk to each other. At the local level, municipalities have been won back by a union [of the Left] with a clear program of change: in Lyon, in Bordeaux, and also in smaller towns and suburbs.

So I’m very sad about the national-level solution, and if you ask me who I’m going to vote for, I don’t know. But I really believe that local elected representatives have a role to play in this very complex situation, to maintain a thread of connection, to make sure that it doesn’t break. Because if we let go, I don’t know how our country is going to bounce back.

_{Source: Jacobin, November 6, 2021, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/grigny-best-mayor-banlieue-suburbs-philippe-rio-french-communist-party}