Jodi Dean

Biography

Dean received her B.A. in History from Princeton University in 1984. She received her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University in 1992. Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has held visiting research appointments at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, as well as McGill University in Montreal and Cardiff University in Wales.

Work

Drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, she has made contributions to contemporary political theory, media theory, and feminist theory, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism; the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse. She has spoken and lectured in the United States, Canada, Ecuador, Peru, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. She is the co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.

The Communist Horizon

In the first two chapters of her 2012 book The Communist Horizon, Dean surveys the contemporary political landscape and writes that the persistence of anti-communist rhetoric more than twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She says that capitalists, conservatives, liberals, democrats, social democrats, and “radical democrats” all embrace the idea that 20th century experiments with communism were an unqualified failure, and in doing so, limit the ability to discuss political alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets (a fusion of democracy and capitalism that Dean calls “neoliberalism”). Dean asserts that when people think of capitalism, they do not think only of its worst excesses (war, imperialism, slavery, robber barons, the Great Depression, the global financial crisis, etc.). The history of capitalism is allowed to be dynamic and nuanced. By contrast, Dean writes, if one utters the word “communism,” there is no dynamism or nuance. A single story emerges, which links the word “communism” with a fixed and simplistic historical narrative.

Dean argues that “communism”, for most people, equals the Soviet Union. Communist experiments in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin American are never mentioned. Second, Dean asserts that the entire seventy-year history of the USSR is collapsed into the twenty-six years of Joseph Stalin’s rule. Third, Stalin’s violence – the purges, the great famines, the Gulags – are the only events allowed to represent the ideal of “communism,” ignoring the modernization of the economy, the successes of Soviet science (including the Soviet space program) or the general increase in the standard of living for the once predominantly peasant society. Fourth, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets, follows directly from the totalitarian nature of Stalinism and its political and economic rigidity. Thus, the singular experience of Stalinism in the Soviet Union becomes the basis upon which all discussions of alternatives to neoliberalism are silenced. Stalinism serves as the “proof” that communism can never work in practice, because any challenge to the political status quo will inevitably end with purges and the Gulag.

Books