Jodi Dean (at her great blog I cite) has posted a link to a depressing song and dance by Robert Reich, who manages not only to take bait offered by Bill O’Reilly, but also to “defend” himself by denying any association with Karl Marx or communism. He laments that the FoxNewsers have cheapened our political discourse, but he himself affirms a discourse in which it is absolutely out of the question to call oneself a Marxist or a communist.
As Dean says in the comments, there is a pressing need to recapture these terms, to claim them and use them, to declare with joy, “I am a Marxist,” and “I am a communist!” Of course then we need to say what we mean by those terms, but that discussion is precisely what Reich closes off.
And more than that, we need to refuse, with Deleuze and Guattari, an either/or understanding of these terms in favor of a “and…and…and” understanding. So unlike Robert Reich, I am a Marxist and a communist and an anarchist and a libertarian and an autonomist and an Aristotelian and a Nietzschean and a Gramscian and a democrat. And I am loving every minute of it.
Path to the Possible 