Where the Commies At?
No Commies.No Nukes. No end in sight.
by Floyd Webb
The Question
I keep hearing about them.
The communists. The radicals. The ones supposedly waiting just outside the frame, ready to take everything, remake everything, tear it all down and build something else in its place.
Depending on who you ask, they are everywhere—universities, unions, the streets, culture itself. A permanent threat, omnipresent and imminent.
And yet—
I walk through Chicago. I sit with filmmakers, teachers, workers, organizers. I listen. I watch. I ask.
And I keep coming back to the same question:
Where the commies at?
I know the answer before I finish asking.
They are not a presence but a position—a vacancy kept permanently filled by narration. The question is not where they are. It is what work their absence performs.
Because if communism is, as Karl Marx imagined it, a horizon—a classless, stateless end to exploitation—then what we are living in is not its failure.
It is its displacement.
The Enemy Beyond the Barrier
Sam Delany, in his Nevèrÿon cycle, writes of an enemy beyond the barrier—spoken of constantly, described with certainty, yet never fully encountered on its own terms. The boundary is real. The stories about what lies beyond it are even more real. But the enemy itself remains elusive, assembled more from narrative than from direct experience.
During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain performed this function. It condensed an entire world into a single figure: the communist—omnipresent, abstract, perpetually available.
Strong enough to be feared.
Weak enough to be defeated.
Abstract enough to be everywhere.
The point was not accuracy.
The point was availability.
An enemy described everywhere and encountered nowhere begins to look less like a force and more like a function.
Gramsci’s Answer
Antonio Gramsci understood that power does not survive simply by defeating its enemies. It survives by shaping the terrain on which enemies can appear.
Hegemony is not just control. It is calibration.
It produces enemies that can be feared, invoked, and managed—without ever fully materializing in a way that would destabilize the system itself.
The communists, in this sense, are exactly where they need to be: nowhere in particular, everywhere in narrative.
The Operating System
What we are looking at is not simply ideology.
It is infrastructure.
An ideology that reproduces itself without requiring belief is no longer an argument. It is an operating system.
This system does not eliminate dissent. It reorganizes it.
Take “defund the police.” It was not simply suppressed. It was separated from its abolitionist roots, renamed as “community safety investment,” and absorbed into municipal budgeting language. What begins as rupture becomes policy variation. What threatened structure becomes a line item within it.
This is how the system learns.
Labor becomes workforce development. Mutual aid becomes charity. Collective struggle becomes advocacy.
And the commons—that shared space of life not yet fully captured by market or state—is not destroyed. It is partitioned, managed, rendered into pieces that cannot cohere.
What cannot be suppressed can be separated. What cannot be separated can be renamed. What cannot be renamed can be absorbed.
The result is a world where people feel the contradiction but cannot assemble it into force.
The Necessary Enemy
If the communist is spectral, China is not.
China is real—industrial, technological, material.
And yet—
it too must be narrated.
China is not only a country. It is an argument.
Here is the contradiction: the communist was supposed to be the threat. China became a partner in everything but narrative.
The category could not hold what actually emerged, so the narrative split. The communist remained abstract—available for domestic fear-work—while China became something else entirely: an adversary that is also indispensable, a rival that is also infrastructure.
Deng Xiaoping’s formulation—what matters is not whether the cat is black or white, but whether it catches mice—names this shift. Ideology yields to function. Systems adapt.
An enemy you cannot disengage from is not an enemy. It is a partner in a system that requires both roles.
The function survives by dividing its object.
The Problem with Armageddon
The grinning commander believes in an ending.
A final conflict. A final resolution. A moment where history closes and meaning is fulfilled.
In that worldview, conflict is not failure. It is fulfillment.
But the system cannot allow that ending.
Because the world it depends on—trade, finance, logistics—cannot survive it.
You cannot end the world with a country you depend on to make it run.
China disrupts the script.
Iran, however, can be cast.
No Commies, No Nukes
There is always a reason. There has to be.
Today, that reason is Iran—not for what it has done, but for what it might become.
No commies. No nukes. And yet—the war continues.
The communist and the bomb now function the same way. Both are located in the future. Both justify action in the present. Neither needs to fully materialize to do their work.
The system requires a threat whose completion would end the story—so completion is indefinitely deferred.
Iran cannot have the bomb.
And it cannot be allowed to definitively not be seeking it.
The ambiguity is the engine.
The bombs fall in the present. The justification comes from the future.
Some nuclear states stabilize the system. Others destabilize it before the capability even exists.
The distinction is not technical.
It is structural.
What Remains
What emerges from all this is not confusion, but pattern. A system that sustains itself through managed contradiction. It allows conflict without resolution, crisis without transformation, opposition without coherence. It produces enemies that never fully arrive and wars that never fully conclude.
The theology of the grinning commander calls for rupture, for an ending that resolves everything. But the system overrides that script. It absorbs the language, circulates the belief, and defers the conclusion. Armageddon is invoked, but never allowed.
At every level, the same logic holds. The communists are invoked but do not cohere. China is named as enemy but remains indispensable. Iran is projected forward as threat but never fully arrives. Each occupies a role. Each sustains the system by remaining incomplete.
This is not contradiction.
This is design.
The system does not run on resolution. It runs on continuation. It requires enemies that can persist, threats that can be sustained, futures that can be invoked without being fulfilled.
The question was never about them.
If the system requires enemies that never fully exist and wars that never fully end, then what it is defending is not safety, not freedom, not even victory—
it is the preservation of a world that cannot survive the emergence of the commons
Floyd Webb is a writer, filmmaker, and curator on Chicago’s South Side. Founder of the Black Light Film Festival and Blacknuss Network, he creates films and essays that document the present as it unfolds—leaving a record for those who will need to understand what it felt like to live through it.
Further Reading
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Delany, Samuel R. Tales of Nevèrÿon. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998.
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
Harcourt, Bernard E. The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Preston, Andrew. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Scribner, 1972.
Whitman, James Q. Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
These works trace the contours of a system that sustains itself through narrative, contradiction, and control—often in plain sight.