Return of the Spectre
Crowds and Party
By Jodi Dean
Verso Books, 2016
The Communist Horizon
By Jodi Dean
Verso Books, 2012
Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging
By Jodi Dean
Verso Books, 2019
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Left and the various social movements associated with it have been caught in a cycle of helplessness. From the riots of the Anti-globalization movement to the Occupy movement, social ferment erupts onto the scene in the form of mass protests, only to be crushed by police power and then co-opted by hegemonic liberalism. This process is dialectically both a symptom and a cause of an ethos that reduces politics to a set of individual moral endeavors, rather than a collective project of liberation. Unable even to raise Lenin’s (in)famous query, “What is to be Done?”, a Left seemingly afraid of its own shadow has been stuck asking itself: “What do we want?”
Through her three volumes, The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, and Comrade, psychoanalyst and political theorist Jodi Dean lays out a response to this interminable crisis in three parts and with each at a distinct level of analysis: the political project we need (communism), the organizational vehicle that can get us there (the party), and finally the social relations that constitute the organization (comradeship). Dean’s analysis names the desire for a Communist future and in so doing indicates a path out of the wilderness the Left has been lost in for so many years.
What is to be desired?
Why should we want communism? Anti-communists dismiss the idea of communism as a utopian fantasy that ends in totalitarian nightmare. Dean points out that these critics, who are so quick to accuse Marxists of teleological thinking, rely on a kind of anticommunist teleology of their own, following the schema: “communism means the Soviet Union means Stalinism means failure.” (Communist Horizon 34) This framework falls into the same essentialism that the anticommunists accuse Marxists of, ignoring the pluralism of distinct communist movements in the “Third World” as well as the US and Europe, not to mention the contingency of the plight of the fledgling Soviet Union, beset on all sides by imperialism and counter-revolution. Communism is not the sole province of a single party, as its critics would prefer, but to quote Marx from The German Ideology, “the real movement of the working class which abolishes the present state of things.”
To say that communism remains the horizon of our time is to say that the questions posed to us by history in the time of Marx remain unanswered. Communism is relevant today because the fundamental dynamics that shape history’s trajectory–that is, the rule of capital, commodity production, and wage labor–have not changed since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Capitalism unleashed forces of production of unparalleled might, but an economy based on commodity production demands that these forces remain our master rather than the other way around. Capitalism’s twin, liberalism, promised (to varying degrees) to deliver popular sovereignty through representative democracy. But this promise remains unmet to this day.
The unresponsiveness of the capitalist state to the popular will is observed even by the elite institutions of capitalism.[1] Moreover, the bourgeois-parliamentary state has proven incapable of managing even its own crises, as evidenced by the successive catastrophes of world war and depression of the 20th century and the impending catastrophe of climate change. Dean places this question of genuine popular sovereignty at the center of her analysis:
Communist movement strives to bring the conditions for [the sovereignty of the people] into being, grasping that these conditions are material and that the political sovereignty of the people is impossible when the basic conditions of our lives are outside of our collective determination. (Communist Horizon, 117)
This formulation is the key element of a communist politics which goes beyond the purely distributive concerns of social democracy. The point is not so much that people here or there live better or worse, but that everywhere life escapes our control.[2] It highlights the openness of a “communist horizon” – communism is not the “end of history,” but a precondition for steering our own history after taking the economy under popular control. Far from binding our thinking to a single vector, communism expands the field of possibilities beyond the narrow trajectory imposed by a liberal capitalism which insists that “there is no alternative.”
The People Divided
Capitalism thrives on division. Separating and hierarchizing workers along lines of identity has always been a useful way of blocking the emergence of a collective proletarian power. Even as it divides us up, though, capitalism at the same time transforms us into a single, undifferentiated mass. The ideology of homo economicus obscures the reality of class struggle, submerging it under a sea of niche advertising, opinion-polling, and rosy rhetoric about “making your (lone) voice heard.” There is no “us” and “them”, only a sea of autonomous individuals. The question facing the Left today is how to pose a new collective alternative against this atomization, while at the same time re-inscribing the fundamental division between exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed within the political sphere.
The people are not only divided from their exploiters and oppressors, however, but also among one another. Left wing movements in the past three decades have attempted to turn this fact into an object of celebration. Dean observes that during Occupy Wall Street, participants were encouraged to take part only in actions they connected with and felt comfortable doing.
Representation, whether in the form of democratic assemblies or even spokespeople for media purposes, was rejected outright. After all, how could any representation account for the plethora of individual experiences, motivations, and perspectives that made up the movement? The practical outcome of this concern for individualism was not often what its advocates intended. A lack of formal leadership did not erase the reality of de facto leadership. This dynamic bred suspicion: “I can tell that there are leaders, but no one will say who they are; who are these shadowy figures?” Hostility to formal media representatives only gave the bourgeois press more freedom to craft their own narrative and opportunists more chances to boost their own social media brands with no accountability. A lack of coordination led to groups and subgroups working unnecessarily in parallel or at cross purposes with one another. In short, the power of the collective body that had asserted itself against the 1% was diffused into a collection of individuals. This pattern will be familiar not only to Occupy veterans, but to activists from every social movement since.
The only solution to this impasse is to go beyond the politics of pluralism and inclusion and insist on inscribing a particular (albeit collective) point of view. As Dean argues,
The politics of the beautiful moment is no politics at all. Politics combines opening with direction, with the insertion of the crowd disruption into a sequence or process that pushes one way rather than another. There is no politics until a meaning is announced and the struggle over this meaning begins. (Crowd and Party, 125, emphasis added)
A politics that only embraces the multiplicity of the crowd forecloses the possibility of this political struggle. In order to reopen it, we have to build on the opening created by crowds like the Occupy movement and the George Floyd rebellion and build organizational vehicles of struggle, which can articulate and fight for a political program commensurate with the interests of the people.
Melancholy and Mania
It’s become a cliché to point out that leftists of various stripes despise one another. But one of the crucial insights of psychoanalysis is that our consciously expressed feelings often mask our true, unconscious desires and antipathies. With this observation in mind, we ought to ask whether the various neuroses of left-wing sectarianism and ineffectiveness are the product of some deeper pathology. Dean addresses this question in psychoanalytic terms, but always with an eye towards the practical political implications of a given interpretation.
The dominant narrative of the decline of the Left is drilled into our heads as common sense across every major medium, especially in academia: the source of the trouble is a rigid attachment to static, totalizing dogmas (i.e., Marxism) which have failed to predict or properly react to the realities of a changing and complex world. The only solution is to embrace pluralism of thought, a political eclecticism to match the eclectic reality of a radically contingent and fragmented world. The most sophisticated and damning version of this point of view is put forward by Wendy Brown in her influential 1999 essay “Resisting Left Melancholy,” which responded to the particularly vicious debates and polemics taking place within the Left around emerging fields of identity politics and postmodern theory. Dean summarizes Brown’s argument in the following manner:
Scorn for identity politics and disparagement of discourse analysis, postmodernism, and ‘trendy literary theory’ is the displaced form of a narcissistic attachment to Marxist orthodoxy. It’s an attack aimed at an interiorized, the loved and lost object that promised unity, certainty, clarity, and political relevance. (Communist Horizon, 168)
This “narcissistic attachment” is the key identifying feature of a melancholic in the Freudian sense: someone who has experienced a deep loss (in this case, the failure of Communism) but fails to recognize and come to grips with the reality of the loss and so displaces it onto something else (postmodernism, identity politics, etc.).
Dean also diagnoses the left as melancholic, but in proper Marxian fashion flips Brown’s analysis on its head (or rather, puts her back on her feet). The loss in Dean’s analysis is not the failure of a reified Communist Master–which never really existed among the historic pluralism of actually existing communisms–but is instead the betrayal (or successive betrayals) by the Left of our own revolutionary ideals, of the international proletariat, of communism. Having failed to acknowledge and work through these betrayals, the Left, like Freud’s melancholic, is stuck in a cycle of manic (faux) activity:
Instead of a Left attached to an unacknowledged orthodoxy, we have one that has given way on the desire for communism, betrayed its historical commitment to the proletariat, and sublimated revolutionary energies into restorationist practices that strengthen the hold of capitalism. This Left has replaced commitments to the emancipatory, egalitarian struggles of working people against capitalism… with incessant activity… and so now satisfies itself with criticism and interpretation, small projects and local actions, particular issues and legislative victories, art, technology, procedures, and process. It sublimates revolutionary desire to democratic drive, to the repetitious practices offered up as democracy… having already conceded to the inevitability of capitalism, it noticeably abandons ‘any striking power against the big bourgeoisie’ [Walter Benjamin]. (Communist Horizon, 174)
The openly stated reason for Left hostility to “authority” and “totalitarianism” is a desire to prevent or limit the possibility of a new tyranny by new elites, with the specter of the Soviet Union and Stalinism always hanging in the background. But, returning to Freud, Dean asks us: what is the unconscious drive being obscured by our conscious fears? If endless critique becomes a substitute for political action, then the stated fear of authority can really be interpreted as a fear of the responsibility inherent in taking action in conditions of uncertainty. If communism can be said to be the sovereignty of the people, then the fear of communism is really the fear of the “fury of the people unleashed.” Fear of failure masks a fear of success.
The Political is Personal
In the wake of the social rebellions of 1968, the radical feminist Carol Hanisch pioneered the slogan “the personal is political.” The point of the aphorism was originally to indicate the ways in which the supposedly private concerns of women–such as sex, appearance, abortion, childcare, and the division of household labor–were in fact shaped by the social and political reality of patriarchy. Consciousness of this fact was to form the basis of collective action to reshape the social structure.
In the time since, however, the slogan has been misappropriated in the name of a very different set of politics. Rather than a basis for a collective political consciousness, “the personal is political” became the watchwords of a new individualism which substituted personal choice and individual moral purification for mass politics. This politics of (self-)righteousness has been ambrosia for a neoliberalized capitalism that thrives on niche markets and selling us (the idea of) ethical consumer products, and a deadly toxin for anticapitalist organizations. Dean’s analysis offers a much-needed curative for this poison individualism by effectively inverting the slogan, investigating the ways in which the political becomes personal. Comradeship is the becoming-personal of politics, and the means by which communists overcome the atomization and alienation that Dean describes.
I will never forget the first time someone called me “comrade.” It was in 2016, and I was brand new to political activism. I was at the San Diego airport, demonstrating against then-president Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. A crowd of thousands had materialized on a few hours’ notice. I was there on my own, but before long I found myself with a group of socialists I had barely met, and before long I was helping to hold their banner. In all the chaos of the crowd, it was the cohesion and enthusiasm of their chants that had drawn me to them. After a while, everyone’s voice started to get raw. A woman from the group offered me a water. There weren’t many to go around. I thanked her profusely, but she dismissed my gratitude easily: “of course, comrades!”
In any other context, I might have been put off by such an unfamiliar declaration. But there, in that crowd, fighting for that cause, it was so obviously the right term, and I was delighted to have it applied to me. Over the next years, I would find a political home among this group, and shed blood sweat and tears fighting for a better world.
This experience is emblematic of Dean’s analysis of the comrade relation. It “remakes the place from which one sees, what it is possible to see… It enables the revaluation of work and time, what one does, and for whom one does it.” Protests and small actions become not simply a symbolic gesture against the outrage of the day (which quickly cause burn out), but an opportunity to reach newly politicized people and connect them with a socialist project that could actually address the sources of their outrage. Political education is no longer a simple matter of self-improvement, but a prerequisite for thinking clearly about the strategic questions that confront us comrades. Politics itself is transformed from an aspect of personal opinion into a terrain of collective struggle. Ethical responsibility becomes not simply responsibility to some abstract, impersonal metaphysical ethic: be a good person; but a much more demanding fidelity to a cause and the people fighting for it: be a good comrade.
Comradeship can be beautiful, but it’s not all wine and roses. Dean points out that “a comrade can be anyone, but not everyone” –which means that sometimes we can stop being comrades. As many of us across the Left can attest, the loss of genuine comradeship is nothing short of traumatic: “The end of comradeship is the end of the world: nonmeaning, incoherence, madness, and the pointless, disorienting insistence on the I.” (Comrade 135) Since the degeneration and collapse of the mass communist parties in the 20th century, then, all communists have been living through “the end of the world,” with hundreds of little Armageddons along the way.
The trauma associated with comradeship’s loss is not a weakness of the concept, but rather evidence of its strength. If its absence becomes psychologically apocalyptic, that is because comradeship has the power to remake the world–not only in the future, but in the here and now, and in the meaning of our own actions. It is the glue that binds revolutionaries together on a long and treacherous path to emancipation.
Uncle Joe
Dean’s analysis comes up short at several points. For all of her insightful criticisms of anticommunism, she is too quick to back away from certain theoretical foundations of Marxism. She argues for a move away from “empirical class categories” such as bourgeois and proletarian, in favor of a broader conception of the haves vs. the have-nots. Such a hazy view of class composition leaves communists ill equipped to analyze and take advantage of the concrete contradictions and key inflection points of the social order, and opens the door to class-collaborationist social democracy and opportunism.
This problem is exacerbated by a lack of clarity on the relationship between Stalinism and the defeat of communism in the twentieth century, which treats them as distinct phenomena rather than as inextricably linked. This lack of clarity leads to some bizarre conclusions:
Using the tone of respect when speaking of Stalin isn’t a sign that one is a Stalinist… it rather indicates belief in collective struggle for a better world. And the thing is this, something even anti-Stalinist skeptics have to admit is right: the end of the twentieth-century socialist experiment destroyed democracy. The tone of respect was thrown aside. A dream of emancipated equality died. (Comrade, 131)
Dean is at pains to clarify that she is not an apologist for Stalinist “purges and camps.” But her equation of “respect” for Stalin with a democratic ethos (or at least with a more democratic period in history) sustains the Stalinist myth, originating with Kruschev’s secret speech in 1957, of Stalin as a flawed leader, who, having been forced to take extreme measures to protect the revolution, sometimes made mistakes and went too far.[3] This narrative occludes the reality that the real horror of Stalinism was not its failures, but its success in transforming the Bolshevik party from a revolutionary party committed to the overthrow of global capitalism into the bureaucratic steward of state ownership and planning in Russia.
This question is not simply a matter of historical trivia. To speak of Stalin with a “tone of respect” is not to express critical support for the effort to build socialism in Russia, but to signal comradeship with the coalition between the Allies and the Soviet bureaucracy that stabilized global capitalism in the 20th century at the direct cost of the lives of thousands of revolutionaries, and at the indirect cost of millions more lives when taking into account the failure of Stalinism to effectively confront the rise of fascism. To this day, the logic of Popular-Frontism continues to drive dedicated and promising cadres of the Left into the graveyard of the Democratic Party.[4] To actually accomplish a proper “working through” of the betrayals of communism such as Dean calls for requires that we confront these hard truths.
Party Time
Despite these problems, Dean provides a powerful analysis of the contemporary Left’s pathologies and comes to the fundamentally correct conclusion – we need a communist party. Until very recently, the party has been the great taboo of the Left. Dean observes:
Communist philosophers who disagree on a slew of theoretical questions… converge on the organizational question – no party! … Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, or reimagined, except the party of communists. (Comrade, 6)
This rejection is the product of a host of different factors: a fetishistic disavowal of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the labor movement by neoliberalism, and the emergence of a new individualism facilitated by social media and ultra-segmented consumer capitalism. These obstacles must be overcome if communism is to become a real point around which to orient our politics rather than an empty signifier.
The evidence for this is all around us. The social movements which exploded during the Trump era came and went with little effect. The police and military budgets remain, taken as a whole, essentially unchanged, the kids are still in cages, and the 1% continue to gobble up more wealth. There has been virtually no change in the long term level of organization on the Left as various groups come and go. The DSA, the lone exception to the rule in terms of organizational growth, continues to retreat from its post-Trump lurch to the Left and accommodate itself to the Democratic Party.[5] There is a gaping hole in the political landscape that only a party can fill.
The only social body which has ever been able to at least wobble the rule of global capitalism is the communist party.[6] The division of the people from our exploiters and oppressors exists, but it cannot become real in the political sphere without a collective body capable of speaking for the interests of the people as such. In the absence of such a body, comradeship itself always remains tenuous, based around interpersonal relationships rather than shared commitments and shared discipline, incapable of expanding beyond narrow local boundaries. The social bonds that keep us working towards a common goal easily evaporate under the heat of neoliberal capitalism’s frenzied pace, and the only power we have–the power of the people–is lost. The last word on this should belong to Dean herself:
The challenge is becoming the Left that the crowd deserves, a Left that, faithful to the crowd’s egalitarian discharge, works to make it endure. A Left that speaks the language of radical change but refuses its forms is no Left at all. It’s the means by which political energy and conviction is displaced into styles and practices that make us feel good by making us feel radical. To advance, we need to organize. We need to be a party for the people in the crowd. (Crowds and Party, 264)
Notes
[1] A 2014 study published by Cambridge University Press finds that “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
[2] Credit for this formulation belongs to the comrades volunteering at Groundwork Books on the UCSD campus.
[3] https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115995.pdf?v=3c22b71b65bcbbe9fdfadead9419c995
[4] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/10/popular-front-communist-party-democrats
[5] https://www.leftvoice.org/leading-members-of-the-dsa-want-you-to-get-out-the-vote-for-biden
[6] This is not to deny the laudable accomplishments of anarchist and anarchist-inspired projects in places like Chiapas, but simply to point out that no such endeavor has ever managed to expand beyond a regional significance ultimately dwarfed by the might of imperialism.
Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.
