How Should Comrades Party Today?

A key figure helping to stir a resurgence of communist thought in the United States, Jodi Dean stands out for the consistency, accessibility, and force with which she has made the argument that, in order to break out of the melancholic loser’s slump of the past several decades, the Left needs to return to the idea of the communist party. In her most recent book, Dean zooms in further to argue for the necessity of reclaiming the notion of the comrade.² In the process, Dean does not only make a compelling case for this powerful but long-neglected, much-derided form of political association, she offers insightful criticisms of existing and predominant forms of political affiliation that are woefully inadequate, if not obstacles outright, to creating the kind of robust, inclusive, yet disciplined revolutionary force that we desperately need if we are ever to overthrow capitalism and thus make a radically different, just and sustainable world possible.³

Dean’s argument for the party is pitched not as a case for a specific organization (though she has personally joined the Party for Socialism and Liberation [PSL]), but as a defense of the party as the political form that is required to make possible anti-capitalist revolution as such. Her call is a defense of thinking big, organizing on a mass scale, especially in an era where mass culture and politics have become fragmented and atomized in an era of “communicative capitalism.” It is a call to mobilize people to consciously confront the root contradictions of the system—against the idea of merely settling for what appears “realistic” within the current coordinates of 21^st century capitalism. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues for the party as the form that can sustain the energy and consciousness of the protest crowd (or, we might add, in light of recent events, the riot) beyond the moment of immediate popular uprising. We need an enduring and serious form of organizing, Dean insists, one that is devoted explicitly to shaping the people into a revolutionary subject.⁴

Dean drives home core truths: we need to overthrow the logic of the entire capitalist system—not (just) to bear witness to its atrocities. We need more than resistant or alternative niches in its seething pores and margins. We need more than fanning the flames of existing popular rebellion. We need a focused forum for coherent strategy and coordinated action to take root, locally, nationally, and internationally. In short: a genuine, communist party!

To this now, in her latest book, Dean adds an argument and analysis of the crucial political relation of comradeship. As she makes clear in her interview with S&D’s Mat Callahan, the comrade for Dean is both a generic relation (linking those on the same side of a political struggle, irrespective of their identity or social position) as well as a more specific and disciplined relationship that exists only in the context of shared membership in the same communist party organization, with its particular program and internal processes. Dean also registers a third level of comradeship, existing between the other two (the specific campaign or issue fight on the one hand; the specific organizational commitment on the other). This level encompasses those comrades who, though not in the same party organization, and thus not on the same side of every distinct issue or political line question, nonetheless share the common political horizon of overthrowing and transcending capitalism as well as other forms of oppression with which it has been historically entwined (imperialism, racism, sexism, etc.).

In the interview, Callahan broaches with Dean a crucial question: granted the importance of the Party, how can we actually win in a place like the USA? How do we conceive of the process by which the small currently existing socialist, communist or Left parties and pro-parties in the US could actually become a force capable of contending for state power? More discussion of this key question is surely needed.

To be sure, it’s a big question, encompassing many aspects that I don’t have space to address here. Perhaps Dean is right to focus us instead on the immediate challenges of building the struggle today where we are—and to defer discussion of distant future challenges that are not yet on the horizon. There is certainly no shortage of work to be done, and to become mired in potentially divisive hypothetical questions at the expense of present practice would be a sectarian error.

We might, however, I think, make progress on this difficult question of growing party potential by reflecting on how we conceive of the relationship among comrades at the third, intermediate, level, that is, the comrades who do not (yet) answer to the same party organization, but nonetheless do share a common horizon and a commitment to anti-capitalist system change, whatever strategic, tactical, historical, or ideological differences may separate them individually or organizationally. Related to this is also the question of how comradeship in the specific organizational sense relates to comradeship in this broader one.

Dean’s suggestion that people seek out party-organizations that are operating where they are and that inspire them, is generous and helpful. In particular I appreciate how it breaks from what has been called the “small business mentality” of some Left organizations, which have too often acquired a reputation for ranking recruitment to their own particular groups above the cause of building the broader movement. Nonetheless, the question of how comrade-members of different (at times allied, at times rival) organization should relate to one another, as well as to that broader layer of anti-capitalists, socialist, or communists who do not (yet) formally belong to a party or pre-party organization in this sense, remains an open one. But it’s an important question. Recent polls showing a majority of youth favoring socialism over capitalism, as well as the mass support for the Bernie Sanders campaign, suggest that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the USA today who fall into something like this category: socialist-oriented, but not a member of any formal party. (I confess to being one of these and imagine that many of the readers of S&D are as well.)

By Dean’s own admission, we don’t yet have THE PARTY that we need. Pending, then, (re)establishment of such a Communist Party—whether by merger, by growth, or by rupture with organizations that already exist—I want to propose that we find ways to party now as comrades.

What if we were to shift our thinking so that party is understood not just or primarily as a noun (a thing one joins, a structure one belongs to), but also a verb (a mode of being, acting, and organizing). Not only as a matter of affiliating with a particular structure or form of organization, but as a method of political praxis, a way of orienting theory and practice across diverse locations and organizations, in light of a common communist horizon.⁵ Such a verbal shift—all playfulness aside—has the immediate virtue of foregrounding not just the question of who or what we should form or join, but what we should do, and how we should do it.⁶

To sharpen the point: What are the pre-revolutionary tasks that need to be accomplished today and how can we go about accomplishing them, from where we are now?

What are the things that an effective mass communist (or socialist) party should or must do (and that other parties have done, or failed to do, in the past)?

In short: How should comrades party today in the USA (and beyond)?

Dean’s work over the past several years has helped foreground some of these key party tasks, tasks which she argues, have often been neglected by most of the contemporary Left. Among these necessary party-tasks, as I see them, are the following⁷:

• Demonstrating to masses of people the fundamental inability of capitalism to meet the needs of the common people;

• Providing long-term vision and strategic direction to activists to counter the pull of “capitalist realism”;

• Encouraging and enforcing discipline and accountability, while (on that basis) building trust among comrades (and between comrades and the people);

• Organizing in ways that can endure and that can scale as well as coordinate beyond the spontaneous and the local;

• Creating accessible structures that give the newly activated or curious a way to plug in and get involved;

• Collectively summing up political experiences and experiments, so that we can learn both what is working and what is not;

• Institutionalizing political memory, so that lessons can be passed on from place to place, struggle to struggle, generation to generation;

• Giving our disparate struggles a name in common, so that essential points don’t get lost in the cloud of competing codes and enemy propaganda;

• Cultivating the desire for collective desire, that is, for a new order of being—where mutual human flourishing is a shared goal;

• Countering isolation, individualism, competitive sectarianism, and the entrepreneurial “small business mentality” that divides and demoralizes the left;

• Relating the locality to the totality, helping each particular struggle to see how it is related organically to that of other struggles elsewhere, and to the dynamics of the system as a whole;

• Sustaining the egalitarian desire of the “crowd” beyond the necessarily short-lived upsurge of the immediate protest or riot;

• Cultivating critical discussion and clarifying the lines of struggle about strategy and the correct way forward;

• Building networks of solidarity for the defense of those in the crosshairs of capitalist assault (including those sectors of the people enduring racist super-exploitation and state repression);

• Cultivating and sustaining revolutionary courage, enthusiasm, and joy among activists, enabling them to achieve more together than they ever could alone.

You need not be a self-identified communist to see the importance of each of the above. Who could deny the necessity of these tasks without giving up on radical egalitarian social transformation altogether? I would wager that many who consider themselves to be socialists or anarchists or radical democrats or Green Party members, or otherwise on the progressive Left could agree that most if not all of the above are absolutely necessary.

So then, a question: Can’t we begin taking up at least some of these partying tasks now, where we are, even prior to joining, inaugurating (or waiting for someone else to found) some new formal party organization? Aren’t there tasks above that comrades can integrate into our current praxis where we now stand? Can’t we comrades begin to party like communists, even before joining (or being invited to join) an official communist party organization (with its formal leadership, platform, and strategic plan)? Rather than each existing pre-party organization trying to do all of the above on its own, couldn’t and shouldn’t comrades work together (within and across formal organizational lines, from parties to unions to community organizations) to develop a division of labor wherein such tasks are distributed across a coordinated network? Might we work together to cover all these necessary tasks, rather each node trying to do this massive work alone?⁸

Notably, the historic Leninist task of the revolutionary communist party—to make possible united strategic action that can overthrow the state at a key moment of systemic vulnerability—is not mentioned in the partying outline above. This is not to deny the need for such strategic planning, as the US empire shows signs of coming apart. But if we are to not only overthrow but overgrow the current system, we’d best learn to party more broadly, developing now a culture of comradeship that transcends organizational lines, and a pre-revolutionary division of labor that is rooted in deep popular participation. For only the people can lay the foundation for the world to come.