The Party, the Comrade and Communist Renewal in the 21st Century – An Interview with Jodi Dean

Amidst deepening crisis and growing unrest, questions of organization and strategy are more urgent than ever. With a young generation casting off decades of anti-communist brainwashing and embracing socialism with enthusiasm, it is suddenly possible to explore themes which only a short time ago might have seemed the province of a marginalized fringe. Jodi Dean's latest book, Comrades: An Essay in Political Belonging,¹ is especially useful in focusing attention on both the promise and the problems inherent in building organization capable of a sustained effort to emancipate humanity. Professor Dean was kind enough to share her thoughts in the following interview.²

Mat Callahan: What inspired the book Comrade: An Essay in Political Belonging? Why Comrades? Why now?

Jodi Dean: What inspired the book was my sense that the socialist and communist political traditions have an understanding of political belonging that's quite different from what we see on much of the contemporary left, where the contemporary left is a wide expanse that goes from anarchists and ultra-leftists all the way to liberals. Particularly since '89 and the defeat of the Soviet Union, we have this very inchoate, highly liberal vision of the left, mostly oriented around concerns that are associated with very specific issues or that are organized in terms of identity categories. Those kinds of approaches to politics begin from a position of, "Are you like me?" not, "What are we fighting for?" So I was interested in thinking more about the differences in how political belonging is understood; I should add that as an organized communist, I've been thinking about this for a while. My sense was that the debate around identity politics was missing the issue. It wasn't capturing what's at stake in, say, a generic kind of political belonging where we are people committed to a struggle. It was too invested in beginning with the question "Who are you when you come into the struggle?" rather than in "What is it to be on the same side of the struggle?"

That was, the underlying intuition driving Comrade. And then I thought, okay, well I'll just look up the writings on comradeship. And I realized there's not very much there. There was not a set of writings addressing the characteristics of comrades. There was not any academic inquiry or history of the figure of the comrade. There were a few bits of agitational party writing around, for example, letters to comrades written by Lenin, or how to be a good communist written by Liu Shaoqi.

But overall there was very little there. There was fiction, like Gorky's important short story Comrade.³ So I'm like, "Well, okay, I should write this." And then there was also something that's a little bit more particular to my life, which was that I travel a lot and so I realized, Oh, I can ask people when I'm traveling, "How has the term comrade been used in your context?" And particularly when I was talking to older socialists and communists in parts of Europe and the former Soviet Union, I could have these conversations. Those conversations created the fabric of the book. They weren't formal interviews or anything like that. They were much more casual conversations to give me an orientation. Some of them come out in the book, but it wasn't done as ethnography. It was more like these conversations helped me get a sense for the kind of affective infrastructure that I wanted to bring out.

Callahan: That leads to another question, first your discovery that there were very few writings on the subject. Why do you think that is?

Dean: I have two preliminary answers. The first is that people within communist and socialist parties were experiencing comradeship and they had a shared understanding of what they expected of each other. They didn't feel the need for an abstract theorization of their daily experience. Similarly, you can have a lot of contemporary leftists who don't theorize what they mean by the category identity. They just take it for granted as part of the general milieu that they're in.

But why wasn't this someone's really great dissertation in the last 30 or 40 years? I attribute that to--and I'll just speak of the English language context--American anti-communism. Anti-communism has so shaped what counts as an important or interesting question that it didn't occur to anyone. It was a kind of censorship in advance, the same kind of censorship that says, "If you discuss the work of V. I. Lenin, you must do so critically (with exceptions made from time to time for Trotskyists).” In other words, anything evoking Lenin has to be rendered either totalitarian or sectarian. Every liberal thinker can count as a political theorist worth reading and discussing while communist theoreticians are utterly dismissed. The cold war continues to shape history and academic inquiry.

Callahan: Do you think that that makes it more of a problematic word in the United States? Having lived in Europe for 20 years, the word “comrade” has multiple meanings and it's much more commonly used. I know people call themselves comrades when they're not even referring to politics. They use it almost interchangeably with friendship.

Dean: When I've spoken with, let's say, German colleagues, their immediate response when I started talking about this project was that, "Well, comrade is a Nazi term and ‘Genossen’ is what we use on the left." And so even though the specific term comrade is used, it has a different connotation there. In everyday German speech, at least according to my German colleagues, the actual word, comrade, Kamerad does not have multiple meanings and is not interchangeable with friend.

In Spanish and Italian contexts, “compagno” has replaced comrade because it doesn't have the same kind of left connotation. It's a little bit blander, a little bit more fluid, and slides into friends a little bit easier. And so, “comrade” actually still has a left-wing connotation.

Callahan: Friendship is also a very profound term and certainly not limited to the way Americans look at it. Everybody's my friend or like Facebook, "friend me." No, friendship is a profound idea that has to do with bonds of mutuality and reciprocity. Why would the Society of Friends (Quakers) exist? Why would George Fox found a religion on the basis of friendship?

Dean: I distinguish comradeship and friendship as modes of belonging. The way I distinguish them is via Aristotle's account of friendship. Aristotle thinks that one can only have a very limited number of friends. The reason is that friendship is for the excellence or virtue of another person. So it requires a degree of singularity. One can't infinitely involve oneself in bringing out the unique virtue of an infinite number of people. That kind of close attention to another person's life is always going to come up against limits. That's Aristotle's point. Unlike Facebook, you can't have 5,000 friends because friendship is singularly demanding and that's demanding in a good way. This doesn't mean demanding in some kind of psychoanalytic sense.

To be a good friend, you have to give a particular amount of singular attention to a singular person. In contrast, one can have an uncountable number of comrades. One doesn't even have to know one's comrades' name. Comrades are those that we have a relation to that's instrumental, it's not for their own good or my own good, it's for the sake of a political set of goals, a political project. It's not about that person's, that other’s, that comrade's singular life. It's how are we working together to achieve political goals? The difference between limited and unlimited here discloses that the real difference between friends and comrades is between an instrumental relation versus a relation that's anchored in the virtue or excellence or good of another. Comradeship is instrumental.

Callahan: Well, taking a step further, how do you think, or how do you hope, that this intervention will interact with, or clash with the identitarian? What you said at the beginning about the characteristics of identity politics: "Who I am and what I'm like?"

Dean: I have a few hopes. One is that my arguments and my account in Comrade gives people who are engaged in socialist and communist politics arguments to use in debates with people around identity politics, specifically, the emphasis on being on the same political side of fighting against oppression. As comrades we are the same. Our sameness comes from being on the same side. We share a politics. Communist politics is animated by opposition to capitalism, opposition to oppression wherever it appears. You don't have to occupy a specific identity to be against oppression. In fact, no politics arises specifically out of any identity. This is clear in the socialist and communist tradition: class consciousness has to be built, has to be generated. It's not automatic. The same holds for feminism. A woman isn't naturally a feminist. Or obviously, or innately a feminist. These politics have to be built.

My hope is that, particularly for people who were engaged in organized socialist and communist struggle, Comrade provides them with useful arguments. I also hope the book might help younger people who are still winding their ways through the left, that they would find something appealing in, "Oh, here's a politics that tells me I can be equal and the same as everyone in the struggle against oppression. I'm not separate because of who I am. I'm like everyone else on our side." And that that would be strengthening and be a relief from the specificity, the burdens of the determinations given to us by capitalist society. That one is, in a way liberated, like I don't have to worry about my own specificity, I'm involved in the struggle against oppression

Callahan: I'd like to branch out and ask about philosophy. The question has two parts. One part is how would you interpret the left's or America's view of philosophy? The other part concerns specific philosophers in the contemporary context, for example Badiou or Zizek?

Dean: Yeah. That's a hard question. The United States is a really anti-intellectual society in general. Anti-intellectualism has been pushed to the fore in the culture wars of the last 30 or 40 years. And there are versions of anti-intellectualism that appear on the left and appear on the right that are part of the mainstream. And so I don't think there's something specific to the left with regard to a view on philosophy because the left is so fragmented anyway.

Some of this is for good reasons. There can be good reasons to be critical of philosophy. Particularly Anglo-analytic philosophy is so detached from the critical interrogation of the present, so detached from helping make sense of people's lives and conditions, that finding it arid and unhelpful is not just anti-intellectualism. It can also be a real critique.

On the other hand, they're also leftists who read theory and read philosophy and write theory and write philosophy. So I don't want to characterize the left as having one view on philosophy. The same thing would go for specific philosophers. I think that such an abstracted way of approaching the question doesn't take us very far. Yes, there are people who are critical of specific philosophers, but that's not news. It's been that way since before Socrates.

Callahan: But specific philosophers you refer to, namely Žižek and Badiou, and you were critical of them. You said that you don't agree with them about the party, for example, in your book.

Dean: Yeah. So what do we mean by criticism? I use Zizek and Badiou to build my ideas, and I develop my ideas through engagement with their work, among that of other people. Those are just two of the folks that I use.

I am critical of particularly, Badiou on the party. Žižek is less dismissive of the party and state than Badiou is. In Comrade, my criticism of Žižek is more focused on the notion of terror. But for the most part, I only think that a critique or criticism is useful if you're building something with it. So, that I'm critical of them is a way to develop the argument. It's not a dismissal.

Callahan: Yes, but when the subject of philosophy comes up, I find it often elicits one of two responses. One is, philosophy is opinion. Everybody's got their own philosophy.

But the other is that philosophers like Žižek and Badiou are rejected without people reading them. Many leftists won't pick up a book by Badiou or Žižek. They just categorically reject them.

My sense is this is a highly controversial subject. It is not merely anti-intellectualism. It's actually a battleground that many people on the left are not even willing to acknowledge. They're dismissive. It's not organizing. It's not active. It's not doing anything. It's just talk.

Dean: I've had that experience as well in particular kinds of meetings that say, "Okay, I don't want us to have a reading group on X, or we shouldn't let the meeting now turn on some kind of esoteric interpretation of a contemporary philosophical point," but sometimes that's correct. I mean, what's the meeting for? Is the meeting for planning an action? Or is the meeting a reading discussion? We can have and in fact require both; the philosophy versus organizing dichotomy is a false choice.

The opposite version is there's an academic panel or a theoretical panel of some sort, and folks are debating the, I don't know, category of the subject, and activists say, "Well, what does this mean for practice?" And it's like, well, this particular thing right here and now is not about that. This is about a very narrow question. So both philosophical discussion and political organizing are part of our world, right? There is room for both. We should resist any compulsion to choose one or the other. If a comrade doesn't "feel it" reading Žižek or Badiou, that's no skin off my back. I don't think that's a problem. They don't find it useful for them. They don't find it helpful. I try to write my own books in ways that make it optional to skim the parts that deal with high theory or that clarify why the high theory parts are essential.

On the question of the subject, for example, this is actually not just a philosophical problem but a compelling matter for activist political practice. Much of my discussion in Crowds and Party is on this point. I try to clarify why the individual cannot be a political subject, why the crowd is not the subject, why the party is not the subject and so on. I argue that the people is the subject of politics and – using Badiou – that the people only appear retroactively, an effect of an event to which they are attributed to be the cause. This theory of the subject of politics makes the task of the party of communists to be finding the people in the crowds, that is, ensuring that the revolutionary people are understood as the subject of political disruptions, movements, and events. Any time crowds amass, there are arguments over what their presence means. Are they just a bunch of people hanging out? Are they reactionary or progressive? The party engages in the fight over the subject, which means seeing the movement of the subject – or not – in mass events.

Here’s an example that goes in a different direction: Comrade came out of a lecture that developed four theses on the comrade. Typically, whenever I gave the lecture, I would skip the fourth thesis. And I would say, "Well, it's in the interest of time," but really it made most sense to skip the fourth thesis in most of the public talks because the fourth thesis is about fidelity to a truth, and I use Badiou to develop this idea.

It's a fairly complicated way to understand the truth that animates the party and that then underpins comradeship, particularly for people who think of themselves as post-truth. So it takes a fair amount of time to develop and clarify the idea and that's not usually great for a public talk. It's usually something that makes a lot more sense when developed in the setting of a philosophy seminar. Also,people who are inclined to find the idea of the comrade compelling usually don't need to hear an elaborate account of fidelity to an evental truth, and people who are not going to find comradeship compelling won't be persuaded because of the theory of truth. But a full account of the comrade does require a sense of the side to which comrades belong and I develop this formally via Badiou’s theorization of fidelity to a truth event. Again, we don't have to choose: there's a time for some kinds of discussions and a time for other kinds.

Callahan: Well, on the other hand, as you said, Badiou's position is pretty much, the party is, as he says, saturated. It's a saturated form so you have a political difference. That's not even a philosophical difference. That's programmatic.

Dean: Yeah. We disagree on that.

Callahan: And so what happens? What happens in the real world of activity and of organizing? It may not affect an American, it may only affect the French, but he's propounding these ideas broadly.

Dean: So let's start thinking about this first with respect to the party, and then we'll branch out. So let's look at the party, our core. By party here, I have in mind a revolutionary communist party, one that's oriented around a program and a line. The agreement between comrades is the agreement on the program and the line. If you're in a democratic centralist party, after the decision is made, you don't publicly disagree. Once a decision is made, all are bound by it. That's what party unity is.

Now, obviously, Alain Badiou and I are not in the same political party; it’s the same with Žižek. We are not party comrades. Further, there may be a few people in my party with whom I might have a few very obscure academic disagreements. These disagreements, though, are not relevant to our membership in the party and our adherence to the party program. Being comrades doesn't mean that there's full intellectual agreement on everything. It means that you're following the party program and the party line. So that's the first level. And then the next thing: what about fellow travelers? Are they comrades? This will generally be context dependent, and that's what would makes someone more a fellow traveler or friend of the party than a comrade. You don't know what you can expect of them in a given struggle because they're not in your party, they're not your comrade in any strong sense.

And then in the broadest sense, among say intellectuals who write in this genre of the return to communism, which has been going on now, what, like 15 years? There is disagreement. There's political disagreement on key issues- but at the same time, I would say everyone rejects capitalism. Everyone rejects raced oppression; everyone rejects sexed oppression and so on. Everyone rejects the liberal status quo. So here there may be a broad sense of something like comradeship. This was practiced with extraordinary grace and generosity by Antonio Negri recently when he wrote an endorsement for Comrade. There are many places where we disagree –on the question of the party, on the political potential of networked media/communicative capitalism, on Deleuze v. Hegel and Lacan, etc. Yet of course we share communism as a horizon. And Negri extended a beautiful sense of comradeship when he endorsed the book.

We should not make the mistake of thinking that people who share academic convictions or a common archive are automatically comrades, because you don't know what you can expect from them in a political struggle. I mean, that's one of the worst things about intellectuals. Intellectuals are not necessarily politically reliable. You don't know what you can expect.

For me, part of the importance of bringing out the term comrade is making clear that not every relation that we are in is a relationship of comradeship. There's a set of shared expectations that comrades have of one another. And that's one of the ways to measure, okay, is so-and-so a comrade? I don't know what to expect when the answer's no.

Callahan: When I think of the number of communist parties that exist in the United States that were product of the 60s, let alone the Communist Party of the United States, and the Socialist Party of the United States, and the Socialist Labor Party of the United States and a myriad of Trotskyist organizations, I go, okay, well, which party are you referring to?

Dean: Well, I'm a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Callahan: But is that THE party? Can you convince all the other parties to go away?

Dean: When I write or talk about the party, I'm trying to bring out the sense of the party as a form and the abstract relations of belonging that the form presupposes. And so that's an abstract discussion along the lines of discussions of the state. We know that we can speak of the state in the abstract. The same holds for the party.

Historically the Communist Party was the Party, but now we're in the aftermath or afterlife of that historical party. There's not one party that overlaps with the form in the same way that the CP did. One can even push against this claim of overlap: Lenin's party was actually Kautsky's party, the German Social Democratic Party. That was the form, not the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which then becomes the Communist Party. The CP only comes to overlap with the form or provide the model afterwards, as an effect of the work of the Comintern. And later on you get the Chinese Communist Party.

The question of which party is “the” party always marks a rupture, a gap or division characteristic of the experience of socialist and communist parties. In addition to the constitutive split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks we see the rupture in social democracy in 1914, the splits of the mid-fifties, and then the lethal rupture of '89. "The Communist Party" is a myth, a signifier, an ideal type, the big Other of the Symbolic. It’s a form or formalization of political belonging separate from any existing empirical party. In a sense, it’s what we measure existing empirical parties against, not what any existing empirical party is or instantiates.

Callahan: But what about winning? You have to win don't you? I mean, state power. I mean, what's the point of having a party if it's not to take power?

Dean: I understand the goal of the party as taking state power. Yeah.

Callahan: But eventually, either that's going to be a coalition or it's going to be one party.

Dean: My own intellectual concerns are not worried about that right now. Given where the left is in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Europe, the worry about what happens after we take state power is not the thing to worry about. We have to worry about building capacity and will.

For many on the contemporary left, broadly speaking, the concern with what happens after the revolution pushes us away from the task of building the political party or parties that we need to fight the struggle. I think that it's really a red herring and we shouldn't go down that road. We know that political struggle is crucial. We know it has to be organized. We know that taking state power is going to be necessary.

And so to say, "Well, yeah, but then what are you going to do?" is like saying, "Oh, well, you guys are going to get married. Well, what happens after you have three kids, then what are you going to do?" It's just like, let's take some things a little bit more step-by-step, rather than invoking a far off future as a way to bind the present.

Callahan: Well, actually I think you jumped a step in answering, because my question wasn't what we were going to do after, it was how to get there. My question was between now and then. What are all these parties

Dean: I think we've got to reject this parody version of the left that's like, oh, the left always splits. I mean, it's as if it was not necessary and right for the communists to split away from the social democrats after they voted for war credits. It was. And we should not pretend that that was somehow some kind of destructive split. It was a productive split.

And right now, there has been the dissolution of at least one, but perhaps two of the parties that have a somewhat longer history on the US left. And there has been some more building of some of other parties.

So, it's a process and maybe we will start to see further consolidation, but the proof is in the work. Does it happen? I don't think that's a theoretical point in advance. It depends on what happens through practice.

Callahan: But don't you think from your experience that people ask those questions? In other words, everybody is not an anticommunist. They're certainly not born that way. And in any case, I would assume that young people who are not steeped in anti-communism and are coming into activism for the first time are more open-minded anyway, but they still ask these questions.

Dean: And what I almost always say is look at the parties in your area, or that you have come across that are doing work that you admire. Look further into that and see if it becomes right for you. That's the only way forward, but it's not to say, "Parties split. I can't decide."

You look through the groups that are available. I can make some suggestions, but people have to figure out for themselves which party provides a program and practice that inspires them. And then they must get involved in it and do the work from within the party. They, we, learn through doing.

Callahan: One of the dimensions of the present is that my generation is still alive and organizations born in the Sixties still exist. I'm wondering what your view of the '60s is. I mean specifically in regard to revolutionary communist organizations.

Dean: I do most of my thinking against the backdrop of the '80s, '90s.

And the reason is because in the '80s and '90s, you see much more of the emphasis on civil society organizations, civil society as the place of organizing. Not class struggles on the terrain of civil society but the rejection of class. In contrast to the sixties and seventies there was in the 80s and 90s much less emphasis on party building.

The strongest tendencies coming out of the late '60s were black power, environmentalism, the student movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, and what would become the LGBT movement. Identity and issue work was more compelling that party work; and, it should be said, in some cases this is because the party work failed to take concerns with race and sex seriously.

The fragmentation into separate issues and identities is definitely a shame because one of the other elements of the late '60s and early 70s was a committed internationalism. This was present in the small parties that were bridging, say, forms of black power struggles from the United States into anti-colonial struggles in parts of Africa and southeast Asia. Anti-colonial struggles linked to native American, the American Indian movement, to the Palestinian liberation struggle, and so on. Forms of struggle and alliance were not limited to identity, but were much broader because they had an anti-colonial, communist, socialist core to them.

As issue specific and identity-based politics became more prominent, internationalism lost its prominence and had to be perpetually reinserted and rebuilt. This is not least because of the loss of the material infrastructure that the Soviet Union had provided for international conferences and so on. Anyway, my work has generally been against the background of developments in the 80s and 90s. And I think that the new return to parties, if we can call it that (that's probably a little too optimistic), can learn from the strands from the party movement of the 60s – 70s.

Callahan: Not to belabor the point but can you explain or at least identify the forces that elevated identitarian politics above and against party-building work?

The best resource on this question is Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air. He draws out the ways the economic shocks of the mid-70s impacted the movement. With the recession and massive layoffs, survival needs became more and more pressing; unity declined and fragmentation was exacerbated. There was also the very real impact of police and political repression, particularly of revolutionary black leaders such as Assata Shakur. I would add that as the dominant culture became more conservative and more oriented toward the “me generation,” in other words, as the sense of what radical politics could accomplish diminished, specific issue areas came to be seen as places where at least something could be accomplished. This is the familiar “cultural turn” in politics. Blocked from achieving fundamental change at the level of the economy and the state, leftists highlighted cultural struggles around identity, recognition, media representation, and so on.

Callahan: Well, just in the interests of time, you've already given me an hour. I appreciate it. I want to move on to something else it's obviously directly related and I'm going to edit this. So don't worry. It doesn't have to flow like a television show would or anything like that.

How do you view, A, the question of analysis, the role analysis plays in determining political program or political line? And, B, what is yours, or can you venture one, of our current situation?.

Dean: A proper political account requires an analysis of the objective and subjective features of the present, especially in the ways they impact each other, their interrelations. The analytical work I've done toward analyzing the material features of the present has been through the category of communicative capitalism. “Communicative capitalism” conceptualizes the way networked communications changes both production and politics. It changes production and it changes democracy because the same communicative practices that have been upheld as necessary for democracy are now more than ever elements of production. The merging of communication and production is characteristic of the present, whether we're talking about the grabbing of all of our speech acts and related utterances through social media networks, the metadata these interactions generate, or the use of algorithms and technology or even just-in-time production. So I use communicative capitalism as a concept for grappling with the present. More recently, as in just the last year, I've been doing a thought experiment around tendencies to neo-feudalization. This work is extending the analysis of communicative capitalism, especially with regard to “network effects,” the structure of complex networks, and with regard to the rise of our technology overlords (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple). I've only published a little bit on this so right now it's still at the level of a wager and a thought experiment. At any rate, the analysis generated through the concept of communicative capitalism is in dialogue with Hardt and Negri. The difference is that Hardt and Negri absorb the political into the economic. They omit negativity, lack, and alienation, that is to say, the very space of politics and political struggle. Instead they draw out potentiality and the becoming of desire. I find this flattening and empirically unconvincing. So yes, an objective analysis matters.

Callahan: Have you encountered objections or resistance to making an analysis? In other words, there's an enormous amount of information being pumped at everybody 24/7, but I don't see a lot of analysis. I see a lot of information and that's not the same thing, or am I wrong?

Dean: When I hear your question, I think about it in terms of the political struggles I've been part of. Let me just use one really specific example, and this was, probably six years ago. I got involved in a civil disobedience campaign in upstate New York to stop the expansion of storage capacity for natural gas on our lake (Seneca Lake). This was not a "not in my backyard," NIMBY struggle; it was a climate change struggle. The first meeting I went to began with the announcement of why we're doing this. Different organizers spoke, setting out the local version of the argument, the state version, the federal version, and the broader global version. Each analysis prepared us to address different constituencies or audiences. We learned how to understand and present our action and goals. So it wasn't just, oh, let's go all get arrested for the heck of it. It wasn't going to be a one off. It wasn't just because we feel something about Seneca Lake. The analysis was crucial to the political struggle.

And then of course as a member of a revolutionary socialist party, we always have an analysis. Whether or not it's our branch doing a local action or a national campaign or set of actions. Building the analysis and disseminating the analysis is crucial to the political work. So I approach the question from the standpoint of doing politics – and from this angle it’s hard to see why an analysis would not be crucial, central, indispensable. I can’t quite get a handle on how someone could think otherwise. Maybe if they think that the only thing that matters politically is personal subjective experience?

Callahan: Okay. But I'm not only talking about analysis of the lead content in Flint's water. I'm talking about an analysis of the world situation, how it strategically impacts every country. In other words, do you see the situation as being favorable for communist revolution or is this a long-haul situation? It's very volatile. I think most people would agree with that.

Dean: Me, too. I also mean a political analysis that includes broader features of its setting, With respect to communist revolution in the United States there are several factors to notice that are key to the current conjuncture. We are essentially in a new depression, in the context of arguably the world’s worst response to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s worth pointing out the miserable failure of the previously globally respected US Center for Disease Control. The Trump administration’s declaration of a withdrawal from the World Health Organization. The US’s capitalistic approach to a vaccine etc. There are uprisings against racism and the police in hundreds of cities. Similar protests against racism and police violence are taking place in cities throughout the world. It seems pretty clear that there's going to be intense social upheaval for the foreseeable future. The direction of and response to that social upheaval will depend on the forces able to push it. Will the left cohere enough to push people in a left direction? Will we have the strength to force progressive rather than oppressive responses to it? For example, will we only see moderate police reform intended to placate the movement and get people to go home? Or will there be widespread and serious dismantlement of the legal, administrative, and material infrastructure of the largest carceral system the world has ever seen? With respect to the pandemic: right now there are rising numbers of cases in nearly half of the states. Businesses that had shut down are re-opening, but at what human cost? At the same time, large numbers of small businesses will never be re-open. So, is this a setting where a more socialist solution will be implemented or where capitalism will be more extreme, along the lines of the strong, the rich, those with capital survive, while everyone else sinks ever lower?

Right now, the mainstream media in the US pays most attention to the far right. Particularly the far right with guns, even as it's clear with every single poll that the majority of people in the country disagree with these crazy far right people. Nevertheless, the mainstream media gives the extreme right it a larger status than it should have. All in all, our condition is one of a barely contained generalized civil war.

Is revolution on the horizon here? I'd say probably, yes. The question is which direction will it go. That's very hard to say. Good friends who grew up in the former Soviet Union talk about the fact that they did not see the breakup of the Soviet Union happening, especially as quickly as it did. The situation in the US is similar and it would still seem highly unlikely, we don’t really expect it, so when it happens, it would be unbelievable, unpredictable, but still happening.

Callahan: And do you think that the global situation bears on that? What's the dynamic between what's happening internationally with what's happening in the United States and vice versa?

Dean: Who are the major holders of forms of US debt? China for one, so what is China’s interest in US stability, especially given the US’s ongoing militarism and aggression? Is it in Europe's interest to see the United States fall apart? Three or four years ago, the answer would have been no, but right now is that the case?

I don't feel like I can predict what would happen because the US is such a large country and has been so influential globally – especially as an imperialist power. And so the question is, is the world ready to say, yeah we're tired of this aggression and imperialism, you go and disintegrate on your own or is it, no, we need to hold you up because, for better or worse, the global economy has given billionaires all over the world a strong interest in maintaining US hegemony?

Callahan: Perhaps you could tie all this back together? I mean bring us back to the questions posed by Comrades.

Returning to our earlier discussion of the figure of the comrade, I develop the idea of the comrade as the zero-level for communism. That's a discussion in the book that relies on the use of categories of negativity that come out of continental philosophy. I use a Soviet novel, Chevengur, by Andrei Platonov, to explore how comradeship comes out of a break from other relations. When everything else is gone, comradeship remains. In the novel, Platonov presents it as the relation between those who are remainders, miscellaneous non-classed others. This vision of comradeship gives us a sense of why it is a relation important in a struggle for communism, or for a sense of communism as a real movement of struggle. Comradeship involves a breaking away from things we might be attached to that creates the space for the relation to comrades. Particularly in this COVID time, what's left? People feel their need for connection to others, right? Just at the level of connecting. And as I say in the book, it's like wiping the flies off of someone's back or meeting a very, very basic social need of other people. Here we see philosophy, literature, theory, and everyday political agitation inflecting each other.