Book Review: Jodi Dean's 'Comrade'

Photo: The Young Communist League, 1929. (Afro American Newspapers / Gado / Getty Images) By Corey Robin The Nation ...In Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 film Ninotchka, three Soviet officials are sent to Paris on a mission. But instead of doing the work, they’re bewitched and bourgeoised by the City of Lights. They drink, they dance, they stay out late. Moscow dispatches an envoy to set the rogues straight. They anxiously await the envoy’s arrival at the train station. When they discover the envoy is a striking woman nicknamed Ninotchka (played by Greta Garbo), they’re enchanted. A “lady comrade!” one exclaims. But Ninotchka is not amused. “Don’t make an issue of my womanhood,” she tells them. “We’re here for work, all of us.” That struggle—between an identity based on gender (or nation, race, or class) and the solidarity of doing the work—is at the heart of Jodi Dean’s Comrade. One of the most innovative and imaginative political theorists on the contemporary scene, Dean uses this scene in Ninotchka and a thoughtfully curated library of other texts, from the writings of the Soviet avant-garde to oral histories of the Black Belt, to argue for a communism that is stringent yet pleasurable, joyous yet disciplined. Like Ninotchka, Dean’s here for the work. Like Lubitsch, she makes it fun. Comrade is part of a trilogy of texts Dean has written over the past decade on the political theory of communism. In The Communist Horizon, she identified the transcendence of capitalism as the ambit of the left’s actions. In Crowds and Party, she located those actions in the party form. In Comrade, she examines the relation between members of the party. That relation creates two force fields. The first lies between members of the party, where a regulative ideal of being a “good comrade” not only governs the actions of each but also binds the actions of all. That binding creates a massive amount of power, which then projects a second force field—against the agents and institutions of capitalism that comrades seek to overthrow. The attraction of the first force field is necessary for the repulsion of the second. Seasoned union organizers know the truth of these force fields all too well; as Dean shows, so did anti-communists like George Orwell. Yet it is a truth many on the left ignore or evade. “If the left is as committed to radical change as we claim,” Dean insists, “we have to be comrades.” All politics require a space—a place where people can assemble, deliberate, and if necessary, move—and domains of action, which may include the economy, religion, sexuality, health, and more. What makes comrades unique is that it is the relationship among them that creates both types of space: where they assemble and what they assemble for. The word “comrade,” Dean explains, “derives from camera, the Latin word for room, chamber, and vault.” (Much like “cadre,” from the Latin quadrum, or square.) Rooms and vaults can be identical and easily reproducible. They provide cover or shelter. They differentiate those within from those without. Comrades create all of these effects by their affect, “a closeness, an intensity of feeling and expectation of solidarity,” and by their activity. Whereas work in a capitalist society is sustained by the coercion of the market, the work of comrades is powered by their commitment to one another, which derives from their close quarters (psychically speaking) and their commitment to the task at hand. The two commitments are mutually reinforcing. “One wants to do political work,” Dean writes, because of one’s attachment to one’s comrades, and one is attached to one’s comrades because one wants to do the work. Yet comradeship exceeds those affects and attachments. It must, for our sympathies are momentary, our purposes inchoate. Sometimes we fly to the assemblies, ready to do the work of the collective; other times, we laze about at home, succumbing to other desires or hesitation about our aims. Comradeship turns longing into intention and sustains that intention after the originating rush has dissipated. Comradeship extends the life of the crowd. It fulfills the function that labor historians have ascribed to the best union bureaucracies, which prolong solidarity after the strike, and that Arendt ascribed to constitutions, which institutionalize the aims and ambitions of the revolutionary moment after that moment has ceased. Comradeship does that work without the law or the state. It is instead an “ego ideal,” to use Dean’s Freudian language, maintained by the comrades themselves. That attempt to create a political space without relying on the law or the state is where we find the most intense unity of the ancients in all their outwardness and the moderns in all their inwardness. It is also where communism—and left politics in general—is most vulnerable to criticism and complaint. The effort of comrades to create and sustain a public space entirely through the psychic mechanisms of the ego ideal puts tremendous, almost inhuman pressure on them and their work. Without the customary supports of public life—whether the institutions of the state (after communism comes into power is a different story) or familiar sources of identity and attachment—comrades must ensure that each and every waking hour of their lives is dedicated to the common work of comrades. It is a demanding and unforgiving ideal, for much is at stake in any one person’s withdrawal from it. Yes, the work is performed in common with comrades, and the force field between them is mighty in its effects. Yet the force field is vulnerable to the competing energy of other forms of identification and attachment. Our other identities and attachments don’t simply disappear because the comrade declares them gone. They constantly clamor for our attention. Conversely, if those identities and attachments don’t sap the comrade of her energy and commitment, they may become all too tempting substitutes for the true work of comradeship. How many communists and leftists have taken this shortcut, forsaking political argument for simpleminded appeals to a worker’s identity or to national citizenship or gender or ethnic affiliation as the basis for action? How many activists have spoken those words of promise and threat—“You’re one of us”—that are so resonant in families yet so dangerous to politics? Tribalism comes in many varieties, and it would be foolish to think the comrade is not immune to its calls.  That moment of Ninotchka’s arrival in the Paris train station offers Dean another instructive mise-en-scène. As the three Soviets scan the platform, wondering who the comrade from Moscow might be, they spy a passenger who fits their expectations. They’re just about to extend a welcome when the passenger greets someone else, with a salute of “Heil Hitler.” The Soviets freeze. “That’s not him,” one of them says. Their mistake is productive for Dean. They’re assuming the comrade is a specifiable type—a gender, a face, a look—but comrades are “generic”; they don’t look like anyone or anything. They don’t have a specific identity. Comrades can be anybody, though not, Dean adds wryly, with a nod to that fascist, everybody. Anybody can do the work, and anyone who does the work will enjoy the solidarity of comrades. “We don’t even need to know each other’s names,” an activist tells her. “We’re comrades.” The solidarity of political work is not a subject well examined in the canonical literature of politics—Weber, one of the few theorists to think about politics as work, focused almost exclusively on charismatic leaders, not collectives—but it is a concern of vital interest to the left. Socialists of varying stripes have often looked to the workplace (or warfare) as laboratories of solidarity. So taken by the coordinated nature of modern work were the Saint-Simonians, for example, that they designed vests with buttons in the back so that no one could dress without the cooperation of others. In the physicality of concerted labor, many a socialist has caught a glimpse of a more solidaristic future. Dean’s model derives from neither the workplace nor warfare but from the political work and testimony of communists themselves, which yields an eclectic blend of voices—part republican, part romantic. On the basis of that testimony, she concludes that comradeship enables us to take on the perspective of others, to see our actions “through their eyes,” which “remakes the place from which one sees.” That enlarged perspective has been the calling card of thinkers ranging from Rousseau and Kant to Arendt and Habermas. Whereas these thinkers often find that perspective in the legislative institutions of the state or the organs of public opinion or the heroic moments of civic action, Dean locates it, as does Gornick, in the slow boring of hard boards, in the work of politics that escapes the limelight but where comrades dedicate themselves to a task and hold themselves accountable to its completion. Through that work, comrades can come to experience the joy of collective action and the enjoyment of one another. The joy is so intense that it spills onto other entities. Drawing on the work of artists and writers from the early Soviet avant-garde, which she compares to the poetry of Whitman, Dean describes an extension of ecstasy to “comrade objects” and “comrade things.” When the “love and respect” among comrades is “so great that it can’t be contained in human relations,” it “spans to include insects and galaxies (bees and stars).” Up to the 1990s, Dean’s commitment to the generic nature of the comrade would have raised the hackles of those in the liberal center and on the right, who would have seen it as a threat to the individual. Today, it will press buttons for some on the left, who will see it as a challenge to the claims of certain forms of identity. The comrade, Dean insists, seeks to equalize relationships across race, class, nation, religion, ethnicity, and gender. It creates a sameness, the sameness of those who are doing the work. The only difference that remains salient is between those who are on one side of the struggle and those who are on the opposite side. The mobility of that metaphor—of being on one side or the other—allows Dean to insist on forms of affiliation and attachment that are neither identitarian nor exclusive. Anyone can be a comrade; all one has to do is move to the other side. Though this quote from a Washington Post report on the Bernie Sanders campaign arrived too late for Dean to use, it offers a helpful instantiation of her claim: “Sanders is a candidate who presents himself less as a personality than a conduit for a movement. And in the Bernie bubble, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez is seen as the future of the movement embodied. What makes her so effective as a surrogate, beyond her star power, is that if you campaign on electing a movement rather [than] a person, there’s no difference between hearing the message from the 78-year-old white male candidate or his 30-year-old Latina supporter.” The comrade, Dean makes clear, is not a description but an ideal. Comrades do not eliminate gender or race or conflicts. But what they can do is name a common horizon; they can state a destination to which they are collectively heading, an aim toward which they are working. Comradeship is the announcement of another way of being: not one in which difference is eliminated but in which it becomes the stuff of political art, of mediating conflicts in order to do the work for which all have come. Though it is anarchists who are best known for emphasizing the prefigurative elements of radical politics—arguing that how we do the work now will shape the society to come—Dean’s analysis also has a prefigurative element, with Lenin as its seer. The discipline of comrades, he said, “is a victory over our own conservatism, indiscipline, petty-bourgeois egoism, a victory over the habits left as a heritage to the worker and peasant by accursed capitalism.” The comrade contains within herself the defeat of the old regime. The left has good reason to be wary of the stern antinomies of the comrade. The freedom that goes by the name of discipline, the suppression of difference in the name of solidarity, the words of emancipation as window dressing for authoritarian constraint—we’ve been down this road before. Read More