When considering assorted potentials for effective collective action against financialised capitalism in the UK, I have so far put the emphasis on a triad of factors:
- Permanent reform – or the significance of constantly pushing and campaigning for achievable shifts in policy and practice, and doing so on a sliding scale from minor to major change on a kind of ‘domino principle’ (ie one reform makes the next – and more significant – one more likely.
- Alliance formation – or the need to work on and across multiple fronts, building alliances with like-minded campaigners to accomplish companionable and reconcileable ends.
- Narrative construction – the urgent task of getting beyond what activists are ‘against’ to forge a pragmatic narrative on what they are for. This spells out the need for what has sometimes been termed ‘utopian realism’ (Giddens) (journalists/writers like Paul Mason and George Monbiot have had a go at constructing just such a utopian narrative). I have coined the phrase ‘foresight sociology’ to capture what I take to be sociology’s responsibility to contribute to ideas of alternative and better futures (the late Erik Olin Wright was an exemplary foresight sociologist).
I have stumbled across another – fourth – factor. As so often, it is obvious when mentioned, at least to anyone engaged in serious political activism or struggle. It is comradeship.
The concept of comradeship, I suggest, is in the process of being rediscovered and adapted for 21st century deployment, like that of communism (see in particular French philosophers and social theorists like Badiou, about which I have already blogged).
I recently read Jodi Dean’s Comrade. It is an intriguing read that draws on historical examples, frequently from debates and experiences linked to the CP in North America in the early-to-mid-20th century. It is an analysis that splendidly reflects the importance then as well as now of an intersectionalist perspective: not just class but gender and race ‘simultaneously’. She deconstructs and counters the obstinate presumption that comradeship is masculine and white, in the process celebrating the extraordinary bravery and persistence of individual CP activists.
Let me start with a definition by Dean:
‘Indifferent to the individual specificities it contains, comrade is a figure of political belonging, term of address, and carrier of expectations for action. As a figure of political belonging, it attends to the relation between those on the same side of a struggle. As a term of address, it refers to those engaged in emancipatory egalitarian struggles for socialism and communism.’
It is also a carrier of expectations for action: comrade engenders the discipline, joy, enthusiasm and courage of collective political work.
So comradeship, as broached by Dean, is a logical, political and moral adjunct of my triad of factors critical for ‘effective collective action against financialised capitalism’.
Jodi Dean advances ‘four theses on the comrade’. I’ll draw on her own wording.
- Thesis 1: Comrade names a relation characterised by sameness, equality, and solidarity. For communists, this sameness, equality, and solidarity is utopian, cutting through the determinations of capitalist society. Kollontai wrote: ‘in place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all workers, men and women, will above all be comrades.’ Comradeship is here characterised by equality, solidarity, and respect: collectivity replaces egoism and self-assertion. Times change. Dean: ‘today, in a setting that is ever more nationalist and authoritarian, intensely competitive, unequal, and immiserated, in a world of anthropocentric exhaustion, it’s hard to recapture the hope, futurity, and sense of shared struggle that were part of an earlier revolutionary tradition.’ Nevertheless, for Dean, comrades in our contemporary setting are more than allies: ‘they are those on the same side of a struggle for an emancipated egalitarian world.’
- Thesis 2: Anyone but not everyone can be a comrade. Comradeship designates a relation and a division – us and them – a political relation. Yet there is a space for non-belonging: ‘you may be a bystander, someone politically disengaged, an ally with interests of your own that temporarily overlap with mine, someone who might later come to be a comrade.’
- Thesis 3: The individual (as a locus of identity) is the ‘Other’ of the comrade. We must reject the bourgeois fiction that intimacy depends on one-to-one relations or how a singular person feels about people and events. ‘There are other intimacies of common work and shared purpose: preparing the newspaper, making the banners, planning an action, knocking on doors.’
- Thesis 4: The relation between comrades is mediated by fidelity to a truth. Practices of comradeship materialise this fidelity, building its truth into the world. The term comrade is ‘a carrier of expectations for action – the expectations that those on the same side have of each other.’ Fidelity is demonstrated through reliable, consistent, practical action. The primary virtue of comrades is solidarity. Discipline is key.
What’s to add? Several pointers I think. In prior blogs I have commended the concepts of permanent reform, alliance formation, and narrative construction (with narrative construction possibly drawing on largely-French theories around ‘rediscovering’ and rehabilitating the concept of communism) in the context of resisting/overcoming capitalism. Comradeship should be appended here, though it perhaps takes more thinking through. This is because, as Jodi Dean writes, times are no longer auspicious.
(In my terminology, while objective class relations have sharpened their teeth in financialised capitalism, subjective class relations – that is, people’s self-identification as class representatives, let alone ‘warriors’ – have become progressively blunter, in the process inhibiting the development of working-class consciousness.)
Notwithstanding the structural and cultural obstacles, comradeship in Dean’s sense would seem to be a precondition for mounting affective collective action for transformatory change. Nor is it enough to come together against extant institutions. Comradeship is positive and narrative-based. But it is also and necessarily more than consensual understanding. Lenin knew this (in a positive way), so did Stalin (in a negative way). And national CPs were often effective, at least up to the mid-20th century (eg running the French resistance movement in WW2 and in the postwar French elections). No more of course. Is there, should/must there be, a disciplinary core – an organised avant guard or party – to engage effectively in class struggle? If the answer is affirmative, then we have a long way to go. If, as some sociologists predict, capitalism is likely to implode, undermine itself through sheer excess, around mid-century, are we socialists prepared? The short response is ‘obviously not’. No less obviously I need to revisit the salience of the concept of comradeship and delve deeper. But in the meantime, thank you Jodi Dean for your Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. (London, Verso, 2019).