I recently finished reading the excellent new book by Jodi Dean (Political Science, Hobart and William Smith College) entitled Comrade: An Essay on Belonging. There are many reasons to recommend Dean’s all-too-brief, but brilliantly executed, text: its surgeon-like evisceration of the ideological cult of “allyship,” its elaboration of the truly liberatory promise of the “Communist Horizon” (which Dean first began to unpack in her 2016 Crowds and Party), its reinvigorating of enthusiasm for Party politics (pace orthodox/reactionary/dogmatic left-liberal skepticism of the same a la Badiou, Negri, et al), and perhaps most of all its head-on grappling with the relatively recent (but somehow seemingly age-old and tired) identitarian contests that endlessly pit the sufferings of some oppressed group against the sufferings of another oppressed group in a contest of sufferings.
To her credit, throughout Comrade, Dean consistently resists committing the cardinal sin of identitarian politics, i.e., elevating “class struggle” to a status that subsumes, elides, and thereby diminishes the singularity of every other identity-based struggle against oppression. In fact, she explicitly situates White supremacy as THE greatest obstacle to true comradeship– that is, to the true realization of the Communist Horizon– in the American milieu, arguing at the same time that the orthodox Marxian class struggle is necessary AND ALSO that adherence to a class-reductionist and colorblind “workers of the world unite!” slogan is myopic, historically-vacant, and in fact counterproductive to any real, liberatory, revolutionary change. Regular readers of revolutionary philosophy will, I am certain, find her agile navigation of this particular minefield both astute and refreshing.
You should really read Dean’s Comrade. It is definitely one of the best political philosophy texts I’ve read in years. But for this post, I’m interested in talking about– quelle surprise!— what Dean’s articulation of (human) ‘comradeship’ means in a world of intelligent machines.
But first, let me point you to this short interview that Dean did with The Chronicle Review, which was mostly about her book but was also about what she thought it meant to be a “Comradely Professor.” In that interview, and in the process of talking about how her scholarly and political work are deeply interconnected, Dean remarked: “To be a communist professor today means to try to find and forward revolutionary optimism in a setting of climate catastrophe.“
This claim is, of course, entirely consistent with Dean’s argument throughout Comrade, namely, that comradeship (and, concomitantly, communism) is “history’s condition for possibility– the possibility we need if there is to be anything like history in the future.” I suppose that it should come as no surprise to any reader– or any scientifically-informed human being living on the planet Earth right now– that Dean would choose “climate catastrophe” as the setting against which to insist on the necessity of comrades “find[ing] and forward[ing] revolutionary optimism.” The impending and very-near-unavoidable climate disaster facing our species now surely ought to be one that, for straightforwardly existential reasons, finds and forwards comradeship.
And yet, alas, the “setting of climate disaster” has not done this. Not for (at least) the last 30yrs that we’ve been sure of its inevitability. It has not motivated us (humans) to regard one another as “comrades” on Dean’s own definition of that term, as engaged in a “political relation of protected cover,” or “tied together instrumentally for a common purpose,” or even “enabling the revaluation of work and time, what one does, and for whom one does it.” The very real and very imminent possibility of an uninhabitable natural environment has accomplished exactly zero in forwarding “comradeship.”
Which makes me, for one, wonder: is the role of a comrade, today, to find and forward revolutionary optimism in a setting of climate catastrophe? Or is there some other impending catastrophe that, if centered, might be more generative for the project of finding and forwarding both “revolutionary optimism” and “comradeship”?
Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I think there IS an impending, existential “catastrophe” that might be a more generative starting-point for jump-starting the project of revolutionary comradeship, and it is the very real, very possible near-future arrival of the post-human.
Maybe this is a ticky-tack “strategic” disagreement with Dean– I say that, though tbh I 100% do not think this is trivial– but, in my view, there is quite simply zero evidence to support the claim that the “setting of climate catastrophe” is, in the actual lived-experience of most of the 7.7 billion people living on the planet, experienced as an immediate existential threat. I would wager that “climate disaster” barely even registers on the List of Existential Concerns for most humans. Or workers. Or women. Or people of color. Or disabled people. Or LGBTQI people. Or [fill in the oppressed identity blank here].
Ditto x10M for members non-oppressed identity groups.
Ok, so here’s where I am going to impart some (I don’t think inaccurate or uncharitable) interpretations to Dean’s claim in the TCR interview. On my reading of Comrade, Dean’s “comradeship” is thoroughly humanist, not humanist in the Classical Enlightenment sense, but definitely humanist in the 1844 Manuscripts Marxian sense. I do not say that as a criticism of Dean. I think that is one of her text’s great virtues, in fact.
Nevertheless, if you’re going to go full humanist– “comradeship,” on Dean’s account, understands the revolutionary struggle for the liberation of the oppressed to be concomitant with the liberation of all, which is an axiom that attends any legit Marxian philosophy and true derivative of it– then, I would argue that, in the 21st century, the “antagonist” in this struggle must ultimately be understood to be something that is contrary to the existence of universally free humanity.
Yes, climate disaster is contrary to the “existence of universally free humanity,” of course, but only in the trivial sense of climate disaster ending humanity’s existence altogether.
The real threat– and, I would argue, the real Archimedean point on which we might collectively lever the weight of human concern for human freedom– is actually that very immediate, very felt and lived, and very frightening possibility of not our “natural” extinction, but our evolutionary eclipse. Which is exactly what we are currently facing with what we might call the “Posthuman Catastrophe.”
I’ve written a fuller account of why I think the arrival of the posthuman is more imminent than you’re ready to consider here, so I’ll spare you a full rehearsal of that argument, but my point is I have argued that there is very good reason to believe that the greatest motivator for “comradeship” (as Dean articulates it) is not climate disaster, or capitalist exploitation, or compulsive heteronormativity, or patriarchy, or white supremacy… but, rather, the posthuman.
Let me be clear that the issue that I am taking with Dean in this post is mostly in response to her comment in The Chronicle Review interview, a view that is NOT really echoed in the actual text of Comrade. (In fact, I was a fan-without-reservations of her text before I read the TCR interview!) Nevertheless, it did worry me more than a little bit to hear her describe “what it means to be a comradely professor” in the way that she did, in no small part because my deep sympathies with her published work make me question what sort of “revolutionary optimism” I can or should be trying “to find and forward” in my own day to day grind.
To wit, near the end of Comrade, after considering all of the ways in which “comrades” become resigned, defeated, and “drift” away from solidarity, Dean writes:
The best I can hope for when you are not my comrade, when there are no comrades, is a tired-old liberalism. And given the psychosis that sets in with the collapse of the party, even this small dream feels impossible.
I, also, worry about this drift toward futility, disenchantment, quietism on the part of my comrades. I also worry that what comradeship makes appear as possible is closed off as a possibility by the drift away from comradeship. (The forces that push that drift are many and varied.) And it is for that reason that I want to resist Dean’s framing of the possibilities for revolutionary optimism as only “in the setting of climate catastrophe”– even and despite my ready acknowledgment that whatever revolutionary optimism we comrades might generate will undoubtedly, as a scientific fact, be made manifest in the setting of climate catastrophe.
But comradeship, on Dean’s account, is first and foremost about occupying the same side in a struggle, which means that it is first and foremost a collective, strategic and tactical enterprise of fighting against oppression in the direction of (universal) liberation. As such, it matters how the struggle is framed, and against whom or what the struggle is fighting.
For existential, substantive, and strategic reasons, I think the impending “climate catastrophe” is NOT the best frame for comrades to find one another in the struggle for freedom. Human oppression is much more immediately determined by wealth, privilege, access, opportunity, entitlement, immunity (and the structural forces that guarantee the unequal distribution of all of the above) than it is about any immediate or near-future natural disaster.
Climate disaster is our collective bogeyman, to be sure, but it is not out felt bogeyman. It has not and will not (in our current global socio-political arrangement) ever appear as so to the majority of the human population, who are immediately seeking an immediate salve for their suffering. We must be ever vigilant, ever concerned, ever working in consort to mitigate in whatever way we can, as comrades, the impending climate catastrophe. But we must also recognize, as comrades, that “even this small dream feels impossible” to the majority of the 7.7 billion humans living today, that is to say, the most of us, who Fanon rightly named “the wretched of the earth.”
The Earth is not their enemy. The wretchedness is.
The “posthuman” won’t appear to the majority of the human population today as their immediate enemy, anymore than Nature herself will. But “comradeship” formed in the service of human liberation, and in the fight against the evolutionary eclipse of the human by the posthuman catastrophe, may very well be our last (human) hope for avoiding the “tired-old liberalism” psychosis that obviates all possibilities for a future and makes “even small dreams feel impossible.”