by
Jodi Dean
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The comrade is a generic figure for the political relation between those on the same side. It is characterized by sameness, equality, and solidarity. But what does this mean under conditions of racial capitalism, of a capitalism anchored in white supremacy? It means the active confrontation with and rejection of these conditions in a recomposition of equality and solidarity. [...]
[...] Comrade entails taking a side, rather than refusing to acknowledge and avow the existence of sides. Belonging on the same side lends a generic quality to comradeship: Comrades are indifferent to individual difference, and equal and solidary with respect to their belonging. Comradeship thus requires the dissolution of attachments to the fantasy of self-sufficiency, hierarchy, and individual uniqueness. There is no place for such attachments in the comrade.
Comrades let one forget the status that the world gives them—birth, family, name, class. In the absence of these relations, comrades develop a reflex for solidarity that exceeds personal happiness. Commenting on Chevengur, McKenzie Wark writes, “The comrades are the ones with which we share life’s task of shoring up its impossible relation to a recalcitrant world. All we can share are the same travails, and we are only comrades when we might all share all of them.” The shared destitution of those who endure contains hope.
Today, in a setting that is ever more nationalist and authoritarian, intensely competitive, unequal, and immiserated, in a world of anthropocenic exhaustion, it’s hard to recapture the hope, futurity, and sense of shared struggle that were part of an earlier revolutionary tradition. What, then, is comradeship for us? My wager throughout this book is that a speculative-compositive account of comradeship, one that distills common elements from multiple uses of comrade as a mode of address, figure of belonging, and container for shared expectations, can provide us with a view of political relation necessary for the present. Comrades are more than survivors and more than allies. They are those on the same side of a struggle for an emancipated egalitarian world.
The comrade is also not the same as the neighbor understood in an ethical sense. “Love thy comrade as thyself” makes no sense: Comrades don’t love themselves as uniquely special individuals. They subordinate their individual preferences and proclivities to their political goals. Comrades’ relation to each other is outward-facing, oriented toward the project they want to realize, the future they want to bring into being. They cherish one another as shared instruments in common struggle; comrades are a necessity. [...]
Expulsions are a way that comradeship ends. It’s easy to see this in the case of the expelled individual. Haywood’s recollection of a time when expulsions ran amok, when the party entered into a self-destructive frenzy, lets us see the broader impact of expulsion. Paranoia undermines the trust necessary for comradely criticism and self-criticism. Turning in upon itself, the party turned away from mass struggle; away from the campaigns, organizations, and popular work through which it had actively fought for black liberation. No longer an instrument of struggle, the party disintegrates into a field of struggle. Comrades become combatants, then casualties, cut off from their previous world.