Multidões e partido

by Jodi Dean

Como agrupamentos de pessoas viram movimentos organizados? Rejeitando a ênfase em indivíduos e multiplicidades, Multidões e partido reitera a necessidade de repensar o sujeito coletivo da política e demonstra a importância de ver o partido enquanto organização capaz de revigorar a prática política.

Partindo de exemplos como o Occupy Wall Street, Jodi Dean destaca uma contradição interna desses o individualismo de correntes ideológicas democráticas, anarquistas e horizontalistas acaba por minar o poder coletivo que de início se almejava. Citando outros acontecimentos da mesma época, a autora argumenta que discussões anteriores deixaram de considerar as dimensões afetivas da forma partido, bem como a maneira pela qual esta viabiliza a formação de vínculos entre as "A celebração da individualidade autônoma nos impede de colocar em primeiro plano o que temos em comum e, assim, nos organizar politicamente", escreve.

Ensaio sintético com recorte e análise bastante originais, reabilita tradição e prática comunistas clássicas sem apelo a tradicionalismo ou nostalgia, mobilizando linguagem, abordagem e arcabouço teórico ancorados na atualidade política e na filosofia e teoria social contemporâ "Recorro a Robert Michels e Jacques Lacan para pensar os afetos que o partido gera e os processos inconscientes que ele mobiliza […]. A função do partido é manter aberta uma lacuna em nosso ambiente, a fim de possibilitar um desejo coletivo por coletividade", diz.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Political Science, Activism

378 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 6, 2015

About the author

Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited eleven books, including The Communist Horizon and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the most important books I have read in a while. It's dense, for sure, and will be challenging for readers not used to deep political theory. But the underlying argument is clear. The Left has for too long contributed to the focus on the "individual" from bourgeois liberalism, rather than the more powerful "collective" that is the legacy of working class politics. The distributed, decentralized nature of current resistance movements, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, however exciting and innovative, must be channeled through institutional structures that are able to wield power, if they are to have any hope of really changing the world.

Dean goes through the history of theories on the crowd and masses, spending many pages to analyze the Paris Commune (which I really enjoyed reading), its short-lived successes and catastrophic failure, adding commentary of many thinkers both from the time and since. She also illustrates the role of the Communist Party in multi-racial working class organizing during the 30s with several interesting personal stories from that time. Of particular interest to me was the outline of the role a party structure plays with regard to weaving together activists into a central narrative and knowledge base that is bigger than they themselves, and able to span time and space in a way that simple street-mobilization only captures fleetingly.

Dean urges us to reconsider the party structure as a vehicle for effective class-based politics. Given the current political climate, this book is must-read for anyone who is grappling with organizing strategy and how to position a modern political platform and framework within the context of Trump's America. Great read!

[Nathan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opposition from various corners expected and provoked, but Dean is right about a lot more than she's wrong here -- fully conceived and bears the weight of a decisive intervention -- steeping her arguments in the likes of Badiou and Lacan may mean your mileage may vary, but it coheres here in a way fully legible even if you gloss over some of that. It shouldn't be intimidating, it should be invigorating -- a clear-throated call for the return of the party-form, the glaring absence the left has been shadowboxing since the collapse of communism was officiated.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jodi Dean takes the notion of the crowd and establishes a gap for creating a political subject - to maintain (and, indeed, to establish) the purpose or meaning of the crowd event. Though I tend to favour emancipation through self-realization and radical democracy, Dean offers a convincing argument for the importance of a Party/vanguard. She achieves what Zizek has fallen short of doing, and that is a clear expression of communism as a movement that could actually achieve its goals. And it is a call to pragmatism in left politics:

"Or do we optimistically look to democracy, expecting (all evidence to the contrary) that communism, or even upgraded social democracy, will arise out of electoral politics? All these fantasies imagine that political change can come about without political struggle. Each pushes away the fact of antagonism, division, and class struggle as if late neoliberalism were not already characterized by extreme inequality, violence, and exploitation, as if the ruling class did not already use military force, police force, legal force, and illegal force to maintain its position. Politics is a struggle over power. Capital uses every resource—state, non-state, interstate—to advance its position. A Left that refuses to organize itself in recognition of this fact will never be able to combat it" (p.248).

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frankly the first half of the book was too academic for me. But the last two chapters plus the conclusion section were (dare I say) exciting.

I have been aware of Jodi Dean, but had never read anything by her.

In thing book, Dean demonstrates the strength of a Party, and provides a compelling critique of the current Left abandonment of Party structure, its mirroring of neoliberalism, and it's embrace of identity politics.

I finished the book wanting to have a conversation with Dean that would continue the book.

My primary criticism of the book is literally all her examples come from the CPUSA and CPGB. I am much more interested in the efforts of the organizations that made up the New Communist Movement of the 1970's, which tried to correct the errors of the old parties and tried to apply the insights of Maoism, especially an insight Dean quotes: "The slogan from the Cultural Revolution makes the point most powerfully: the bourgeoise is in the Communist Party."

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Communist perspective on the activist/political turn towards anarchism.

She doesn't like it ;)

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jodi Dean is someone I encountered by way of the Magnificast (a leftist Christian podcast), hosted by two guys named Matt and Dean, who have in many ways disavowed Zizek, but have maintained an interest in Dean despite the fact that a lot of her work draws heavily on the psychoanalytic corpus of Zizek. I have listened to Jodi Dean a number of times on Rev Left Radio or on PSL’s BreakThrough News, and I find her interesting even if I don’t always land where she stands.

Dean is a fairly typical Marxist-Leninist, whose work focuses on the need of a Communist Party to properly organize and structure leftist political struggles. While I disagree with many of her conclusions, I think she puts forwards some very fundamental questions concerning the turn leftist politics has taken over the past couple decades (especially since 1968) and also particularly those reflected in anarchist and libertarian socialist circles (such as those of the Occupy movement). She poses problems and questions that cannot merely be dismissed with simplistic smears that label people as ‘tankies’ without properly engaging with their political arguments.

I felt very compelled to read this immediately after the fascist storming of the Capitol in DC. Dean provides some interesting theoretical tools to contemplate crowds drawing on the work of Elias Canetti, whom one of my close undergraduate friends was very interested in, though I have sadly since lost contact with that person. Canetti’s work on crowds draws on and critiques the work of the arch-reactionary Gustave Le Bon, who influenced fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, imperialists like Teddy Roosevelt, and interestingly, Lenin. Admittedly this theory Dean engaged with was fairly over my head. The psychoanalytic stuff as well as all that stuff on transference and subject theory, all rather opaque to me. The books opening chapters as well as its closing chapters were the most fruitful for me.

Dean’s writings on communicative capitalism are very interesting. The way she ties in theories of crowds to the way social media functions and the voting of posts up and down on reddit raises interesting questions regarding democracy and popular opinion. This is an example of some of the fascinating stuff Dean writes at this intersection:

“Marx famously describes the crowds of the Paris Commune as the people “storming heaven.” For nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers, then, crowds and popular democracy are intertwined. At issue is whether the sovereignty of the people can be anything other than mob rule.

A benefit of the democratic reading of the crowd is its revelation of a split: the mob or the people. The crowd forces the possibility of the intrusion of the people into politics. Whether the people is the subject of a crowd event is up for grabs. The crowd opens up a site of struggle over its subject. A crowd might have been a mob, not an event at all. It might have been a predictable, legitimate gathering, again, not an event but an affirmation of its setting. And it might have the people rising up in pursuit of justice. Which a crowd event is, or, better, which it will have been, is an effect of the political process the crowd event activates. The crowd does not have a politics. It is the opportunity for politics. The determination whether a crowd was a mob or the people results from political struggle.”

While Dean is far more dismissive about the importance of democracy than I am, I think she points to important questions about certain types of ‘democracies’, which are more accurately understood as dictatorships of Capital and how violence functions within them. It is American ‘democracy’ that brought someone like Trump to power, and when people speak of American ‘democracy’ as something sacred that was violated in the ‘storming of the Capitol’, I can only perceive such laments as partially blindsided to how deeply flawed American ‘democracy’ is in the first place, and how far from sacred it really is. Again, it was this political order that empowered Trump, that perpetuated Indigenous genocide, that enslaved human beings, and on and on.

That being said, democracy in a sense much fuller than merely the domain of electoral politics, that is a democratization of infrastructure, energy, water, production, labour and the workplace is a very important aspect of leftist politics for me. I do take Dean’s point that any effective politics requires degrees of delegation, representation, and divergences from unanimous consensus. But democratic control over the means of production and the workplace is also important for me. I think democratic control over the allocation of productive forces and labour is vital to resolving issues like the climate crisis and especially poverty. I agree that this political force cannot be simply left to the ‘spontaneous’ action of the masses who will magically self-organize without long-dedicated organizing and consciousness-raising, but it cannot be left to the whims of some professional revolutionary intelligentsia of some central committee of some vanguard party either. I have been combing through some of these tensions in Ronald Grigor Suny’s biography of Stalin lately, and the tensions that existed between Bolsheviks and other radical factions like the Mensheviks. I think Dean is very Leninist in this respect, but in a very incisive way that I think brings important issues to bear.

Dean has lots of fascinating portions on the Paris Commune as well as the appropriation of revolutionary politics by the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War (e.g. the VP of the Confederacy who identified as a ‘communist’ though not in the sense of abolishing private property, but in the sense of decentralization of power). I disagree with some of the dichotomous framing Dean makes with respect to the individual and the collective, although I think her theoretical elaborations of the ‘enclosure of the subject’ is an interesting perspective on the individuating tendency of neoliberalism. I think there are certain moments within certain Leninist tendencies in which the subjection of the individual into some collective subjectivity shares common terrain with fascism. So I'm always a little cautious in this area. Dean critiques Althusser’s notion that ideology subjects individuals into structures of name, sex, place, etc., and proposes an inverted causality where ideology actually fragments collectives into singularities – atomizes the crowd or mass. Dean raises a fascinating example of how the Protestant Reformation was an early iteration of this early bourgeois ideology at work:

“I use “bourgeois ideology” to refer to the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The Protestant Reformation exemplifies bourgeois ideology’s interpellation of the subject as an individual. Breaking with the communality of Catholicism, Protestant theologies hail believers as singular souls responsible for their own salvation.”

I think Dean understands the immense pressures many communists felt as part of a larger party and organization, and she does provide where collective structures put immense pressure on individuals but by different means than capitalism does. Many communist party members did not want to fail their fellow comrades who were also making immense sacrifices. Dean makes an interesting remark comparing these communist impulses to Calvinist ones:

“[Raphael] Samuel, in his account of British communism in the forties and fifties, is not wrong to imply that the CP embodied a secular Calvinism whereby comrades sought to justify their election. “The willingness to make sacrifices, whether in terms of time, comfort, or money, also seems to have been a litmus test of dedication lower down the Party scale: as in some of the Party’s successor organizations of more recent times, there was a relentless pressure on members to be ‘active.’” The pressure was the interior force of their own collectivity. They exerted it on themselves. Every sacrifice strengthened it, generating a sense of the more that needed to be done and that could be done if more sacrifices were made. To be “politically developed,” as Hudson would say, was to feel a gap open up in the world between the actual and the possible and to see the world from the perspective of that gap. Samuel reads a CPGB appeal from 1945 as masochistic in its evocation of specific instances of heroic self-sacrifice...”

These communist pressures to dedicate every waking moment outside of working life, constantly handing out pamphlets and ‘evangelizing’ the proletariat reminded me of my experiences in evangelical Christianity as an undergraduate student, where an evangelical organization had helicoptered in some guy to basically set our campus chapter in line and started deploying all these metrics with respect to how many converts groups should strive towards each month, and separating mature Christians (like ‘advanced workers’) from seeker groups (like the ‘lumpen proletariat’). That type of campus ministry ironically was very Leninist, haha. I suppose that’s why I’m sometime weary of Leninist organizing. At the same time I attend an evangelical church (now online) with my parents and see the passion, fervour and dedication of so many of its congregants, and wonder how immensely more effective the left could be if it had that sort of dedication to its causes. I can listen to these sermons and so easily transpose them into some ‘kindom’ on earth as it is in heaven, that they often serve as motivation to be more politically engaged, but that large-scale mobilization of energy is so rare on the left. It’s so often a handful of very hardworking people who are always drained and exhausted (me sadly not being one of them, but merely admiring them from a distance; which again is the issue of leftist apathy and lack of discipline that Dean is pointing out as an ML).

My favourite section of the book was Dean’s elaboration on Hosea Hudson and various facets of American communist history. Dean also has this great story she borrows from Vivan Gornick’s book “The Romance of American Communism” about Eric Lanzetti’s conversations with Lilly, a Jewish woman who had decided to marry a Chinese worker and the way the communist party gave her courage to face her very conservative Orthodox father who said he’d kill her if he married the man. Lilly told Lanzetti:

“…it was like you were in there in the room with me. I saw you and my branch organizer and all the people I work with and I felt like the whole Communist Party was right there in the room with me. I looked at my father and I said to him: ‘If you kill me, who’ll cook your eggs?’”

Anyway, this was an immensely fascinating book. Again I haven’t arrived at the same conclusions as Dean, but I think Jodi Dean is a very important theorist and provides a lot of important considerations for all manner of leftist tendencies to consider.

[Ramora Reggianno · Rating 5 out of 5]

The political is personal –– this inversion of the 1960s feminist rallying cry “the personal is political” has become a bipartisan neoliberal assault on the potency of the Left’s politics according to Jodi Dean. Far from ignoring the personal or reducing all political issues to matters of class, Dean instead uses “Crowds And Party” as an argument for the Left to re-examine its aversion to the party form.

“Crowds And Party” draws heavily from psychoanalysis and sociology descriptions of the crowd to argue in favor of the party form as the best vehicle channeling a spontaneous crowd’s demands into sustained political action. The engine of Dean’s argument is an evocative anecdote from her own time in Occupy 2011. Dean found herself part of a defiant, militant crowd at New York City’s Washington Square Park where the group listened to speakers and deliberated on whether or not to occupy the park overnight despite city and police opposition. A young man addressed the crowd:

“We can take this park tonight! We can also take this park another night. Not everyone may be ready tonight. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual.”

“The mood was broken,” Dean writes. She found that in this moment of “reducing autonomy to individual decision” the speaker’s words “destroyed the freedom of action we had as a crowd.” Capitalist influence has driven large swaths of the Left to individualism, an assault that began long before the 21st century but has nevertheless been intensified by austerity that heaps more and more responsibility and financial burden on the individual form. The communicative nature of 21st century capital has generated new tools of organizing and awareness, and yet the individual form is rarely comfortable with building power in a sustained effort that can genuinely match capitalism’s titanic organization and scale. Instead, we cower in the non-politics of “the beautiful moment” which is but only a scrap of the possible. “The crowd doesn’t have a politics. It is the opportunity for a politics,” Dean writes.

Dean’s critique, originally authored in 2016, hits many points that are timely and apt as the decade of the 2010s closes. The decade’s political unrest includes Occupy and countless Black Lives Matter protests which responded to blatant corporate pillaging of the people and brutal police murders respectively. Despite the militancy of the uprisings, police budgets continue to grow and corporate power has been amplified by the austerity and the internet.

Beyond merely arguing in favor of the communist party as a form, Dean’s work is appropriate for all on the left, including anarchists and “progressives” who continue to lean on an individual practice of politics as opposed to the party-like structures of 19th and 20th century anarchist labor movements, antifascist militias and syndicates. When it comes to the politics of the oppressed, the individual is not the main engine of political change. The crowd, a critical mass of united ordinary faces, is historically the engine of radical change. Dean argues that now more than ever crowds need dedicated structures and forms that carry its banners onward when the oppressive boots and sabotage of the ruling class forces crowds back into silence and toil. . . . .for now.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

A philosophical analysis of the state of modern left politics after the demise of strong parties of the left following the fall of the Soviet Union. This is a superb critique of the long term impact of the capitulation of the left during the early nineties, and should be essential reading for the Occupy generation.

Dean's analysis is superb, grounded in Zizek, Badiou, and Lacan she unpicks the dissolution of progressive movements into decentralised individualism under the pressure of neoliberals - or what she calls "communicative" capitalism, a capitalism built on individuals connected by powerful and pervasive communication networks. Dean starts with the nature of individualism, it's importance to modern capitalism. She analyses how the values of personalisation and decentralisation have also been taken on by the modern left with it's focus on identity.

Dean moves on to the dynamics of crowds, how the crowd creates a rupture in society, the possibility of dramatic and systemic change. However this energy is impermanent, with a tendency to dissipate. It needs the organisation and discipline of a left party to hold that rupture open and take the opportunity available to deliver anything other than transient anger. She also discusses how "the people" and the party interact, using psycho-analytical principles to bring out the influence of leaders and the possibility of a tendency to bureaucratisation.

If there is a weakness it is that in the final section she does not offer a convincing programme for rebuilding or recreating strong parties of the left. If she has made the analytical and philosophical case demonstrating the need for such parties - and I believe she has - she does not then move on to explain how the existing "horizontal" movements can be turned into more comprehensive parties which do not then turn into the bureaucratic monoliths detached from "the people" that was the fate of the Soviet Union and other communist states in the twentieth century.

The book is also sometimes difficult reading, Dean is obviously influence by Zizek in style (without his cultural eclecticism). It is though well worth the effort, and a great philosophical companion to "Inventing the Future" on the need for an organised modern progressive left.

[Sarah SL · Rating 4 out of 5]

So so much to say about this book, the content of which is really many of Dean’s key commitments e.g.

– her dislike of individuality as a implicit value
- her insistence that for the left individuality and its supposed correlates (creativity, lack of hierarchy)– are really just an alignment with capitalist ideology, especially that of neoliberalism
- her insistence that some key social problems cannot be solved without clear rules, guidance, structures and systems of accountability that go all the way up to the state.

Even for me, some of her tales of the Communist party and its trials felt either cherry picked or less than fully critical. But overall, the book does a good job of showing why parties are necessary and how they can represent, and help develop, the work that is started by crowds. I of course course particularly enjoyed the discussion of the party as a pedagogical system. I also found her criticism of Kristin Ross’ book, if possibly too harsh, nevertheless illuminating and helpful commentary on that book, and a very different way of looking at the Paris Commune. If you’re looking for a m book that demonstrates, from many many different historical and sociological angles, the dangers of an individualistic mindset in left struggle, this is your book.

[Nick Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would give it 3.5 stars if I could. I found specific chapters and sections very useful: sections on communicative capitalism and exploration of individualism on the left. The psychoanalytic stuff around the party as the Other, a vehicle for transference, etc was also quite interesting. And overall, the call to action for a party-based structure and struggle for state power is a needed and important intervention to make.

I thought the crowd theory section was a chore to read and not particularly useful or applicable. I also found the focus on the left’s opposition to a party organization in the final chapters self-referential and lacking in complexity when it comes to navigating the US political system. Dean was too focused on party identification and collective belonging, but wasn’t able to bring the argument into a more practical realm to address the elephant in the room - navigating within our limited political system and the specific challenges of building power for communism in our country. Maybe she considers this outside the scope of the book, but it makes application of the theory more difficult.

[Emmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting work on the organisational crisis the left is facing. I came of age politically just as Occupy wound down, and share Dean's analysis of horizontalism's shortcomings. She argues from the mass uprisings we've seen in the last two decades, in many ways prefiguring the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, making the case that the lack of structure has made it impossible for the left to achieve our goals. This argument is coming to be made more and more frequently lately, but I like that Dean's argument is based in the fact of mass uprisings rather than a sort of neo-Blanquiste elite coup as is sometimes seen. Dean also navigates the inadequacy of identity-based politics but the importance of sectional oppression thoughtfully and correctly. At times the argument is based a lot on psychoanalytic claims, and some these went over my head. It is often scarce on prescriptive discussion of what the party form should be like or how to organise, although I accept this wasn't Dean's intended subject. Over all, this was a useful affirmation of why parties are necessary, and crucially, of how the are connected to rather than alternatives to crowds.

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read all but the last chapter of Crowds and Party immediately when it came out. I guess I put off reading the last chapter because I didn't want this book to end. It's so phenomenal. Dean has a reputation as a prickly and principled thinker, but Crowds and Party demonstrates she is also capable of adapting different forms of thought into her project of theorizing communism. In particular, her use of Canetti here strikes me as spot on. There is also a fantastic deviation from Althusser, and a theorization of the "affective infrastructures" of the crowd and party-form (and the transition between the two) that is very much needed. Great book.

[Charlie Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jodi Dean does amazing work stressing the importance of pragmatic political activism, while criticizing horizontalist objections towards building political power on the Left. Her engagement with Lacan is an interesting turn in social psychology and the chapter unpacking the individual as an idea productive to capitalism is also incredibly enlightening. She continues to astound me and she's always prescient, especially in a time when building power is the number one question on everyone's mind. Thank you Jodi Dean.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dean builds off of the foundation of her previous book, The Communist Horizon, to make the case for why the Left needs to focus on party-building. I agreed with the conclusions of this book, but not the method. This book gets more into the philosophical weeds of how "the individual" and crowds are constructed and supported, but the latter practical half of the book isn't fleshed out as much as it could have been (unlike The Communist Horizon, which had a strong philosophical foundation backing her timely prescriptions for organizers).

[Dayton Martindale · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half was a bit of a slog but it got interesting during the analysis of the Paris Commune, as well as of 20th century US/UK Communist Parties. I mostly was not convinced though, it feels like there is a middle ground between the unstructured individualism she critiques and the more hierarchical party form she seems to endorse.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell yeah Jodi Dean! This one was inspiring and reads like a contemporary Lukács piece as she is incredibly well read and theoretical (also maybe the first real-life popular academic “Zizekian”) - she is awesome and craaaaaazy radical. Love it

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

liked all the bits except the bits I didn't understand

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes me wanna join a communist party real bad.

[Băcilă Marcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW.

[amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I am not 10 communists"

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written for a very narrow audience. You should probably be pretty conversant with Zizek, Foucault, Butler, and about a dozen others before reading this. Not really for the layperson, even a moderately well-read one.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much I disagree with politically, but on a second read I liked it even more.