Rev Left Radio - Communist Party Building and Combatting Bourgeois Individualism

Episode Date: February 14, 2018

Jodi Dean is an American political philosopher and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Dean received her B.A. in History from Princeton University in 1984. She received her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University in 1992. Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, she has made contributions to contemporary political theory, media theory, and feminist theory, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism; the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse. She has spoken and lectured in the United States, Canada, Ecuador, Peru, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. She is the co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.   Jodi joins Brett to discuss the importance of building a revolutionary party and combatting bourgeois individualism.   Follow Jodi on Twitter @Jodi7768 Outro Music: “Minumum Wage” by Bambu. Listen to and support his music here: https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com Reach us at: [e-mail] follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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Welcome to hit in and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and today we have on Jody Dean to discuss communist party building, some leftist language issues, individualism, etc. Jody, would you like to say hi and introduce yourself for anybody that doesn't know who you are? Sure. I'm Jody Dean, and I'm happy to be on the program. I'm a communist and author and professor in upstate New York.

And you said you're a communist, do you identify politically with any certain tendency like Marxist-Leninism, or do you just prefer the word communist? I like the word communist a lot because it is the one name that we have for a anti-capitalist alternative. vision. And so I think that it's clearer than a lot of other words. You can have Marxist Leninist to, it's primarily for them maybe a theoretical orientation rather than one that involves organizing and political struggle. So that's one of the reasons I like saying communists. Also, I sometimes worry that when one says Marxist Leninist, you're tied interpretively to orthodoxy. And so then the argument's become things like, oh, yes. but you forgot that in the Grindrissa Marx says, blah, blah, blah,

even when nothing politically today will turn on that. So that's one of the reasons I also like or also prefer to say communist. Sure. I mean, I'm not not a Marxist or Bolshevik. I mean, I like those terms as well. I just think that, you know, it's a little bit clearer in most conversations today to say communists. Absolutely. And I also kind of think it might actually work to kind of tamp down some sectarianism

because there's a lot of anarcho-communists, there's a lot of Marxist, there's a lot of Leninists. I mean, you could say communist and mean a lot of different things that's more inclusive than like very hard-line sectarian tendency lines, though. Yeah, I think avoiding sectarianism is really good. Also, I would hate to say Marxist-Leninists and make people think that somehow I was anti-Mao when, in fact, I think we learned so much from Mao and from Maoist. So, again, yeah, communist is more inclusive. Definitely.

Now, before we get into a lot of the other questions, I'm kind of curious about your relationship to the party for socialism and liberation. How did their National People's Congress of Resistance event go? So I thought that our Congress of Resistance went really well. That was put together, though, by a broad group of organizers. Of course, you know, PSL was part of it. But, you know, a whole bunch of different groups came together. I was on the kind of general, what do we call it, the conveners committee. um with talking with different people from unions and from tenants rights organizing and immigrants rights

organizing so um you know it was it was a it was a fairly broad group though PSL played a major role in it um i was just i was blown away by having i think we had something like 800 people at it and the energy was incredible the group the groups of people who came together were really diverse and a lot of young people i met um a documentary filmmaker there and he had had gone and spent the summer going to different left gatherings, like one of the ones in Chicago. I don't remember which one that was, one of the socialist ones, another couple of ones. And he said that the People's Congress had the youngest groups of people there, right, rather than just being a bunch of white hairs. There was lots and lots of young people. And he thought that the energy there was more

exciting than any place he'd seen. So that was really gratifying to hear and to see. Yeah, that's awesome. Are you technically a member of PSL? Yes, I am. Awesome. Yeah, I'd like to get a PSL chapter opened up here in Omaha. I've been in some talks with some comrades around the country about doing just that. Omaha is kind of small, though, so it has some difficulties there. But yeah, that's awesome. I'm really glad that that went down so well. Yes, let me tell you, I live in Geneva, New York, and we, so for a little while,

I was like the only PSL comrade here, and then to someone I teach with and her partner, who we've known each other for, you know, five or six years, they then became members. And so we have a branch of three. And now we have three or four people in candidacy class. And so very soon we're going to have a branch of about seven or eight. And even without doing that, after we became members of PSL, it inspired us in other organizing.

So we work in other groups that have, you know, two or three times as many members, which didn't even exist before. before we started thinking, you know, recognizing, oh, as members of PSL, we, there's a lot of stuff we're supposed to be doing. We got to get active. And so it's just this amazing change in our orientation to local politics, to, you know, that came about once we became members of PSL. So you can do it with just a few people in Omaha, and then you will grow faster than you even expect. That's wonderful. Yeah, here in Omaha, we have a, we started an organization called the Nebraska Left Coalition, and it's really just a coalition of, of small

other groups like, you know, the DSA or the IWWGDC members kind of overlap in between that and the broader umbrella group. So I think PSO would work in that capacity here as well. Yeah, that'd be great. So let's get into some of the questions because I, you know, I'm a fan of your work. I've listened to a lot and read a lot of your interviews. It's always very fascinating to hear you talk. I think you talk about things that a lot of other leftist thinkers don't really address. And one of your arguments related to left-wingers using terms like democracy, I find really interesting. So why do you think framing our political projects in terms of democracy is unwise or counterproductive? Actually, I've got a number of reasons for that. And the thing is,

is that the reasons are not like anti-democracy or anti-democratic. The reasons involve what does it mean to articulate a communist or revolutionary socialist vision today, right? And so let me give you, I'll give me these reasons. I have six reasons. I can give them to you right now. So one of them, the first one is that, like, I was just working on an article about this. So it's amazing. So first, democracy does not name an antagonism, right? It doesn't identify like a kind of fundamental split. Our enemies consider themselves Democrats or, I mean, Democrat small D or small Democratic. So George W. Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of democracy. Trump even declared that his election, that with his election,

power had returned to the people. So to say democracy doesn't name a division between us and those we opposed. It's utterly confusing for anybody we're trying to organize. So that's the first reason. It doesn't name an antagonism. Second reason. Democracy points to processes, not to substance. And so whether or not you're, you know, the Democrat democracy we're talking about,

whether or not you have in mind electoral democracy, which of course we don't, or deliberative or radical democracy, What happens when you think about your politics in terms of democracy is that the focus is on how politics occurs rather than on the political outcomes we're trying to achieve, right? The debate becomes over self-governance, but nobody's against self-governance in their rhetoric, right? But those who, and those who prioritize democracy as the vision think that self-governance is the primary goal, not say, ending economic inequality, ending exploitation, and ending private property, right? But if we're socialist, if we're communist, those should be our goals, right? Ending economic inequality, exploitation, private property, wage, the value form. That's our goal, not just self-governance.

So again, here, democracy gives us a bunch of processes, but it doesn't give us a substance. In a lot of my work on new media, I have further arguments about the limits of democracy when I talk about communicative capitalism. I won't go through those there, but they have to do with the way that all sorts of democratic processes and ideals have been, have blurred into the mechanisms that generate capital for, you know, a small class, you know, the small capital's class today under new media. So we can think about, you know, if you think back to the early 90s, everyone's like, oh, the internet's going to be town hall for millions, and it's going to make democracy increase. And instead, we've had an increase in inequality and a concentration in wealth in smaller and smaller hands, right? It's no accident that Jeff Bezos is now, like, one of the richest, if not the richest man in the world. Right? And the other media people, you know, I've seen this kind of, you know, a concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. So there's media arguments that, you know, that show the limits of democracy today.

Another argument, fourth set of arguments, to argue for democracy now is like arguing for more of the same. So our general milieu is like this ideology where everyone should speak for themselves and everybody's voice matter. And including as many voices as we can is the goal of all politics, which is the same goal as communicative capitalism, by the way. But the problem there is that there's no cut that advocates for some views rather than others. And as socialist and communists, we shouldn't want there to be more expression of bad right-wing views. We're not like free speech liberals, right? We should be in favor of pushing socialist and communist views and wanting to see more of those, right? not just a kind of cacophony of more of the same, the expression of opinions for their own sake.

Fifth set, the emphasis on democracy includes class struggle, right? I mean, like you don't see class struggle when you argue for democracy. That's why anybody can argue for it. That's why it's not a good ideal for socialist and communist to argue for. Then when we say, oh, our goal is democracy, we're presuming the equality of participants. But under capitalism, that's a fan of. right instead we have to begin from class struggle right between the the fundamental antagonism between labor and capital and the exploited and the exploiter and we should not try to imagine oh wouldn't it be great if they were democratic relations between them no we want to abolish the rich and the owners and the capitalism exploitors we want to eliminate them right that's not like oh we just need to have more participation one last reason um why democracy is inadequate for a communist or socialist vision, we can't get what we need to go through democratic means.

That's, that kind of reformist ship has sailed a long time ago. And so, I mean, it's not like we're just going to vote and say, oh, ruling class, give up your money. And they'll be like, well, you voted for it. I guess we will. That's never going to happen. So, yeah, so democracy doesn't, can't name an ideal. It can't name a tactic.

it names just the kind of the delusion that people have had since 1989 and the kind of collapsed the Berlin Wall and subsequent defeated the Soviet Union that somehow democracy is going to achieve socialist goals. It won't. Yeah. Extremely systematic and thorough breakdown. I love it. I could not be in more agreement with you on that.

You did mention community of capitalism. Now, I don't know if you've coined that term or just made a good use of it. So I'd like you to answer that up front. But also, can you explain what it is? is and why it's important for revolutionaries to understand it? Okay, so I'd like to say I coined it, but that would be wrong because, in fact, my partner did when I was like, I was, we were putting together a panel actually in Budapest on Hart and Negre's book Empire, right?

It had just come out. And I was working on a book of mine called Publicity Secret and was like, you know, oh, how do we, you know, I don't like cognitive capitalism. how do we understand this kind of version of capitalism that is using forms of communication to generate basically for for processes of capital accumulation my partner's like um communicative capitalism i'm like oh yeah right but so but i guess but actually you know i've been the person who's theorized it right my this has been a huge bunch of my work so what what is it so communicative capitalism designates that version of capitalism where

communication has become functional and necessary for capital accumulation. So communication now becomes generative of contents necessary for processes and an instrument of production. It's a means of production and a content of production under communicative capitalism. There are a lot of different repercussions of this. In one way, I mean, so one set of repercussions is that democratic aspirations, but become repurposed for capital. So things like inclusion, participation, opinion sharing.

These would be some of the primary ones. These are both participation, transparency, access. All of these kinds of values are the same kinds are the same kinds of values that capitalism pushes on us in order to get us to generate more and more free content. to buy more and more media tools to engage in this massive, intense, mediatized world, right? In the name, say, a participation. So that's one of the ways that communication and capitalism start to merge. The effects of these are, the effects of this are immense. One way to think about it is our, there's a change in the way communication works,

so that our utterances become, our utterances start to matter not for what they mean, but for how much they circulate. And I think of this as a change in the use value, from the use value to the exchange value of the utterance. So you can think about this, like all sorts of crap circulates and gets tons of hits online, right? A bazillion shares, a zillion likes, a zillion retweets. And it doesn't matter if all that stuff is true or false. if it's valuable or not valuable, people, like, I mean, when I say valuable or not valuable, if it's like some sort of meaningful contribution in some, you know, to some sort of larger cultural

thing, like none of those things matter. What only matters is does something circulate, right? And circulate, it's like there's a circulation value that has overtaken anything that has to do with meaning, which is why memes are so popular, funny images are so popular, it doesn't matter what they mean, right? What matters is, you know, are they funny? Do they give you a little hit of outrage for a second? You can think about this also when you look at hashtags on Twitter, right? When you know that something is trending, you don't know what that means. You don't know until you start looking at it, are people against this thing for this thing? Why is something trending? And all of the things that go into making trending are not the same. They don't, the meaning is ultimately not what

matters. What matters again is the circulatory power of the thing. So that's a repercussion of communication becoming not a matter of transmitting meaning, but just a matter of the circulation of opinion, of affect, of outrage. The circulation has taken over. Then there's a whole bunch of other effects that have to do with the increase of inequality. But I won't talk about this right now. I can talk about them later if you want. Okay, well, yeah, one example that I kind of think of is like when you look at Facebook and you, I don't know if this is exactly right or not, but perhaps one aspect of it,

but, you know, the regular people create the content for Facebook. Facebook just provides the platform. People provide the content. And then Facebook extracts our data to sell and make a profit off of that. So like you were saying, it doesn't matter what the meaning of the content. It could be incoherent. But the point is that it's utilized for capitalist ends. Is that another way of thinking about it?

Yeah, that would be an additional feature, right? So the change from meaning to circulation is the way that communication is affected. What you're describing is one of what I would call a form of network exploitation that communication, that communicative capital relies on. So people work for free. And the owner, which includes shareholders now, they get the profit. that's from it. And so there's, in some ways, you know, Facebook is just like any kind of exploitative capitalist corporation. But the thing is even worse here. So much of the natural

resource that goes into it is stuff that we give to it and make for free. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a super interesting idea. And I urge listeners to go learn more about it. But I do want to move on to the concept of party building, because this is a lot of your work focuses on this. And I think it's, I think it's important and I agree with a lot of what you say about it. So can you highlight your primary arguments for the notion that we need to build up a sort of communist party and what that would look like? First, we can say that all of the resistance, well, first, resistance is not much of the goal, right?

There's always resistance to power, and it's almost hard to eliminate resistance. Usually the absence of resistance means that people are satisfied. So there's always going to be different forms of resistance. The challenge is how do you, how do different kinds of resistance then actually have effects that change the structure of power? We can protest all day long in the streets. But where's the account, where's the vehicle, where's the instrument from moving those protests

into something that will actually change the political and economic system that we're in? For too long, it seems to me that the left has owned, only focused on multiplying sites of resistance, multiplying tactics of resistance, multiplying opportunities for resistance, and not on translating these different tactics and spaces and opportunities into something

that's going to have a larger political effect. So the problem is that our politics don't endure, right? They're temporary and momentary. But the absence of a politics that endures has enabled over the last 30 or 40 years a increase in inequality that makes the robber barren years look like relatively tame, right? We've seen an unbelievable increase in global inequality.

All the while, while the left is all engaged, everybody's active, people are doing all sorts of stuff, but what we do does not in a form that lets us have more permanent effects. So I think, so the one of the major reasons that we need a different approach to and left politics is so that our achievements can endure.

That would be one of the first arguments I make. Oh, so, and then if you want some more, another one would be, you know, you hear a lot of people talk about, oh, you know, we need a politics that can

scale, right? That can move from the local to the global and that can, that won't just be something that matters here. It's not just going to be a one-off. It has to be able to scale.

The thing is, is that in terms of political opposition, the form that we know scales is actually the party form, right? The party is a form that has international, national, regional, and local versions. When their people are a member of a party, they will work in a small branch, and then they will have a regional group. I'm now thinking about a limited structure, but mass party forms do the same way. It can have national, it'll have a national form, and then usually it will have international ties.

And so the thing is, is that we know that we have a form of political arrangement that does scale. So we don't really need to invent that anew. Right. Yeah, and obviously a revolutionary communist party wouldn't play the role of merely another third party in bourgeois electoralism. So what would it look like in practice and how would it operate? Okay, so now we're getting into kind of different sorts of specifics. And so let me try to put some brackets in. So in my book, Crowds in Party, I have a relatively abstract argument in favor of the party form.

And that argument is designed to reach out primarily to radical Democrats and anarchist of different sorts, you know, whether or not their forms of, you know, autonomous libertarian communist or autonomous communists but i'm trying to reach that broad bunch of the left that has turned away from the party in that argument by emphasizing the importance of enduring and scaling um and there'll be more like there'll be um knowledge sharing an organization would be the other parts but um so that's an abstract argument not one that is about specific party building How come? Why did I write the book that way? In part because I wasn't just talking to people in the U.S.

The presumed audience, my publisher is located in the UK, was going to include a much broader audience. And so in the UK, they've got, I mean, fewer people need to be convinced about the importance of the party form. Many have had an experience already in SWP, whether or not that was good or bad. others have a better experience with Corbin and Corbin politics. So there were ways that to make a more specific argument about party building wasn't going to be general enough for my purposes in the book. When I think about it now, you know, more specifically in the U.S., I would say, like if I think analytically, I would say that we're at a time where you see at least three different

paths for for the left. So let's say one path is the push the Democratic Party from the far left, right? But but but in a way that is that does take the Democratic Party to be have some kind of potential for functioning as a working class or oppositional party. I take this to be at least part of how DSA understands itself. That that it's not at DSA is not actually a party. It's, you know, whatever. an association and they want to influence mainstream politics. And so I think that that, I don't think that that's all they do or that their vision's exclusive to that, but I think that they take that that kind of push is plausible. And so run the, and so that they would have an affection for an affiliation with a lot of the electoral politics efforts that have been going on over the last year or two, particularly in the wake of the Trump victory, to really try to, um, really try to. to influence the Democratic Party and run people at a whole bunch of different levels of the party, right, from local to state and national elections.

Okay. A second attempt would be something like the draft Bernie Sanders to have a new third party approach, which some people, I think, what does it call people for Bernie Sanders? Yeah, something like that. And they really want him to do that, and they want to build a mass electoral party. I think that that approach thinks that we can, that the role of electoral politics is winning elections because if you win elections, you can change the system. And so I think for people who think that winning elections will let you change the system, that that's, you know, not a crazy politics to pursue. That's not my view. The third view would say that the hard work of small revolutionary parties is meaningful

and important because it tries to let people, the goal is not being big for its own sake. The goal is raising militant and revolutionary political awareness. The goal is maybe having a red thread that knits together. the already radical movements that are, you know, popular in the country from whether or not those are the environmental movement, you know, the climate stuff, Black Lives Matter, the new increased visibility around feminist politics and Me Too and Times Up. So this third part would say, look, there is radical, there's radical energies in the country. There's a lot of discontent, and one of the things that a revolutionary party can do is imbue that with more

of a Marxist, Leninist, communist, understanding. And so that one has a much longer term vision of what change will have to entail. Right. How can we build the party that would be inclusive of many different types of leftists? Because one of the issues that we have is obviously sectarianism and a lot of anarchists would would hear that idea and immediately reject it as like you know trying to be co-opted by by Marxist or Leninist. So how can we build a party that is inclusive to many types of leftists which actively counteracts the tendency towards sectarianism? I guess so here's the thing you know I actually don't think that sectarianism is the big problem that people make it out to be right like I when I look at

what's going on in the left I mean I it doesn't seem to me like that's that's where the problem is it seemed to me like thinking like liberals is much more of a problem and accepting that things won't change

or being so attached to one's own personal view that you can never imagine going along with what a party thinks right those to me seem to be much bigger problems than sectarianism I mean most of the people I know in left parties will do actions with each other really frequently.

So I think that thinking the problem is sectarianism and then thinking that the answer to that problem is a multi-tendency party, to me is not the way we need to go right now. What about if people actually made a commitment to parties that they found exciting and convincing and weren't to strengthen those? And then maybe as we start to do that, and people realize like, oh, you know, I'm really not terribly invested in debates from the 1920s, that the things that have been sectarian in the past will kind of wither away.

I mean, think about this. Like the bullshit, I mean, first of all, the Bolsheviks and Benjaviks were freaking, they were sectarian and they got a lot done. Right. They, I mean, and even at, and even at the revolutionary time, right, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was only. one of multiple parties. And so there were multiple groups doing things and acting and they didn't work on, oh, guys, shouldn't we just all get along? It's like, no, we're going to, you know, fight, fight, get our lines out there. And then that tumultuous energy was also part of the revolutionary energy in October 1917. So I think that, thinking that, like, it's like such a

weird excuse like, oh, I don't want to join a party because they're too sectarian. It's like, really? Is that, could that really be, it's like, or is it that you don't know what you think? Is it really that you don't know what your commitments are? And so you're not, and say, or you're refusing to make some. I think that's much more of a problem than sectarianism. Yeah, I absolutely love the idea, and I guess I've never really had it presented to me, like you just presented it to me, but the idea of like, instead of focusing on trying to make everybody happy, just start to just work on whatever you believe is, right, build up that party.

And then as it catches momentum, as more and more people are drawn in, people are going to have to choose. do I want to stay fragmented and off to the side or do I want to join what is actually successful and has a mass movement behind it? And so I think that's where the energy should go. That's extremely convincing to me. I appreciate that thought. What can we learn about party formation from earlier leftist movements in the U.S.? I'm thinking specifically of the Black Panther Party, which was exclusively Marxist-Leninist with a big Maoist inflection? What can we learn from some of some movements like the Black Panther Party into today's world?

you know they're so inspiring and great and um like what one of the things i think that is some of their their community work um with the um you know the free lunches and the lunch sharing program that that was really uh what i think that was really useful the community self-defense was really useful um you know and the thing is that this stuff that i really like i'm not sure the practical lessons is great but i still like it at the beginning of her autobiography Elaine Brown and I heard

the first couple of lines are I've got all the guns and all the money comrades who's with me

because I just think this is fantastic as one because I'm working on the notion of comrades it's just like I got the guns

and money that doesn't mean we're not comrades you know you got to get with the program and I just I love her power

in that I love the way that it's a realistic assessment of the need for, you need material if you're going to be in a revolutionary organization and that material might, you know, you need weapons and how we understand those weapons might change, but you can't

do it just with a bunch of ideas and a, you know, family-friendly march. Right. Yeah, and I think when we look back at the Black Panther Party, we did an episode recently on the Black Panther Party and you mentioned there's total immersion in the community. That was the basis that gave them the legitimacy of the broader black population and even segments of the white left was precisely their ability to first and foremost address the immediate material needs of the community and then build off that base of support to something more radical. Now, of course, the U.S. government and the FBI and the police departments of Oakland and Chicago, etc., actively worked to infiltrate and dismantle the Black Panther Party. And maybe that points to, I'd like to get your

opinion on this, maybe that points to a sort of weakness in a party strong. where you have a clear set of leaders is that they can more easily be targeted. How would you respond to that sort of criticism? It seems to me that infiltration is a lot easier when you don't know who's in the organization, right? Because just anybody can show up or something and say, oh, yeah, hey, I'm with it. Let's do this, right? If you don't know.

I mean, that was one of the problems with Occupy Wall Street is it was really easy to derail and really easy to mislead. really easy to infiltrate because there was no criteria for membership. So I think that that's actually a bigger problem today than it is, you know, then the problem of a few leaders who can be identified and imprisoned. I mean, I also, honestly, these days, I think that, you know, that if, if, if, if contemporary leaders of some of our socialist parties were to be imprisoned. Honestly, the kind of galvanizing effect that could have actually would be really useful and meaningful. I mean, it's not like I want my party leaders arrested, but I'm just

thinking, let's think about these in different ways rather than, oh, it's just a matter of defeat. Thinking about it, it's like, no, that would be a sign that we actually are, you know, we're a threat, we're meaningful, and then it would create a situation that would draw a lot more attention to it. Also, I think any well-organized party works on. on making sure that it's always, always, always training more leaders, training organizers. You know, just, I mean, being in a revolutionary party, you're not just sort of sitting around and giving money, right?

You have to be doing stuff all the time. It's a full commitment. Every part, you know, it becomes a way of life. So I think, again, it's the worry about, oh, our leaders could get in prison is the wrong worry about a party structure. Yeah, I listened to your interview with This Is Hell, And you talked about some of your critiques of the Occupy movement and some of the sort of weird individualism that crept into it and like the sort of commitment to consensus decision making where if even one person dissents, then the whole plan falls through. Can you elaborate on some of your critiques of Occupy and why you felt like it failed?

I mean, first, I think we need to acknowledge first the good part, right? I mean, it was so funny about a month, well, two or three months before Occupy some other. or left friends and I were like compiling a kind of preliminary materials for a set of pieces we were going to write about why everything is so miserable and horrible and there's no politics. So that was just like two or three months before. And then a month before Occupy Wall Street, I was giving a talk down in an art space in Brooklyn. And I was saying like, you know, liberalism is wrong. anarchism is wrong.

These things are terrible approaches. And then one month later, you get this great burst of energy that the anarchist should get a lot of credit for with Occupy Raw Street. It totally changed the game. It gave people a hope that we can have radical politics in the U.S. again. It showed people doing things that we just were like literally unimaginable by most people, you know, including most people on the left,

a few months before, right? you just, we hadn't seen anything like it. So I think we really need to, even as we're comradly critical of how Occupy and Wall Street turned out, we've got to give them full credit for generating the excitement and the possibility of another politics. And I think what's most important about Occupy was that it made questions of economic inequality, class struggle, the problem of capitalism, it put those front and center. Right? And that's the, with the slogan, we are the 99%. That's a slogan of class struggle. It's the 99% against the 1%. Unfortunately, in my view, too many of the voices that came to represent Occupy Wall Street, even as they claim that they weren't, but of course they were, argued for something else. They wanted to say, well, you know, this is not that politics. It's an open politics. It's like there are multiple views. We don't have to

and tried to make this kind of very big and pluralist statement, which just flew in the face of what had actually galvanized the energy of so many people to come and get involved. So I think that the represent, and then you get the more mainstream representation, which is like, oh, it's just, you know, first of all, it's just democratic energy. That's also not correct, right? It was a divisive class moment, and that's what needs to be held on to and not kind of eclipsed in some kind of, you know, anarcho-cultural politics that just embraces democracy and process, because that's the stuff that broke down, right? The democracy and process and the kind of anarcho-cultural, you know, hipster pluralism. Right. Yeah, that's a good, that's a perfect way to explain it.

Yeah, and I also agree with you that it played a false. fundamental role in American politics. I can kind of trace a line roughly from, you know, the WTO protest in 1999, which you really saw this emergence of, of black block or anarchist politics, making a huge scene on the streets of Seattle, through to the sort of Iraq war, anti-war movement. And then you have Occupy. And then today we have Black Lives Matter. We have DSA. We have Antifa. We have, you know, a blossoming of leftist ideas and leftist sort of tendency explosions, and even Bernie Sanders being able to be a viable candidate in a U.S. election came in large part from the Occupy Movement that brought into the mainstream American

conversation, the issues of class. So I definitely don't want to take away from all that the Occupy Movement did. I was active in it myself, so. Yeah, I think everything that you said about that trajectory, I think that's great. I agree with that. Yeah. Now, let's get into a little bit. I mean, I know you've touched on in a little bit in this conversation, but I think it's worth

really hammering home to people. this, the threat of sort of individualism as, as bourgeois and dangerous. Can you talk about this danger and maybe highlight some examples of how this has crept into left politics over the last couple of decades? Okay, so what if I give an example from Occupy Wall Street? Okay, perfect. Because this is, you know, it's one that I talk about in the book, Crowds and Party. And it was for me, like, one of the moments where I was just kind of disappointed. I wanted it to be something So this was in October, so it was still early, and the energy was great in this is in New York. And it was probably around 1130 at night in Washington Square Park, and there was a giant general assembly of, you know, let's say at least a thousand people.

It was fantastic. And around the park were already a number of police cars, and there were. little kind of wagon truck van things and barricades, you know, their police barriers, like, you know, they were kind of piled up as if they were going to, you know, use them sometime soon. And a bunch of, you know, a bunch of cops, a bunch of cops. So, and they were, but they weren't, you know, crowding the people yet. They were just around the periphery. And so when I showed up a bunch of, you know, people were in small groups and little discussion groups. And everybody was talking about whether or not, um, that park, Washington Square part was

going to be occupied that night, whether people were going to stay, put up tents, and refuse to leave, right? They make another Zucati kind of outgrowth there. And so people were all talking, then they went back to a big group and then took the stack and, you know, people started, you know, giving their positions. And so there was this one guy down in the middle who, in my, in my memory, he always looks just like Russell Brand. That's probably just something I'm making up. That's how I remember it. I can remember it really clearly.

Like this guy, it's just like Russell Brands down like, you know, 200 feet in front of me. So he's in the middle and he's like, you know, we can take this park. And then people's mic, we can take this part. And everybody, we can take this part. It's a great energy. We can take this part tonight. And everybody's like, yeah, we can take this part tonight. We can take this part tonight.

And then he's like, and each of us will decide. And then now we have it. And of course, that's echo, each of us can decide. You know, no one can speak for us. It's our own individual decision, right? Each person decides for themselves. Okay. And then after that, Pat is different people speaking like, well, you know, I'm a student at NYU,

and this is not a good time for me, you know, for whatever reason. And someone else, like, next week is exams. It would be better to do this at another time. And someone else is like, I don't think everybody had a chance to bring their tents. And so it was just utterly the whole wonderful collective moment that had been building in such great way where people could sense their collective power, power that they only had because they were a thousand strong, because they were a group. You could see it and feel it dissipate and become just a bunch of singularities, just at this point a multitude of singularities, and to use Hart and Negre's phrase, where the crowd is, energy was gone and it was each person thinking about what was best for them and that is to my mind the reason that occupy fell apart is because it didn't keep its own collective energy and cherish and

nurture and encourage that instead it kept trying to dissipate it and emphasize individual preferences individual feelings individual ideas but but what made people strong and into it was because we were all there doing it collective. That's what gave the power. And when the left goes into these individualist emphases, all we do is repeat the message of the dominant culture. We repeat the capitalist message that it's our choice, you know, everything should be personalized, you know, make your designer parfei up to you or your designer sneakers or whatever it is. But don't, for heaven forbid, don't do anything collectively. And the left should not repeat that message that's capitalism's message we lose when we amplify the message of our enemy oh yes perfectly said

and you know so much of the alienation and the way it manifests in our in our current society is that we're we're constantly being atomized into individual consumers and we're not ever engaged in a community effort a collective effort and i've been to many many many protests where it gets really really intense people come together and they you know it's it's like a surge of adrenaline and energy when a lot of people are looking at each side of them and say, that's my comrade, that's my comrade. And when you're in a collective force, because all we have is our numbers and a lot of these protests and you're squaring off against the whole line of police officers, you feel more alive than you've ever been because in a society that has dismantled and gutted any sense of

community for the first time maybe in a lot of people's life, you're feeling the power of community. And to dissipate that and to fall back on to bourgeois individualism at the last moment at a crucial moment of political action is just devastating. And I think you highlight that perfectly with that story. Now, I just, I love the way you said that, right? When you're there with your comrades and you have that strong feeling that you can go up against anything. It's amazing. And, but of course, you know, the dominant interests of society don't want us to have that and they would break it up at every cost. Absolutely. Now, I'm pretty sure I've heard you before call the individual a quote unquote fiction. Can you elaborate on that idea for us and flesh it

a bit? Okay, so this is a theoretical point, but I still think it's useful for us. So, first of all, if we think about it, anything that we think of that makes us who we are is something that we actually share with other people. So anything that one initially thinks of as their identity category, for example, is actually not personal and individual. It's a, it's a statement of group belonging. So this strangeness about identity politics is the way that these statements of group belonging become transferred into this kind of thing about me by myself. So there's a weird, there's a weird, there's a weird shift that happens. It's really not one's own identity. It's a collective thing, but the collective part gets pushed away because, you know, the dominant forces

of capitalist and bourgeois ideology wants it to. That's one way. Additionally, if you think about the fact that people actually have an unconscious, right? This isn't just from psychoanalysis, but we recognize this with slips of the tongue when we find ourselves doing things that we realize we wish we hadn't when we say stupid things like, why did I say this? But in fact, it was something you really made, you just should have repressed. But we have an unconscious. We don't know ourselves. We're split beings. Once we recognize that, we start to realize that, oh, this thing that, this supposition that I am, this singular individual by myself, as if I could control everything about myself, is a myth.

I'm split and divided. There's all sorts of stuff in me that comes out of my mouth or comes into my thoughts that has nothing to do with me. This is also some of the ways that ideology makes and shapes us. Like, why is it that all of a sudden everybody needs to be wearing a particular kind of boot? Is it to express one's individuality? No, this desire came to you from elsewhere, and it's part of being in a kind of collective.

It's not, the idea that it's just yours is a fiction that's from this ideological construct of the individual. Yeah, and I would actually sort of highlight it from a couple other angles. One is the evolutionary angle, which is that we are social apes, and that an individual can literally not grow and developed outside of a social and community context. So you've seen sort of the notions of feral children,

the children that get abandoned, either to orphanages that don't ever pay them attention or even like literal stories of children going and living with wolves. The individual literally cannot grow and develop without a social context. So even what we take to be the individual is really a community structure itself. You know, the morality, the ideas,

the modes of behavior that we engage in, that we all attribute to our self, is actually socially constructed in the sense that it takes a society to raise an individual. So the individual is also a fiction in that sense, I would argue. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, another good example with that would be language, right? Language is always that of a collective. There's no such thing as a person can't learn to speak or think alone.

And, you know, Wittgenstein said there's no such thing as a private language. But because we are linguistic beings, we are necessarily social beings. Absolutely. So I know you're pressed for time, so we're going to wrap it up here. I really appreciate you coming on. It's been awesome. Before I let you go, can you just tell us really quick? This is a question I ask a lot of guests. Are you optimistic about the future of the U.S.? Why or why not? Yeah, I'm optimistic about the future of the left, in part because I'm in a revolutionary party. And one of the great things about being in a party is that the party lets you recognize that it's not up to you alone, you know, using it. a fiction of the individual, but you're with a group that shares the commitment and the group's struggle is bigger than you, you just one contributor to it, and it will go on after you, it's going on before you. And so knowing that, right, like being in a party makes me recognize, yeah, there are groups, there's a group that's struggling for the things that I think are

necessary for the survival of the planet. And we will win. Yeah. Where can listeners find your work? Let's see So I've got a few books that they might look for And I don't want to give the name of the largest bookseller in the world But most people will know it Some of my recent books that might be relevant to your listeners Are Crowds and Party, published by Verso in 2016

And The Communist Horizon, published by Verso in 2012 Awesome. And I've got stuff online, so people can Google me. Yep, and we'll also link to that information in the show notes. Thank you very much for coming on. You have two comrades here, Revolutionary Left Radio. Anytime you want us to help you with anything, even if it's promoting your work or articles, we are down. We really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much, Jody, for your insightful sort of ideas and your hard, everyday work trying to build a better world.

We really appreciate it. Thank you, comrades. I've enjoyed it very much. Take care. Solidarity. OJ, this for Central Cali right here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep the port from out my rights.

Immigration ain't an issue for the right because it ain't right to have the right to keep the laws in favor of the job creator. When the job creator ship a factory but cheaper labor labor, low enough to keep the people quiet and complacent when the money's getting spent right on the soil that's adjacent to the place where they are starving.

So hop a fence, coffee, My blood will keep the dogs off my scent skin Color versus the board of education If you ain't catch that line And you should study segregation This is rap mediation Time to snap me right back in the face Because they've been begging for some shit

From back before 2008 I'm thinking 1998 90 grades with two turntables Run the time your Auntie Merley Put a tattoo on our ankle Talking Ratchet When Ratchet was escaping all the drama Back when we could work with Anna

Working a blue collar I am from a different time Uphold a different code I hope we are connecting I don't know Because I know a couple people listening is dealing with some real shit. Yeah, that's right.

Real shit, feel like packing up your shit and skipping town for a bit. I'll throw you in my carry on and we can take a trip but we can snorke with the fish and hit some real rap shit. Make love in the sandal with some real rap shit. I'm a career emcee, working on minimum wage. Make the brothers yell, right. This is to say, hey, make the sisters say right.

The brothers yell, hey, make the brothers yell, right. The sisters say, hey. I hit the stage and leave a crater size of media rights. the sound man getting pissed. He think I'm cuffing the mic, but it's just me of my projection like an RPG to shoot a unmanned drone into the goddamn sea. You faint a heart, that's the part that you should stop the CD. Those rappers do claim they feel you a lying on TV. Megaphone a type of truth inside a load of your boot. Easy feet to feel what I do till I lose in my tooth. I don't shoot like unprofessionals ducking eyes closed. They're shaking about the liverables,

talking about the control, because I know it's as simple as a power plant closing. Y'all don't know how to preserve your food if it ain't frozen y'all been screaming all that gun right ready for a robot but couldn't filter off the rain to clean some water to go grab a pen and try your hardest to imagine that the tip by the size that you alone even matters and all of this because i'm a career emcee on minimum wage make the brothers yell the sisters say hey make the brothers yell the sisters yeah i'm from a different time and i uphold a different code i hope we are connecting i don't know i know a couple people listen is dealing with some real shit

Yeah Real shit Feel like packing up your shit And skipping town for a bit I'll throw you with my carry on And we can take a trip Drinking drinks inside a hut And hearing real rap shit

Clip diving in the ocean Over real rap shit Real rap shit This that real rap shit Central Cali was suck Southern Cali was suck North Cow was suck Whole World was suck

Philippines was suck Hold on none. Thank you.