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Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging

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When people say “comrade,� they change the world

In the twentieth century, millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade.� Now, among the left, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies.� In Comrade, Jodi Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended.

Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterized by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm. Considering the egalitarianism of the comrade in light of differences of race and gender, Dean draws from an array of historical and literary examples such as Harry Haywood, C.L.R. James, Alexandra Kollontai, and Doris Lessing. She argues that if we are to be a left at all, we have to be comrades.

176 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2019

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About the author

Jodi Dean

46books134followers
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.

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5 stars
137 (26%)
4 stars
218 (42%)
3 stars
129 (25%)
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25 (4%)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
Profile Image for Alex Nuttle.
24 reviews1 follower
January 18, 2020
Jodi Dean has written a very thorough history and analysis of the word ‘Comrade� that I enjoyed for the most part. One of the other goodreads reviewers called Dean a ‘tankie� and if you know what that means then I’ll say that I disagree with that analysis, and if you don’t know what that means then don’t worry because it’s not important to what this book is truly about.

In the current political climate of the western world and especially the United States, there is a tendency amongst left and left adjacent activists to ask people to be allies in the struggle for social justice. However, allyship is something that is often largely performative and allies can often take steps in and out of the struggle as they see fit. In order to win the struggle for social justice we need to move beyond allyship. Comrade explains that to be a comrade means to take up others struggles as your own. Dean frequently uses the example of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s. The CPUSA had a commitment to ending white chauvinism (which was later walked back in the 1950s), which meant the CPUSA drew two sides, either you fight for those who do not look like you, or you stand with the oppressors.

Comrade provides a necessary understanding of what it means to relate to one another in our current political moment especially as so many are bunkered down in liberal ideology. To be a comrade does not mean that people will always agree on every detail. To be a comrade means you are on the same side, and share a common political horizon that can only be achievable if everyone takes up each other struggles, regardless of their identity.

The only problem that I have with this book is that Dean dedicates a majority (if not an entire) section to a philosophical exchange between Badiou and Zizek, which is most probably enlightening if you have an understanding of both philosophers and their interactions, but as someone who doesn’t understand those things, it felt like inaccessible academic jargon that I wish the left would move away from. Leftist academia is important, but leftist academia that only other academics understand is useless. If you do read this book and you’re not well versed in Badiou and Zizek, I recommend skimming this part to see if you can pull anything useful out of it, but I personally couldn’t.
Profile Image for ê.
67 reviews11 followers
September 3, 2020
I was prepared to love this book instantaneously, being called Comrade and edited by Verso Books. The premise was promising: in the 20th century we had comrades, now we have allies; don't we need a political belonging that only comradeship brings? Instead, I found the book very tiresome, always repeating itself, sometimes the same sentence with the words placed in another order, it felt like. It's clear that apart from the Soviet examples, which were somewhat enlightening, the author was set on justifying endlessly the actions of the CPUSA which, honestly, I don't care about that much. Where is the political analysis of the bigger picture? It seems like it's just about semantics after all. Maybe I was too demanding. So I give it 3 stars for the premise.
Profile Image for Electric.
611 reviews1 follower
January 9, 2022
Ausgezeichnetes Essay von Jodi Dean, die Anhand des Begriffs der Genoss*innenschaft einen wichtigen Möglichkeitsraum bzw. überhaupt die Bedingungen für kommunistische Politik skizziert. Ein ausgesprochen gut lesbarer Gegenentwurf zu Ansätzen hyper-individualistischer, liberaler Identitätspolitiken und natürlich ein Plädoyer für Kollektiv und Partei. Das Dean dabei sehr orthodox leninistisch vorgeht, ist für mich eine Stärke und keineswegs ein Defizit dieses Buches. Undbedingte Leseempfehlung!

Anmerkung zur deutschen Ausgabe: Warum es weder Verlag noch Übersetzer nötig gefunden haben wenigstens eine Anmerkung zu geschlechtergerechter Schreibweise einzubringen, ist mit absolut schleierhaft. "Comrade" ist im Englischen natürlich nicht auf ein bestimmtes Geschlecht bezogen, "Genosse" im Deutschen aber sehr wohl. Aus meiner Sicht ein schweres Versäumnis das durch Inhalt oder Form des Originals keineswegs gerechtfertigt scheint.
Profile Image for Alexis.
280 reviews279 followers
January 11, 2021
i loved this soooo much. a good analysis of what it means to be a comrade. anyone can be a comrade, but not everyone is a comrade. loved that she stresses one of the components of comradeship is engaging in collective and organizational struggle with others, not just believing in communism. very heartwarming parts that made me assess myself as a comrade & assess who i call comrade from now on
Profile Image for Sarah Y.
43 reviews3 followers
November 14, 2021
a must read imo especially the part on comrade vs ally
Profile Image for Camille McCarthy.
Author1 book40 followers
February 13, 2023
This is a harsh review because I felt like the book did the absolute opposite of what it was supposed to do. I started the book with a positive view of the word "Comrade" and ended it feeling like perhaps there was something to the criticism that addressing people as "Comrade" turns us all into generic automatons.
Dean's writing style also contributed to the harshness of this review. I found it to be almost unintelligible at times, and for something meant to draw in the lay person to a positive view of communist practices, it was very off-putting to read such academic and pedantic language. For instance, several times she talked about ideal-ego versus ego-ideal, without ever explaining what in the world that meant. The concepts were simple but explained in such a way that I had to read sentences over and over to make any sense of them. She also includes an overly detailed summary of "the Golden Notebook" towards the end which was way too in-depth, to the point that I don't feel like ever reading that book because it's already been laid out in this book.
There was some useful history about the Communist Party of the US in this book, but most of it made them look really bad, which also detracted from her points about how great it was to be part of a communist organization. I thought there was some positive details about how it can be so freeing to be part of a group and to give up some individuality to serve the needs of a collective, which is such a change from our individualized culture in the US, but this was overshadowed by the really dark and depressing parts about kicking people out of organizations and how badly people were treated just for questioning or disagreeing with certain policies of organizations.
She ends the book with a section on leaving the party or when the party falls apart and how it can completely wreck someone's sense of purpose in life, and they can feel like their whole world is coming apart. As someone who has been a part of an organization that fell apart (the ISO) and an organization I resigned from and then was essentially treated as if I'd betrayed them (the North Carolina Green Party) I can say that this part resonated with me the most, but I didn't feel like she offered any balm or mitigation for this, she just went into depth about how terrible it was to be cut off from the communist party and how it essentially cut someone off from the working class as a whole - which is a little hilarious because the working class has always been so much more than just the communist party and that almost made me laugh out loud.
One thing this book was good for was confirming that I prefer to be part of anarchist/libertarian socialist organizations. I do not ascribe to the authoritarian socialist mindset - it comes across as dangerous, cult-like, and gas-lighting to me now - and I don't think I will ever again be part of such a group that imposes a rigid hierarchy on its members. This book was good for clarifying that, but otherwise just reminded me how terrible it was to be in such a group. Maybe some people prefer groups like that, but I have a strong anti-authoritarian personality that does not do well in those situations.
Profile Image for Julesreads.
226 reviews8 followers
October 21, 2020
Good essay using the term “comrade� as a jumping off point for exploring the fracturing of the now stalled left. If you believe in class consciousness—especially if you believe in exploitation as the key to our ails—this essay offers a valuable contemporary perspective. Plus the cover is fun. I read 3/4’s of an uncorrected proof, and I don’t feel like finishing it, so it gets no rating from me.

UPDATE: I give it five stars now because Jodi Dean is awesome, I’m rediscovering.
11 reviews
August 22, 2021
Sure, I’m down to call you all Comrades, it’s the original gender-neutral term. But, at certain points this just reads too close to ANSWER Coalition pamphlets I’d read on the bus and toss in the garbage at the end of the ride. Please make agitprop more exciting and less like I’d being convinced to join a cult.
Profile Image for Ryan Bell.
60 reviews28 followers
December 28, 2020
Had to set this aside for other reading, not because it wasn’t amazing. It was. I wish every person who is working for collective liberation would read this. I have so many thoughts I hope to share on my blog in the coming months.
Profile Image for Lucy.
75 reviews
Read
October 3, 2021
everyone: “lucy read a book that isn’t published by verso�
me: “no ❤️�

i really liked this, jodi dean rules
Profile Image for Destinie.
5 reviews1 follower
April 17, 2022
“But what does that mean if anyone but not
everyone can be a comrade? The mistake here is in thinking that communism is the end of history rather than history's condition of possibility-the posibility we need if there is to be anything like history in the future. The problems facing the world can only be addressed through communism, as comrades-~-the class struggle today is the fight for a future. Capitalism is incapable of addressing climate change and the migrations and struggles over resources that will result with anything other than militarism, walls, and genocide. At the same time, comradeship is not risk- free.� Jodi Dean writes with such clarity. We need to build an anti-imperialist movement challenging every parasitic aspect of the capitalist system
Profile Image for Shaun Richman.
Author3 books39 followers
September 19, 2019
The first 3/4 of the book is excellent. A history, etymology and philosophy of the word and persuasive argument to use it in place of brother, sibling or ally. The last chapter makes clear that the author’s conception of the comrade relationship is within a small democratic centralist sect. Still, social democrats and DSA types will find utility in the first three chapters and could use them as the base for their own formulation of what it means to “no longer be comrades.�
Profile Image for Ale.
71 reviews
October 11, 2024
A long forgotten lesson about the necessity of knowing what a comrade is and the necessity of this type of relationship to seek truthful change. Beautiful and to the point! We should read more Dean.
Profile Image for Jack Wallace.
21 reviews
March 13, 2024
loved this one a lot. it spoke about what it means to be a comrade and helped me to evaluate how I see myself in the movement but more importantly how crucial it is for people to be in a party, and beholden to one another. discipline makes us stronger!
Author1 book517 followers
June 7, 2020
I wasn’t a big fan of the philosophy bits (mostly drawing on Badiou, Zizek, and Lacan) but I liked the historical references & the critique of liberal identity politics.
Profile Image for nkp.
222 reviews
May 24, 2024
Not what I thought it was but still a very interesting look into language and how it constrains/enables relationships.
Profile Image for Jule.
222 reviews9 followers
March 3, 2025
Im Essay widmet sich Jodi Dean dem Begriff der Genoss:innen unter Bezugnahme zahlreicher Verweise auf Geschichte und Literatur. Das ist horizonterweiternd, teilweise aber auch anstrengend hinsichtlich des roten Fadens. Spannend die Abgrenzung Ally/ Genoss:in, der Hauptteil mit vier Thesen zu Genoss:innenschaftlichkeit und auch der Abkehr oder dem Ende dieser. Manchmal fand ich den Text ein wenig redundant.
Profile Image for Leo Laglia.
34 reviews
January 3, 2022
Insightful take, while slightly repetitive around the core of the book, championing the need of the comrade in an age of unprecedented individualism and self-righteousness in politics. The true added value of this book comes in the historical context it provides for a variety of important developments - particularly in the US - with regards to communist political action and belonging.
Profile Image for Graham Cifelli.
84 reviews1 follower
July 8, 2022
3.5 but rounding up, some of the pieces in here are really moving and inspiring and really made me think differently on what political belonging on the left meant but at the same time the middle section felt like a rose tinted view of cpusa that never really grappled with the party's history of bigotry (as well as the settler nature of early cpusa)
17 reviews
November 6, 2022
I read this book for the same reason that I read most other books. Political strategy is commonly referenced in the debate community, and this book offers very good insight into a particular type of strategy. I had read excerpts of this book before actually reading the entire thing, so I had a feel for what I could expect. But reading it helped form many more historical connections.
For example, the book talks in depth about the Communist Party of the United States of America. She discusses how the political faction worked to include more people as it progressed, namely women and people of color. Jodi Dean uses this connection to argue for a strategy of Comrade. A strategy that does not focus on the individual identities of its members, but rather one that reasserts solidarity. Conflicts over things like language are important, but we also must consider that our ability to change these things is also reliant on our ability to work together and challenge larger structures, particularly capitalism as Dean believes. The political struggle must be formed as a collective of different identities or it will fail. That is the same reason that groups like the Black Panther Party made alliances with poor Appalachian white workers, known as the Young Patriots.
I think that anybody who is unhappy with the current state of US politics should read this book. It strategizes on how to move away from identitarian conflicts that aren't creating progress while still recognizing the value in those identitarian conflicts. To be a comrade doesn't mean to forget the struggles that individual groups in society face, but to recognize that if groups want to solve their own struggles, they need to work together to solve other groups struggles as well.
Profile Image for Roberto.
36 reviews
April 27, 2024
This was my Jodi Dean introduction and I liked it for the most part. Many of my COMRADES (lol) have made it clear to me they feel the word “comrade� is archaic, tacky, and to them “larpy�. While I agree in a joking fashion I feel like they are actually rather wrong about this. The usage of the word I agree can be worn out but as Dean explains the importance of the word lay in its conceptual context. The idea of what a “comrade� is will only serve to make our movement stronger because it binds us together as one force instead of many individuals. Comradeship allows us to delineate tasks and party work at a much more manageable and effective pace. Under capitalism it’s easy to find ourselves entirely buried in work or feeling guilty when we aren’t being “productive�. I had already advocated for the use of the word among my friends and trusted allies but I must insist even further that we utilize this word in our thinking and action. Dean gives a multi layered argument that provides us with many definitions and examples on why comradeship is vital. I really enjoyed her writing style as I found it friendly but factual with a read that was very short. I am totally going to pick up her book on the Communist Horizon.
Profile Image for Rhys.
865 reviews125 followers
May 31, 2023
"Disorganized leftists too often remain entranced by the illusion of everyday people spontaneously creating new forms of life that will usher in a glorious future. This illusion fails to acknowledge the deprivations and decapacitations that forty years of neoliberalism have inflicted. If it were true that austerity, debt, the collapse of institutional infrastructures, and capital flight could enable the spontaneous emergence of egalitarian forms of life, we would not see the enormous economic inequalities, intensification of racialized violence, declines in life expectancy, slow death, undrinkable water, contaminated soil, militarized policing and surveillance, and desolate urban and suburban neighborhoods that are now commonplace. Exhaustion of resources includes the exhaustion of human resources. Lots of times people want to do something but they don’t know what to do or how to do it. They may be isolated in nonunionized workplaces, overburdened by multiple flextime positions, stretched thin caring for friends and family. Disciplined organization—the discipline of comrades committed to common struggle for an emancipatory egalitarian future—can help here."
58 reviews2 followers
May 5, 2022
Hints at a pretty solid book idea: exploring comradeship within a shared organization (such as the Communist Party), what expectations this carries, how it differs from "allyship". intervening in the woke wars that were already sort of over by 2020, but making fine points about it I guess. Helped us to talk about discipline and what we think about the idea, but sometimes in spite of the book itself.

She also follows a bizarre urge to devote half the book to psychobabble of the lacanian/zizekian variety, which as always contributes nothing at all to the book except to give it a veneer of intellectual power and depth (in practice only harming the book for people who aren't pulled in by that stuff). Flirtations with "Stalinism" are, in a familiar trick of 2010s youtube communists, placed underneath this philosophical stuff, when I'm sure Dean's opinions about this stuff would be interesting if they were stated plainly!!
Profile Image for holly.
40 reviews
January 26, 2020
'As it gives form to the political relation between those on the same side, comrade promises alienation and fulfilment: liberation from the constraints of racist patriarchal capitalism and a new relation born of collective political work towards an emancipatory egalitarian future. Exceeding a sense of politics as individual conviction an choice, comrade points to expectations of individual choice, comrade points to expectations of solidarity as indispensable to political action.'

'The end of comradeship is the end of the world: non-meaning, incoherence, madness and the pointless, disorienting insistence on the I.'

This book has left me full of hope! Using engaging examples from the history of communist struggle across the world, Dean demonstrates how comradeship as a relation contains radical possibilities, shared expectations and solidarities.

Profile Image for Galibkaan.
38 reviews7 followers
January 30, 2022
aslında bu kitap sol düşünceye iman tazelemek için ideal bir kitap orası kesin. hatta sol örgütlerde yönetici olsam bu kitabı örgütteki herkesin okumasını isterdim. kitap, yoldaş kelimesinin etimolojisini hatta arkeolojisini yaparken yoldaşlığın ahlaki temelleri üzerine de çok önemli şeyler söylüyor. kitabın tek aksayan tarafı amerikan komünist partisinin deneyimleri üzerine fazlaca eğilmiş olması. o tarih ve kişileri bilmeyince o bölümler biraz sıkıcı geliyor insana. onun dışında iyimserliği, ümitvar oluşu hoşuma gitti. yazarın, sınıf mı kimlik mi tartışmalarının ötesine geçen bir yaklaşımı var sanırım. "yoldaşlık" hem kimlik hem sınıf için mücadeleye uygun, kapsayıcı geniş bir çerçeve oluyor. çeviri de benim gibi alana uzak insanlar için bile gayet anlaşılır.
8 reviews
October 12, 2023
This is one of the first few essays I read on communist politics and it was great!!! Dean does a great job making this accessible and clear while tying more complicated concepts for more involved readers. Through the study of the comrade these essays explore the intricacies of the left politics and where the focus needs to be directed so that we can achieve the common goal of the radical evaluation future.

That being said my first thoughts on the book were: "big words about communism and stuff. I like"
Profile Image for Sohum.
358 reviews38 followers
November 27, 2019
kind of immersed in tankie language (and clearly Jodi Dean IS a tankie), but a few of the actual points might be worth thinking about--
-discipline as a kind of collective responsibility, in opposition to an individual's needing to know/do it all
-communism as a perpetual possibility in history, not as an achievement to be won (obviously, derrida made the same point in Specters of Marx, and was much better in doing it)
Profile Image for emma.
152 reviews
April 25, 2021
What the hell does speculative-compositive mean? I take issue with books written for/about the working class that render themselves inaccessible. This isn't impossibly dense but considering that the main premise is an important one for millions of working class people - the loss of political belonging on the left that is encapsulated in the concept of "comrade" - then it could have benefited from being less like dry toast.
319 reviews1 follower
January 18, 2024
A very good piece by Dean, positing that the term "comrade" is not a personal identity, but a specific relation and set of expectations for those fundamentally committed to a common emancipatory political project. It rejects the neoliberal shifting of the political sphere inward, towards personal identities and individual action, and reaffirms the necessity of all political action as collective. Chapters 2 and 4 were especially good in my opinion.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews

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