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People Just Do Something is a relaxing and possibly enraging podcast about people who might self-identify as activists. Join professional busybody Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins, The Bristol Cable’s in-house Columbo, Priyanka Raval and a special guest each week as they attempt to untangle the means of effecting change in Bristol, broken Britain and beyond.
Episodes release ever other week with the first season spanning 6 episodes.
To secure the future of the show and The Bristol Cable, head to www.thebristolcable.org/join
Priyanka Raval
Isaac, that live show with Jodi Dean. I don't think I've ever seen you so happy.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Oh, mate, I was in my element. You were just unleashed like buzzing. I got to quote the Communist Manifesto. I was with one of my ideological heroes. It was, it was epic…
Priyanka Raval
…and she stayed in your attic!
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Yeah, she did. I was like, though, in the morning she saw my chickens, and she'd given this whole thing about how she was sort of anti Brooklyn hipsterdom or something,
Priyanka Raval
yeah. It was like, the sort of Brooklyn mentality, garden hippie ism,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Yeah. And in the morning she saw my chickens, and was like, Oh, you really are just one of them. Like, no. I mean, I don't think they're gonna change the world. They're just… and then she asked me what they were called, and I had to admit to her, like, Well, that one's Larry. We got that one from a neighbour… that one is Rosa Kluxemberg.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Luckily, Hengels is already dead, because otherwise would have been well, awkward, and Tony Hen, she might not even got that reference… from the Bristol cable. This is people just do something, a podcast where we try to uncover what it takes to be an activist by talking to people on the front line of political movements. I'm Isaac Kneebone Hopkins,
Priyanka Raval
And I'm Priyanka Raval
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Episodes of this podcast come out every other Friday for Cable early access members and Monday general release on all good podcast players. If you love this, then do something about it and subscribe to People Just Do Something on your podcast app of choice today, and make sure to give us those five star reviews and share it with your friends so that the algorithm gods know we're good. While you're at it, you should also join the Bristol Cable. Then you can get the early release. You can do that at the Bristol cable.org. Forward slash join, and if you do it because of the podcast, let us know. That's why you signed up.
Priyanka Raval
Today we will be listening to our interview, our live show interview, with Jodi Dean. She is a long time political theorist, activist, academic, and we're talking to her about whether the left should form a new party… is broadly what it was…
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Particularly a revolutionary communist party, if we're not being completely coy,
Priyanka Raval
Yes, I think her definition of what is a party, what constitutes a good political movement, how we can be flexible and adapt to the times with this party was really interesting, a much more expansive discussion. You know, what is the comrade? What are the relationships that you need to have discipline within a party and proper relationships between party members? Let's get into it.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I just want a show of hands, because we're gonna be talking about Marxist parties, right? Who has been in a Marxist party? Hey, big room tonight – or they're just very loud.
Priyanka Raval
Preaching to the choir, then. So you grew up in the States. Tell us about it.
Jodi Dean
So I actually grew up in the Deep South. I was born in South Carolina. I lived lived in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and my parents were Southern Baptist. Now, you might think this is not an obvious road from Southern Baptist in Alabama to communism, but there is actually a tiny element of continuity, and that is in my parents, we went to we went to church like three or four times a week. I'm not exaggerating. They were very Southern Baptist. And one of the things that I learned was from the Book of Acts. And the Book of Acts says in the disciples divided their goods to each according to their needs. And that's just straight up Marx, right? Like, that's like Marx in the Communist Manifesto, talking about communism as from each according to ability to each according to their needs. And that sort of stuck with me. And it stuck with me that, oh, geez, like these white Baptists in the US South aren't living that way, and there is a lot of hypocrisy, obviously, racism, militarism, back when I because I was growing up during the Vietnam era, but there was this core idea, and so I kind of think that that's sort of played a little bit of role in my kind of personal political trajectory. Thing is, it's like, I'm not trying to say like, oh, religion is this great thing, but I think that there's this, that there's sometimes on our cultural messages that we get in our community messages and our religious messages that actually have the seeds to a socialist and a communist future, that that can be watered and nurtured and planned, that can flourish.
Priyanka Raval
And at what point did you crystallise as an activist?
Jodi Dean
So we talked about this beforehand. This is a kind of long and boring story, but I want to anchor it in the sort of post 9/11 anti war movement. I had a couple of young kids at this point, and but we were, you know, in my small town in upstate New York, we started doing regular Saturday honk and waves to stop the war, to prevent the war from happening. And on the one hand, it seems like okay, why in a town of 11,000 people, is a honk and wave against going to war in Iraq. Why does that matter? And it's like, well, it mattered because at the time, the US was just drowning in American flags and drowning in this patriotism that said, you know, since 9/11 and you know, anybody we bomb is fine, like this kind of aggrieved victimhood that makes any other country a threat that can be now, you know, rightfully destroyed, and to give people in this small town a way to say, no, that's not what it has to be like. And and you don't have to just buy into all these American flags, and that you can see that despite what the media is saying, that there are folks who disagree. And so this became a really, we, I thought it was a really important thing to do in a small community. So then, from the anti war movement, I got involved a few years later in Occupy Wall Street, and that was a really exciting time. And, you know, it took off everywhere, not just, obviously… everyone knows, not just New York City, but pretty much all over the world.
Priyanka Raval
Yeah, and we really want to get on to Occupy, and we can, I mean, I hope it's in people's own, people's memories.
Jodi Dean
Y'all remember the Occupy movement.
Priyanka Raval
But before that, I remember when we were talking earlier, you were also saying about you became very interested in Soviet history, and so simultaneously to this, you were also forging your career in academia.
Jodi Dean
Yeah. So growing up in Alabama during the 70s, what does the US look like? The US looks like racism, growing inequality, a kind of weird, flat culture, militarism, and the only sort of… what registered to me is to be opposed to that meant the Soviet Union. Maybe it's a kind of Cold War binary, but you know, that's what I thought. And so I kind of became a Soviet fan girl and studied Russian in college and went to the Soviet Union a couple of times and then pursued a kind of academic life.
Priyanka Raval
What was that like going to the Soviet Union? Gold?
Jodi Dean
Apart from that, the thing is, is like, I'm going to say this in this way. It's going to be way too romantic, but it is how I remember it. And this so I took a train from this was in 1984 and I had to set up my I traveled by myself in the Soviet Union. In 1984 you had to set up the whole trip in advance, through Intourist so that they knew what hotel you would be in and what train to be going to be in, and And conveniently, someone would meet me everywhere and then take me. And that was very, really helpful. But so I took a train from Rome to Moscow. It took, like three days. I was in second and third class train, and then they stop at the border, and it's like 4am and I pulled down the window in the train and see these, this giant, giant poster with, you know, a drawing of multicultural children and and it just, and it says, Welcome to the world's first Socialist Republic. And I had, like little tears in my eyes, skipped to be and then the soldiers came in and searched everything, and, but, but it was still really, it was pretty wonderful. And there were bookstores everywhere, and you can books were cheap, and then there were great posters of Lenin everywhere. And I thought this was wonderful. It was, yeah, I mean, if, if you're looking for something that wasn't going to be the flat commercialism that was part of the US suburban life, where banks are everywhere and commodities are everywhere. It seemed like something that was really different.
Priyanka Raval
Yeah, and look, I know maybe a lot of people in the audience know, but if you had to summarise… not the Soviet Union, but maybe communism. And specifically what it was in this politics that really spoke to you…
Jodi Dean
I think, a politics that is about equal meeting of needs and a kind of collective building of a society that can continue to flourish by the equal meeting of needs
Priyanka Raval
…and distribution of wealth.
Jodi Dean
Oh yeah, absolutely right. I mean, you can't, I don't think you can meet people's needs equally if you have private ownership of the means of production. I don't think you can do it. I don't think a world with billionaires can meet people's needs. It's because the billionaires actually people start acting differently around them, right? People there becomes a kind of subservience that sets in to society. Wealth inequality hurts the ability to meet needs, because you don't even think of other people as the same anymore, right? You become divided by class. You become lesser than… so, no, it's like, it's, I mean, I know that. It's, you know, we tend to want to say, No, we've got to socialise the means of production, and it's all about production. But why? It's because we are not treating people as equal if we're not all participating in making and planning how we're going to meet our needs together,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
The line of like, each according to their ability, each according to their needs. To go back to the Communist Manifesto, I'm having a great time tonight. But like, you know, part of that is that, like, there was people toiling in fields, who could have done amazing things who throughout history, had been wasted because they'd been stuck in a field and not had a chance to thrive. And like having a society that is actually channelled around, what can people do? What can they bring to build society, and not just personal wealth, is kind of is very romantic. Oh God, I might cry…
Jodi Dean
One of the things that's been driving me nuts over that I mean forever. But my my kids are in their late 20s and early 30s, and it's just, you know, become sort of personal when you see people who are lovely, educated, smart people, and they can't find decent jobs, right? It's like capitalism is like the worst system in the world for distributing labour, right? It's like people don't have an opportunity to use their skills to develop their skills, and then a few people, like end up getting everything. It's wrong and and we can, of course, we can do better. And I think that's the promise of communism.
Priyanka Raval
So from the Soviet Union, if we can make a jarring return to the 2010s and the Occupy movement, how did you see that take off? How did you get involved with it?
Jodi Dean
This is a little embarrassing, but for the fuller version, you can see my book – this is a plug – Crowds and Party, but about three weeks before the Occupy Movement set off in New York, I was invited to give a talk in a gallery space in Williamsburg by an art collective called Not an Alternative that I later worked with for about three or four years. And I give this talk in the art collective, saying how anarchism is completely over. These horizontal forms of arrangements are clearly failures, and we really need to make sure that we are sort of building the party. And three weeks later, it was completely clear that I was 100% wrong, that these horizontal movements were now taking off, that there was exciting people, and it really reinvigorated left politics in the United States. And so I then I became more involved because of working with Not an Alternative and Occupy. Let's sorry, let's just explain what occupy was and how it took off.
Jodi Dean
So Occupy Wall Street began with, well, begin. I mean, you know, begin is always hard, right? Do you talk about all the different experiments in you know, when? How long will it take the US, the police in New York, to kick you off a sidewalk if you set up a tent, but it's generally understood as taking off when a group of activists set up tents in Zuccotti Park. It's actually not on Wall Street, it's right off of Wall Street, and they were able to stay for a while, and then the police don't evict them, and then it starts growing, and they are creating a vision of a more egalitarian world. They're sharing. They're sharing experiences like the first the first part was, like a kind of collective dance was involved, and then collective speak outs, the whole bunch of experimentation happened. Like, one of the things was, it's against the law in New York to use amplification without a license or a permit. And so instead of using amplification, they developed the people's mic, which would have everyone in the audience repeat what the speaker said. And, you know, keep going with that. And one of the things that was great about that is then everyone's speaking literally the same language, and the words become collective and the ideas become collective. So the experiment of Occupy Wall Street was opposition to bank. I mean, they didn't say it was explicitly anti capitalist, but it was obviously explicitly anti capitalist. What, what they said was that the movement was its own demand, and it was a creating a different kind of space.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I mean, like, we're going to probably do occupy slightly down but, like, actually, one of the kind of lineages of that has been the kind of Palestine encampments that we've seen – you could see that a lot of the strategies that we used in Occupy were replicated, and actually some of the lessons were learned. Of like, having a chosen spokesperson for the encampments who was the one person who speak to the press. I think, you know, as we sort of go forward and sort of talk about its limitations, it's been interesting to see it kind of revive among this younger generation. Your book Crowds and Party starts at Occupy right? And you've spoken very fondly about it here, but like, it did sort of run out of road. And what that was, what you said was, like a sort of… it didn't keep the collectivity. There was too much kind of individuality or like that was pushed. Is that fair to say? Is that a fair kind of assessment of your criticism of it?
Jodi Dean
Yeah, I think it's fair to say. It's hard for a movement to keep going when its tactic is its demand, right? What does it mean to just stay in a place for months on end? Different different encampments had different dynamics. But to think about Zuccotti Park, winter was coming, and it was going to be hard to maintain it. Also the encampment is not growing its own food, right? It's relying on food coming in. So there's a way, there was a kind of mythos of it being an independent, self, organised, non capitalist space. It's completely dependent on, essentially, other kinds of capital relations.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Interesting. I've set this up because I was really keen to do this. Since we booked this, I'm really keen to this. We're going to do the human microphone, right? You all have to join in with me.
Priyanka Raval
People's mic! Human mic, makes it sound like a human centipede!
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
That's thrown me. You all have to join in, otherwise the revolution will fail. So we're in the park. We need to move. Winter's coming. We don't have any food. We need to go to the toilet. So you have to chant, I will say it. Then you chant after me. Does that make sense? No louder. Come on. Does it make sense? All right, we can take this park. 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. So Jodi, what do we see there
Jodi Dean
That actually, that really happened.
Priyanka Raval
That was from Jody's book. That's a direct quote, yeah, I just thought that was you madlibbing.
Jodi Dean
No, it's direct it really happened. It was completely frustrating, because you could just see the wonderful potential of we can take this park tonight. I mean, literally, like half the people did. This was in Washington Square Park and it was… I don't remember it late October, I guess maybe a month or so after Zuccotti Park had gotten established and and a lot of folks were ready, and the cops were also ready, like they were, you know, around the edges of the park, and sort of beginning with their barricades. But, you know, there was, I mean, I don't know, 1,000-2,000 people were out there doing this and and to see the collectivity fall apart with this appeal to each person's individual own interests and decision making. I found it heartbreaking, and to me, it was an indication of the kind of limit point of the politics of Occupy Wall Street, right? That that you needed to have ways to to endure. You need to be able to have ways to make decisions that are going to be empowering and lead people, and you need to have forms of decision making that aren't going to be just sort of… that aren't going to get individualized so quickly, right? Like, why not keep making building the collective strength? But that wasn't happening at that point.
Priyanka Raval
I and so the collective strength, collective energy, is part of what you call for when you say we need a party. What is a party?
Jodi Dean
That's a really hard question. First, my students have always said what you really mean is Jodi's imaginary party, because they think it's never been really defined. I also… Marx in some letter talks about the difference between the formal and the historical party, where the historical party refers to, over time, the people who are allied against depression, who are allied in favour of the producers, who are allied in favour of the working class being able to take control of its destiny. That said a party is an organised political formation with particular goals and procedures. Is it an electoral party? When I'm talking about the party for the like in my book, crowds and party, I actually mean a revolutionary party. But the tactics a revolutionary party will use can vary, and sometimes they might be electoral and sometimes they may not be. But I think that that we, as in people on the left who want to see bigger change and who want to see bigger change that can endure, need to think in terms of parties as ongoing formations beyond elections…
Priyanka Raval
And you say that this party should be a Communist Party…
Jodi Dean
Yeah. I mean…
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Have you now? Have you ever been a communist? But, yeah? Why? Why?
Priyanka Raval
Well, why do you say yeah, that tone of voice?
Jodi Dean
I say, like, yeah, like, that way. Because it's to me, the discussion is not about what's the best name, like, what's the coolest name? What's the name that's gonna win? It's about what is the horizon. And it seems to me to be pretty clear at this point that social democracy came up against its limits doesn't mean it wouldn't be better than what we have, but that communism as a horizon really tells us that that capitalism cannot secure any of the things that we need. Can't secure equality, can't secure freedom, can't meet basic needs, particularly on a warming planet. And so I say the Communist Party as a way to have a break and a rupture with parties that accept as their limitations the continuation of capitalism.
Priyanka Raval
But as you said, you know, in America, there are consequences for being affiliated to a Communist Party. In the UK too. I think so maybe we have to be wary strategically about the word, even if we have the principles…
Jodi Dean
Sure. I mean, I think if, if people, you know, feel the need to call their party the sort of socialist, collectivist, Leninist Association, right, then, you know… I'm in a party that has social that has socialism in its name, which is actually convenient for people who might end up having to take have you, you know, have you ever been a member of a Communist Party? They can, literally, can take the question really literally. But I also, I have a book called The Communist Horizon, and maybe it came out, like, roughly 10 years ago, and when I was doing publicity for that book, people would always come up afterwards and like, you know, I agree with everything you say, But can't we just rebrand it? And I'm like, then you don't agree with everything I say. It's not about branding, right? Like, it's about, what is the horizon? What are the aspirations? You know, what are you take as the principle of political being that's motivating you in the group?
Priyanka Raval
Then how do you avoid? I remember when me and Isaac were talking about, about talking to you and the state of the left in general. And how do we avoid being torn apart by the narcissism of small differences?
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
More schisms, more schisms. Schism means a breakup for the listeners at home…
Jodi Dean
I think that one of the most important ways is for the left to stop trashing itself and that that sometimes we overplay our own divisions, right? Like, like, it's just like, all the time, like, Oh, we've got so many schisms. Like, really, do we really have that many schisms? We really may not, like, I was just, I was,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I've broken out with two organisations in this room!
Jodi Dean
This is about you. This is about you. But I was, I've been staying in London, and I just wandered out to actually get some yogurt on Saturday, and ended up in this, you know, I don't know, several hundred thousand person march for Palestine and Iran. And there were all sorts of different groups in that, all sorts of different groups. And so I didn't see a bunch of schisms. I saw an incredible show of unity and solidarity where it really mattered.
Priyanka Raval
But when you're talking about having a continuous organising force, I mean, how many organisations were we listing just in Bristol?
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Yeah, there's quite a lot. All right, so we got we got the SWP, we got the Socialist Party. We got the Socialist Party Great Britain. We got AWL. We've got Bristol Transformed, the Communist Party, the Communist Party, Great Britain, the Communist Party Great Britain, Marxism, Leninism, we don't have the Spartacist League here. They're weird, but it'd be good if we did. There's probably some more… Counterfire. Sorry, comrades, it's when you try and explain to someone who hasn't been in any of them, they're like, Well, why did you fall out? Well, there was a really intense argument about something that happened in the Soviet Union in 1954 and it was very important, and people got divorced over it. Like, I don't know there is. There does seem to be this tendency, like, I'm being glib about it. But like, you know, when you look at these maps of British Socialist Party history, and then these insane spider diagrams that are like, like, hundreds deep and kind of…
Jodi Dean
I think most of us in this room have been in conversations about left schisms. And lots of times these conversations happen when people have left a party, or who are not in a party, or who may be looking for a party. And it seems to me that they it's almost like people start thinking about parties as, like, you know, cereal in a grocery store, and like, Oh, I like it more crunchy, or I want mine sweetened, and mine needs to be more nutritious. And rather than thinking about, look, there's a cereal that's going to meet my needs, and I'm going to do the work here, recognising that there will be many times when we will work with other groups too. I mean, to be in a party does not mean that you hate everyone else. It means that these are the people that you want to work with, because you share a set of commitments, and sure, they're going to be other people. You don't share their commitments, but often you're going to still be at the march, be at the demo, together, at something else. So I think, I actually think we've got to stop overplaying the schisms and start emphasising doing the work and recognising that there's some times when we work together, and also that sometimes our differences are real, and that's okay. We'll hold on to the differences when they matter, and then work together when we can.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
On that then, like, because we started this conversation in sort of Occupy and like, obviously in Britain, we didn't have Occupy, but there's been other kind of horizontal sort of movements. XR being probably the biggest example, I'd say, what does the Communist Party offer to stop that kind of straying from the original aim, or that sort of diffusion of energy of the movement like, you know, as we're trying to give activist advice? What? What is the utility, I suppose, of the Communist Party in that kind of sense?
Jodi Dean
Um, my understanding is that XR was based primarily on a set of tactics.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
And an acid trip…
Jodi Dean
…and that it was primarily about bringing attention and publicity to a single important issue now a party usually works across multiple issues and endures and shows the connections and builds by working in different areas, and it doesn't then, when one issue loses the limelight, it doesn't fall away, right? It doesn't vanish. In fact, it takes the skills and experiences learned from one struggle and bring those to bear on other struggles.
Priyanka Raval
So would a party then encompass extinction rebellion as their eco arm?
Jodi Dean
The way I would say it is a revolutionary party will use multiple tactics, and these might be some of them, and also that any Revolutionary Party is going to exist in a larger left ecosystem, right? But it's not a choice, right? It doesn't have to be an alternative. It's not like if you do this, you can't do that.
Priyanka Raval
You talk about the term comrade, which, you know, we say a lot, but when you say it, you mean something very particular. And I think it speaks to this party discipline that we're talking about.
Jodi Dean
Yeah, so I have – here's another ad – another book called comrade.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Buy the books.
Jodi Dean
The subtitle is an essay on political belonging. So I think of Comrade as a term of address and a form for interactions for people on the same side of a struggle, and a carrier of expectations. So when you address someone as comrade, you can just say, hey comrade, you know, can you do x? And the answer is always, of course, and in a way that you wouldn't with someone who is not your comrade. Right comrade brings together a set of very intense expectations that you know, that we have to live up to right count. Come with our comrades, we become bigger and more than we are in any other kind of political formation.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Is it cringe? Like I'm trying to think, yeah, I'm trying to think. Because I remember the first time I went to a meeting and everyone was like, oh comrade. I was like, Oh fucking hell, I've made a mistake. And actually, now I use it kind of quite it's quite ingrained, because I think that happens when you're in one of these organisations for long enough. But I think about, like, my friends from South Wales that came to a party of mine and like, some of my comrades from Bristol were already setting up, and they knocked on the door and they opened, and they were Hello Comrades and my mates, like, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? And like, they keep going on. They're like, the reason you lost in Corbynism is because you all called each other comrades. It does seem kind of off putting, maybe, if you're not on the inside of it, even though it's something now I use without almost thinking about it.
Jodi Dean
I had a student who thought it was a kind of weird cosplay that like, Why are you guys doing that? I think that it is a marker of being separate, and that's important, right? It means that you have basically entered into a set of self-instrumentalising relations, where you were together for a political purpose. Now, in a lot of our formations, many of us might be friends with people we organise with politically, or we might be having sex with them, might be related to them… but when we're
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Not at the the same time!
Jodi Dean
But when we address one another as Comrades, we are know that we're moving into a different register, right? Like, like, I'm going to talk to someone as a friend differently from how I'm going to talk to them as a comrade. Like, there's a degree of a formality that's important, right? We can't our politics. Can't just be friendship groups, right? That way that will never expand to be the kind of, basically, for us to build, the sort of of parties and movement that we need given our global world terrible conditions,
Priyanka Raval
I had the same fear as Isaac of, is it cringe? And then when I read what you meant by it, I now do feel like we should bring back the term, but I know that you you made a distinction between being a comrade and an ally. What is that distinction?
Jodi Dean
I wonder in the book, if this is too much of an American phenomenon. Now I'm seeing head shakes… like y'all hear this ally or use this ally language. I think it's quite, quite awful actually, in the US movement, because this language of allies makes it seem like some people own a politics, and that then other people might, I don't know, help them out or something, and that this is your politics, and then other people might support it. But it's not like you're all in this together, as if racism is bad for everyone, right? It becomes, no racism is just this struggle for these Black people or these brown people and white people do not have a core, fundamental interest in abolishing forms of racism and white supremacy. It's used in US context, in ways that are, I think, quite disciplining in a bad way, in a negative way. Like, you know, don't ask someone about their oppression. Go look it up. Like, well, you know, there's a lot of information out there. Shouldn't we wanted to teach and guide and train people and give them the best kinds of information, but the the allyship stuff makes folks feel like, Oh God, I guess I can't ask them, because somehow it proves my inadequacy. So I think, no, we, we might need to have allies. So we can say allies if we're working with liberals on something, but, you know, to bring out people to a March, but within the movements, no, I mean the core relations got to be comrades.
Priyanka Raval
I think that at the moment, I'm thinking of books by like Ash Sarkar. At the moment, the left is looking at whether we have fallen too far into identity politics and lost then a common struggle or a common language that is seeking liberation for us all. I wonder, though, how you address some of the power imbalances that come from, you know, being of different genders, different sexes, different races, that that will inevitably come out in a party politic, no matter how unified your ideology might be. Maybe you could say it's gone too far with some of the discussion around allyship. And I think that is true. Maybe it becomes an overly shaming. Is the word that I was looking for of like, Oh no, you can't, and it's a bit of a barrier to conversation. But sorry, my overall question is, how, how do you address those power imbalances that may come up even in horizontal structures?
Jodi Dean
I want to use an example that I use in the comrade book, and it comes from black and white people walking on the street. And I guess it was Pittsburgh in the 1930s people yell at him, like, hey, comrades, right? Why? Because it was a black person and a white person walking together. And in the heavily racist segregated United States, any white person who was walking with a black person, any black person with a white person, must have been a communist right, because they were the ones who were opposing racial segregation and who were actually actively fighting against it. There's a kind of supposition that somehow that comrade erases differences, rather than is a container through which we enact and fight for more egalitarian relations with one another. So I think that, in fact, having a term that lets us address one another that way, that says for sure we're equal, and this means that I am 100% behind any of the struggles for oppression. And I know that you know that about me, and I know that about you.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
There's a quote from your book which I wrote down because I thought was great, which is, like, comradeship engenders discipline, joy, courage and enthusiasm. And the bit on courage, I thought was really interesting, is like, like, I told you the story earlier, when Occupy happened here, and I went to go and talk to them in their tents, and I was 18, and I got to the tents, and I got scared, and I ran off. And because I was young and I was awkward, and I didn't really know what to how to engage with the movement. Why does being a comrade make you courageous? What does it give you in that sense?
Jodi Dean
The first thing it means you're not alone. You're never alone. You've got essentially a whole party behind you. One of the stories that I use in the book is from the romance of American communism, and it's about a so there's an organiser from the Lower East Side of New York, and he has a young woman, very poor, hard working, Jewish woman, who lives with her father, and she is coming to him for advice, and she tells him that she's dating a Chinese man, and he's assuming that, oh, she was probably, you know, wants to know whether or not it's okay to have sex with him. And I'm going to tell her, it's just fine. And, and, you know, because I'm so progressive, and she's like, Oh, that's not the question. We've been having sex for ages. What I really need is advice for talking with my father, because we want to get married. She and the Chinese guy, and the party organiser says, you go to him, and you know that right behind you, I'll be behind you, and your branch will be behind you, and the entire Communist Party will be behind you. And so she goes to her father the next day, and she says, you know my boyfriend and I, we want to get married. And her father throws a fit and says, no, no, but she's imagining the party behind her, and she's like, I will, because if not, I will leave you and who will cook your eggs? She had that strength. She had the courage. So just think, if you were going to the tent, you wouldn't be going by yourself, you'd have a whole party behind you. You didn't have to be afraid of those occupiers.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Yeah, I think, I think that's, I think that's really beautiful. I love that story as well. I because I suppose that's like, you know, we've got the Bristol Apartheid Free Zone here tonight, who will be talking to you later about wanting to get people involved. But like, in that it's an organisation that is asking people to go and, like, knock on their neighbour's doors and talk to them. And like, there is something when you actually get asked to do that, you're like, Well, that sounds terrible. Like so many people now don't know their neighbours. You're like, in your garden, you don't like eye contact. And then the idea of being told go and knock on their door, and then that builds up and be like, go and do a speech in front of all these people and tell them about and like, building people up through these organisations to do things that maybe they would have if you'd asked them straight out, would you do a speech to 100 people about this? They'd be like, No, and like, I suppose that that organisational form gives them the confidence, I guess, and builds them up to do that. Is that kind of what we're sort of getting at?
Jodi Dean
Yeah, it's, you know, I think we all have, have seen the way all of the organisations of the working class and even the middle class have been eviscerated over the last 30 or 40 years in the US in particular, unions are smaller than ever. Public education is crumbling. There's no neighbourhood life. There's no clubs. Are the very practices of sociability have broken down. Most people communicate with other online, which is horrific, right? Also, it's a nasty trolling and behaviour people become super awkward, and having organisations that train people how to go talk to one another, and then organisations like the party that train people how to talk to one another politically. You know, I want to think, you know, I mentioned I'm a I'm a professor, and students over the last… it's not, it's not just since COVID, it's been a little bit longer than that. Over the last 10 years, have become increasingly afraid to talk with one another about politics. It's like, it's too fraught. May have started with the first Trump administration, but everyone is afraid of being ostracised or being looked down on and like they don't know how to talk and so I think any of our organisations that help people overcome that are really valuable and crucial to the movement.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I guess, because we talked about, maybe the bits that I think anyone listening would go yes, beautiful, amazing, that maybe we should count on to the dirty word of discipline, right? So, mentioned it before, but we spoke before about like, was it democratic centralism and like, I guess do you want to give an elevator pitch of what, of what democratic centralism is?
Jodi Dean
Can I first start with discipline? So here's the weird thing, right? We tend to admire people who exercise regularly and who eat reasonably responsibly, who, you know, make their childcare payments or pay their bills like these kinds of discipline are part of a responsible life, and it's not just a capitalist life. I know, I know that it there's that sometimes, on the left, we act like any kind of discipline behaviour is only behaviour that serves the man, and that's just not correct. It's when we act in a disciplined way, we support one another, we become reliable, and we make our organisation stronger. A democratic centralist organisation is an organisation that prioritises the voices of everyone, and then after these are heard, comes to a central decision that everybody upholds, right? That's just normal, right? That's what we should do. And yet, I think because of decades and decades of anti communism and too much of a left blurring into liberalism, that kind of seriousness of purpose has gotten lost, or it's gotten a bad name, and people become more self indulgent. Everybody's got an excuse, and then you can't get anything done, but a disciplined organisation can always punch above its weight and get more accomplished than any one of them would be able to do without it.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
We saw this in the Corbyn years, I suppose, of like, people would just be badmouthing, like Momentum, especially online. And you're like, we're already under attack on all sides, like, we can't have a meeting without the like the press coming and putting on the front page of a national newspaper, being like, look at these mental socialists and like, and then you've just got some twat on Twitter going, oh yes, well, I actually quibbled with… is it that like they, especially now, when we're so drawn to criticize everything that we why do we need to know we don't need to do that. What do we add to the movement to be constantly sniping on social media or whatever?
Jodi Dean
One of the things that I love about a democratic centralist party is that it frees everyone from the need to have a hot take, right? You don't need to say something about everything, right? There's a party line. We do not need to do the work of the right for them by trashing the left, trashing our own organisations, trashing even organisations we might have a little bit of disagreement with, like, we can talk about it at the bar, okay, but why? Why? I mean, it makes the left dysfunctional.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I thought you can jump in there.
Priyanka Raval
Yeah, I just wanted to give you a meaningful Twitter troll about Twitter trolling, but,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Well, it's why I can't be in a party at the moment, too many hot takes!
Priyanka Raval
We should conclude by talking about people who are here today who want to go away and take something with them. We have a vague notion that we should join a party. But what is that? Obviously, in the UK, the left is a bit in the wilderness. I think 300,000 people have quit the Labor PartyThe left of labor is decimated. Some people are going to the Green Party. Confusion about whether that is the right vehicle for the left.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
And most people haven't. Most people have not joined anything. They've come to they're probably at these marches like the one you spoke about in London, but they're not part of an organization anymore.
Priyanka Raval
And it's what you know, we have had movements like kill the bill, or, you know, like you said, the Palestine rallies and these, these groundswells of activism. But like you said, if there is a crowd without a party, then it lacks the momentum to turn into anything solid. So where does that leave us now, especially in the UK context, how do we move forward?
Jodi Dean
I mean, I think that's your conversation, right?
Priyanka Raval
Fair enough.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
No, but I think like those example. I mean, the biggest example in Bristol would obviously be like the Colston statue, like you had this huge upsurge of energy. They literally took this thing, which had been quibbled over by politicians for decades, and they just fucking took it and they threw in the water, and it was awesome. And then you had this international discussion, and all it led to was eventually the black mayor of Bristol going well, the people who did it are actually as white and middle class, I prefer the racists defending the other statues and and then a mad argument on whether or not we could change the names of certain streets, and then no meaningful like change in that area of discussion, except that fucking statue is not there, which I you know, we're all grateful for…
Priyanka Raval
What they do get started somewhat like after the we had these far right riots in the summer of last year, and there was a lot of anti racist movements that sprung up off the back of that, you know, cross party coalition building, but then they also kind of stutter to a halt…
Jodi Dean
The left needs to be adequate to all of the people who are coming out to these things. I mean, it's a left failure if hundreds of thousands are willing to come out and protest once, you know, once a week or once a month, if thousands are overturning a statue, and we're unable to help channel that into more permanent kinds of political change that's on the left, right, that's on us. But what has to that's what you know. That's why people have to realise that discipline is crucial, and that more and that tighter organisational forms are necessary.
Priyanka Raval
But what else is missing? Do you think there isn't a strong enough knowledge or legacy or memory, of what communism could offer as one particular horizon to work towards?
Jodi Dean
I think probably the way I would put it is the legacy of anti communism is strong and that it's been hard to fight against. I think that among particularly young people, there's a degree of hopelessness because of climate change. There's a sense that worker does not name their identity – working class isn't how they see themselves, even if by any stretch of the imagination, they are working class, and that it is up to left party, left political formations, to actually give that sense of purpose and meaning and futurity that's missing.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
One of the things I took, maybe I misunderstood this from you, but was that, like you have some of these organisations that are already doing aspects of what we would want in our kind of you know, Jodi Dean's perfect, doesn't quite exist yet Communist Party, as your students called it, like, is it that we can kind of bring… something like Food Not Bombs, right? Which is an organisation that is, can make food once a week and feed homeless people, which is, you know, good work, but it's not going to cause a revolution, whatever they say. But, like, actually, could you, like, create these organisations that have within them, something like that so that, like, oh, look, we're gonna have a massive strike, or we're gonna have a big march, is there a way that these groups can be brought together within but also work sort of semi likely already?
Jodi Dean
I mean, in some ways, I don't fully understand your question, and I kind of hear like, ‘oh, but we can’t' underneath it. And maybe that's unfair, but I want to give another example. I mentioned this to them earlier. So I live in upstate New York, like way upstate in the kind of central and western New York rural area, lots of farms, and we're less than 100 miles from the Canadian border, which means that there there's ICE. That's the Immigration and Border Control folks who are rounding up non citizen workers for deportation so ICE can operate up there. And you know, in the past few weeks, the owners of a farm called ICE on their own workers, because their workers were organising a union, and not a lot of population up there. But we had the folks from the union, the people who've been doing immigrants rights work, which we've got a big network on, because they're left. We'd already built the structure during the first Trump administration, and then we have the branch of my party that's active up there. All three groups have now been working together, and each one is indispensable, right? Because we don't have a whole lot of people, but each one has been indispensable to organising the fight in defence of these workers, to keep them from being deported. So it's not a choice between the union or the folks who are just working on immigration issues, and then the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Each is indispensable.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
In the book Crowds and Party, one of the things it talks about, he used these big kind of events, like the throwing the Colston statue, like, Kill the Bill, like, I'm using the British examples. He used American ones. But like, how does, I guess, the party take that energy and then push it forward so it isn't just statue goes in the water, that's the end. Like, how does it sort of channel it to that communist horizon? I suppose?
Jodi Dean
I think the party endures after the crowds go home, and it provides, then a way for people to continue right beyond the particular event that they were part of, right? It has memory. It has structure. It has endurance. And a pure movementism lacks that endurance and memory.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Yeah, fair. I mean, one of the things that kept coming up when I was a young activist is like, people, older comrades, would tell you things, you go, no, no, it's fine. And then about 10 years later, like, oh yeah, everything they said would happen did just sort of happen, because they did do it before, in the 1980s and exactly the same thing happened. Listen to older people! The question we always ask people in this so people have something they can take away something concrete. It's like, if you could tell them one thing to go and do, what would that be? Is it join a party?
Jodi Dean
Well, I should say, join a party, but I want to say read my books! But join join a party. And if there's not one, join a militant revolutionary organisation that's doing work that is crucial to us creating a future for you know, in which the majority of people in the planet can thrive.
Priyanka Raval
Thank you. Jodi Dean,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
So one of my concerns after this was that I'm pretty sure when I was asking what I meant to be a sort of in theory question about why someone on the left would resist party discipline or discipline in movements. I'm pretty sure she did think I was talking about me. And I like to think that I, I would do that. I'm not, I'm not in a Communist Party…
Priyanka Raval
but you would have discipline if you were, yeah.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I mean, I didn't when I was in one, but I'm sure I would now…
Priyanka Raval
that was one of the conversations that left me with more questions than answers. Because I think I mean the questions that we asked her as well, of like, can we really unite all these different lefty parties who, all you know, like, you say, sometimes get torn apart with the narcissism of small differences. Is there a desire to do that? Could it actually happen? Could organising under communism work in this day and age? And you know, my central reservation for everything is until we've sorted out our media system. Could that? Could such a movement work at all?
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Isn't central reservation of the little bit of grass between two roads. Where you stand, going, communism doesn't work. No, I know I'm being I do see what you're saying. I am being annoyed. But I think you know, it came up in the Q and A. That's why listeners should come so they don't miss out on the good bit. But look that like, actually, yeah, maybe some of the leaderships of these groups are a bit kind of like, No, this is the way. It can be no other way. But most of the people who join them are well meaning and want what's best. And actually, if you can show models that work, like we had the Bristol Apartheid Free Zone people there and like they were talking about how they applied a lot of what she was talking about in their organisation, which isn't a party, but is using that democracy, using the sort of training, using the discipline, giving each other the confidence they need to go and do the work. And I think, like, if you can show in your organisation that you can make it work and that it's effective, people often come to you. I think in all politics, we're always like, well, maybe they're gonna try and steal this from me, or maybe it's like, just be the best at it. Get results, and people will see those results and they'll follow,
Priyanka Raval
Yeah, I liked the coalition building thrust of what she was saying, And I think we could maybe bring back the word comrades without it being too naff…
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Without being too cringe. I mean, my Welsh friends at home don't agree. Producer George doesn't really agree. He's not being very comradely today. Yeah, no, but no, I think, like all those things of like trying to you're always going to seem a bit odd. If you're saying society as it currently is isn't going to work, and I'm going to give all my time to changing that, that makes you almost definitionally a bit weird. And like, yeah, maybe you shouldn't be scared of that, and maybe we should just embrace that we're until we are being successful, we're going to be a bit on the outside. And you make a virtue of that, rather than a kind of drawback. Although I think you can go too far on that. I've definitely met some groups who are like, well, everyone should hate us. Where evolution is like, doesn't mean you have to be a dick. It just means you have some views which are not yet that popular. That's what that should mean. There's always balance in these things. I think there's a way forward. And I think we've, hopefully, you know, laid out some of the some of the roots, some of the things people could try to try and be more effective in what they're doing to try and change the world. This was People Just do Something…
Priyanka Raval
With me, Priyanka Raval and him, Isaac Kneebone Hopkins…
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
If you like the show, please give us your money and keep it alive and join the cable. You can do that at the Bristol cable.org forward slash, join and 10 pound a month. 420 join and 10 pound a month, 320, pound a year, with the early access to all cable podcasts and a delivered copy of the newspaper every quarter, also 50% off our live events. If you've got things you want to add to this conversation, maybe you can email us them to pjds at the Bristol cable.org as ever. This episode was produced by the Bristol cable producer, George Colwey.