re: the term “comrade”

https://jacobin.com/2019/11/comrades-political-organizing-discipline-jodi-dean/

This poor writer can’t understand why it didn’t work out.

The article shows why the left is bogged down. It names the malaise and then demonstrates how the author, like so many, is stuck in the retrograde mindset that thwarts moving forward.

“Comrade.”

I gave that up when I stopped identifying as a Marxist. It’s a Red-paradigm legacy.

Meanwhile, I — and many others — have been distressed to see Greens starting to use that verbiage (and adhere to that paradigm).

The article says:
“Big ideas are nothing without cadre to fight for them.”

The left tends to think in terms of “cadres” rather than communities.

The article says:
“We need to convince enough people to carry out the struggle and win.”

Struggle, fight, combat, struggle. Yes, we need to work against the domination of capital; yes, we need to defend the exploited and the oppressed. But within the context of mass statist society you’ll never ultimately “win.” Primarily, we should be patiently and constructively working to build the new society within the shell of the old.

The article says:
“What we are really missing is a political relation built on solidarity.”

The image is there and it frustrates. The truth is that organizational relations among the atomized individuals of our society don’t yield much in the way of solidarity.

At the level of aspirations: Since the left got discouraged about its original raison d’être re: socializing society’s productive assets, it has dropped back to vague prescriptions like “solidarity” and “mutual aid.” These conceptions have little operationally significant meaning.

The article says:
“We need to accept the reality of division, know whose side we are on, and fight to strengthen that side.”

One reason many people don’t much like the left has to do with perception of fomenting divisiveness. “Class war.” Very nice. Very productive. It’s led to such a better state of society. Not.

It’s advocated by head-in-the-clouds intellectuals. Actual workers know better. Actual workers kick class-struggle “cadres” out of their unions. Actual workers associate the word “comrade” with Communism and disdain it.

Green politics arose during the 1970s on the basis of a desire for a very new political paradigm. That’s where the idea of “neither left nor right” came from. Use of the term “comrade” harkens back to all the old crap. Its resurgence among us essentially shows how hard it has been for the Greens to forge the new pathways that are called for in our times.

“Ecology and community” should be the basis for Green politics. It does not divide the world into “us“ and them.” The system is pernicious. It leaves most of us feeling stressed, lonely, and spiritually impoverished.

Nothing will be egalitarian or restore a sense of meaning until we rejuvenate local community life. The article’s image of cadre collectives will just never amount to much. That conception has been disappointing all along and it will continue to be. Why? Because atomized people in our society trying to come together in that way have too little relation to each other. They tend to be distracted in a million directions. They tend to be hyper-mobile. They come and go.

What will be productive will be to think in terms of building communitarian (neighborly) relations not comradely relations. Within the context of Transition Towns. Ecovillages. Real community consists of a stable, human-scale group of familiar people interdependently sustaining life together; identifying with, dwelling in and caring for a particular place-on-Earth. Fostering that new/old reality does not require “class war.” Or cadre formations.

For the sake of the future of leftism, Greens should be trying to transition the left From Red to Green.

Sorry … “comrade” reminds me of Josef Stalin. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

* * * *

[addenda]

The article says:
“Moore reminded the jury of the seriousness of expulsion from the Communist Party. ‘I would rather have my head severed from my body by the capitalist lynchers than be expelled from the Communist International,’ Moore said.”

. . . my god, it was such a religion-substitute movement. Phantasms and concoctions: “the class struggle” … “the people” … “the proletarian revolution” … “working class unity” … “the International.”

Red was millenarian. Out of touch with reality. Green is communitarian. The latter is realistic in the sense that humans have lived that way sustainably for ninety-nine percent of our species existence.

* * * *

To all those who constantly disparage the Greens for “failure to thrive,” well, we’re enduring. DSA had that big post-Bernie surge in membership five years ago but now is stagnating and finding out just how much lack of solidarity is the norm on the left these days.

And the two most recent initiatives trying to supplant us as the main left-of-center independent party — Rocky Anderson’s Justice Party and Nick Brana’s Peoples Party — never did amount to much. All they did was show, once again, how hard third party politics is in this country.

The Greens will endure until the day there is suddenly some kind of breakthrough. Meanwhile, colleagues, we can be building alternative institutions and revitalized communities day-by-day.