You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

Where have all the comrades gone? Once a common term of address for those engaged in joint struggle for a better world, decades of defeat, betrayal and marginalisation leave it barely used except ironically. In Comrade – An Essay on Political Belonging, Jodi Dean seeks to recover the term by arguing it defines a unique and necessary relationship for common struggle. As a union organiser, I was very sympathetic to this endeavour. Effective collective organising undeniably demands a strong level of commitment and discipline that cannot be attained through allyship or arise spontaneously. As Rodrigo Nunes and Vincent Bevins convincingly argued in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal and If We Burn respectively, neither disorganised horizontalism nor the post-capitalist networked citizen can amass the power we need for the struggles we face. Unfortunately Dean’s argument doesn’t succeed in revitalising the comrade for the 21st century, attempting to resurrect the ideal comrade from the 19th century instead. The effort is commendable, but unconvincing. The old order has gone, and we cannot simply will it back into existence.

Comrade begins with a useful and necessary distinction between allies and comrades. Allies, as Dean points out in the first chapter, are not engaged in our fight, but only asked to offer assistance. They may share our goals, but they cannot share the struggle, because its contours are delimited by one’s identity. Comrades, on the other hand, contribute to a common struggle regardless of their identity. Comrade is a reciprocal relationship based on a recognition of a common aim and common enemy.

In the same chapter Dean also contrasts comrades with systems, despite these being different categories. Dean considers a systemic view to be disempowering due to its scale, but that is because she only picks systems at vast spatial or temporal scales. It is not clear if she is ignorant or disingenuous, given a system can refer to any set of related entities that together produce some effect on the world. Yes ‘climate change’ is a system and it is very big, but smaller systems are available: ‘the economy, ‘the party’ or even an amoeba. It felt odd to me that Dean would dismiss an effective analytical tool for understanding the world and finding ways to change it, but the disinterest in understanding the world persists as an unfortunate theme for the remainder of the essay.

Chapter Two draws on examples from the early days of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and Soviet Union to preempt the criticism that comrades can only be white, male and stale, but it is questionable if this is the right target. The more obvious attack to anticipate is that the cloak of comradeship has historically been used to cover enduring prejudice against female or black comrades. In particular because, as Jo Freeman argues in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, putative equality can make actual inequality much harder to challenge. The female comrade isn’t absent from our cultural imagination, but she was still expected to cook dinner, clean the house and raise the kids after the agitating was done. Invoking Alexandra Kollontai doesn’t prove women were equal comrades any more than Barack Obama’s presidency proves the US is no longer racist. A more effective argument could have mirrored Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism, which demonstrates that while communist regimes were unable to fully eradicate patriarchal oppression they nonetheless advanced women’s liberation much further than their capitalist counterparts, but that is not the road that Comrade takes.

Chapters Three and Four define the boundaries of comradeship by including those who are faithful to a common truth and have the discipline to fight for it. Immediately this raises the question of who defines this Truth, and Dean does not have a satisfactory answer but implicitly falls back on the traditional communist position that it is the Party. This leads us back to the dangerously tautologous logic that the party gets to define truth because it represents the workers, and we know the party represents the workers because it articulates their truth. Dean herself includes various examples where parties schismed, dwindled or descended into internecine warfare, but does not use these as a prompt to explore how a party could be organised so that it can attain a shared truth without its uniformity risking disintegration, irrelevance or internal violence. If the objective of the essay is to revive a viable organisational form, then this is a fatal omission.

The same tautological flaw also affects Dean’s comrades directly. Comrades are comrades because they execute the party’s directives with enthusiasm, courage and joy, and they have enthusiasm, courage and joy because they are comrades. Comrades are not only expected to do the work, but in a rather unpleasant similarity with your average Pret-a-Manger worker, they must enjoy it. I don’t dispute that working together for a common goal can enable people to do great things, but that is not the same as assuming that all obstacles can be overcome simply by sheer force of Stakhanovite will. Again, Dean is not interested in questions of organisation. Maybe that is expecting too much from the essay, but without attending to it, the argument comes down to assuming that if people will something hard enough, they can achieve it.

If moving mountains by force of will wasn’t enough, Dean also asks her comrades to subsume their identity into the generic nature of the comrade. Comrades are not only functionally, but also personally interchangeable. Again, I don’t dispute that surrendering a degree of individuality to be part of a common effort cannot be rewarding and joyous. But if comradeship requires a total renunciation of who we are, then why would anyone want to be a comrade? In Taoist terms, Dean’s comrade is all yang and no yin: all force and will, no patience or introspection. There is no balance.

We have seen where this leads. Dean’s comrades populate the pages of Hannah Proctor’s Burnout. Comrades who fell out and apart because they couldn’t will the world they wanted into being, or themselves into the transformed people they desired. The road to the Workers Paradise is paved with the remains of comrades who willed themselves to destruction, and what exactly has it given us?

I expect that Dean would counter that my position is the result of cowardice, of an unwillingness to do what is necessary to be a comrade, a bourgeois inability to surrender my individuality. And she may well be right, but I would argue that doesn’t actually matter. Our present moment demands a comradeship that can accommodate both collectivity and individuality, discipline and diversity, yang and yin. Time has moved on. New Soviet (Wo)Man left on the dustheap of history. A historical materialist cannot ignore the hard lessons of the 20th century or fail to acknowledge our world differs from that of our ancestors, only to fall back on an idealist faith in the power of voluntarism. Comrade is a missed opportunity to reinvigorate an essential relationship for the 21st century. The past can help us chart our course, but we cannot return there. We must move forward, as comrades, together.

Notes & Suggestions

• Rodrigo Nunes’ Nether Vertical nor Horizontal is a much more nuanced and constructive exploration of organisational forms, and a genuine attempt to salvage what we can from our past failed efforts to help us move forward.
• Hannah Proctor’s Burnout carefully and compassionately assays what happens to communities who strain themselves beyond endurance in an attempt to bring a new world into being, and suggests what we may do to care for ourselves and each other while we still live and struggle in our broken world.

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A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

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How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative #cyberpunk #solarpunk #superheroes

Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism