Attacking Marxist humanism’s reliance on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Louis Althusser wrote, “We do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other people’s.” Jodi Dean does. Hopefully it leads to something productive.

I assigned some reading, though I know some of the class just watched the movie. What follows may be unintelligible without doing either first. The gist of Dean’s thesis is the Left needs serious reformation, revolutionary theory and an all together different perspective on social change. She covers way too much ground for me to respond in full. Instead I’ll focus on her views on left-wing organization — including our shared pining for “the Party” — and the general strategic orientation of the Left.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t first contest the most inflammatory of her pronouncements, rooted in what appears to be some undigested Stalinism. Early on in her denser “The Communist Horizon” draft, Dean offers a provocation. To define who’s a “liberal democrat,” she suggests we single out those who “think any evocation of communism should come with qualifications, apologies, condemnations of past excess.” This amnesia reoccurs throughout Dean’s work. And what she presents as a good way to identify liberals, is actually a good test of sanity. Here’s a general rule: make no argument in New York that you wouldn’t make in Warsaw.