Crowds and Party

How do mass protests become an organized activist collective?

In this enthralling and exhilarating book, Jodi Dean shows that, contrary to neo-anarchist cliche, the party form and class struggle are very far from being outmoded. The revival of the party has produced a surge of enthusiasm in contemporary left politics-an enthusiasm that Crowds and Party both explains and stokes up.

Jodi Dean's new book isn't just a timely reminder that to change our thoroughly and deliberately atomized society demands collective action and militant organization; it is also a passionate analysis of the fractured passion of shared political commitment, linking the enthusiasm of group experience with the sustained and steady discipline of popular empowerment.

Written clearly, forcefully, and passionately, Dean gives us-the Left-not just a diagnosis of our defeat but, more importantly, a way out: the communist Party.

Dean has a powerful point to make: political movements have to move beyond immediate expression-the crowd-and embrace long-term organization-the party.

Jodi Dean's book rejects those who invest positively in the individual or the multiple per se and instead asks for a new and more subversive collective subject of politics. From real crowds like the Occupy Movement to the theoretical conceptions of crowds and mobs, Dean's book interrogates the role of the crowd and the party in an attempt to provide a way forward politically.

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.