For Asad

Asad Haider tragically passed away on December 4, 2025. The tributes poured in afterwards, rightfully so, and he’s been widely celebrated as a monumental figure of the contemporary left. There were tributes published in Historical Materialism, The New York Review of Books, Neues Deutschland (translated in HM), and even the New York Times. Trip Graiber, in the NYT, mainly focused on Mistaken Identity and his interest in the Black Radical Tradition. Ben Tarnoff, in the NYRB, labels Haider as the preeminent thinker of “millennial socialism”, and touches on some of the themes that will be explored in this essay: his interest in the history of twentieth century socialism, his embrace of emancipatory politics, and the concept of the break. Historical Materialism’s tribute featured his obituary, a remembrance from York colleague Jeffrey Webber, and a personal reflection from Viewpoint Magazine editor Bue Rübner Hansen. The tribute in Neues Deutschland from Ivo Eichhorn and Morten Paul exemplifies the international scope of Haider’s influence on the contemporary left, and they produce an excellent intellectual biography.

Despite these voluminous tributes, they consistently omitted one part of Haider’s intellectual trajectory. In the last few years of his life, Haider was producing a new framework for thinking about politics. He wasn’t the only one doing this work, and this framework for thinking about politics was largely adapted from the work of Sylvain Lazarus, Alain Badiou, and Alessandro Russo. Haider’s work over the last few years can be characterized by a shift from Marxist categories to emancipatory politics via Lazarus, and this shift needs to be taken seriously and more widely transmitted. This shift can be understood in the sense Althusser proposes in relation to Marx’s thought, where one set of questions was displaced by new ones, leading to a different terrain of political thought. The ingenuity of Haider’s work was to make a complex theoretical apparatus digestible to a broader audience. And not only digestible, but also in a way that made one willing to embrace it. His interventions, which might normally only exist in academic or intellectual circles, would always seep into organization at a concrete level.

The tributes to Haider published so far mostly focused on his work as co-founder of Viewpoint and his 2018 book Mistaken Identity, both of which are immense contributions to contemporary political thought. Yet none of these tributes really register the stakes of Haider’s conceptual shift over the last few years, outside of vague allusions to his embrace of Sylvain Lazarus’s maxim that “people think”. This is mainly because the authors struggled to digest his turn. Tarnoff writes, “I could never accept his broader diagnosis of our era. I remember arguing with him about it… to take so restrictive a definition of politics, I felt, was to hold today’s movements to an impossible standard.” Rübner Hansen writes of how Haider’s commitment to this new framework led him to drop Marxism¹, and “he now definitively put it second to Badiou/Lazarus, and their insistence that no true revolutionary theory can be derived from an analysis of class, capital, crisis, or, for that matter, from categories such as race and oppression.” His embrace of this new problematic seemed to spell the end of the Viewpoint project:

In those meetings, when I last spoke to Asad, it seemed as if his strong sense of the sequence starting in 2011 provoked an equally strong sense of closure. As if all that was left was the communist invariant, general decomposition, and a deep faith in the people. In the final meeting, I tried to sway Asad with talk of class recomposition and the irruption of the ecosystem crisis as an opening for transformative politics. Asad did not take the bait: he had followed, with his usual uncompromising consistency, his own line of thought, and that was clearly it.²

It’s interesting that almost all of the tributes praise Haider’s brilliance and identify him as one of the pre-eminent theorists of our generation, yet are unwilling to really explore his theoretical shift. This disjunction between his reputation and the wider left’s willingness to embrace his shift can be seen in the popularity of his articles, “On Depoliticization” and “Socialists Think”, both of which explicitly advance towards this new problematic, without really registering what is taking place in the text. We felt that if Haider found this new path of inquiry worthwhile, so much so that it completely shifted his intellectual project, then there must clearly be something useful there. And, in different ways, we each began to see that he was onto something after engaging with this source material.³

The Lazarus Encounter

Towards the late 2010s, Haider was increasingly influenced by the work of Lazarus and had begun incorporating his theories on politics into both his written and academic work, where he dedicated many weeks of teaching to Lazarus.

We will explore Haider’s work by drawing on Althusser’s presentation of Marx.⁴ The one major difference is that Althusser’s notion of an epistemological break in Marx was premised on the notion that his break resulted in the birth of a new science: historical materialism, whereas we’re claiming no such thing for Haider. The development of his thought is marked more by the shift from one problematic to another. Or in other words, he pulled off one road and merged onto another that was already running somewhat parallel. Luckily, Haider did the work already of tracing his shift for us.⁵

The shift really begins in late 2018 following the publication and reception of Mistaken Identity, and it was marked by a contingent encounter with Lazarus. Haider has written about this extensively, but he was troubled by the reception of the book and thought considerably through its interpretations. As Daniel Tutt observes in his tribute to Haider, after he met him through a Lazarus Anthropology of the Name reading group in 2020:

He told my reading group that he was undergoing “self-criticism,” meaning he was re-considering his core views based on the responses his book generated. Asad explained that he was criticized both as “too Marxist” for enveloping race into class, and as “not Marxist enough” for thinking racial struggles could be emancipatory in themselves. The latter critique, he said, was the more influential on his thought and led him to think about what a more comprehensive theory of class would be (although he admitted that such a project was not what the book set out to achieve). The way that Asad responded to these criticisms did not lead him to recoil in passivity, nor did it lead him to double down on his initial viewpoint.⁶

Before Mistaken Identity was even published, Haider had already begun charting a new path of inquiry through the concept of universality, although “sensing that it was not precisely the word I was reaching for.” He began exploring this in an article on Martin Luther King⁷, and was intrigued by his invocation of the universal in relation to political subjectivity, and drew an immediate parallel with Badiou’s book on Saint Paul which touched on a fundamental experience of politics: “A kind of test of faith in the face of fear and despair, the courage and commitment which is displayed by those who persevere. We can give no social explanation for this basic condition of politics, it is subjective and prescriptive.”⁹ This train of thought was interrupted⁸ by the reception of Mistaken Identity.

While thinking through the book’s responses, Haider remembered Lazarus’s “Workers’ Anthropology and Factory Inquiry”¹⁰ which he came across years before while researching class composition:

Since its framework and context were rather distant from the material we were researching, I had only glanced at it. I turned to it then because in all these debates, I frequently encountered formulations which began: “Socialists think that…” Socialists think that the working class is the only force that can change society — to be sure. Socialists think that that race and class are inextricable — perhaps, or to the contrary that it is only a politics of class that can address the problems misrecognized in terms of race. Many such statements are possible. But filling in the blank that followed these first two words, it seemed to me, was actually an injunction not to think.¹¹

These explorations were exhibited in his popular article, “Socialists Think”, which was published in September 2018 in Viewpoint. “On Depoliticization” would appear over a year later in December 2019, also in Viewpoint. This is clearly a work of the shift. While Haider doesn’t outright identify with Lazarus’s categories in this work, they lurk throughout the text.

Haider said that while Lazarus’s formulations seemed somewhat consistent with the tradition of workers’ inquiry he was already familiar with, “I had a nagging feeling that there was a different framework there which posed a threat to my theoretical stability”, and that reading Lazarus gave him “entirely new questions”. This is where the shift begins. “I started to doubt it was sufficient to question identity as the foundation of politics from the vantage point of another foundation. Digging further, I shifted my emphasis from thinking about class as a sociological category to a political investigation of the successes and failures of the twentieth-century revolutions.”¹²

The shift didn’t seem to fully register in his published work until after the 2020 uprisings. “Dismissal” was published in the fall of 2020, and 2021 saw the publication of “Emancipation and Exhaustion” and a new edition of Mistaken Identity, which we’ve largely drawn on here, published with the new subtitle, “Mass Movements and Racial Ideology”.

Previously Haider’s thought had been largely influenced by three sources: Louis Althusser¹³, the tradition of Italian Operaismo (and European post-war communism more broadly), and the Black Radical Tradition. The former two are largely explored in his doctoral thesis, “Party and Strategy in Postwar European Marxist Theory” and the latter features prominently in Mistaken Identity. As others have already noted in their tributes to his work, Haider was dedicated to the concept of emancipation theoretically, politically, and personally, which is partly why he was eager to embrace the Lazarusian maxim that “people think”. Yet this new theoretical problematic he entered, and subsequently deepened, was largely foreign to Operaismo and the larger Marxist theoretical culture.¹⁴ This led to a questioning of the viability of class composition as a political framework. Haider says, “was it a viable theory to identify a hegemonic figure of the working class in the first place, to view the historical process as a succession of class compositions?”.¹⁵ And as Rübner Hansen observed in his tribute, this led to Haider to drop any commitments to Marxism in general. Although, as we will explore in the next section, this doesn’t make Marxism useless or obsolete.

The goal of this essay, and indeed of Fracture in general, is to draw out the stakes of this shift. What was this new theoretical problematic that Haider was contributing to and attempting to popularize?

Saturation

It’s impossible to understand Haider’s shift in thought without understanding his interest in twentieth century socialism. While twentieth century socialism is often framed in terms of its failure, mainly the perceived failure to usher in the once promised period of global revolution, Haider, following Lazarus, prefers to view the previous century with more nuance. He would often note that Marxism could only fail because it had already succeeded. Or in other words, the crisis of Marxism only takes place, as announced by Rossana Rossanda and Althusser in the late seventies, after Marxism had succeeded in becoming the universal referent for emancipatory politics. Emancipatory movements, from Western Europe, to the United States, to China, and beyond would all draw from Marxism in their particular struggles. By the late seventies, however, this is no longer the case.¹⁶

This way of thinking about the twentieth century, and of political sequences more generally, is specifically drawn from Lazarus and his method of saturation. Lazarus’s method of saturation is premised on his view that politics is sequential.²¹ Politics emerge through correct prescriptions that produce novel sites or places that advance emancipation. According to Lazarus, these sites and prescriptions eventually become exhausted. He says, “to return to the French Revolution, such sites would include the Constitutional Convention, for instance, the Sans-Culottes clubs, and the Army of Year II. When such sites cease to be, the mode has ended, closed itself off.”¹⁷ This is the meaning of the method of saturation, that a mode of politics has confronted limits it’s unable to overcome. This doesn’t mean that the politics failed, but that “the process underway has been completed”.¹⁸ Thinking of politics as sequential shifts us from historical narratives of defeat and betrayal, which often dominate Marxism, and allows us to instead accept that they completed themselves. Thus, “Politics is not destroyed from the outside, submerged or obstructed. Its exhaustion cannot be blamed on the opposing camp and politics is not a victim that requires looking for an offender.”¹⁹ Since the lapsing of a mode of politics brings that sequence to an end, Lazarus says that politics is singular: it does not repeat. Yet we can still draw on past modes by examining the thought that occurred, the thought of what was invented. This is what Lazarus calls the mode’s intellectuality, and the method of saturation investigates this intellectuality. As Lazarus himself puts it: “I term the ‘method of saturation’ the examination from within a body of work or a thought of the lapsing of one of its founding categories. It is a matter of interrogating the body of work from the standpoint of the lapsing of the category and of re-identifying it in this new conjuncture.”²⁰

Haider’s embrace of this way of approaching the history of emancipatory politics can be seen in his article on “Dismissal”. The article focuses on Alessandro Russo’s 2020 book, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture in an effort to confront two problems: depoliticization, “which results from the closure of the revolutionary sequences of the twentieth century and the categories of political struggle that defined them”, and factionalism, where, “initial energies of unity, organization and political creation turned, in a sinister reversal, into factions which sought to eat each other alive”. The irony of the latter, in Haider’s own organizing experiences, was that they were absent of the stakes that were present in the disputes and struggles of twentieth century parties and organizations.²² He draws on this, and the cancel culture of the late 2010s more generally, to explore contemporary parallels with the Cultural Revolution. He says,

Human liberation requires actively building new structures that prevent domination and exploitation from reasserting themselves. Since we do not yet know what these structures will look like, we have to both seriously study past attempts to build them and open up the space for experimentation in the present. Examining the Cultural Revolution helps us to explore both the conditions of possibility for political experimentation, and also the dynamics that often shut it down.²³

This approach to emancipatory politics, inspired by Lazarus’s method of saturation, defined Haider’s inquiries into the history of twentieth century socialism. The point of the method of saturation is to ground sequences in their own domain, which would be politics itself. The benefit of doing this is that it keeps emancipatory thoughts alive. This move is necessary for Lazarus because the disciplines of history and social science have already sought to extinguish these ideas.

This approach to emancipatory politics entails two major departures from Marxism: the severing of politics and social analysis, and conceiving of emancipation beyond the categories of social identity, and specifically of class. Or in other words, there is no necessary relationship between analysis and politics, and there is no pre-determined subject of politics, such as the working class.

The Severing of Politics and Social Analysis

The severing of politics and social analysis represents a major departure from Marxism, which typically derives politics from historical necessity (The Manifesto), or from an analysis of the social formation, mode of production, or class composition. Returning back to the 2021 Postface of Mistaken Identity, Haider clearly critiques this type of operation:

The theory of class as an object internal to the existing order is not the same as the theory of class as a subject that will be capable of overturning the existing order. Definitions of what already exists cannot serve as the basis for realizing the exception to what exists, which is a form of human life that is beyond the market and the state. Categories of social analysis, whether they are class, race, gender, or anything else, describe effects of the social structure; when social analysis is the starting point, and consciousness is understood as the effect of social being, we remain at the level of what exists, and not the capacity of people to think of what is distinct and exceptional, what is in excess of that which exists. As a result, the attempts to give emancipation a foundation in a category of social analysis will always lead us back to what already exists.²⁴

Haider rejects general models of capitalism and class, and instead insists that there are only specific capitalist social formations, specific class compositions, and specific processes by which classes are generated.²⁵ In such situations emancipation is generated by exceeding those social conditions. Yet if we begin with the social conditions and the political thought and invention of the masses, we cannot formulate a theory of exceeding those social conditions.

Haider borrowed this position from both Badiou and Lazarus, whose political work and theorization was premised on a separation between the two. Badiou articulates this in an interview with Peter Hallward, titled “Politics and Philosophy”, where he discusses the work of the l’Organisation politique (OP), the group co-founded by Badiou and Lazarus along with Natacha Michel, and the theoretical positions grounding their political practice. The OP developed a “politics without party” and were a “post-classist” organization, which means their political work was not rooted in the referents that sustained Marxist politics throughout the twentieth century. Badiou clarifies: “This doesn’t mean ‘unorganized politics.’ All politics is collective, and so organized one way or another. ‘Politics without party’ means that politics does not spring from or originate in the party. It does not stem from that synthesis of theory and practice that represented, for Lenin, the Party. Politics springs from real situations, from what we can say and do in these situations.”²⁶ It’s within this framework that Badiou outlines the severing of politics and social analysis. “It is a matter of going beyond the idea that politics represents objective groups that can be designated as classes… there may exist emancipatory politics or reactionary politics, but these cannot be rendered immediately transitive to a scientific, objective study of how class functions in society.”²⁷ This analysis is continuous with Badiou’s analysis of May ‘68 and the “search for new modes of politics” that defined the organizational practices of militants following the sixties.²⁸ This new mode of politics advocated by Badiou is opposed to the “old way” of doing politics that was hegemonic throughout the twentieth century. This old way presupposes an existing political subject or objective agent, and that this agent has to be represented by some form of institution or organization.

Lazarus in some ways goes further than Badiou in articulating an autonomist conception of politics, and his entire project consists of thinking politics from within itself without any reference to the economic or the social. Lazarus articulates this position throughout his work, and notably in “Can Politics be Thought in Interiority”, written in 1985 as a sort of founding theoretical text of the OP. Lazarus explicitly lays out his defining concepts of people think, thought is a relation of the real, politics in interiority, and historical modes of politics — all of which would be developed systematically in Anthropology of the Name. These concepts all represent an attempt to think politics from within itself and from the side of the subject. This is what he means by ‘politics in interiority’. A helpful illustration of this way of thinking politics appears in Lazarus’s recent analysis of May ‘68, and more specifically in his critique of the dominant, sociological ways of interpreting the agents active in the sequence. He says:

In the social sciences, what an individual does or says, and what a group of people does and says, is understood as expressive of, and causally referred to, their social origins and social territories. Socio-professional category, level of education, average income, age, gender, religious practice... are said to be the explanatory factors behind what people say, are, and do. I am opposed to this determinism.²⁹

Social analysis is insufficient, both for understanding politics and the process of subjectivation, and for formulating a politics. This is the meaning behind Lazarus’s founding statement: people think, but more on that later.

The severing of politics and social analysis is at the center of Haider’s embrace of Lazarus. In his talk on Lazarus for an online conference hosted by Daniel Tutt in 2020, Haider says, “One of the fundamental points in Lazarus’s thought is that the social is not a foundation for politics. There is no direct expression between social categories and emancipatory politics.”³⁰ This position would pull Haider away from Marxism, and more specifically from Operaismo, one of his original theoretical influences. Haider identifies a necessary relationship between social analysis and politics in the operaisti categories of technical composition and political composition. The former refers to the technical composition of the working class, the way in which classes are organized by capital, while the latter refers to the forms of organization constructed by the working class. Haider says,

Now here we had a kind of dialectic of the social and politics, the social and perhaps the political, and there was constantly an idea that the technical composition of the working class yielded particular forms of political composition and that you could periodize them historically and find the hegemonic forms of class composition that represented a particular stage of capitalist development. Now this theory was extremely suggestive as a way of trying to understand the specificity and the material existence of class. Class not as an abstraction which would be applied transhistorically and not as a form of consciousness, but in terms of these forms of composition. But it would turn out to be very unsatisfactory that you would end up identifying these hegemonic figures in a kind of linear periodization. You would not account for the fact that in the period when, at the beginning of capitalist development, when the industrial worker was supposedly the hegemonic figure of the working class, the vast majority of labor performed in the capitalist world market is done by slaves and [on] plantations.³¹

Salar Mohandesi, in an article on the class composition framework, emphasizes that the whole strength of Operaismo, compared to the framework of class consciousness which is historically prevalent in Marxism, was that it was supposed to guarantee some kind of relationship between technical and political composition.³² Haider’s move is to reject this entirely. He emphasizes that an analysis of the social, no matter how complex and intricate, will not yield a politics. Thus:

[Mistaken Identity] is not about the sociological relationship between race and class, that is not the theory I was presenting. But intuitively I was trying to present a theory of emancipatory politics in which both race and class could be categories… It was clear to me that the anti-racist struggles were emancipatory in content, but I was within the problematic which said that they had to be related to class. I came to realize that this problematic has to be abandoned… It is only from the vantage point of emancipatory politics, which does not rest on the sociological foundation, that we can identify the emancipatory character of these struggles. And thus both struggles against racism and class struggles belong to emancipatory politics, but not because of an intrinsic sociological foundation, but rather from the vantage point of emancipatory politics considered in itself… in interiority or in subjectivity as Lazarus would have it.³³

This is frequently referenced in Haider’s work during this period. In his interview with Negation Magazine, he draws on both Hall³⁴ and Lazarus to emphasize that an analysis of the social will not yield a politics or an understanding of emancipatory politics.³⁵ He elaborates on this further in his interview, “Marxism and Emancipation”, where he says the goal of emancipatory politics is not to produce a more dynamic or complex account of social analysis. Politics is not an expression of social categories like class. These arguments were also advanced in “Emancipation and Exhaustion”, and Haider deepens some of his explorations from the articles on depoliticization and dismissal.³⁶ Thus, following Haider, we can define Marxism as an instance of emancipatory politics articulated in terms of class. However, class is not the foundation of emancipatory politics in general, emancipation is its own foundation.

People Think

Haider would also adopt Lazarus’s founding statement, people think, to think both emancipatory politics in the present and to critique contemporary socialist culture, which often presupposes what people think, or are supposed to think. At the core of Lazarus’ system are what he calls the “two statements”, one is that people think, and the other is that thought is a relation of the real.³⁷ The two statements operate together, but let us focus, for now, on the first. What does people think articulate? It articulates the possibility of emancipatory politics after what Lazarus calls the lapsing of classism. To put this another way, it articulates an attempt to think politics after the severing of politics from social analysis.

In Lazarus’ framework he articulates that the standard position in social science is to state that science thinks, not that people think. The emphasis in social science on statistics, ideology, and cheap psychology all point towards this. A fundamental point of social science is that social life is obscure to those caught amongst it. A brief yet illuminating example is how Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology and hence social science, articulates his notion of a social fact:

Here, then, is a category of facts with very distinctive characteristics: it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him….Their source is not in the individual, their substratum can be no other than society, either the political society as a whole or some one of the partial groups it includes, such as religious denominations, political, literary, and occupational associations, etc.³⁸

The social facts operate with force on the social individual. The goal of social science is to understand those facts which are, as Durkheim states, external to the individual. Indeed, these social facts exert control over me and exist and operate apart from me. What hope could I have of understanding such powerful processes? Thus, we can say that where the social scientist thinks, people do not. When this methodology is extended to politics, we, at best, return to the difficulties of orthodox Marxism and the special pleading that is the proletariat as a universal class. So if we’ve severed politics and social analysis, we are in the realm that people think.

To be in this realm is to be in a place where we can think from what Haider called “the vantage point of emancipation.”³⁹ This vantage point is one that does not attempt to understand a correct politics as following from the correct social analysis. Rather, the vantage point of emancipation is “not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments and ultimately recedes.”⁴⁰ Haider himself understood that something like this was at stake in in Mistaken Identity when he forthrightly admitted the book offered neither a conceptualization of race and class but an account in which both could be categories of emancipation, or as he puts it in “Emancipation and Exhaustion”:

It seemed to me that to describe the relationship between two abstractions — which are only articulated in concrete and specific historical circumstances — would be a logical error. Instead, I concerned myself with the articulation of struggles against racial domination and class exploitation in emancipatory and social movements.⁴¹

This can be read as a methodological announcement, and it ties into Lazarus’ notion of people think when we consider what drives an emancipatory movement. Badiou articulates the communist hypothesis as “the existing world is not necessary”.⁴² Politics takes this on by offering a prescription, “let us do something about the situation”, articulated in the form of what Ernest Wamba dia Wamba calls, echoing Lazarus, an “active prescriptive relationship with reality”.⁴³ What does it mean to have a prescriptive relationship with reality? We can only really understand this if we turn to Lazarus.

We should not be surprised that to understand this term we have to consider a concrete example. Lazarus himself offers one: his investigations at the Renault Billancourt factory outside of Paris in 1985, the old workers’ “fortress” which shut down in 1992. Lazarus engaged there in a project of workers’ inquiry, and interviewed many immigrant factory workers. One of the worker statements that draws Lazarus’ interest is the following: “In the factory, they call me a worker, outside, they call me immigrant because they’ve forgotten that I’m a worker.”⁴⁴ For Lazarus this is not a question of sociological confusion to be realized with a sociological theory of multiple social identities that would produce a new account of the migrant worker. Rather it represents “that there are two orders of the real, constituted by two alternative prescriptions: in one order, there is an assignment of the worker to the factory and the maintenance of the figure of the worker; in the other order, assignment to society and the disappearance of the figure of the worker by the qualifier ‘immigrant.’”⁴⁵ Thus an immigrant who wishes to advocate for his rights as a worker is engaged in an active prescriptive relationship with reality, and indeed in a conflict over differing prescriptions.

In French politics in the 1980s, the status of immigrant labor in the factories was a major political issue. The argument was made that if a worker was an immigrant then they were not really a worker. Differing orders of the prescriptive were on offer here. The word ‘worker’ then took on the category of what Lazarus calls a “problematic word.” This is a term in dispute. How can the same person be a worker only at the factory and an immigrant outside of it? This dispute over two prescriptive orders is, for Lazarus, a dispute over two reals in which a single term is contested. This is what it means for a word to be a problematic word and the dispute over it constitutes precisely what Lazarus means by “people think”.⁴⁶

A dispute over two prescriptive orders is, however, a dispute over what is possible. How is this so? It is important to understand that for Lazarus this is not a dispute over definitions. It is not the case that some new, sociological category will help. Nor is the French government or the factory bosses committing some kind of epistemic injustice or misusing the word ‘worker’ or ‘immigrant’. They are workers in the factory, but not outside of it. It is a question of who counts as what where — it’s a question of how we organize our social reality. It thus generates, for Lazarus, an “intellectuality of which the proper register is that of the possible.”⁴⁷ In this way, people think and problematic words are tied to rupture and the new.⁴⁸ This returns us to Badiou’s communist hypothesis and Wamba dia Wamba’s “let us do something about the situation.” The us of this statement is generic, and when it takes the form of a conflict of prescriptions it forms, in Lazarus’ words “a proper field, that of people’s thought, configuring the real through prescriptions and possibles.”⁴⁹ Haider brings this all together when he writes that:

There is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people”.⁵⁰

We can put this another way. If Haider had begun Mistaken Identity with an account of race and class, he would have written a very different book. Yet he wrote a book about emancipation and about various movements against racism in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he wrote the core of the book before his encounter with Lazarus, his method was attuned to the question of the prescriptive and the possible that was at stake in these movements, ahead of any particular sociological categories they might have claimed.

In Haider’s three public-facing essays that bear the mark of Lazarus the most — “On Depoliticization”, “Dismissal”, and “Emancipation and Exhaustion” — he ends with an exhortation to go in search of new mode of politics. Yet to go in a search of a new mode of politics means to be open to this statement that people think. A mode of politics is defined by its intellectuality, it marks out the relationship of a thought to a politics. When Lazarus formalizes ‘people think’ in Anthropology of the Name, he sets out to maintain its generic status. People is itself a generic term. In the original French, Lazarus writes “les gens pensent” for people think. “Gens” is the most generic term possible in French. With it Lazarus is attempting to preserve a generic category for people. His approach to the ‘think’ part of the formulation is even stranger. Lazarus tells us that to understand ‘people think’ we need to proceed via the category of intellectuality, which has the goal “to maintain that there is thought…without demanding that thought hold forth on its requisites or conditions.”⁵¹ Of course if thought held forth on its requisites or conditions, we would exit politics in interiority and proceed in exteriority. We do not say then that people think X because Y, but merely that “people think.” To go in search of intellectuality is to go in search of new modes of politics, organized around a prescriptive relationship to reality.

Haider writes, in “Socialists Think”, that “this is the problem with writing ‘Socialists think that…’ Across history, socialists have thought a great many things, sometimes things that were so incompatible they divided organizations or plunged entire nations into factional disputes.”⁵² Against the descriptive “socialists think that”, Haider proposes the prescriptive “socialists think” — let us find out what we think, what workers think, and not presuppose “dictation from above, which provides ready-made answers to externally imposed questions.”⁵³ Doing so will allow us to see things from the vantage point of emancipation and honor the statement that people think.

Sources of Pessimism, Sources of Optimism

It may be the case that the world has always been in a state of crisis. At the moment, however, things appear particularly grim. Emerging out of the pandemic, we entered a world of increasing morbidity: the growing forces of conservative reaction; a growing concentration of wealth; the end of the small semblances of respite won in the 20th century (the various rights of employees, immigrants, and citizens are all on the chopping block both in the United States and across the world); the defeat of popular left-wing movements (Kier Starmer successfully purged the Labour Party in the UK, Biden successfully absorbed the Sanders campaign, and the right is on the rise in Latin America); the return of genocide, officially sanctioned by the West; the list could go on forever.

In this context, one must acknowledge that both “Dismissal” and “Emancipation and Exhaustion”, even though they were written in 2020 and 2021, conclude with a certain wavering. Right at the very end of “Dismissal” Haider writes: “we will probably be defeated, now more than ever.”⁵⁴ In “Emancipation and Exhaustion”, he writes: “time will tell — but not too much time — if we are up to the task [of emancipatory politics].”⁵⁵ These pronouncements are pessimistic, no doubt. Without the comfort of social analysis and confronted with the generic ‘people think’, we appear to have lost the assuredness of a classically Marxist methodology.

But Haider’s pessimism was not a defeatism. Nor did his interest in Badiou lead him to a kind of voluntarism. As a thinker of emancipation, he attempted to clarify the present moment to keep the idea of emancipation alive. Thus Haider’s true view of our situation was not as grim as he sometimes presented it. In an essay on Gramsci that Haider wrote in 2020 we have a much more modest account of this apparent pessimism.

After a detailed analysis of Gramsci's infamous slogan, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”, often taken to be an exhortation to realist analysis and utopian hope, Haider offers us a new slogan. He reverses the claims, giving: “optimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will.” It is indeed Haider’s hope that such a reversal will allow us to “better understand our situation.” He explains the optimism of the intellect as follows: “[o]ptimism of the intellect, because we have to start by recognizing that all people are capable of thought, that they are able to not only form conceptions of the world but also to experiment with new possibilities. There is no emancipatory politics without recognizing this universal capacity for thought.”⁵⁶ This is clearly an invocation of Lazarus’ “people think.” In going on to explain pessimism of the will he writes:

But pessimism of the will, because we know that the will has to take a material organizational form, and that across the history of revolutionary politics the classical form assumed by the young Gramsci is no longer available to us. We lack the concrete basis for organizations on the model of the twentieth century revolutions, and we know from the history which followed these revolutions that the emancipatory potential of the party seizing the state has been exhausted.⁵⁷

This argument about the end of the political party is also, of course, an invocation of Lazarus. Haider’s reversal articulates a programmatic approach to our present crisis. It starts with acknowledging a crisis in politics, one that requires an optimism of the intellect. He writes: “Our subjective horizon is the optimism of the intellect; our objective, structuring condition is pessimism of the will. Without optimism of the intellect, we have the party without the people. Without pessimism of the will, we have the illusion of power. Until we recognize this there is no path for action.”⁵⁸ The true pessimism lies, then, in those who insist on the repetition of political forms, whose position is thus: nothing else could possibly work, so why bother with anything new?

When Gramsci wrote his famous slogan, the left believed they had a viable organizational form: the political party. Bolstered by the success of the Russian Revolution, Gramsci saw the communist party as the vehicle for the collective will of the masses. This clear identification of the organization renders sensible Gramsci’ optimism of the will. While pessimism of the intellect can be read as a call that it is important to be tough-minded about the possibilities of emancipatory politics, Haider argues that here pessimism refers to a lack of clarity about the role of the intellectual in political organizations. As he goes on to say: “Gramsci was in fact grappling, albeit in a hasty and triumphalist manner, with the tension between the underlying recognition that all people are intellectuals, and the conditions for politics in which those with the social function of intellectuals play a leadership role.”⁵⁹

The reversal of the slogan then represents a distance traveled in the history of Marxism and emancipatory politics, of which Haider was our last great theorist. Hence, he says ‘optimism of the intellect’: we know that people think and can do something about the situation. And now, on this side of the millennium, we also say, ‘pessimism of the will’: we do not know yet what form this doing something about the situation will take. Contra Gramsci, this is in fact the general position of emancipatory politics. The fact of people’s capacity has been proven over and over, but we do not always know what form it will take. It is then incumbent upon us to go in search of new modes of politics, an investigation that like all investigations has no predetermined outcome. Yet, as Haider himself was fond of pointing out, if one seeks predetermination and certainty, they are better off in the pews of the church and not the trenches of emancipatory politics.