Jodi Dean is an essential political theorist. Her work examines how the left can build a new collective politics.

In her latest book she asks: in a society of serfs and servants, how do we get free? With the rise of neofeudalism, and as more and more workers are drawn into the service sector—from nurses to Uber and delivery drivers—Dean argues that we can see the emergence of a new vanguard, the class that can lead the struggle for liberation from oppression and exploitation: what she calls the servant vanguard.

“Dean provides the most rigorous account of what a neofeudal society entails. Every page is a provocation, every sentence is a delight.” —  Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

Capital's Grave

by Jodi Dean

Bringing together analyses from different fields—law, technology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis—Jodi Dean shows the direction the contemporary world is heading: neofeudalism. Feudalism isn’t just a m...

Further Reading

Comrade

by Jodi Dean

In the twentieth-century millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade”. Now, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies” on the left than it is of comrades. In Comrade, Jodi D...

Crowds and Party

by Jodi Dean

Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multi...

The Communist Horizon

by Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolu...

Organize, Fight, Win

by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete mater...

An American Utopia

by Fredric Jameson

Contributions by Jodi Dean, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Kojin Karatani, Kim Stanley Robinson, Frank Ruda and Kathi Weeks

Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal co...

Occupy!

Contributions by Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Jodi Dean, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Zoltán Glu?ck, Elizabeth Gumport, Doug Henwood, Christopher Herring, L.A. Kauffman, Svetlana Kitto, Kung Li, Audrea Lim, Manissa Maharawal, Thomas Paine, Marco Roth, Marina Sitrin, Rebecca Solnit, Stephen Squibb, Sunaura Taylor, Alex S. Vitale and Slavoj Žižek

Edited by Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt and Astra Taylor

In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, O...

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