The Feed and the Party
The Illusion of Machinery in Municipal Socialism
“Let’s all share our dreams under a communist moon.”— The (International) Noise Conspiracy
A city councilor posts a photo of her kickball team, hoping for a double-digit win. Two posts later, she is reading the mayor’s budget overnight because it arrived late, and the hearing is at nine-thirty. Two posts after that, she declares that the council has just passed a historic housing bill.
The feed shows the life, the labor, and the legislative claim. What the feed does not build is the machinery that would turn the historic claim into something more than an adjective.
This is Portland, but it could be anywhere. American socialist political speech in 2026 lives largely on such feeds. A Bluesky thread from a progressive council member, a repost of a mayor’s inaugural address, a tearful-face emoji attached to every proclamation that a city deserves a “Mamdani Mayor.”
The medium through which these wins are announced is not a neutral channel but a circuit of accumulation. The feed converts political speech into circulation. It rewards affective intensity over sustained organization. It substitutes a rhetorical totality for the party-form.
Jodi Dean names this condition communicative capitalism in her earlier Blog Theory (2010); in Crowds and Party (2016) and Comrade (2019), she develops the argument for the party-form as the answer to it. Our basic communicative activities, according to Dean, are enclosed in circuits as raw materials for capital accumulation.
The message seeks no decision.
It enters a stream.
The stream produces value for the platform, not a political force.
Against this logic, Dean sets the communist horizon that underwrites the possibility of social transformation, and the party-form that concentrates a crowd’s affective release into the persistence required for struggle at the scale of the mode of production, not the scale of the city budget. The feed is what the Left has instead of the party.
If we read the genres of contemporary socialist speech on their own terms, a distinct taxonomy emerges:
The Maximal Adjective: A zoning resolution is “historic.” A revolving loan fund is “historic.” A municipal social housing allocation is a “turning point.” The adjective compensates for an institutional position that cannot deliver what the rhetoric invokes.
The Testimonial: The speaker offers the cat and the kickball team as a councilor-as-knowable-person. This stands in for the collective body that would walk with the speaker when her identity is under attack.
The Aspirational Repost: The local official retweets a national figure she has never met, filling the space left by the charismatic leader her local coalition cannot produce.
None of these gestures is mere vanity. Each does the work a party would otherwise do. A minority bloc of four socialists on a twelve-member council, operating under a freight-company executive mayor, inside a state that preempts municipal revenue tools: under these conditions, the rhetorical elevation is not a choice. It is a form.
But without the party-form, political disagreement on the feed inevitably reads as betrayal. A colleague’s alternative amendment is immediately cast as pork-barrel politics. A pragmatic critique becomes grandstanding noise. The billionaires-versus-working-people framing, descriptively accurate about material relations, mutates in the feed’s compressed reality. It becomes a reflex that assigns “billionaire-function” to any local interlocutor who votes the wrong way. In the feed, the opponent is not an opponent. The opponent is a traitor.
Dean argues in Comrade (2019) that the party’s symbolic function is to metabolize this Manichaean structure into disciplined factional argument internal to a shared horizon. Without the party, the imaginary runs unchecked. Every legislative setback becomes evidence of the opponent’s bad faith, rather than the unfinished work of persuasion.
What the party-form was, when it existed, can be read in two scenes from American Communist Party life in the 1930s and 1940s. In Birmingham, Alabama, during the depths of the Great Depression, the Party organized illegally among Black industrial workers in one of the most violently segregated cities in the country. Hosea Hudson, a Black iron molder, joined in 1931 and built cells that operated under the constant threat of Klan violence and police raids.1 In one such cell, a unit organizer knocks on a company-house door in broad daylight, handing out pamphlets. A checkup meeting reveals that a member dumped his leaflets in a sewer. Comrades press him. He confesses. The unit continues.
Or take a scene from the Lower East Side of Manhattan a decade or so later, recounted in Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism (1977). The neighborhood was then a center of Jewish, immigrant, and working-class radicalism, and the Party had deep roots in its tenements and union halls. Eric Lanzetti, a Party organizer, tells a young communist named Lilly that when she confronts her father about her engagement to a Chinese man, “we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party.” Lilly later says she felt them in the room, not just the organizer, but the whole Party.
The historical Party was demanding, often cruel, and catastrophically wrong about the Soviet Union and the commitments it extracted from members. But what it delivered, inside and despite that record, was concentration and endurance. Contrast the grueling, life-or-death discipline of a 1930s cell meeting with a contemporary Zoom coalition call where half the participants have their cameras off. One body assembled under threat. The other, half-present by design.
The Party had its own communicative machinery: pamphlets, the Daily Worker, the internal bulletin, and the section meeting. The crucial difference is that the Party owned its media and directed its circulation toward decision and accountability inside the organization. The checkup meeting was a circulation with a terminus; the leaflet’s journey ended at the comrades who would answer for it.
The contemporary feed, whether billionaire-owned like X and Meta or venture-funded like Bluesky, directs circulation toward extraction. The platform’s governance matters less than the form. The circulation has no checkup meeting. It accumulates as engagement and disperses as feed-fatigue. The crowd generates the affective intensity that Dean’s party-form was built to metabolize, but the feed does not. It merely circulates it. The next post displaces the last, and the affective residue dissolves into the revenue the platform was built to extract.
The common objection is that the feed is the only assembly ground a de-industrialized city still has. The company-house door is gone, the foundry shift change is gone, and the union local is captured or hollowed out. Dean’s framework does not deny this. The feed can be a site of crowd formation, as it was during Occupy Wall Street, and the DSA’s national growth since 2016 has relied heavily on digital circulation.
But what remains open is whether that growth has produced sustaining machinery, or just a larger version of the same ephemeral crowd. The organizational work that produces electoral wins (door-knocking, union endorsements, chapter infrastructure) is real. The feed does not produce it; the feed only announces it. What the feed forecloses is the symbolic recognition of that work. In the digital stream, the “historic vote” becomes the content. The organization that produced it recedes into the background.
The national DSA mayoralties do not resolve this question; they press it. Winning the mayor’s office is not yet evidence of the party that would hold the mayor accountable or the chapter infrastructure that would outlast the term. The inaugural address, the hundred-day tour, the reading-to-toddlers photograph — these are feed-events. A socialist mayor is not the same as organizational change.
The Democratic Socialists of America exists—it has members, holds conventions, and endorses candidates. In a conventional sense, it is a party. But the party-form Dean describes is not a membership organization with a logo and a dues structure. It is a body that holds its members accountable, concentrates scattered affective energies into a durable force, and ensures a comrade is never alone. Historically, the Communist Party achieved this through cadre discipline, democratic centralism, cell-level accountability, and the ownership of its own media. The contemporary DSA, a multi-tendency organization with roughly 80,000 members, does not. This comparison does not criticize the DSA so much as it distinguishes a modern membership organization from the specific functions the party-form once fulfilled. A DSA-endorsed mayor is a member of an organization; whether the office is backed by a party is the question the mayoralty tests.
The question of what is to be done under these conditions remains open. This essay has argued only that the feed cannot answer it.
The state is a reader of the same feed on which the Left assembles, and it reads to surveil, to map, and to neutralize. The communist horizon is not a destination the feed can reach. It is the division that the feed was built to swallow. The machinery that would let that division become a sustained political struggle is what the feed has replaced.
Sources
Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016) and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso, 2019). Dean's earlier work on communicative capitalism is most fully developed in Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity, 2010) and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke, 2009).
Hosea Hudson’s account survives in two forms: his own autobiography, Black Worker in the Deep South (1972), and Nell Irvin Painter’s The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979), an oral history drawn from interviews Painter conducted in the 1970s. Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1990) is the definitive scholarly treatment of the broader organizing context. Dean draws on the Painter volume in Crowds and Party and Comrade because it preserves the texture of cell-level organizing that theory cannot recover: not the Party as slogan or horizon, but the Party as the specific expectation that a comrade would answer for what he had done.