For Asad Haider, the fact that people think constitutes the condition of liberation. Yet thinking does not take place in a vacuum. It remains bound to the situations of which it is a part. And these situations are not self-determined but – at least for the time being – largely determined by others. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci had drawn conclusions from this insight, which Asad Haider later took up. Following Gramsci, the young US American theorist shifted the emphasis of Marxist debate. Instead of continually targeting the supposedly absent or deficient class consciousness, in need of enlightenment or external guidance, Haider turned his attention to questions around the production of knowledge: how does it operate, what purposes does it serve, where is it contested, and, not least, can it be organised differently?
The tension between human beings’ fundamental capacity and activity of thought and the historically specific forms in which knowledge is organised runs like a red thread through Haider’s reflections on social movements and questions of organisation, on class politics and identity. Haider’s thinking was oriented toward the renewal of socialist politics in the twenty-first century. For such a project, it is a great loss that a voice has fallen silent so early – a voice, which like few others of the younger generation, pointed both to what remained unresolved in the revolutionary attempts of the twentieth century and to their limits, and thereby to the necessity of their reinvention. On 4 December 2025, Asad Haider passed away at the age of 38.
Toward the Renewal of Socialism in the 21st century
Haider’s intellectual and editorial work took shape in a concrete situation: the Occupy movement and the global wave of uprisings and square occupations around 2010. In the wake of the 2008 financial and sovereign debt crisis, these movements challenged the increasingly fragile neoliberal status quo from below and thus forcefully underscored the end of the “end of history.” Just one month after the start of Occupy Wall Street in New York, the first issue of the online magazine Viewpoint, founded by Haider together with the historian Salar Mohandesi, appeared in the autumn of 2011. Having had only just begun writing their doctoral dissertations, they created a crucial site of exchange and collective reflection for this political upsurge and for the years to come.
To this end, Haider, Mohandesi, and their comrades made accessible to the Anglophone left the undogmatic Marxist thought of the twentieth century. They provided translations of key texts from moments in which a renewal of socialist politics was being pursued – or in which its failure had become evident – and, in doing so, cast a wide and often surprising net of texts, concepts and authors. In their first issue, they included a correspondence from the 1950s between the already eighty-year-old council communist Anton Pannekoek – who, in 1920, together with others had incurred Lenin’s wrath, who called them out as “left radicals” or ultraleftists, a smear taken up as a badge of honour by many after that – and the young Cornelius Castoriadis, a member of the French anti-Stalinist group Socialisme ou Barbarie. However, Viewpoint also published extensive commentaries and essays that did not merely situate political upsurges and downturns historically, but rendered them legible for contemporary developments. In this way, Viewpoint offered activists a framework in which to sharpen their thinking and put it up for discussion.
Asad Haider himself published nearly forty articles on the platform between 2011 and 2021, among them many fundamental contributions to Marxist theory. Proceeding from the diagnosis that the historical forms of the vanguard party as well as state socialism had exhausted their mobilising and strategic force, many of his essays revolved around the experience of defeat. For Haider, however, failure was not a cause for “left melancholy”, but an occasion to place the unresolved theoretical problems of Marxism – along with their productive potential – back on the agenda.
After the Vanguard Party
At the centre of Viewpoint’s reflections was, at least initially, the emergence of new forms of subjectivity and practice and the question how they are connected to a transformed class composition, as one might say in the language of the operaist tradition, which the magazine reintroduced into contemporary debate. The analysis of class composition was to constitute the point of departure for present-day left politics.
Haider’s project of actualising Marxism was also decisively shaped by the interventions of Louis Althusser. Althusser’s reflections from the 1960s and 1970s on the overdetermination and underdetermination of social contradictions rendered Marxist thinking, as it were, more flexible. His approach made it possible to understand social struggles not merely in relation to economic development, but as components of complex constellations in which different social relations and practices intersect. Precisely such a perspective promised to free Marxist theory from the determinism of purported historical laws. Building on Althusser, Haider proposed appropriating Marxism as a finite and limited – and therefore open – theory that moves and lives through crises.
His aim was to revive Marxism precisely through its problems. Perhaps this is most evident in Haider’s discussion of Gramsci’s dictum concerning the “optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect.” This sentence has long been utilised as an aphorism and a slogan to persevere on the Left: Haider restored its historical context and in doing so, he simultaneously showed how the distinctly Leninist problematic associated with it in Gramsci – referring to the relationship between the working class and the Bolsheviks, soviets and party, revolution and state, the Russian October and the two Italian “red years” (Biennio rosso), as well as the subsequent fascist rule – has since been transformed to such an extent that the precise inversion of the slogan now appears to be adequate.
To start with Gramsci from the premise that people think, leads, according to Haider, to an optimism of the intellect. Without this, one risks settling into a detached vanguardism and turning away from people and their thinking. That political forms of organisation capable of testing and realising this thinking are lacking, however, produces a pessimism of the will. This is necessary in order not to fall prey to the illusion of power. It is only such an inversion of the slogan that clears the way for seeking new paths of emancipatory politics in today’s reality: “What we need now is not a voluntarist dedication to repeating old models, but laboratories which can observe new forces and experiment with new forms.”
It is in this context that Haider’s unpublished dissertation Party and Strategy in Postwar European Marxist Theory must be situated as well. In this text, written to earn his PhD in 2018 in the History of Consciousness programme at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he does not grasp the development of Marxist theories in France and Italy in the second half of the twentieth century according to a history of ideas. Rather, he reconstructs the tensions between the strategic debates within the Communist parties and the theoretical practices within the forms of political organisation that challenged these parties’ claims to leadership at that time. Theoretical and organisational practice were, for Haider, intertwined processes: they were attempts to produce new collective actors and new political practices under changed historical conditions, for which no guarantees could exist. Under conditions of class domination and division of labour, the intervention of intellectuals as specialists in thinking and theory remains necessary. Their activity, however, must aim at the end of this division; otherwise, it merely reproduces domination, as state socialism has demonstrated. Sites of such activity are therefore collective organisation and shared struggles, in which intellectuals ultimately become students just as much as they are teachers. Theory is, then, understandable as a necessary detour, to use one of Haider’s favourite formula, drawn from Althusser and Stuart Hall. Theory draws its being from the problems of political practice and returns to them again.
Between Class and Identity Politics
The demand for his own theoretical work to be – and remain – a necessary detour runs through Haider’s texts, which display both acute seriousness and a malicious pleasure of the fitting punchline. This strength of his writing is particularly evident in his 2018 book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, published by Verso. The small volume was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Italian, establishing Haider as a requested speaker and writer internationally. It remains a decisive intervention in the deadlocked debates on class and identity politics, that proved provocative for most proponents of the latter as well as its loudest critics.
Mistaken Identity eluded well-rehearsed frontlines. Haider draws on his varied experiences as an organiser of broad political coalitions and as a member of a student union during times of neoliberal austerity and racist police violence, to show how leftist politics aimed at comprehensive liberation can be slowed by narrow identity-focused approaches. At the same time, however, Haider demonstrates that class politics without antiracist critique necessarily loses its universality. To make this point, he recalls the enduring theoretical and practical productivity of one of the foundational texts of leftist identity politics: the Combahee River Collective Statement.
In fact, it was the reading of a wide array of texts by Black, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist theorists and activists – such as Huey Newton or Frantz Fanon – that, alongside thinkers of the Frankfurt School, provided Haider with his first encounter with Marxism. Later, together with Ben Mabie and Erin Gray, Haider compiled a reader on the Black Radical Tradition to make their knowledge accessible to a wider public. The idea that Marxism was a eurocentric undertaking seemed absurd from the get-go to the son of Pakistani immigrants, who had spent his teenage years living through the anti-Muslim paranoia of the US War on Terror.
From Class Politics to Emancipation
After completing his dissertation, Haider initially taught in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University and then became a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, before taking up his position in 2021 as Assistant Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto. In this way, he both witnessed and participated in the largest mass protests in recent US history, the George Floyd uprising, during the pandemic summer of 2020 in New York.
It was not least the debates around this mass movement within the US Left that soon prompted Haider to engage in a self-critique of his successful book. This reflection is documented in several essays around the turn of 2021, as well as in the foreword to a new edition of Mistaken Identity, that came out in 2022. In this edition, the book bears the new subtitle Mass Movements and Racial Ideology. Already here, a shift in perspective becomes apparent, one that radicalises Althusser’s ideas toward radical contingency, that is, the non-necessity and uniqueness of every emancipatory politics.
Haider increasingly drew on the ideas of Sylvain Lazarus, a lesser-known former collaborator of Alain Badiou. He sought, more and more, to think emancipatory politics as such, as is evident, for example, in an exciting text on the political thought of the Congolese theorist Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba and the Italian Il Manifesto co-founder Rossana Rossanda.
The idea elevated by Lazarus to the status of an axiom – that people think – once again marks the starting point. Such politics is fundamentally linked to spontaneity, which unfolds in particular historical sequences depending on given forms of struggle, organisation, and thought. Class politics, previously considered fundamental, represents only one specific variant of such a conception, a variant that remains bound to a historical sequence. These sequences are determined by their own dynamics and eventual saturation, which can extend to exhaustion and depoliticisation. The radical, insurgent universalism that characterised Haider’s earlier work is no longer conceived in relation to structures of class domination against which strategic struggle is required. Instead, he now begins from a universal desire for emancipation, which manifests itself always differently within the politics of the masses.
In a 2021 conversation on the podcast Below the Radar, Haider once described his way of thinking as follows: one must read a text or a political situation with an eye to which question it answers – one that has not yet even been asked – and then determine whether it was the right question at all. Haider applied this method to his own work as well. For him, knowledge was never something given, but something that had to be produced through an often difficult and prolonged process of engagement with the circumstances of thought.
Exhaustion of a Political Sequence
The political sequence that had opened up for Haider and many others after 2008 – and had provided the driving force for his enormous theoretical labour – seemed to have come to an end by 2021. With the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016, and with the waning of Black Lives Matter in the years after 2020, the possibility of inventing a new socialist politics seemed to have disappeared. “[W]hen I last spoke to Asad,” writes his occasional Viewpoint collaborator, Bue Rübner Hansen, “it seemed as if his strong sense of the sequence starting in 2011 provoked an equally strong sense of closure.”
Ironically, Haider’s reflections thereby approached the kind of thinking that Viewpoint, starting from the upsurge around 2011, had tacitly but decisively skipped. His assumption of an exhausted sequence of class politics led him to conceive of emancipation in a more fundamental way. This resembles the “idea of communism,” or communism as an idea, that thinkers such as Badiou or Slavoj Žižek had kept alive in the 1990s and 2000s in the face of the failure of real socialism and the absence of new communist movements, particularly in academic circles.
The major theme of some of Haider’s final works was, unsurprisingly, exhaustion on a political and individual level. In times of weakening mass movements, to search for and experiment with organisational forms corresponding to such movements risks becoming empty and hollow. He sceptically viewed the shift of leftist debate into social media. Not only because he saw the Left as exposed to the opponent’s apparatuses, but also because these apparatuses accelerate communication to a degree incompatible with the processes necessary for political organisation. Haider understood social media as machines for producing what he called, borrowing a formulation from Spinoza, “sad passions.” Fear, hatred, envy, and shame, for him, largely defined recent political developments.
Haider’s increasingly grim assessment of the situation did not, however, lead him in his final, more sporadic texts to abandon the fundamental insight that people think. If politics as liberation does not always occur but unfolds only in certain sequences that begin and end, for which there are no ultimate guarantees, and which can therefore always fail, it remains always possible anew. “All our biographies,” he writes in one of his most personal texts, composed in 2021, on the occasion of the publication of two large volumes of selected writings by Stuart Hall, “are unfinished, and will remain so long after we are gone. In all our “detours” we learn to think, and to act, and the intensity of thought resists the fixity of selfhood we impose on it. And as we think we still hear Stuart Hall, in all his multiplicity, inviting us – why not? – to live without guarantees.”
First published in https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1196697.linke-in-den-usa-asad-haider-menschen-denken.html
