The philosopher Asad Haider died in December at the age of thirty-eight. He was my friend. But I knew him best through his writing, which earned him a loyal following among his contemporaries. For us Asad was the preeminent thinker of “millennial socialism.” Not only because he was impeccably millennial in his formation (born in 1987, he protested the Iraq War, graduated from college the year after the financial crisis, and participated in the Occupy movement) but also because he was perpetually wrestling with the problem of how to make socialism millennial—that is, how to take up the socialist tradition while reinventing it for the twenty-first century.

Socialists of the present day are survivors of a shipwreck. The socialisms of the twentieth century—as elaborated in Russia, China, Tanzania, and elsewhere—had their achievements, and their atrocities. But in trying to escape capitalism, they all reached the same impasse. None, in Asad’s words, “managed to proceed” through a period of transition to arrive at the “kind of society” Marx had envisioned, a society in which, to quote The Communist Manifesto, “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Asad believed that everything depended on drawing the correct lessons from these disappointments. One danger was denialism: to pretend these failures hadn’t happened. The other was defeatism: to take socialism’s failures as an indication of its futility. “Are people equal, and are people capable of governing themselves?” he asked. His most deeply held conviction was that the answer was yes, and that capitalism, as a system of class rule, had to be overcome for this possibility to be realized.

Against the temptations of denialism and defeatism, Asad offered a third option: the idea that history is a series of situations. These situations are, in the words of the philosopher Louis Althusser, whose influence on Asad was profound, “exceptional.” They are unique, in other words, and their uniqueness resides in the ever-shifting mix of elements within them. A historical event—such as a revolution—is produced by a particular coalescence of these elements.

It follows that the various socialisms that have appeared throughout history cannot be understood apart from the situations that produced them. To say that socialism has failed in the past does not mean it will fail forever, since we are forever being thrust into new situations. But by the same token, socialism’s old shapes can’t simply be taken off the shelf and dropped into our present. We should study them the way an art student might study Cubism: not because Picasso or Braque discovered the one true method of painting but because their creativity can inspire and inform our own.

Historically, American socialism has been a modest affair, at least in comparison with its counterparts in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Socialists helped lead the US labor movement and the civil rights movement, and helped bring about the New Deal, but their organizations generally remained small. Being an anticapitalist in the heart of world capitalism was never easy, and the last quarter of the twentieth century proved especially inhospitable: by the turn of the twenty-first, socialism had virtually disappeared from the American scene.

Over the past decade and a half, however, the American socialist movement has enjoyed a revival, driven primarily by people who were born in the 1980s and 1990s. Emerging in the aftermath of Occupy and taking a more defined form around Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, millennial socialism tapped into young people’s exasperation with inequality, corruption, and dismal economic prospects. The cruelties of Trumpism and the dithering of the Democratic Party have further swelled its ranks. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) now has around 95,000 members, making it one of the largest socialist organizations in the country’s history.¹

Millennial socialism has scored important victories, most recently the election of Zohran Mamdani—like Asad, a millennial socialist of South Asian descent—as the mayor of New York City. Yet its political content remains somewhat ambiguous. Does socialism mean an expanded welfare state of the Nordic variety, as Sanders often suggests? Or does it describe a completely different kind of society? As more millennial socialists find themselves in positions of power, such definitional questions become harder to defer. Before long the movement will have to specify what makes its socialism distinctive—how it differs both from liberalism and from the socialisms pursued in other times and places. It’s tragic that Asad died as this challenge arrived, because parsing such predicaments is exactly what his work was for.

Asad’s intellect took shape at a young age. Growing up in a small town in central Pennsylvania, he spent much of his childhood reading. Two early favorites were The Communist Manifesto and Tropic of Cancer. “Between Marx and Engels’s ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ and Henry Miller’s nomadism—in which, as Gilles Deleuze put it, ‘everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside’—I was convinced of the impossibility of settling on fixed territory,” he later recalled. Both Marx and Miller were fascinated by fluidity, and each strained to imbue his prose with the kinesis of his subject: capital and the Parisian flaneur, respectively, two creatures of constant motion.

As Asad absorbed this outlook, he also developed a set of firm moral beliefs. One source was the Islamophobia he endured as a child of Pakistani immigrants after September 11. Another was his chance encounter in the public library with the autobiography of Huey P. Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party. The book gave him a different way to think about the racism he was experiencing and the kinds of struggle that would be required to overcome it. “His story spoke to me,” Asad remembered years later. “In this very country, in this white, alienating world, there were others who had lived through the experience of exclusion, indeed, far worse than anything I had ever experienced.”

He came to see himself as an anticapitalist and an anti-imperialist, although these labels are too generic to fit him well. It would be more accurate to say that there was something moving and something motionless in Asad’s thought. He was on the one hand analytically restless, forever in search of new ideas adequate to new realities, and on the other hand immovable in his devotion to the principle that everyone should be, in the most fundamental sense, free.

This pairing of peregrination and commitment defined Viewpoint, the magazine that Asad founded in 2011 with Salar Mohandesi, a historian of modern Europe. Its first issue appeared one month after Occupy began. “We wanted to look at the complexity of the Marxist tradition by reading it through the lens of the contemporary social movements and the questions that they raised,” Asad later explained in an interview. This led him and his fellow editors to excavate aspects of socialism’s history in the hopes of aiding its renewal.

Especially important for Viewpoint was the legacy of Italian operaismo, a Marxist current from the 1960s and 1970s that drew theoretical inspiration from the study of rank-and-file workers. Another touchstone was the Black radical tradition, which, combined with Donald Trump’s 2016 election and the associated discourse on the “white working class,” steered Asad toward the questions of race and class and the relationship between them, the theme of his 2018 book Mistaken Identity.

Mistaken Identity presents a critique of identity politics, which Asad defines as “the neutralization of movements against racial oppression.” Writing at a time when identitarian appeals were prevalent within the Democratic Party, most visibly in the case of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, Asad contends that elites have co-opted the legacy of the civil rights movement to advance their careers while reducing politics to “the policing of our language” and “the questionable satisfaction of provoking white guilt.” In response socialists shouldn’t abandon antiracism but instead recognize how the ideology of whiteness works to divide the working class to the detriment of all its members—including white workers. “As long as racial solidarity among whites is more powerful than class solidarity across races, both capitalism and whiteness will continue to exist,” argues Asad. “This is why the struggle against white supremacy has in fact been a struggle for universal emancipation.”

As Mistaken Identity illustrates, Asad kept pace with political developments and used them to pollinate his thinking. It was important to him that his Marxism stayed limber enough to learn from events. This put him at odds with those Marxists whose engagement with the world consists in the recitation of holy mantras, for whom everything can be explained by the invocation of “the economy.”

Asad’s Marxism, like Althusser’s, began from the insight that, while economic forces have an outsize part in determining the course of history, they do not dictate outcomes in a direct way. Rather, such forces make themselves felt through their interaction with other factors, such as law, politics, and culture. To say that a society’s methods of making the things it needs (“the economy”) shape the overall structure of that society is true as a general rule but too abstract to be very useful. Although all societies are materially determined, each is materially determined in its own way. Concrete knowledge comes from studying the economy’s complex interplay with all the other elements that compose a particular “social formation” at a given point in time. It is within the messy ongoingness of human relations that the categories of Marxism can be found.

This way of seeing history has a dual aspect. On the one hand, the situation sets the parameters of what is possible. “In part, what we do and how far we can go are inscribed in the historical constraints of the given terrain on which we operate,” remarks the sociologist Stuart Hall, another of Asad’s favorites.² Yet every situation also contains a certain openness; people can and do act in ways that reject the necessity of what exists.

Asad’s word for this undertaking was politics. For him, politics meant envisioning and enacting another world, above all by inventing new organizations that could bring such a world into being. Socialists of previous eras had innovated the commune, the party, and the workers’ council—but with the passing of those eras, Asad believed, their contributions had become obsolete. Millennial socialism’s historic mission was to create organizational forms of its own. “Politics is a creative invention,” asserts the Congolese theorist and militant Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, in a passage quoted by Asad in one of his pieces. “Let us do something about the situation! characterizes a political attitude.”

Let us do something is an exhortation. Asad insisted that politics is a choice, not a reflex. People do not engage in politics simply because they have been exploited or oppressed. Neither their class position nor their racial identity nor their “material interests” ensure that they will be moved to act in a particular way. Nothing can carry people into politics but people themselves. In the process, they bring their own ideas with them. “People think,” Asad liked to remind his readers, an observation that sounds obvious but can be overlooked by socialists, who sometimes assume that the explanatory power of their theories is so great that they already know what people think—or at least what people ought to think.

If human beings did not possess the capacity to think for themselves, in fact, egalitarian social transformation would be impossible. “Emancipatory politics is based on the premise that all people are capable of thought, that they can and should govern themselves, and that when they act together they will be the force which will overturn the existing order,” Asad writes. More specifically, he hoped such a politics would be guided by the “communist hypothesis,” a term introduced by the philosopher Alain Badiou, who observes that a scientist can propose a hypothesis that may take centuries to prove. The communist hypothesis submits that a classless society is possible. Or, in Asad’s words, “It is not necessary for human life to be subordinated by the state and the market.” Socialism’s history, in this account, may simply belong to the centuries that separate a proposition from its proof.

Advances can be made only when the masses are in motion. Sanders’s presidential campaigns, to take one prominent example, assembled a coalition of working-class voters—nurses and teachers, machinists and baristas—around the demand for a “political revolution” against an oligarchic social order. These campaigns politicized millions of people, including millennials like Mamdani who went on to run for office, organize labor and tenant unions, and reinvigorate the DSA. Asad, for his part, wrote supportively of Sanders and affirmed the “rationality and necessity” of reforms like universal health care. But “the more important thing” about the Sanders phenomenon, he maintained,

was that new masses of people were mobilizing around the idea that it’s possible to totally change our existing system—that it’s possible to put the whole political structure into question and conceive of a different kind of politics.

To devise and sustain a truly antisystemic alternative, such energies would need to find “a lasting organizational expression” that remained “independent from the state.” The Marxist ideal, as Asad never tired of pointing out, was not only a classless society but a stateless one. Friedrich Engels had looked forward to the day that humanity placed the state in “the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.” It was a line Asad loved.

My clearest memory of Asad involves rum. We are sitting at a bar in Somerville that serves tiki drinks, and he is telling me that he used to be a tiki obsessive. He’d filled his apartment with bottles of rum and tropical juices. He’d purchased recipe books. He’d spent hours honing his technique, mixing one cocktail after another. He’d gotten very drunk, but there was also, he explains, an intellectual component to his enthusiasm. The history of rum is the history of the plantation. It is the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism.

Eventually he decided to stop. Tiki was taking over his life. So he got rid of the rum and the juices. He put away the recipe books. He still enjoyed tiki drinks, but his passion for making them had come to an end.

The reminiscences published after Asad’s death spoke to this tendency of his to become consumed by a hobby. Apparently his other fixations included French cooking and heavy metal. But what I remember finding most surprising about our conversation that night at the bar was not the intensity of his infatuation but the decisiveness with which he had dropped it.

Breaks are an important theme in Asad’s work. His faith in politics—the capacity of people to remake themselves and their society—was qualified by his belief that politics is not always happening. Sometimes a political sequence can end without another one starting. Those unlucky enough to live in this interval are marooned in a dead zone. They must endure what Asad calls “exhaustion,” which occurs, he writes in an essay for the magazine South Asian Avant-Garde, “when an existing historical mode of politics comes to an end and a new one is not yet apparent.”

This condition characterizes our own era, he maintained, with damaging consequences. When politics appears impossible, people take refuge in various kinds of “pseudo-politics.” These include “adjustment,” where socialists accommodate themselves to the world that exists, abandoning their ambition to overturn the status quo in exchange for making some minor modifications to it. Another is “personalization,” where politics is reduced to “interpersonal relations.” This is a recipe for cults, denunciations, popularity contests, and other familiar pathologies of the left, as supercharged by the high school cafeteria of social media. “In the place of the aspiration for structural transformation,” Asad warns, “there is the centering of politics on the person, on the person of the adversary, whose offensive proclamations and style of speaking may provide the opportunity for a self-satisfied disgust.”

These pitfalls are real enough. But I could never accept his broader diagnosis of our era. I remember arguing with him about it. We are living in a politicized moment, not a depoliticized one. To take so restrictive a definition of politics, I felt, was to hold today’s movements to an impossible standard.

The movement that came closest to meeting his standard was the uprising against police violence that took place after the murder of George Floyd. In the militancy and mass character of the protests, in their autonomy from the state and traditional institutions, Asad saw the most promising opportunity in his lifetime for taking the leap into a new politics. “The rise of the autonomous movements against state racism and state repression is extraordinarily significant,” he told an interviewer in the summer of 2020.

They have entered into direct confrontation with the state and also capital, responding not only to the systematic violence which targets Black people, but also the mass unemployment and impoverishment which has only been exacerbated by the pandemic crisis.

As the protests faded, however, and their vitality failed to find an enduring organizational form, his pessimism seemed to grow. “In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us,” he wrote in March 2021, by which point the George Floyd moment had passed.

When I return to this sentence now, it is hard not to hear another, more personal exhaustion behind his words. Defeat is something that happens not just to socialism but to socialists, and the experience of it hurts. “To dedicate one’s life to human emancipation is a decision one could decline to make; yet it is also a condition that seems as if it were imposed from birth,” Asad reflected in one of his final essays, “and on more days than others, it is a burden that defeat makes painful to bear.”

Yet defeats are never final. People keep thinking. Even when the world is at its narrowest, other worlds are conceivable. Sometimes inspiration arrives on the barricade or the picket line. Sometimes it sneaks up on an exhausted body lying sleepless in bed. “The mind is its own place,” muses Satan in Paradise Lost. Revolutions are imagined before they are made. People think, and politics follows.