It's a matter of seizing these things back and demanding more.

-Asad in an email to me, April 2020.

It’s hard to believe that Asad is dead. Like many of you, I cannot bear it. It has been heartening and beautiful to see the outpouring of love and admiration from all sectors of the Left mourning Asad’s far too early passing. Asad will rightly be remembered as a thinker on fire, one of those frighteningly smart individuals able to deliver interventions with devastating precision and even more devastating impact. We all likely know him from his vital contributions to Marxist theory, both in the form of Viewpoint Magazine—of which he was a founding editor—and his brilliant 2018 book Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology. Over the coming weeks and months there will undoubtedly be an accounting of Asad’s thought, which is expansive, disciplined, razor-sharp, and above all incredibly deserving of high status in the Marxist “canon.” This, however, is not what I’m here to laud. I knew Asad, and was fortunate enough to encounter him at both a formative time in my life and the greatest period of rupture in the last century.

Who I got to know, through so many classes that would become Zoom meetings, was a kind, patient, incredibly funny man who lived and breathed commitment to the communist values of emancipation and human flourishing. This is the story I would like to tell in this memorial. It is perhaps a cliché at this point to speak of the eternal tension between theory and practice, but it is impossible to speak of Asad without speaking of both. I was lucky enough to both learn from him and, when push came to shove, put that education into immediate practice alongside him. I know that my story here is likely one of countless others, as he was unsurprisingly beloved by his students, and I look forward to reading every one of them. For now, this is when I knew Asad.

Asad was my philosophy professor when the pandemic hit. I had moved to New York City only five months prior to starting his class, in January 2020, with a significant motivating factor in my choice of attending The New School being the veritable who’s who of prominent leftist thinkers that made up the faculty. Asad was a bonus, as his visiting professorship had not been announced until around the time I started my first semester. Having read Mistaken Identity somewhat recently, I jumped at the chance to study under him.

I was not disappointed. In January we worked our way through Oliver Cromwell Cox. I found Asad a deeply knowledgeable, clever professor who refused to treat undergraduates like anything other than adults. He insisted on a level of rigor and critical engagement that he practiced himself in every waking moment, yet did so with the utmost patience and grace. I immediately understood the privilege I was enjoying in being able to discuss philosophy with Asad twice a week, and did not take this lightly.

In February, I briefly absconded to Nashua, New Hampshire, to trudge through knee-deep snow for the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. While on this trip I had to miss one of Asad’s classes, but promised to make it up “remotely” with a response to that week's readings. At that point in the semester we had arrived at the 2002 debate on race and class between Adolph Reed and Ellen Meiksins Wood. In my vyvanse-filled haste—during what felt like the most urgent and important political fight of my life thus far—I skimmed the readings and churned out a good-enough response in a hotel room largely based on the contours of what I’d understood to be the positions of Reed and Wood from then-contemporary discourse. Reed was a class reductionist, Woods was not, hit send.

As it turns out, I had embarrassingly got this formulation backward. Asad was firm but encouraging in his response. Where it would have been easy for a professor to just fail a student for clearly not doing the reading, he insisted I “look more closely at the texts and do it again.” I remember feeling a red-hot shame which was likely visible under my many winter layers. That afternoon I purposefully skipped a canvassing shift, found a library room in Nashua, closely read every line of the texts, felt even more shame at realizing the obviousness of my mistake, and corrected the record. Asad was pleased with my correction, and even generously offered that “Reed now says many of the things that he criticizes in Wood, which makes it confusing.”

I arrived back in New York City just in time to start hearing about something called “Coronavirus.” The next several weeks were a smash cut of horrors. Bernie got ratfucked by the DNC and Obama, forced to drop out after Super Tuesday. Businesses started shutting down, people started wearing masks. My school went online, people were elbow-bumping instead of handshaking. My housing situation fell through, I had had enough. I got on a plane and went home to Seattle.

Due to the vast majority of the school’s population relocating, Asad paused classes until beginning again in early April. With the onset of the pandemic every university was trying to adapt and figure out the best way to go about things. Students were, rightfully, upset that they were paying the most expensive tuition in New York State—more than students at Ivy’s like Columbia and Cornell—for a now-online education. On top of this, not only did the school’s administration refuse to offer any kind of tuition reimbursement, they proposed raising the tuition amidst a global pandemic-induced online semester. This was more than students could bear, and we set to organizing an online student “strike.”

I could not have imagined a better professor to be in class with while attempting to organize against austerity during a global pandemic. As a small organizing cadre of students, we used the online nature of things to our advantage and tried to appear bigger than we were. We spoke authoritatively and made demands of the administration, claiming to represent the whole student body. We spoke to the press and exercised every avenue for maximum leverage. This included organizing with professors, both for their valuable input and to include any demands they may have had of the school. Much like the situation of COVID-19 more broadly, it was all of us against the administration. While maintaining his responsibilities as a professor, Asad quickly became a comrade, offering his advice and assistance to us. We would discuss strike tactics in class, linking our live conditions to the readings and his experience in other struggles. He was always deliberate in first situating us in a position of shared solidarity before encouraging us to clarify the thought behind our demands and tactics, ultimately being incredibly instrumental in what proved to be a largely successful “strike.” The decision to raise tuition was reversed, and a mandatory A/A- grading policy was implemented so that students wouldn’t face permanent marks on their transcripts for adapting to the new world of the pandemic.

I came to The New School precisely because of its reputation for left-wing thought and organizing, but I could never have imagined that within six months I would be thrown into strike organizing committees with Asad Haider speaking militantly of the UAW at UC Santa Cruz. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world.

The last time I spoke to Asad “face to face” was on May Day, 2020, when I was asked to moderate a panel on Zoom for Red May Seattle with him, Michael Hardt, and others. Philip, the Red May Seattle organizer, had asked me to speak a little about The New School Student Strike. Toward the end of the panel I brought it up and asked Asad if he had any thoughts or insight, since he had been involved. He replied: “Of course, you know, when the students told me about their idea for a strike I told them that they have to start a Leninist vanguard party, and that this will be the way to win their demands. And clearly it was successful!”

This was everything I loved about him. He took the dizzying, paradoxical, often miserable world of interminable Marxist debates and not only cut through it with the efficacy of a freshly sharpened machete, but made it funny. Asad knew that being on the Left and taking that seriously was, in some way, resigning yourself to a life of eternal argument, infighting, exhaustion, discourse, and, usually, defeat. There was no alternative, however, so he made it all a bit less miserable while he was there. This was a blessing that will surely become more and more apparent in his absence.

In our last email exchange I expressed dismay at learning that Asad was leaving The New School after only one year, a brief stint that resonated far beyond his tenure. For years to come, New School students would bemoan the fact that Asad was not kept on in the department. Asad kindly gave me his personal email and told me to stay in touch. I told him that I was not done learning from him, if he was up for it.

I am now in yet another miserable round of PhD applications in what is maybe the worst year for PhD applications in my lifetime. A few nights ago I was in bed making a list of who I needed to email in the morning regarding applications. Asad was on that list, I had wanted to inquire about studying under him at York. Then, I closed my notes app and opened Instagram, where I saw a post informing me of his passing. I have not brought myself to remove Asad’s name from the list yet.

I was correct that I was, and am, not done learning from Asad. I don’t think any of us are. I know he would have been up for it.

I will let Asad’s final words from our panel, in the context of May 2020, be his final words here.

What I think I know is that in the actions that we take now, we have to constantly be affirming the possibility of mobilizing an emancipatory politics. Whatever forms we experiment with, and they may be electoral campaigns, they may be the various kinds of coalitions among different kinds of workers at the level of production and reproduction and so on, but they all have to be oriented towards, I think, producing a new kind of unity. A new kind of unity which is of an emancipatory politics that forecasts the possibility of overcoming capitalism. Is it possible? I don’t know, but nevertheless we should commit to it.

-Sasha Slansky