At the same time and together with the global wave of popular unrest, the collective energy of Occupy at its height nevertheless points to an “idea whose time has come.” People are moving together in growing opposition to the policies and practices of states organized in the interest of capital as a class. Crowds are forcing the Left to return again to questions of organization, endurance, and scale. Through what political forms might we advance? For many of us, the party is emerging as the site of an answer.
Against the presumption that the individual is the fundamental unit of politics, I focus on the crowd. Across the globe, crowds are pressing their opposition and rupturing the status quo, the actuality of their movement displacing the politics of identity. Bringing together thinkers such as Elias Canetti and Alain Badiou, I highlight the “egalitarian discharge” of the crowd event as an intense experience of substantive collectivity. I make fidelity to this event the basis for a new theory of the communist party. Because global movements are themselves pushing us to consider the possibilities in and of the party form, we have to recommence imagining the party of communists.<sup>4</sup> Who might we be and become as an international revolutionary party again, in our time? To think clearly about these questions, we need to consider the party form unfettered by the false concreteness of specific parties in the contingency of their histories. Liberals and democrats are not the only political theorists who can reflect on their modes of association in the abstract. Communists must do this as well.
As a means of breaking out of the binaries of reform or revolution, mass or vanguard party that historically have inflected discussions of the party form, I approach the function and purpose of the communist party psycho-dynamically. I draw from Robert Michels and Jacques Lacan to think through the affects the party generates and the unconscious processes it mobilizes. The role of the party isn’t to inject knowledge into the working class. Nor is it to represent the interests of the working class on the terrain of politics. Rather, the function of the party is to hold open a gap in our setting so as to enable a collective desire for collectivity.<sup>5</sup> “Through such a gap or moment,” Daniel Bensaïd writes, “can arise the unaccomplished fact, which contradicts the fatality of the accomplished fact.”<sup>6</sup> The crowd’s breach of the predictable and given creates the possibility that a political subject might appear. The party steps into that breach and fights to keep it open for the people.
Canetti makes a point I return to throughout the book: crowds come together for the sake of an absolute equality felt most intensely in a moment he refers to as the “discharge.” Akin to Lacan’s notion of “enjoyment” (“jouissance,” the only substance known to psychoanalysis), the discharge provides a material ground for the party. The party is a body that can carry the egalitarian discharge after the crowds disperse, channeling its divisive promise of justice into organized political struggle.
Crowds
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