Crowds and Party · 第 103 页

Maoist, or militant perspective, the underlying supposition was the same: politics exceeds the narrowness of class and party; it thus requires turning away from the state and toward everyday life in all its unique specificity.

Forty years later, the suppositions of this critique continue to frame left politics. Despite their otherwise acute differences, communist theorists such as Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri beat the same anti-state, anti-party drums. Radical democratic activists emphasize global summits and events, NGOs and CSOs, communities and the local. Militants refuse and subtract, as if nothing had changed, as if politics were a matter of the micro-pure, as if the setting of politics remained that of a centralized state and dominant party instead of a combined and uneven mix of centralizing and decentralizing forces in various distributed combinations of state use of market and market reliance on state. The Left repeats a forty-year-old critique, as if its rejection of mediating institutions like the party did not serve capitalism’s interest in preventing the buildup of the solidarity necessary for the collective power of the proletarianized.³

The problem with the Left’s entrapment in repetition is not the repetition. It’s that the repetition prevents us from acknowledging how struggles at the level of the social come up against their limits in the state and market. David Ost’s account of the Polish Solidarity movement provides the best political analysis of this encounter with the limit. Documenting the deep connections between the spirit of ’68 and the Polish movement in the seventies and eighties, Ost describes its goal of a “permanently open democracy,” a political field irreducible to the oppositions between state socialism and market liberalism.⁴ Solidarity emerged as a postmodern anti-politics that deliberately abjured state power, seeking instead the strengthening of citizens in civil society. A left politics outside the party, Solidarity appeared as a fascinating experiment in a new political form, as Badiou puts it.⁵ What Ost makes clear is that the movement “became irrelevant the moment it succeeded.”⁶ Legalization, official recognition of an organization by a monopolistic state, was unavoidably an encroachment on that state. There was no way that Solidarity could pursue its program of societal democratization without touching state power, as it realized shortly before the December 1981 crackdown.

Slavoj Žižek makes an analogous argument with respect to capitalist societies. Antisexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and other such social politics founder against the hard rock of the market. Žižek writes,

The domain of global capitalist market relations is the Other scene of the so-called repoliticization of civil society advocated by the partisans of “identity politics” and other postmodern forms of politicization: all the talk about new forms of politics bursting out all over … ultimately resembles the obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in order to ensure that something—what really matters—will not be disturbed, that it will remain immobilized.⁷

Newness and experimentation, not to mention preoccupations with changes at the level of the individual and actions focused on media and culture, take the place of a politics targeting capitalism and the state, ensuring that they continue doing what they do. At some point, however, an encounter with the state or the economy becomes unavoidable as one or the other becomes a barrier to movement ideals. The fantasy of a politics capable of remaining focused on authentic social relations, a revolution in personal life, and flourishing cultural experiments occludes the legal and economic conditions that either make them possible or prevent their realization.

103