The Party Organizer reveals a party in the process of exerting pressure on itself, of imagining itself and struggling as it produces a place from which to see itself. This place is in flux, unstable, sometimes occupied by idealized revolutionary workers and sometimes the place from which workers are idealized. The stronger the Party feels itself becoming, the fiercer and more intense the demands it puts on itself. A letter from an active Party comrade in Chicago expresses the pressure of the relentless injunction to do more:
I will be criticized next Tuesday night at the organizers meeting because the unit is not larger; because I have not done more; because I did not attend some meeting or other … I do the best I can. However, no matter how much I do, I always hate to show my face because there are things I do not do that I was told to do. Directives, directives, directives. An organization letter sometimes of three pages. Hell, I could not do one tenth of it. I am getting tired. I am just as much a Communist as ever, but I am not 10 communists.<sup>70</sup>
Žižek observes that the symbolic space of the Other “operates like a yardstick against which I can measure myself.”<sup>71</sup> The communists appearing in the Party Organizer measure themselves as many. The desire that expresses itself in the urgent demands they make on themselves is collective—ten communists—even as it is felt as impossible superegoic command.
Political Organization and its Discontents
Thus far I’ve emphasized the psychodynamics of collectivity. Whereas critics of the party tend to fault the form itself for its centralism and authoritarianism, I’ve used Michels’s discussion of the technical and psychological tendencies to oligarchy in any political group to assert the unavoidability of a gap between few and many. Organizing crowds involves division, delegation, and distribution. Number—being many—has affective force, as we see in prestige, imitation, and identification. Further, I’ve drawn from psychoanalysis to theorize the gap as a link, a social space knotting together unconscious processes and perspectives. Inserting the party in this gap, I’ve shown collectivity’s work back upon its members. Their very association alienates them from their setting, opening up the possibility of another perspective on it and separating them from how they are given under capitalism.
To be sure, that political organization means a gap between many and few is unavoidable does not imply that the same people should be on one side or the other of it.
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