Holloway’s critique of externality repeats the old charge of vanguardism leveled at the Leninist party. Holloway attributes to Lenin the view that the party is necessary because class consciousness can only come to workers from “without.” Lenin’s ostensible error here is one of elitism. It comes from validating intellectuals over workers: workers on their own lack the capacity to develop class consciousness; intellectuals, however, have the requisite knowledge and skills. Daniel Bensaïd demonstrates that this argument is misplaced.<sup>76</sup> Lenin’s point is that political consciousness comes from outside the economic struggle, not the class struggle. The economic struggle takes place between particular interests within the field of capital. The terms of the struggle are set by capitalism. The political struggle—for communists —is over the field itself. When “we” is used as the designator for the subject of a politics it asserts more than a collective will. It announces a will to collectivity, a will to fight together on terms that challenge rather than accept the given. Class consciousness is not spontaneous. As Žižek emphasizes, what is spontaneous is misperception—the perception that one is alone or that one’s circumstances are unique.<sup>77</sup> The political “we” of the party ruptures this immediate consciousness to assert a collective one in its place.
Holloway extends his critique of the externality of the party to Georg Lukács. He charges Lukács with failing to explain how the party can adopt the perspective of totality. This charge, too, misses its mark. The party doesn’t adopt the perspective of totality in the sense that it can and does see everything. Rather, the party tries to establish the space for a perspective on the totality, a perspective that is not determined completely by the setting in which it finds itself as if it had no impact on this setting. The party works to create the condition of possibility for a perspective that, empirically impossible, ruptures the openness of the capitalist manifold from within.
Holloway takes direct aim at a Marxism viewed as a source of objective, scientific knowledge:
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