Holloway is right to say that the party is a form for disciplining class struggle, but he fails to consider what discipline means. For communists, discipline involves building solidarity, strengthening collectivity, and sustaining courage in the face of capitalism’s efforts to isolate us in self-interest and fear. The “instrumentalist impoverishment” of which Holloway accuses Marxists is Holloway’s own, apparent in his omission of the abundant life-world of practices organized by communist parties everywhere. It prevents him from acknowledging the diverse activities involved in communist party organizing, activities such as establishing newspapers and literary journals, forming youth leagues and sports teams, building support networks for women’s groups and racialized minorities. Once these multiple and varied activities are included in our conception of discipline, we see again the party as a social link, one that interrupts the imaginary and symbolic order of the bourgeoisie to insert egalitarian ideals and collectivist perspectives. Understood most generally, party discipline is nothing but establishing and maintaining this link.
Bensaïd observes that Holloway reduces “the luxuriant history of the workers’ movement, its experiences and controversies to a single line of march of statism through the ages, as if very different theoretical and strategic conceptions had not been constantly battling with each other.”<sup>83</sup> What Holloway refers to as the subordination of myriad forms of class struggle to the goal of gaining control of the state has historically included an array of tactics and been carried out in multiple time frames. Tactics for winning the state span a wide range: from securing an electoral majority and participating in governing coalitions to organizing factories and neighborhoods into a counterforce; stretching the resources of the state until it collapses; subverting the state from within; violently overthrowing it and militarily invading it. These different tactics fold into one another, operating along different time frames with short-term and longrange goals and cutting across national and regional borders in fronts, alliances, rings, and pacts. Nothing about communist organizing presumes the externality of the state to society much less the autonomy of the state from international political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental forces.
A less reductive treatment of the communist revolutionary legacy would note how communist visions of the party as a means of waging revolution explicitly state, time and again, that revolution requires changing people, beliefs, and practices. Even crude treatments of historical communism admit as much when they attack as totalitarian twentieth-century efforts to create the new socialist man or a new type of human being.
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