One might object that contemporary decentered, federated, and interlinked states are not in anyone’s hands and therefore cannot be seized. This objection, however, implicitly endorses a liberal technocratic view of the state. It proceeds as if the systems of laws and assumptions on which states are based are nothing more than neutral protocols. The classic communist ideal of the dictatorship of the proletariat confronts this lie directly. The liberal state is in actuality the dictatorship of capital. Its premises ensure that the benefit of the doubt, “common sense,” falls on the side of capitalism, that what feels like the right decision is the one that confirms the bourgeois mindset: protect private property, preserve individual liberties, promote trade and commerce. The goal of gaining control of the state takes aim at this underlying level of laws, practices, and expectations, targeting common sense to make it the sense for and of the common.
Capitalists will not voluntarily reorganize processes of accumulation so as to put an end to proletarianization. They will not simply hand over control and ownership of the means of production. States will not just stop oppressing, arresting, and imprisoning those who resist them. Such fundamental changes will only come about through political struggle, carried out internationally. A Left that eschews organizing for power will remain powerless. This is why we are talking about the party again.
1 Gavin Walker, “The Body of Politics: On the Concept of the Party,” Theory and Event 16: 4, 2013.
2 In addition to the debate over the “new times” in Marxism Today discussed in chapter one, differing instances ofthis same turn can be found in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985; Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992; Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, New York: Autonomedia, 2010; originally published in French in 1985.
3 See the contributions to the debate “Communist Currents,” eds. Bruno Bosteels and Jodi Dean, South Atlantic Quarterly 113: 4, Fall 2014, 659–835.
4 David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990, 14.
5 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, London: Verso, 2010, 258.
6 Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, 57.
7 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, London: Verso, 1999, 353–54.
8 Jason E. Smith, “Contemporary Struggles and the Question of the Party: A Reply to Gavin Walker,” Theory and Event 16: 4, 2013.
9 Peter D. Thomas, “The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization,” Theory & Event 16: 4, 2013.
10 For example, Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis; and Joshua Clover and Aaron Benanav, “Can Dialectics Break BRICS,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113: 4, Fall 2014, 743–59.
11 Mikhail Bakunin, “On the International Workingmen’s Association and Karl Marx,” 1872. Available at marxists.org.
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