Under contemporary conditions of communicative capitalism, nonstop ubiquitous media offer a never-ending supply of disasters, invasions, shootings, and protests. Scandals and epidemics displace one another as the most important issue of the day, their measure in tweets testimony to their inability to produce a gap in the dominant order. Anyone can issue an interpretation of an event, calling it this or that and attempting to push discussions in one direction rather than another. Moreover, a certain reflexivity, a self-consciousness about media, is a constitutive feature of communicative capitalism. Hashtags, slogans, memes, images, and phrases or manners of speech that briefly achieve a kind of recognizable currency before becoming outmoded or forgotten all point to the multiple, distributed ways in which communicative acts are less about meaning than circulation, less about use value than exchange value.<sup>8</sup> This setting poses particular problems for left politics: How can acts remain intelligible as acts of a collective subject? How do the people prevent their acts from being absorbed back into communicative capitalism?
The party provides an affective infrastructure that can help address these problems. Rather than ceding the transmission of the overtone to intellectuals, particularly those individualized within academic or journalistic career paths, and instead of requiring fragmented activists working along multiple separate trajectories to produce their alliance event by event, issue by issue, the party is a form for concentration and endurance. In a capitalist setting, the party provides communism with a body—one that is heterogeneous, porous, and polymorphous.
By the end of the twentieth century, this body was present primarily as memory, fear, bureaucracy, or sect, as former necessity and current impossibility. The perspective it provides became so many scattered inclinations to political correctness, no less righteous and insistent for all their fragmentation into weakness. Indeed, the superegoic effects of righteous injunction seem all the more intense precisely because there is no party that can anchor them, no program to which one might appeal for justification and relief. Circulating as insults and directives in social media, these effects rage as an incessant urge to police and punish, whipping the Left into the frenzy of its own failure. The Left can see differences, but no longer pull them together into a politics.
Concentration and endurance are not the same as agreement. Communist parties— like the Left more broadly—are always sites of debate, argument, factions, and splintering. Put in Lacanese: to think of the party in terms of either agreement or schism is to remain at the level of the imaginary where the party is nothing but a figure of egoism and competition. But the symbolic dimension of the party, its form as a place from which communists assess themselves and their actions, is what matters. Concentration and endurance adhere to the party form at the level of the symbolic.
The everyday experiences of rank-and-file members of CPUSA and CPGB testify to the symbolic effect of the Communist Party. I use examples from these parties because of their weakness. The US and UK were neither party-states nor parliamentary systems where Communists have ever had much electoral success. Even in the 1930s and ’40s when the Communist Party was at its strongest in the US and UK, actual political power was out of reach. In the twentieth century, neither country appeared on the brink of proletarian revolution. Instead each encountered a mix of deradicalizing middle-class prosperity, working-class defeat, and capitalist aggression, not to mention the intense anti-communism of the Cold War. How, then, under conditions even Moscow agreed were far from revolutionarily ripe, did a communist sensibility endure? What enabled the Communist Party to provide a location from which members in the US and UK could see their actions as necessary and important and that even non-members could and would adopt? My claim, as I mention at the outset of this chapter, is that the affective infrastructure of the Party provided the material support for its symbolic location.
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