Anyone who is unwilling to talk about the party should not talk about political transformation.
1 Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, New York: Basic Books, 1977, 123–24. I am indebted to Jon Flanders for the gift ofthis book.
2 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984, 22, originally published in German in 1960.
3 Ibid., 29.
4 Ibid., 23.
5 Ibid., 197.
6 Ibid., 185.
7 Gavin Walker, “The Body of Politics: On the Concept of the Party,” Theory & Event 16: 4, 2013.
8 See my discussion in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, chapter one.
9 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 53.
10 Ibid., 64.
11 Ibid., 11.
12 Thanks to Bonnie Honig and James Martel for working out this formulation.
13 Gornick, The Romance ofAmerican Communism, 36.
14 Idid., 46.
15 Ibid., 52.
16 Ibid., 32.
17 Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism, London: Verso, 2006. The book is comprised of three essays originally published in New Left Review between 1985 and 1987.
18 Ibid., 7.
19 Ibid., 8.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 67.
22 Ibid., 171.
23 Ibid., 206.
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