In the course of working-class political struggles in the twentieth century, such a generic identity did already appear: the people. Georg Lukács credits Lenin’s characterization of the Russian Revolution for transforming the idea of the people into a generic revolutionary identity: “The vague and abstract concept of ‘the people’ had to be rejected, but only so that a revolutionary, discriminating concept of ‘the people’—the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed—could develop from a concrete understanding of the conditions of proletarian revolution.”<sup>4</sup> Mao and Third World people’s struggles further this characterization of the generic subject of communism. The “people” thus has a powerful legacy as a name for that political subject which strives for emancipatory egalitarianism.
Nevertheless, various ideologies speak in the people’s name. Constituting a subject in whose name it can speak is ideology’s primary function. Like communism, populism and democracy—sometimes filling themselves in as nations or races—claim the people as their subject. Communism is therefore not unique in its claim of the people as its subject. Its uniqueness consists in its presentation of the people as a divided subject. In contrast with populist emphases on the imaginary unity of the people and democratic reductions of the people to the ways in which they are given (outcomes of elections and polls, categories of demographic identity, media expressions of public and audience), communism presumes that the people are split—bourgeoisie and proletariat, oppressors and oppressed, few and many. Rather than some kind of organic community, society arises around a fundamental antagonism. “Class conflict” is the Marxist name for this antagonism. Lenin’s “revolutionary, discriminating concept of ‘the people’” asserts this division within the people. Communists recognize the people in and as that division. Instead of asserting unity, communists assert the gap.
The party is a form for this assertion. As Badiou emphasizes, Marx’s rendering of the proletariat as that generic group the liberation of which is a universal liberation is an “extraordinary invention.” Badiou notes that the history of this invention “was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather the history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party.”<sup>5</sup> The problem today is thus not only the inability of “working class” to name a generic identity. It is also and relatedly a collapse of confidence in the party as a political organization capable of representing this identity.
The saturation of the generic political identity of the working class became manifest in the multiplication of political identities. From 1968’s intoxication with the politics of the beautiful moment, through the eighties’ embrace of civil society and the politics of society’s own self-targeting, into the “activistism” and “movementism” of the alterglobalization movement, the Left has claimed as a victory the symptom of its defeat: the erosion of working-class political power and the accompanying decay of its political parties. Defeated on the political plane—the name of this defeat is “neoliberalism”—the Left shifted to the social and cultural terrain. It fragmented into issues and identities. On some issues and with respect to some identities, there were political advances. At the same time, in jettisoning the struggle for political power, the Left lost the capacity to defend and advance the interests of the people. Economic inequality increased. Commitment to social provisioning—education, public housing, welfare, social services
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