We the Party
At the end of the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century, parties organizing the working class held out the promise of consolidating mass power, whether into forms for its radical self-assertion or for its subordination and control. By the 1970s and ’80s, however, wide swathes of the Left had become convinced that the party form was no longer adequate to left aspirations. This conviction had multiple sources: the stagnation and authoritarianism of the party-states of the former East; the complicity and betrayals of communist and socialist parties in the former West; the failure of class analysis to address and include the politics of identity, particularly with respect to sex and race, to mention but a few. The loss of confidence in the party as a form for left politics accompanied organized capital’s attacks on unions, waged violently and directly through state power and policy as well as through corporate off-shoring of factories and changes in the technical composition of labor. The political incapacity of socialist and communist parties in the face of this onslaught—an incapacity that manifested itself in Anglo-European contexts as adaptation to the individualist, consumerist, and market suppositions of the resurgent capitalist class and failure to defend working-class political achievements—seemed a final nail in the coffin of the politics of class and party that had defined the century. In the terms that came to define the theoretical debates of the time, there was nothing “essential” about class, class identity, class politics, or class struggle.<sup>41</sup> And, with no class politics, there was no need for a class party, that is, a party that takes as its goal the abolition of the conditions of capitalist exploitation that create classes. Instead, left politics would involve an ever-expanding array of issues and identities, the problematizing and pluralizing of sedimented practices and ideas throughout the terrain of the social, cultural, and increasingly, the personal.
All this would unfold against the background of a capitalism to which there was no alternative. Better put, any alternative (for those still interested in putting an end to capitalist exploitation—many radical democrats proceeded as if their goal were simply capitalism with a human face) would emerge not as a result of organized struggle or left strategy but immanently, organically, as a direct effect of capitalism’s own development, spontaneism now refigured as autonomy.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire captured the political atmosphere on the dispersing Left at century’s end. Hardt and Negri offered a vision of innumerable local struggles across the globe, each striking at the heart of Empire.<sup>42</sup> These struggles may well be incommunicable, their cries and anger, goals and demands confined to their settings, but this incommunicability, Empire told us, is an advantage. Struggles are free to unfold on their own, unhindered by the discipline and constraint of larger organizations. Autonomous struggles don’t reinforce state structures. They enhance the generative creativity of multiple modes of becoming, releasing the constituent power of the multitude from Empire’s parasitic hold. Key to the appeal of the multitude concept, then, was its expression of weakness as strength. The absence of a common language— not to mention a program—didn’t appear as an indication of the actual incapacity of the Left to cohere into a discernible politics and present a viable opposition to capitalist and right-wing forces. Instead it marked a liberation from the constraints of Marxist dogma, an opening for politicizations hroughout the social field.
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