The party suggests itself as a mode of association appropriate to such a process. It offers a political form that spans multiple levels and domains. Typically, parties scale across local, regional, national, and sometimes international levels. Rather than stuck in the local or confined to the abstractions of the global, the party is an organizational form operative on different scales; indeed, its success—electorally or otherwise—depends on this capacity. Further, parties are carriers of the knowledge that comes with political experience. Whether this knowledge is local—histories of relationships, of practices, of who knows whom, what, where, and how—or larger—knowledge of resource extraction and the structure of industry, of civil wars in far off places, of racial histories, of the challenges of social reproduction, of programming, database construction, and design—parties recognize the breadth and depth of knowledge important for political struggle and rule. Providing a body for a knowledge that exceeds what any one person can know, the party takes a position on that knowledge. It fits issues into a platform such that they are not so many contradictory and individual preferences but instead a broader vision for which it will fight. What is sometimes dismissed as party bureaucracy thus needs to be revalued as an institutional capacity necessary for political struggle and rule in a complex and uneven terrain.
The electoral success of Syriza, Greece’s coalition of the radical Left, points to the new relevance of the party form. The Greek legacy of intense party politics is a unique feature of its political culture. Nevertheless, Syriza’s initial victories stemmed in part from innovations in communist party organizing: commitment to social movements, respect for movements’ autonomy, support of local solidarity networks, and enough involvement in institutions “to seem capable of transforming the balance of forces at the level of national political life.”<sup>43</sup> For some Lefts, particularly in the US and UK, it is this last feature that has been conspicuously absent. Hence, our actions fail to gain momentum. Crowds amass, but they don’t endure. In contrast, Syriza’s initial achievements demonstrated a dynamic relation between crowd and party: the crowd that pushes the party to exceed expectations, the party that finds the courage of the people in the haste of the crowd.
Three additional aspects of Syriza’s political opening contribute to rethinking the party today. The first concerns the limits of political victory confined to the level of the nation-state. The institutions not only of Europe but of global finance and governance restrict national governments’ range of maneuver. This poses challenges to the Left internationally, suggesting, at a minimum, the necessity of strong left alliances and coordinated institutional strategies. More maximally it directs us toward the party as an infrastructure for such alliances and strategies. The second aspect involves defeat. No party will be everything to everyone. Just as individuals are internally divided and contradictory, split among conscious and unconscious desires, so is a party—like any institution—a body that is not self-identical. Political forms aren’t pure. To expect perfection is to displace politics into an imaginary realm sheltered from difference and disappointment. Despite Syriza’s inability to deliver on its promises (or, more strongly, despite its betrayal of the very supporters who mobilized in its behalf), it nevertheless shifted the terrain of the possible. Because of Syriza, the European, British, and North American Left have a sense of political possibility they previously lacked. Common sense has shifted, as is apparent in the political rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US. The third aspect of Syriza’s political opening instructive for the Left concerns political will. Kouvelakis writes, “The Podemos experience in Spain as well as Syriza in Greece shows that if the radical Left makes suitable proposals, then it can arrive at an understanding with these movements and provide a credible political ‘condensation’ of their demands.” The making of “suitable proposals” depends on political will, a Left able to put aside its differences, organize, and think strategically about the pursuit of political power. The problem posing itself today concerns less the details of party organization (membership requirements, centralization versus networked structure, mechanisms for accountable leadership) than it does solidary political will. Can the Left’s wide array of associations come together in a way that will achieve a real political advance?
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