The supposition of Crowds and Party is that we have no choice but to answer “yes.” To help us get to yes, to make a party of communists seem compelling to more of us again, I offer an approach to the party inspired by the crowd. Faithful to the egalitarian rupture of the crowd event, the communist party holds open the gap through which the people appear as the political subject. Readers anchored in the classics of revolutionary socialism might balk at what seems at first glance to be an abandonment of Marxist terms. They shouldn’t. The “people” has a rich legacy in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: the “people” are the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed (in contrast to the populist rendering of the people as an organic unity). Under conditions of communicative capitalism, crowds are the proletarianized many, those whose communicative engagements are expropriated from them in processes of accumulation and dispossession that benefit capital as a class. Readers inspired by radical democratic, anarchist, and post-Marxist theories might balk at a return to the party. They shouldn’t. The party is a basic form of political struggle. If innovation is necessary for finding our way out of the current political impasse, then the party, too, can be a site for experimentation and change.
Typically, socialist and communist discussions of the party gel around the themes of reform or revolution, mass or vanguard, factory or state. These discussions are too limiting. Missing is the affective dimension of the party, the way that the perspective of the party operates through different organizational terrains. The party knots together unconscious processes across a differential field to enable a communist political subjectivity. To think through these processes as the effects of collectivity back upon itself, I draw out the psychodynamics of the party. Providing a strength and direction we would otherwise lack, the party generates the practical optimism through which struggles endure.
Many eschew the party as a form for political power, decision, and organization. They fall back into the affirmation of individual autonomy, reasserting capitalist ideology. Discarding the party form, they jettison the possibility of building collective power. I demonstrate how the power the party unleashes is the power we already have
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