Crowds and Party · 第 46 页

targeting, isolation, and control.

Left realism’s second premise is that collectivity is impossible. We are so different, so singularized in our experiences and ambitions, so invested in the primacy of one set of tactics over another that we can’t cohere in common struggle. At best we can find momentary affinities and provisional coalitions. Politics should thus involve cultivating our own unique point of view—or the point of view of our sect, tribe, or locale—rather than trying to organize these views into something like a strategy. Left realism implies that coming together itself should be exposed as a fantasy covering over a hidden Hobbesian impulse to transcendence, a myth some use to manipulate others into fighting for their interests.

A further variation on the premise of impossibility is that fundamental changes in the world economy preclude collectivity.⁷⁴ Rather than concentrating workers in centralized locations, contemporary capitalism disperses them across the globe. It relies on long supply chains and global capital, using complexity to dissolve sites of accountability.⁷⁵ Workers in ever more sectors of the capitalist economy are thus isolated, immiserated, and politically disorganized. To be sure, immiseration and political disorganization also characterize the early decades of revolutionary socialism. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Rosa Luxemburg all emphasize how competition means that workers tend to remain isolated, lack solidarity, and take a long time to unite. This is why unions and parties have to be created and why creating them is a struggle. Left realism’s one-sided emphasis on the objective dimension of our present capitalist setting fails to acknowledge the subjective dimension of perspective, organization, and will: our perspective is part of the setting it sees. This subjective dimension has always been crucial to the Marxist tradition. The communist response to isolation is not to let the reality that produces individualism determine our political horizon. Instead, it is to build solidarity.

The assumptions that collectivity is both undesirable and impossible derive from an even more insidious assumption of left realism: that politics involves the individual. Manuel Castells, for example, treats as a key cultural transformation “the emergence of a new set of values defined as individuation and autonomy, rising from the social movements of the 1970s, and permeating throughout society in the following decades with increasing intensity.”⁷⁶ Exactly how politics involves the individual varies—no one speaksfor me but me; the personal is political; ifI can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. But the premise remains the same: a left politics has to encourage and express the multiplicity of individual projects. Individuals have to choose and decide—even as the left fails to provide something anyone could actually choose. Leaders, vanguards, and parties are modes of politics for a time not our own, we are told. They are remnants of a political-economic assemblage that has already crumbled.⁷⁷

Left realism feels realistic to some because it resonates with the prevailing ethos of late neoliberalism that tells us to do it ourselves, stay local and small, and trust no one because they will only betray us. It affirms capitalism’s insistence on immediacy and flexibility and the state’s replacement of long-term planning and social services by crisis management and triage. Left realism is good on spontaneous outrage. But it fails to organize itself in a way that can do something with this outrage. Disorganized, it remains unable to use crises to build and take power much less construct more equitable and less crisis-prone social and economic arrangements.

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