{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":102,"pdf_page":101,"physical_index":101,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dc6a3f582925d303e15a0eb8c0b60766490d0126bcdfcc824f5a7f9f269412de"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"More Than Many\n\nMany on the Left think that the party is an outmoded political form. For them, what ’68 inspired and ’89 ostensibly confirmed is the conviction that radical left politics necessarily exceeds the constraints of the political party.\n\nOften voiced as a criticism of specific parties, the conviction that the party is useless for the Left swallows up an array of historical particulars. The rejected communist party is not simply the ossified bureaucracy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the other ruling party-states of the former East. It is neither China’s Communist Party, unable to free itself from its inner bourgeoisie, nor France’s and Italy’s compromised and complicit parties. It’s the party form as such. Specific parties are rejected for errors singular or aggregate. They pushed for revolution at the cost of unnecessary violence and loss of life. They pulled back from revolution, selling out the working class and setting back the communist cause. Errors become evidence of the hierarchy, exclusion, and discipline irrevocably staining the party form as such, preventing it from being responsive to our changing times. Criticism of specific parties for the betrayals accompanying their acquiring of or participation in state power merges with a more general critique of the party as an ultimately authoritarian political association. The party is reduced to the actuality of its mistakes, its role as concentrator of collective aspirations and affects diminished if not forgotten.<sup>1</sup>\n\nConsider the shift in radical politics marked by “1968” and characterizing key tendencies over the next decades. Leftists turned away from the party politics targeting the state and toward the social movements targeting society.<sup>2</sup> This turn expressed itself in multiple ways, indeed, multiplicity can be said to be its primary characteristic. Whether highlighting oppression based in sex and gender, exclusion anchored in race and ethnicity, the disciplinary mechanisms of institutions (university, church, family, union, party, clinic), patterns of hierarchy in organizations ostensibly committed to its abolition, the stultifying effects of bureaucracy, the deadening normativity of consumerism, or the overarchingly machinic character of militarized industrial life, the critical project at the end of the sixties was marked by the rejection of the state and the constitution of a new terrain of struggle at the level of the social. How to live freely and authentically became a, if not the, primary political question, one that state politics could not answer. Remarkably, the rejection of party and state cut across state socialist and capitalist societies, across East/West and North/South divisions. Whether the critique was issued from a liberal, democratic, feminist, socialist, anti-racist, anarchist,\n\n4\n\n102","previous_page":101,"next_page":103}