{"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":104,"pdf_page":103,"physical_index":103,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ff043825b30c00181c464f71d6393355832a56f2830aba0f278d4f3332ecd565"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The crowds, riots, occupations, and revolutions of the early decades of the twentyfirst century are demonstrating that the rejection of the party is itself outmoded. As Jason E. Smith rightly points out, “the question of the party-form can only take place with reference to, and indeed from within the dynamics of, contemporary struggles.” These struggles pose the organizational question of the party as “they run up against certain impasses that recur with such predictable if dispiriting regularity.”<sup>8</sup> Confronting the challenge of generating, concentrating, and sustaining collective energies, political movement itself thrusts the problematic of the party back onto the terrain of left theory and practice. Peter D. Thomas writes,\n\nit has been practical experience of the contradictory processes of left regroupment on an international scale—from reconfigurations over the last decade on the Latin American left, to the varying success of coalition parties in Europe such as Die Linke in Germany, Izquierda Unida in Spain, Syriza in Greece and the Front de Gauche in France, to the tentative emergence of new political formations across North Africa and the Arab world —that has firmly placed the question of the party back on the contemporary agenda.<sup>9</sup>\n\nMovement actors increasingly recognize the limitations of a politics conceived in terms of issue- and identity-focused activisms, mass demonstrations that for all intents and purposes are essentially one-offs, and the momentary localism of anarchist street fighting. Thus they are asking again the organizational question, reconsidering the political possibilities of the party form.\n\nThis chapter supports contemporary efforts to concentrate and intensify the international Left by offering a theory of the party that emphasizes the psychodynamics of collectivity, the ways that our collectivity works back on us to make us more than many. I take up critiques of the party form contemporaneous with its emergence: the party is too centralized, too authoritarian. It’s a form by which the few dominate the many. In contemporary left discussions, such critiques are often voiced as if they were new insights born of recent experience. They aren’t. They were present already in the early years of working class political movement. I focus on the most thorough version of the critique of the party as it appears in the work of Robert Michels. Michels’s famous “iron law of oligarchy” applies not just to socialist parties. He extends it to democratic and anarchistic political formations as well. Political organization of any sort entails a gap between the few and the many. Rather than being constrained by Michels’s analysis, I treat it as an account of the enabling conditions of political collectivity, a way to understand the effects of collectivity on the collective. No party, class, or collectivity is identical with itself. Each is ruptured by an irreducible gap. Drawing from Lacan, I use concepts from psychoanalysis to theorize this gap as a social link or space, highlighting the relation of transference. Transference lets us see the dynamic features concentrated in the space of the Other. I close by putting my psychodynamic account of the party to work, illustrating it with examples from the Communist Party of the United States in the 1930s and deploying it in a critique of John Holloway’s argument against taking power. My goal in offering a psychodynamic theory of the party is to dissolve the hold that criticism of the party form still has on the Left such that we can accept again the responsibility of political organization.\n\n104","previous_page":103,"next_page":105}