{"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":121,"pdf_page":120,"physical_index":120,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"373db87aa8ef247ed7f1f59bc32a0c1f6f605df2423940b23b4a5ee71c3d8f90"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The history of people’s struggles (anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc.) demonstrates profound and ongoing mobilization on precisely this point. Likewise, that the gap is unavoidable does not imply that any given instantiation of the gap is permanent or justified. There are better and worse parties and leaders. Some are more faithful to the crowd’s egalitarian discharge than others. And Michels’s own discussion brings out the torsion between many and few as power shifts and folds between them: what appears as an idolized leader is a refraction of the crowd’s enjoyment of the power of number. Finally, that the gap between many and few is unavoidable does not mean that gaps should line up with each other: doing more work should not imply garnering more material benefit. In sum, the crucial point that follows from the unavoidable gap between few and many is that the charges of centralism and authoritarianism leveled at the communist party from its inception in fact apply to politics as such. If we are to engage politically, we cannot avoid the effects—and affects —of number. To think that we can is to persist in the fantasy of the beautiful moment.\n\nThe utility of my psychodynamic approach to the party becomes clear in contrast with John Holloway’s well-known attempt to imagine a revolutionary politics aimed at abolishing power altogether, an aim shared by most anarchists. Published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Holloway’s influential account anticipates the postanarchist converging of post-structuralism and anarchism.<sup>72</sup> It also repeats century-old criticisms of the party form, updating and distilling these criticisms into a concentrated rejection of power per se. Variations on Holloway’s arguments against the party for its state-centrism and externality to the working class appear today as a kind of common sense throughout the radical Left.\n\nHolloway orients his vision of politics in a notion of “doing” as “the movement of practical negativity.” Doing, for Holloway, goes beyond the given, and hence is akin to the gap I associate with the work of collectivity back on itself. Embedded in the flow of human movement, Holloway’s doing is likewise necessarily social: “there is a community of doing, a collective of doers, a flow through time and space.”<sup>73</sup> But insofar as his collective doers are nothing but flows through time and space, their collectivity exerts no effect back upon them as a collective. Holloway’s collective is at best a crowd. At worst it is nothing more than mobile social substance. It can split a field, produce a gap, but it has no place from which it looks at itself.\n\nLacking reflexivity, the sociality Holloway describes is a sociality without sociality. He comes close to acknowledging this omission when he says that “this collective doing involves, if the collective flow of doing is recognized, a mutual recognition of one another as doers, as active subjects. Our individual doing receives its social validation from its recognition as part of the social flow.”<sup>74</sup> People recognize one another, in relations imagined as multiple dyads, exchanges of recognition. Yet the role of the Other as the field of social validation remains unremarked. It has no effects or dynamics of its own, no impact apart from the acknowledgment of individuals. Holloway’s flow of doing, in other words, omits the function of the space of the Other.\n\nHolloway nevertheless presupposes such an Other space when he criticizes the party for its externality to the working class. In the Marxist tradition, he argues, the failure of workers to revolt is explained with notions of ideology, hegemony, and false consciousness. All three are “accompanied by an assumption that the working class is a ‘they.’”<sup>75</sup> Holloway claims that the problem of communist organization is “how can we make them see?” “We” see clearly. “They” do not. Holloway’s mistake consists in the way he presents division as if it were a division between groups—workers on one side, party on another—rather than a division constitutive of political subjectivity (of the gap necessary for the subject to appear). Seeing differently involves a reflective twist, a different perspective on where one is. Where one is has to appear other than how it was. There has to be a gap between the social flow, to use Holloway’s term, and the political assertion of this flow. The problem is not externality, as if the party or the state were separate from and unaffected by society. The problem is the perspective from which something appears differently. A strike can be a matter for the workers in a specific factory. It can also be politicized as a component of a larger struggle. Is a particular strike simply for higher wages so that individual workers can increase their capacities to consume? Or does it incorporate claims of fairness, equality, and right? Does it link itself to other such actions so that it appears as the struggle of a class?\n\n121","previous_page":120,"next_page":122}