{"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":123,"pdf_page":122,"physical_index":122,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e61d4696c2aa9918ae5622fb631335462734cba211b44df6cf9c80c3bc6b304e"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"If Marxism is understood as the correct, objective, scientific knowledge of history, then this begs the question, “who says so?” Who holds the correct knowledge and how did they gain that knowledge? Who is the subject of the knowledge? The notion of Marxism as “science” implies a distinction between those who know and those who do not know, a distinction between those who have true consciousness and those who have false consciousness.<sup>78</sup>\n\nThe subject supposed to know is a structural position. The party doesn’t know. It organizes a transferential space offering the position of the subject supposed to know. In Žižek’s words, “the authority of the Party is not that of determinate positive knowledge, but that of the form of knowledge, of a new type of knowledge linked to a collective political subject.”<sup>79</sup> This form is that of a shift in perspective, a collective political position on a situation that had appeared limited and determined by capitalism. The perspective of the party comes not from religion, law, or individual insight but rather from the fact of collectivity, as I’ve been arguing here, from fidelity to the equality of the crowd discharge.\n\nHolloway asks how we can ever know whether those in the know are correct, how it is even possible for them to know. He is right to suggest that we cannot know this: there is no Other who knows. His questions thus voice the end of a transferential relation to the party. In Holloway’s case, however, the end of that relation to the party does not mean the end of transference. He mourns that “the Leninists know, or used to know … the knowing of the revolutionaries of the last century has been defeated.”<sup>80</sup> Of course, Lenin didn’t know. Lenin famously shifted positions and courses, “bending the stick” and responding to the movement of the revolution. Holloway’s inability to acknowledge that Lenin was lucky, that he erred, that he changed his mind, that he did not know tells us that he, Holloway, remains attached to a position he can’t not presuppose. The position is there, but loosened from the ties that inspired it, disconnected from the victories of people’s struggles, pushed into the past as something left behind but exerting a force.\n\nOn the one hand, Holloway recognizes that there is no Other of the Other, no guarantor of political knowledge. Political knowledge arises through practice, over time, in ways that remain unfixed and contingent. On the other hand, insofar as the position of the Other remains, Holloway fights to keep it empty, to doubt any and all who might occupy it. Abandoning any connection between the substance of emancipatory egalitarian political struggle and the perspective this struggle creates, he insists on the “not-knowing of those who are historically lost,” the not-knowing of the defeated, as if nothing had been learned, as if there were no trace of past victories and achievements.<sup>81</sup> Trusting none to bear the knowledge necessary for revolution, he asserts non-knowledge even as he resorts implicitly to vague supports such as the knowledge of intellectuals. What Holloway can’t acknowledge is that the erasure of past victories and achievements is an effect of his own disavowal of the body that carries them, the party, a disavowal in turn of revolutionary power.\n\nUltimately, Holloway’s critique of the party follows from his rejection of the state. Reformist and revolutionary Marxists alike treat the state as the means through which society can be transformed. Holloway calls this an “instrumental” view of the state premised on the “fetishistic” idea that the state is separate from and external to society. Armed by this instrumental and fetishistic vision of state power, Marxists concentrate and direct radical energies toward its conquest. The party is the organizational form of this state fetishism insofar as it is abstracted from all other social relationships to appear as the primary object of political circulation. The party disciplines and impoverishes class struggle, subordinating its myriad forms to “the over-riding aim of gaining control of the state.” <sup>82</sup> When politics is channeled through the party form, political feelings, experiences, and relations failing to contribute directly to the conquest of state power are deprioritized, subordinated, rendered as lesser than.\n\n123","previous_page":122,"next_page":124}