{"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":126,"pdf_page":125,"physical_index":125,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"41c8a634aedcbf41cdc72b28676b8fa88cb5d338419926a58129715da0c87641"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"As he positions Leninists as the subject supposed to know, Holloway implies that there was a time when the Party was the bearer of working-class consciousness. There was a time when people—workers, peasants, intellectuals, even capitalists—believed that the Communist Party was the bearer of working-class consciousness. More precisely, they believed that others believed that the Communist Party was the bearer of working-class consciousness. In the second half of the twentieth century, this belief collapsed. The slogan from the Cultural Revolution makes the point most powerfully: “the bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party.” This is the element of truth in Holloway’s claim that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of the party. Few today believe that the Communist Party is vanguard of a revolutionary working class.\n\nThe assumption that revolutionaries used to know, however, points to the continuation of transference: Holloway doesn’t say that they never knew. He doesn’t say that the party never was a bearer of working-class consciousness. The space opened up and held by the party remains. It’s as if the party’s form as “enigmatic subject support” persists even as the working class no longer appears as a revolutionary subject.<sup>86</sup> Such a support continues to exert an effect even in the claim that “the bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party.” The claim is reflexive. It is the party itself that opens the space for this criticism of itself. The party holds up the subject making this criticism, a point Holloway attempts to disavow but cannot not presuppose. He is right to say the party is not the bearer of working-class consciousness. In fact it never could be the bearer of such a fiction, the efforts of German Social Democracy to present it otherwise notwithstanding. The party is the support for the subject of communism. This subject has been variously figured as proletariat, peasantry, and divided people.\n\nThe party operates as the support for the subject of communism by holding open the gap between the people and their setting in capitalism. The more the gap appears, the more the need for and perhaps even sense of a party impresses itself. This gap isn’t a void. It’s a knot of processes that organize the persistence of the unrealized in a set of structural effects: ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to know and believe the party as the Other space. This Other space doesn’t have its own interest, a correct line, or an objective science that tells it the truth of history. It is instead a rupture within the people dividing them from the givenness of their setting, a rupture that is an effect of their collectivity, the way their belonging works back upon them.\n\nPolitical experience shows that radical movements cannot simply avoid the state— the state won’t let them. It actively infiltrates, polices, and subverts them. To the extent that movements pose a serious challenge to state power, they encounter its reactive counterforce. That society can seize itself is a myth that has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had for the Left and become visible as the instrument of the expansion of capitalism.<sup>87</sup> Gaining political control of the state thus remains an important goal because the state presents a barrier to political change. As the political instrument of capitalist class rule, the state enforces order in the interest of capital as a class, doing all it can to prevent, redirect, and smash opposition. In the face of militarized policing, not to mention the evisceration of the social gains of working-class movement, does it make sense to envision a political revolution that ignores the state, allowing the state to go on exercising its policing, repressive, and legal functions? If we do not think that the state should remain in the hands that it is in, then we lapse into the politics of the beautiful moment when we fail to factor it into our political perspective.\n\n126","previous_page":125,"next_page":127}