{"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":131,"pdf_page":130,"physical_index":130,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f7cf998eea06707117c67f658d08d835ff4f8c4a329424e00345880bc53977bb"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The Passional Dynamics of the Communist Party\n\nIt sometimes seems as if people on the Left love revolution, but hate the party. We enthusiastically support transformation, especially personal transformation. Yet in the same breath we scoff at institutionalized practices strategically oriented toward the pursuit of radical political change. Many of us thus reject the organizational form that marks the difference between the chaos of revolution and the building of a new political and social order. With this rejection, we shield ourselves from a confrontation with the real of division, luxuriating instead in the fantasy of the beautiful moment.\n\nThe party is a political form that compels this confrontation. It claims, occupies, and mobilizes it. This chapter continues the investigation of the psychodynamics of the party introduced in chapter four. Using examples from British and US American communism, I highlight the symbolic space of the party. What enabled the Communist Party to provide a location from which communists in the UK and US could see their actions as valuable and worthwhile? My claim is that the affective infrastructure of the party provided the material support for its symbolic location. Ceaseless practice generated the intensities that members directed onto themselves, letting them push themselves such that they could see themselves as changing the world. They became bigger, able to do more than they could have imagined, and the world became present in the everyday. So instead of considering the communist party in terms of ideology, program, leadership, or organizational structure, I approach it in terms of the dynamics of feeling it generates and mobilizes. More than an instrument for political power, the communist party provides an affective infrastructure that enlarges the world.\n\nThe communist party’s capacity to enlarge the world comes at a cost. The knot of unconscious processes that holds open the space for communist political subjectivity exerts constant, even unrealizable, demands. Bluntly put: seeing yourself as changing the world requires you to look at yourself from a position that makes relentless demands on you, a position that compels and judges and accepts no excuses. If that’s what communists want, and we should, then we have to confront these costs head on. The stronger the political organization we build, the greater will be its—and our— expectations. Organizing us, the party compels us, or, differently put, it is the apparatus through which we compel ourselves to do what we must, to do what has to be done because we cannot, will not, acquiesce to inequality, exploitation, and oppression.\n\n5\n\n131","previous_page":130,"next_page":132}