{"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":152,"pdf_page":151,"physical_index":151,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"eb3aab73e5fe0f424ef81234f0af65711784a52a811d7bf4ce03ebbfa7964f07"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Ross wouldn’t be going to jail, of course. The Party is a voluntary organization. But the choice goes in both directions: the Party that identifies those made out of “special stuff” also determines who is lacking. It can cut people out, cut them off from the epic struggle of the oppressed, push them out of the crowd and into isolation and anxiety. With language surprisingly evocative of Lacan, Wright confesses that he couldn’t escape the feeling that Ross “enjoyed” the trial. “For him, this was perhaps the highlight of an otherwise bleak existence.”<sup>57</sup> The trial focused the immense affective apparatus of the Party onto Ross. The enthusiasm and commitment of millions was activated because of him, or at least in those moments he could feel as if it was, he could feel that his actions and choices were of world-historical significance. The feeling couldn’t endure. He was to be expelled, after all. But at that moment he was conjoined with the world like no other.\n\nWright describes the trial he witnesses as a spectacle of glory and horror. The ugliness of the Party is the other side of its service as a transferential object, its capacity to make the crowd felt after its dissipation. An engulfing crowd may be frightening. The release from the limits of the everyday may be too much. An apparatus for mobilizing emotional longing and generating affective attachment in the service of struggle, the Party wields power by exerting the force of the collective on its members. It wields this within the members themselves, as their own collective desire for collectivity. How else would the Party maintain a gap within its capitalist setting? Glory and horror are the same arrangement of intensity from two perspectives, the profound feeling of collective strength and the fear such strength can generate. Wright invokes the words of the Internationale, “Arise, you pris’ners of salvation!”\n\nThe trial exposes the gap of desire as perhaps no other element of Party infrastructure can. Desire is never desire for a specific obtainable object—desire cannot be satisfied. Lacan’s famous dictum is that “desire is the desire of the Other.” Desire opens up as a gap in the Other, as what the Other lacks. At times desire can become so overwhelming that it becomes concentrated in a singular place, such as a person imagined as a unified individual. The gap is filled in, the dream of justice truncated and distorted. Misdirected, thwarted back in on itself, desire becomes obscene. It pushes beyond need, beyond demand, into the destructive insistence of the drive. The desire for justice turns in on itself in the enjoyment of power.\n\nThe actuality of the Communist Party exceeds its errors and betrayals. It encompasses the hopes for justice and aspirations for equality invested in it. To reduce the Party to its excesses fails to recognize its indispensable capacity to generate practical optimism and collective strength. Such a reduction likewise reduces the world, contracting possibility into what can be done instead of forcing the impossibility of what must be done. The Communist Party enlarged the world. Expanding the crowd’s egalitarian discharge so that it can endure as the emancipatory push of the people, the party increases the crowd’s effects. It gives the crowd its meaning and takes this meaning as its own. The party continues the moment of belonging, intensifying and expanding it in solidary purpose.\n\n152","previous_page":151,"next_page":153}