{"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":153,"pdf_page":152,"physical_index":152,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3fccd2bed4ca1853557e0e61df8d6428cbdc46144dffb567b257976230770820"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"“Forjustice thunders condemnation”\n\nHow do and can we imagine political change under the conditions of communicative capitalism? Is political change just aggregated personal transformation, communism as viral outbreak or meme-effect, #fullcommunism? Do we think that autonomous zones of freedom and equality will emerge like so many mushrooms out of the dregs left behind in capital flight and the shrinking of state social provisioning? Or do we optimistically look to democracy, expecting (all evidence to the contrary) that communism, or even upgraded social democracy, will arise out of electoral politics? All these fantasies imagine that political change can come about without political struggle. Each pushes away the fact of antagonism, division, and class struggle as if late neoliberalism were not already characterized by extreme inequality, violence, and exploitation, as if the ruling class did not already use military force, police force, legal force, and illegal force to maintain its position. Politics is a struggle over power. Capital uses every resource—state, non-state, interstate—to advance its position. A Left that refuses to organize itself in recognition of this fact will never be able to combat it.\n\nIn communicative capitalism, individual acts of resistance, subversion, cultural production, and opinion expression, no matter how courageous, are easily absorbed into the circulatory content of global personal media networks. Alone, they don’t amplify; they can’t endure. They are easily forgotten as new content rushes into and through our feeds. We indulge in fantasies of the freedom of our expression, our critical edge and wit, disavowing the way such individuated freedom is the form of collective incapacity. Against states and alliances wielded in the service of capital as a class, diverse and separate struggles are so many isolated resistances, refusals to undertake the political work of pulling together in organized, strategic, long-term struggle. The constant churn of demands on our awareness disperses our efforts and attention. What the Left should be doing is coordinating, consolidating, and linking its efforts so that they can amplify each other. We don’t need multiple, different campaigns. We need an organized struggle against capitalism capable of operating along multiple issues in diverse locations.\n\nCrowds push back. From the perspective of the party, we see them as the insistent people. Fidelity to the insistence of the egalitarian discharge demands that we build the infrastructure capable of maintaining the gap of their desire. The more powerful the affective infrastructure we create, the more we will feel its force, interiorizing the perspective of the many into the ego-ideal that affirms our practices and activities and pushes us to do more than we think we can. Radical pluralists and participatory democrats sometimes imply that there can be a left politics without judgment, condemnation, exclusion, and discipline. Denying the way that collective power works back on those who generate it, they suggest we can have the benefits of collectivity without its effects. But “working back” is an inextricable dimension of collectivity’s capacity to cut through the self-interest of individual needs and produce enduring bonds of solidarity. Collective activities always have effects in excess of their immediate goals. Rather than fearing these effects, rather than remaining stuck in the fantasy that an individual can change the world, and rather than remaining so gripped by fears of power that we fantasize a politics that can abolish it, we should confront the force of collectivity directly and take responsibility for generating it and using it. The party capable of building an affective infrastructure that can cut through the barriers of capitalist expectation will err. It is not, cannot be, and should not be believed to be infallible. Sometimes it may turn its immense energies on itself. If we can’t bear it, we aren’t the Left, the communists, we need.\n\n153","previous_page":152,"next_page":154}