{"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":156,"pdf_page":155,"physical_index":155,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"806a0d9acc616d378cc5c24ed4b9ef96187119435b3e60b8840c068059bf11a7"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Conclusion\n\nFor over thirty years, the party has been extracted from the aspirations and accomplishments it enabled. Even as “dogma” has been uniformly qualified with “party,” dispersed yet ubiquitous left dogmatism has turned the so-called obsolescence of the party form into the primary tenet of its catechism. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, reimagined—except for the communist party. It’s time to put this nursery tale aside and take up the challenge of actively constructing the political collectivity with the will and capacity to bring an egalitarian world into being. The party holds open the space for the emergence of such a will. It doesn’t prefigure a new world, but impresses upon us the gap between the world we have and the world we desire.\n\nThe innovation of Marxism was linking the political battle for socialism to workers’ economic struggles. Social democratic parties sought to expand democratic rights and use parliamentary processes to win political power for the working class. But bourgeois, liberal, and parliamentary democracy stood in the way of working-class power. As the political form of capitalist order, liberal democracy secures this order through principles and processes designed to individualize, disperse, and displace class antagonism. Encountering the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, revolutionary socialist and communist parties extended the political struggle beyond its electoral confines and pursued a wider range of tactics. Social democracy, nearly completely dismantled by neoliberalism and now confined to a certain fantasy of Sweden, proceeds by way of managing class antagonism. It denies the incompatibility of capitalism and the people as it finds ways to secure the compliance of the working class. In contrast, the promise of communism is the abolition of class and capitalism. The communist party pursues this abolition as a political struggle.\n\nFor Marx, “proletariat” names capitalism’s self-creation of what destroys it. This “what” that destroys capitalism is a collective subject, a force no longer dispersed in individual and local acts of smashing, sabotage, and disruption, but concentrated in solidarity. Of course, economic destruction alone is insufficient for the abolition of capitalism. The normal operation of the capitalist system is characterized by “uncertainty and instability,” “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and stagnation.”<sup>1</sup> Contemporary capitalism has refined its capacity for wealth destruction: over thirty-four trillion dollars of market value was lost in the financial crisis of 2008. In the course of the recession that followed, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer: the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains made between 2009 and 2011.<sup>2</sup> Not only was the 1 percent better able to weather the crisis than the rest of us, but it was also able to increase its share. So it’s not just economic destruction that’s at stake. It’s bringing to an end the capitalist cycle of creative destructive—the destruction of destruction. And this political destruction is brought to an end by the proletariat. It is not the task of the working class organized as workers. They are already organized as workers in the factory, which enables them to become conscious of their material conditions and the need to combine into unions. The abolition of capitalism depends on the organization of the proletariat as a party, a solidary political association that cuts across workplace, sector, region, and nation. The working class as a class is implicated in the success or stability of capitalism. Capitalism configures the working class’s struggles with the bourgeoisie. In contrast, the party takes as its horizon capitalism’s supercession in communism. For Marx, the party is necessary because class struggle is not simply economic struggle. It’s political struggle.\n\n156","previous_page":155,"next_page":157}