{"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":159,"pdf_page":158,"physical_index":158,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1f51b3a3307278a6bdf66317830759309b0252b138fcc47c6cbca50f965cb1e8"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"—collapsed.\n\nIdentity as an operator for a politics is now itself fully saturated. Symptoms of this saturation include the reduction of the space of change to the individual, the circulation of the momentary outrage in the affective networks of communicative capitalism, the practices of calling out and shaming that undermine solidarity, and the contradictory and destructive attachment to national and ethnic specificity. They include as well the complex mutual policing of who can claim what identity under what conditions and what authorizes such a claim.\n\nWhen identity is all that is left, hanging on to it makes a kind of sense. The reality of the struggle to survive becomes the basis of an identity imagined as dignified because it has to produce itself from itself. Attachment to identity is pathological, nevertheless. It enchains us to collective failure, turning us ever inward as it holds back the advance of a politics capable of abolishing the current system and producing another one. Unfettered capitalism and the repressive state constitute real limits to cultural critique and social experimentation: exploitation, dispossession, incapacitation, incarceration, proletarianization, extermination. Perhaps the most striking symptom of the saturation of identity is thus the economic rupturing of identity categories, that is to say, the emergence of identities as themselves sites of class struggle. In 2014 and 2015, riots in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland pushed this struggle into mainstream discussions in the US.\n\nSince Badiou’s 2006 interview, there has been renewed left interest in the party form. This interest results from the impasses encountered by the crowds and riots in the latter half of the decade. In cities all over the world, hundreds and thousands of people took to the streets and parks in a resounding “no” to the array of policies installed by the capitalist class to protect its interests. These protests signaled a new militancy and determination on behalf of opponents of austerity, precarity, state violence, and the neoliberal mantra of cuts, cuts, cuts. Then the protests ended. The crowds went home. Sometimes they made no demands. Other times they made impossible demands. And still other times they asserted truths both obvious and painful in the urgency of their assertion: Black Lives Matter.\n\nThe press of these crowds presents an alternative to Badiou’s “identity that is beyond identity.” The alternative is movement itself, the force of many where they don’t belong, the intensity of the egalitarian discharge. Marx and Engels link socialism not simply to the identity of the working class. They link it to working-class movement. In the nineteenth century, worker uprisings were pushing forward, coming together, and breaking out, disrupting capital processes of value extraction. This active movement incited Marx and Engels (and other nineteenth-century socialists and anarchists) to see in proletarian struggle more than demands for shorter working days, safer working conditions, and higher wages. They saw these struggles as the political process of the subject of communism. We can repeat their innovation not by looking for a generic identity (a search that already preoccupied Marcuse and returns in another form in Hardt’s and Negri’s multitude) but by emphasizing movement. In place of the saturation of identity, we should turn to the process of movement, recognizing the people as the subject of that process. The very fact of the active aggregation of crowds, the rise of political opposition and militancy, directs us to a collective desire for collectivity.\n\n159","previous_page":158,"next_page":160}