{"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":160,"pdf_page":159,"physical_index":159,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fa004135985f28fc984129aee65a1ac6649ab1be4a37069c759f99c8750c4271"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The crowds and riots of the last decade have shown us the many coming to sense their collective power, the capacity of number to inscribe a gap in the expected. Debt, immiseration, policing, and dispossession have incited those proletarianized under communicative capitalism to revolt. Global demonstrations have also brought to the fore the crowd’s limitation. Its powers are destructive, creative, unpredictable, contagious, and temporary. The strength that comes with the indeterminacy of the crowd’s message is a weakness when the crowd disperses. The crowd lacks capacities of endurance, implementation, and execution. Without mediation, that is to say, absent a transferential relation to another space, it doesn’t know what it desires. The crowd doesn’t have a politics. It is the opportunity for a politics.\n\nSome on the Left like to repeat Trotsky’s warning about substitutionism: the party substitutes itself for the class, the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the party organization, and the leader substitutes him or herself for the central committee. They present horizontalism as an alternative that can avoid these problems. Over the past few decades, we’ve encountered the limits of horizontalism as it fails to scale, endure, or replace capitalist state power. Far from solving a problem of left political organization, horizontalism is the name of a problem. Substitutionism, though, is not. The gaps substitutionism flags are the space of the subject. Neither the crowd nor the party is the people. The people is the gap between them. Political capacity always involves delegation, transfer, and division of labor. Not everyone can do everything. The very idea of a politics of everyone is a debilitating fantasy that denies the constitutive feature of the political: division goes all the way down.\n\nThe crowd enables us to build a theory of the communist party as a synthesis or movement party. Such a party is neither the movements’ vanguard nor instrument. It is a form of organized political association that holds open the space from which the crowd can see itself (and be seen) as the people. The communist party is the party faithful to the crowd’s egalitarian discharge. It doesn’t represent the movements. It transfers their egalitarian intensity from the particular to the universal. The communist party finds the people in the crowd.\n\nBadiou treats the subject-effect as a knot of four concepts: anxiety, courage, justice, and superego.<sup>6</sup> Canetti renders the crowd as a knot of four elements: growth, direction, equality, and density. In the party, the two knots intertwine as concentration, endurance, fidelity, and transference. The party does not represent the people as a collective subject. The party responds to this subject. Hence, it concentrates the subject-effects of anxiety, courage, justice, and superego into a transferential site from which they can work back on the collectivity. The party thus responds to the subject by recognizing it in the crowd and thereby making the crowd into something more than it is. It gives the crowd a history, letting its egalitarian moment endure in the subjective process of people’s struggle.\n\nThe party occupies the place of division opened up by the crowd. It minds the breach, maintaining it as the gap of desire of the people as a collective political subject. Without the perspective of the party, multiple resistances blur into the menu of choices offered up by capitalism, so many lifestyle opportunities available for individual diversion and satisfaction. The legacy of people’s struggle and crowd event are then carried only by university, culture, and momentary organizations, subjected to the demands of capitalism and deactivated as living resource. The gap of desire is sublimated into the circuit of drive. Without the party, there is no body capable of remembering, learning, and responding. Instead, dispersed individuals, absorbed in communicative capitalism and buffeted by competition, offer multitudes of opinions, suggestions, strategies, and critiques, the collective capable of response present only as an absent addressee. Providing the perspective from which the people can be seen and the space of its desire maintained, the party enables the people to appear in the rupture of the crowd event.\n\n160","previous_page":159,"next_page":161}