{"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":163,"pdf_page":162,"physical_index":162,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8afa03d69ba7706465a0a27958d64e995abdb1b7794ba8baa371f55018b8a64d"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"In addition to a common name, we have to build solidarity, to extend the bonds of commitment beyond local ties and small networks. Without solidarity, a common will cannot emerge. Immiseration, precarity, defeat, and betrayal as well as ongoing patterns of sexism, racism, and homophobia have made us deeply suspicious. One way a party helps deal with this is with explicit criteria for membership and expectations for members. It supplements personal relations with relations to an organization, holding members accountable to expectations. Relations between comrades overlay and replace particularized relations anchored in individual preference. Practices of regular reporting help install these expectations. Another way a party builds solidarity is by acknowledging different skills and expertise, providing training and education, and delegating tasks. Developing and respecting one another’s skills and knowledge is essential if we are to form ourselves into a political force capable of taking on and replacing global capitalism. In practice, this suggests the utility of working groups in multiple locales and issue areas, groups with enough autonomy to be responsive and enough integration via practices of reporting to formulate and carry out a common purpose. It points as well to the active development of the organizational and political capacities crucial to multi-scalar communist self-governance.\n\nLeft anti-party dogma mobilizes anti-authoritarian convictions. Yet this mobilization has resulted in the intensified authoritarianism of global capitalism. Today authoritarianism is less that of centralized state power than it is of power decentralized, dispersed, and extended via private contracts, interbank and interagency cooperation, and the extensive network of treaties, agreements, and provisions enabling capital flow and global trade. National states act as the police force protecting the global capitalist class. We encounter the fragmentation, dissolution, and decomposition of some elements of the state, and the concentration and intermeshing of other elements of states and markets, as in finance, security, and media. Capital as a class has worked to smash the bureaucratic state machine for us, to convince us that it is useless, even as it strengthens parts of it for its own ends. For too long, left politics in the US, UK, and EU has mirrored neoliberal economics, urging decentralization, flexibility, and innovation. Even the neoliberal push to privatize is reflected in left politics: not only do we hear ad infinitum that the personal is political, but the micro-politics of self-transformation and DIY takes the place of building and occupying institutions with duration. In this vein, some on the Left have abandoned social change entirely. Wary of “totalizing visions,” they cede society and the state to a capitalist class that acts as a global political class intent on extending its reach into and strengthening its hold over our lives and futures.\n\nThe crowd has pushed this Left aside. Rising up in opposition to the decentralized authoritarianisms of interconnected states and markets, it has occupied, blockaded, and rioted. And it has come up against the limits of its capacity to give social struggles political form. The challenge we face is becoming the Left the crowd deserves, a Left that, faithful to the crowd’s egalitarian discharge, works to make it endure. A Left that speaks the language of radical change but refuses its forms is no Left at all. It’s the means by which political energy and conviction is displaced into styles and practices that make us feel good by making us feel radical. To advance, we need to organize. We need to be a party for the people in the crowd.\n\n163","previous_page":162,"next_page":164}