{"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":18,"pdf_page":17,"physical_index":17,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"19a718c7904d0a8a791e2c1a991f41b46d55ee1aebefcf3a300766020bbddb61"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"So what should we expect? Changes in communication and subjectivity under communicative capitalism, not to mention thirty years of resurgent capitalist class power, point to the real challenges for political organizing.<sup>39</sup> As I explore more fully in chapter one, intense attachments to unique individuality as people try to construct “personal brands” that can help them “stand out in a crowd” hinder solidarity. We should expect suspicion of those deemed threatening to that uniqueness. Likewise, because of the instability of meaning in communicative capitalism—what Slavoj Žižek terms the “decline of symbolic efficiency”—contemporary movements are less likely to rely on empty signifiers like “freedom” and “justice.” We should thus expect greater reliance on common images, tactics, and names—the more generic, the greater the reach: umbrella, tent, mask, Occupy, hashtag.<sup>40</sup> Micro-politics, identity politics, anarchism, one-off demos, clicktivism, and ironic events seem more compelling (they would definitely be easier) than the sustained work of party building because they affirm the dominant ideology of singularity, newness, and now. At the same time, we should expect increasing emphasis on inequality as people cry out and push back against widespread debt, insecurity, and dispossession. And we should expect new, extended modes of coming together as the formerly fragmented experience first-hand the sense of invincibility accompanying collective power.\n\nReading the protests and revolts of the last decade as the class struggle of the people proletarianized under communicative capitalism, we can account for the ubiquity of personalized media, the demographics of the people protesting, the economic position of the protesters, and the political ambiguity of the protests. New proles often have a strong libertarian bent. They may present themselves as post-political, even antipolitical (as in, for example, the Spanish movement of the squares). Their identities are so fluid that they can be channeled in different directions that they simultaneously always exceed. They have a hard time uniting as a class even as their actions are the expressions of a class.\n\nA key characteristic of recent protests has been that they are out of doors. Unlike nineteenth- and early twentieth-century riots that could happen because people already interacted with one another in concentrated urban spaces, more recent ones require an extra effort of overcoming isolation, leaving home or work, remaining outside, and merging with crowds of strangers. People must self-consciously assemble themselves in settings not determined by capital and the state. It doesn’t just happen. The surprise of their collectivity pushes against the expectations of disconnected consumption and screen-gazing that are so much a part of early twenty-first century sociality. The flash mob has been one of the forms experimenting with and drawing out this surprise-effect (although it has quickly been put to use in guerrilla marketing campaigns). Occupation has been even more effective, particularly as it has moved from inside to outside, enabling the occupying crowd to amplify its effect via visibility, noise, growth, and interaction with its setting. As isolated tactics, however, these forms have reached their limit. The challenge consists in changing political actions into political power.\n\n18","previous_page":17,"next_page":19}