{"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":37,"pdf_page":36,"physical_index":36,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dd9b50c3a402fbc1d1f7b7e63e954b0b5b827eb07fa1186af2d00ebf05acde8d"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Rosalind Brunt similarly pushed a left individualism.<sup>35</sup> For her, the “new times” demand a politics of identity. The examination of one’s personal history, a beginning from oneself, is what made sexual politics exciting and what the Communist Party needs to embrace. Brunt argues that identity politics should be at the heart of a transformative politics because it gives a sense of difference, of the many identities offered in and by contemporary culture. It helps people think about how they relate to others, how they live and directly experience ideology. Instead of the Party providing a critical perspective from which to look at the world, breaking from the hegemonic capitalist culture and installing a gap within it, lived experience would be the perspective brought to bear on politics. In Brunt’s version, which prefigures what would become a key feature of left thought for several decades, politics itself turns inward, the task of changing the world preceded by that of understanding oneself. Having listed the identities and relations important to belonging—race, class, gender, nation and colleagues, friends, children, lovers—Brunt writes, “And then there is the bedrock sense of the ‘real me’, the feeling that, however precarious these other identities, there is a secret hidden core, a completely unsocialised and essential self somewhere private and inside.”<sup>36</sup> The implication is that this secret core should be the bedrock of a new politics of “unity-in-difference,” a Bolshevik principle reimagined through an identity politics that refuses talk of priorities and socialism as a greater good. The effect is a resonance both with capitalist society’s marketplace demographics and therapy culture’s emphasis on an authentic self. The result is a change in the focus of communist politics such that it contracts rather than enlarges.\n\nAlthough they voice themes that will come to dominate the post-Marxist and poststructuralist Left, Leadbeater’s and Brunt’s are of course not the only positions taken in Marxism Today’s debate over the “new times.” Ellen Meiksins Wood, to use but one example, offered a powerful critique of the “new times” hypothesis, particularly as set out in the programmatic Manifesto For New Times. Wood rejects the premise of postmodern fragmentation underpinning emphases on personal identity, flexibility, and diversity. Such emphases give the impression that capitalism “has become infinitely more permeable, opening up huge spaces for people to carve out their own autonomous social realities.”<sup>37</sup> The reality, she argues, is that capitalism has become more of “a total global system” than ever before. Subjection to the “expansionary logic of capitalism” and its coercive market forces is growing. Under Thatcher, class politics is more blatant, more extreme. Drawing from Michael Ruskin in New Left Review, Wood asks whose world-view is given expression in the Manifesto. The answer: those who attempt to manage capitalism in a project of modernization. The new times aren’t new: the Left in retreat always presents itself as capitalist managers. And the Manifesto’s perspective isn’t innovative: it’s capitalism’s own. Retroactively, no one can deny that Wood was right.\n\nIn step with the unleashing of the welfare state’s restraints on capital accumulation, views such as Leadbeater’s and Brunt’s came to characterize the “left realism” broadly shared across the Anglo-European Left, theoretically developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and buttressed by cultural studies and post-structuralism (Habermasian critical theory provided the framework for a similar accommodation). As I detail below, left realists accept the market as necessary. They reject revolution, prioritizing democracy and citizenship. In effect, they fear politics, outdoing the Right in their excoriation of twentieth-century communism for its crimes and their disavowal of its successes. Abandoned is anything like communism as a vision of justice. Confining themselves within a limited political field and accepting the state and market as given, left realists embrace the politics of identity: the individual is to be invested with the energy and attention formerly directed toward building the revolutionary people.\n\n37","previous_page":36,"next_page":38}