{"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":86,"pdf_page":85,"physical_index":85,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"caee20ebcc655361a09ca9a97d25cf49f065f31f2f531a6541ab30f976312ec7"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Marx premises the revolutionary break within existing conditions of production, nevertheless Marxist theory doesn’t escape the problem of the people. Whether as the limits of working-class struggle in trade union consciousness, the failure of the masses to revolt, or the betrayals by elitist vanguard parties, Marxist theory and communist movement run up against the disorganized, disagreeable, divided people. The people resist and evade the very forms on which their political subjectivity depends. When it appears, which isn’t often, the movement for the majority isn’t necessarily in the immediate interest of the majority. Since they can never be fully present, no revolution or revolutionary movement can actually be that of the people. It always entails the imposition ofthe ideas ofsome upon many.\n\nIn sum, the Commune gives form to the break with the National Government effected by the crowd even as the people’s elusive desire propels a new subjective process, a process of inserting the people into history as an active subject and rereading history in terms of the actions of this subject.<sup>33</sup> Interpretations of the Commune thus grapple with how to understand the power of the people. Marx suggests as much in the letter to Kugelmann that Lenin cites in State and Revolution: heroic party comrades in Paris are attempting “real people’s revolution.”<sup>34</sup> As I argue above, the multiple, opposing treatments of the Commune are not indications of an expansive political form, and they are not reflections of specific features of institutional design. Rather, they underscore the irreducibility of the gap between the people and their political forms, the gap constitutive of the people’s subjectivity. Badiou writes, “The subject glides between the successive partial representations of that whose radical lack institutes it as articulated desire.”<sup>35</sup> Badiou is glossing Lacan. What I find suggestive is seeing in the partial representations of the Commune traces of the people as a political subject. The point is not to fetishize rupture or celebrate the pluri-potentiality of infinite modes of becoming. It is to see in the overlap of the Commune form and the crowd event the specificity of an emancipatory egalitarian politics. Because it is a form for the expression of the people’s desire, the Commune is necessarily lacking.\n\nThe Destruction of Social Space\n\nIn her classic treatment of the Paris Commune as the transformation of social space, Kristin Ross enables us to feel the Commune as the expression of a new politics.<sup>36</sup> This felt politics, though, is not quite the politics of a subject. It’s more a foreshadowing of the politics that hijacked and dismantled the sense that collectivity is a necessary attribute of the political subject. Ross’s Commune looks like Paris in 1968, more specifically, like the Paris Commune presented by the Situationists in their “Theses on the Commune.” The Situationists highlight the “biggest festival of the nineteenth century.” The Commune was an explosion of inventiveness, an experiment in revolutionary urbanism that, for those who lived it, was a fully consummated political experience (not a failed attempt at establishing a new form of working-class rule). This version of the Commune, developed and extended by Ross as a celebration of individuality, continues today as a key image of radical politics. It’s how we imagine revolution. And it’s what we have to get beyond, a possibility latent in Ross’s own attention to the crowd.\n\n86","previous_page":85,"next_page":87}