{"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":94,"pdf_page":93,"physical_index":93,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e3de3c3f8d7e4af9026af88c5a6c1e6acd8fe7614eed9541324eb15d4ba86597"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Politicizing the People\n\nThirty years subsequent to his analysis of Commune, subject, and party, Badiou revises his analysis. In an essay included in The Communist Hypothesis (a slightly revised version of material presented in The Logic of Worlds), Badiou presents the Marxist discussion of the Commune in terms of the state. Rather than reading the party as the subject support of a politics, he figures it as the realization of the ambiguity of the Marxist account of the Commune.<sup>55</sup> On the one hand, the Commune is a clear advance in proletarian struggle insofar as it smashes the machinery of the state. On the other, it ultimately fails because it smashed the machinery of the state—it’s unorganized, incapable of decision, unable to defend itself. To resolve these problems, the party takes a statist form. It is a vehicle of destruction and reconstitution, but reconstitution within the constraints given by the state.\n\nBadiou’s rejection of party and state is familiar. Bruno Bosteels and Slavoj Žižek compellingly demonstrate the political inadequacy of this rejection. Arguing for the actualization and organization of communism in real movement, Bosteels criticizes the leftist idealism of the later Badiou’s emphasis on the pure Idea.<sup>56</sup> Žižek likewise rejects the alternative of seizing or abandoning the state as a false one: the real challenge is transforming the state itself.<sup>57</sup> I agree with Bosteels and Žižek. I want to add, moreover, that for leftists to make state-centeredness the problem now is to short-circuit the discussion that matters. The Left in the US, UK, and EU—not to mention communists—is struggling just to register as a political force. To worry about our seizing the state, then, is a joke, fantasy, and distraction from the task at hand. Rather than a concentration of political will, communist possibility remains diffuse, dispersed in the multitudinous politics of issues, identities, and moments of action that have yet to consolidate in the collective power of the divided people. What matters for us here and now is the galvanization of such a communist will.\n\nIn his effort to reduce the Marxist discussion of the Commune to the problem of the party-state, Badiou neglects the more fundamental question posed by the Commune, namely, that of the relation of the party to the people, the collective political subject. The Commune is less the form of a state than it is the form of a break with a previous state, both the state as in the National Government and the state of political incapacity associated with the workers, as Badiou himself emphasizes in the later work. As such a break, it opens up and disorders. The people are disassembled, suggestible, strong, and mobile as crowds. It is a mistake, then, for Badiou to reduce the Commune to a state form (as Ross powerfully demonstrates) and the Marxist tradition to commentary on and reaction to this state form. Badiou seems to have fallen prey to the fatalism his younger self criticizes—parties will be parties; “we will always be fucked over.”<sup>58</sup> Marx himself analyzes the Commune in terms of the subjectivization of the people. In the letter to Kugelmann, Marx treats the Parisians, the people of Paris, as “our heroic Party comrades.” Their advances are teaching new lessons in political struggle, namely, that smashing the bureaucratic-military machine is essential “for every people’s revolution on the Continent.”<sup>59</sup> In The Civil War in France, as he presents the Commune as the “direct anti-thesis to the empire,” Marx describes it as the positive form of a republic in which class rule itself is superseded. He draws out the politics of constituting the people under the leadership of the working class, noting the replacing of the standing army by the armed people, the establishing of universal suffrage, the opening of education to all, and, of course, the replacing of the parasitic excrescence of the old state organization with the self-government of the producers. Marx writes, “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people.”\n\n94","previous_page":93,"next_page":95}