--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Crowds and Party" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781781686942" library_document_id: "e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc" source_sha256: "f534ec563af19563b91637b0ce1509fb0241786bf679761d0d53b587a58d09de" pdf_physical_page_count: 183 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 120 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc?start=120&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=120&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=110&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=130&limit=10" --- # Crowds and Party > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=120 | PRINTED_PAGE=121 The history of people’s struggles (anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc.) demonstrates profound and ongoing mobilization on precisely this point. Likewise, that the gap is unavoidable does not imply that any given instantiation of the gap is permanent or justified. There are better and worse parties and leaders. Some are more faithful to the crowd’s egalitarian discharge than others. And Michels’s own discussion brings out the torsion between many and few as power shifts and folds between them: what appears as an idolized leader is a refraction of the crowd’s enjoyment of the power of number. Finally, that the gap between many and few is unavoidable does not mean that gaps should line up with each other: doing more work should not imply garnering more material benefit. In sum, the crucial point that follows from the unavoidable gap between few and many is that the charges of centralism and authoritarianism leveled at the communist party from its inception in fact apply to politics as such. If we are to engage politically, we cannot avoid the effects—and affects —of number. To think that we can is to persist in the fantasy of the beautiful moment. The utility of my psychodynamic approach to the party becomes clear in contrast with John Holloway’s well-known attempt to imagine a revolutionary politics aimed at abolishing power altogether, an aim shared by most anarchists. Published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Holloway’s influential account anticipates the postanarchist converging of post-structuralism and anarchism.72 It also repeats century-old criticisms of the party form, updating and distilling these criticisms into a concentrated rejection of power per se. Variations on Holloway’s arguments against the party for its state-centrism and externality to the working class appear today as a kind of common sense throughout the radical Left. Holloway orients his vision of politics in a notion of “doing” as “the movement of practical negativity.” Doing, for Holloway, goes beyond the given, and hence is akin to the gap I associate with the work of collectivity back on itself. Embedded in the flow of human movement, Holloway’s doing is likewise necessarily social: “there is a community of doing, a collective of doers, a flow through time and space.”73 But insofar as his collective doers are nothing but flows through time and space, their collectivity exerts no effect back upon them as a collective. Holloway’s collective is at best a crowd. At worst it is nothing more than mobile social substance. It can split a field, produce a gap, but it has no place from which it looks at itself. Lacking reflexivity, the sociality Holloway describes is a sociality without sociality. He comes close to acknowledging this omission when he says that “this collective doing involves, if the collective flow of doing is recognized, a mutual recognition of one another as doers, as active subjects. Our individual doing receives its social validation from its recognition as part of the social flow.”74 People recognize one another, in relations imagined as multiple dyads, exchanges of recognition. Yet the role of the Other as the field of social validation remains unremarked. It has no effects or dynamics of its own, no impact apart from the acknowledgment of individuals. Holloway’s flow of doing, in other words, omits the function of the space of the Other. Holloway nevertheless presupposes such an Other space when he criticizes the party for its externality to the working class. In the Marxist tradition, he argues, the failure of workers to revolt is explained with notions of ideology, hegemony, and false consciousness. All three are “accompanied by an assumption that the working class is a ‘they.’”75 Holloway claims that the problem of communist organization is “how can we make them see?” “We” see clearly. “They” do not. Holloway’s mistake consists in the way he presents division as if it were a division between groups—workers on one side, party on another—rather than a division constitutive of political subjectivity (of the gap necessary for the subject to appear). Seeing differently involves a reflective twist, a different perspective on where one is. Where one is has to appear other than how it was. There has to be a gap between the social flow, to use Holloway’s term, and the political assertion of this flow. The problem is not externality, as if the party or the state were separate from and unaffected by society. The problem is the perspective from which something appears differently. A strike can be a matter for the workers in a specific factory. It can also be politicized as a component of a larger struggle. Is a particular strike simply for higher wages so that individual workers can increase their capacities to consume? Or does it incorporate claims of fairness, equality, and right? Does it link itself to other such actions so that it appears as the struggle of a class? 121 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=121 | PRINTED_PAGE=122 Holloway’s critique of externality repeats the old charge of vanguardism leveled at the Leninist party. Holloway attributes to Lenin the view that the party is necessary because class consciousness can only come to workers from “without.” Lenin’s ostensible error here is one of elitism. It comes from validating intellectuals over workers: workers on their own lack the capacity to develop class consciousness; intellectuals, however, have the requisite knowledge and skills. Daniel Bensaïd demonstrates that this argument is misplaced.76 Lenin’s point is that political consciousness comes from outside the economic struggle, not the class struggle. The economic struggle takes place between particular interests within the field of capital. The terms of the struggle are set by capitalism. The political struggle—for communists —is over the field itself. When “we” is used as the designator for the subject of a politics it asserts more than a collective will. It announces a will to collectivity, a will to fight together on terms that challenge rather than accept the given. Class consciousness is not spontaneous. As Žižek emphasizes, what is spontaneous is misperception—the perception that one is alone or that one’s circumstances are unique.77 The political “we” of the party ruptures this immediate consciousness to assert a collective one in its place. Holloway extends his critique of the externality of the party to Georg Lukács. He charges Lukács with failing to explain how the party can adopt the perspective of totality. This charge, too, misses its mark. The party doesn’t adopt the perspective of totality in the sense that it can and does see everything. Rather, the party tries to establish the space for a perspective on the totality, a perspective that is not determined completely by the setting in which it finds itself as if it had no impact on this setting. The party works to create the condition of possibility for a perspective that, empirically impossible, ruptures the openness of the capitalist manifold from within. Holloway takes direct aim at a Marxism viewed as a source of objective, scientific knowledge: 122 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=122 | PRINTED_PAGE=123 If Marxism is understood as the correct, objective, scientific knowledge of history, then this begs the question, “who says so?” Who holds the correct knowledge and how did they gain that knowledge? Who is the subject of the knowledge? The notion of Marxism as “science” implies a distinction between those who know and those who do not know, a distinction between those who have true consciousness and those who have false consciousness.78 The subject supposed to know is a structural position. The party doesn’t know. It organizes a transferential space offering the position of the subject supposed to know. In Žižek’s words, “the authority of the Party is not that of determinate positive knowledge, but that of the form of knowledge, of a new type of knowledge linked to a collective political subject.”79 This form is that of a shift in perspective, a collective political position on a situation that had appeared limited and determined by capitalism. The perspective of the party comes not from religion, law, or individual insight but rather from the fact of collectivity, as I’ve been arguing here, from fidelity to the equality of the crowd discharge. Holloway asks how we can ever know whether those in the know are correct, how it is even possible for them to know. He is right to suggest that we cannot know this: there is no Other who knows. His questions thus voice the end of a transferential relation to the party. In Holloway’s case, however, the end of that relation to the party does not mean the end of transference. He mourns that “the Leninists know, or used to know … the knowing of the revolutionaries of the last century has been defeated.”80 Of course, Lenin didn’t know. Lenin famously shifted positions and courses, “bending the stick” and responding to the movement of the revolution. Holloway’s inability to acknowledge that Lenin was lucky, that he erred, that he changed his mind, that he did not know tells us that he, Holloway, remains attached to a position he can’t not presuppose. The position is there, but loosened from the ties that inspired it, disconnected from the victories of people’s struggles, pushed into the past as something left behind but exerting a force. On the one hand, Holloway recognizes that there is no Other of the Other, no guarantor of political knowledge. Political knowledge arises through practice, over time, in ways that remain unfixed and contingent. On the other hand, insofar as the position of the Other remains, Holloway fights to keep it empty, to doubt any and all who might occupy it. Abandoning any connection between the substance of emancipatory egalitarian political struggle and the perspective this struggle creates, he insists on the “not-knowing of those who are historically lost,” the not-knowing of the defeated, as if nothing had been learned, as if there were no trace of past victories and achievements.81 Trusting none to bear the knowledge necessary for revolution, he asserts non-knowledge even as he resorts implicitly to vague supports such as the knowledge of intellectuals. What Holloway can’t acknowledge is that the erasure of past victories and achievements is an effect of his own disavowal of the body that carries them, the party, a disavowal in turn of revolutionary power. Ultimately, Holloway’s critique of the party follows from his rejection of the state. Reformist and revolutionary Marxists alike treat the state as the means through which society can be transformed. Holloway calls this an “instrumental” view of the state premised on the “fetishistic” idea that the state is separate from and external to society. Armed by this instrumental and fetishistic vision of state power, Marxists concentrate and direct radical energies toward its conquest. The party is the organizational form of this state fetishism insofar as it is abstracted from all other social relationships to appear as the primary object of political circulation. The party disciplines and impoverishes class struggle, subordinating its myriad forms to “the over-riding aim of gaining control of the state.” 82 When politics is channeled through the party form, political feelings, experiences, and relations failing to contribute directly to the conquest of state power are deprioritized, subordinated, rendered as lesser than. 123 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=123 | PRINTED_PAGE=124 Holloway is right to say that the party is a form for disciplining class struggle, but he fails to consider what discipline means. For communists, discipline involves building solidarity, strengthening collectivity, and sustaining courage in the face of capitalism’s efforts to isolate us in self-interest and fear. The “instrumentalist impoverishment” of which Holloway accuses Marxists is Holloway’s own, apparent in his omission of the abundant life-world of practices organized by communist parties everywhere. It prevents him from acknowledging the diverse activities involved in communist party organizing, activities such as establishing newspapers and literary journals, forming youth leagues and sports teams, building support networks for women’s groups and racialized minorities. Once these multiple and varied activities are included in our conception of discipline, we see again the party as a social link, one that interrupts the imaginary and symbolic order of the bourgeoisie to insert egalitarian ideals and collectivist perspectives. Understood most generally, party discipline is nothing but establishing and maintaining this link. Bensaïd observes that Holloway reduces “the luxuriant history of the workers’ movement, its experiences and controversies to a single line of march of statism through the ages, as if very different theoretical and strategic conceptions had not been constantly battling with each other.”83 What Holloway refers to as the subordination of myriad forms of class struggle to the goal of gaining control of the state has historically included an array of tactics and been carried out in multiple time frames. Tactics for winning the state span a wide range: from securing an electoral majority and participating in governing coalitions to organizing factories and neighborhoods into a counterforce; stretching the resources of the state until it collapses; subverting the state from within; violently overthrowing it and militarily invading it. These different tactics fold into one another, operating along different time frames with short-term and longrange goals and cutting across national and regional borders in fronts, alliances, rings, and pacts. Nothing about communist organizing presumes the externality of the state to society much less the autonomy of the state from international political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental forces. A less reductive treatment of the communist revolutionary legacy would note how communist visions of the party as a means of waging revolution explicitly state, time and again, that revolution requires changing people, beliefs, and practices. Even crude treatments of historical communism admit as much when they attack as totalitarian twentieth-century efforts to create the new socialist man or a new type of human being. 124 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=124 | PRINTED_PAGE=125 The focus on the revolutionary goal does not distance the party from everyday practice, as Holloway implies. On the contrary, revolution is an effect of shared purpose. The goal is an instrument of its realization: a collective that has a goal and works to achieve it exerts power over itself. The production of the collective space of the party as a knot of transferential effects is the way people are changed through struggle, the way they induce a gap in capitalism where another perspective becomes possible. Members look at themselves and their interactions from the perspective of the association they create through their association, the party. The goal of revolution lets us see the reflective dimension of the instrument of revolution in terms of its effects back on those out of whom it arises. The party affects members, fellow travelers, opponents, and the general setting insofar as its knotting together of elements of the Other consolidates the space of a politics, establishing a place from which a collective can look at itself. The Party Opening Holloway claims that the party “is historically closed to us now.” He writes, Whether or not it ever made sense to think of revolutionary change in terms of the “Party,” it is no longer even open to us to pose the questions in those terms. To say now that the Party is the bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat no longer makes any sense at all. What Party? There no longer exists even the social basis for creating such a “Party.”84 Some on the Left have become convinced of this point. They repeat it as if it were an obvious truth. It’s not. What does it even mean to say that there is no social basis for the party? Some argue that changes in the social composition of labor and the capitalist mode of production have eliminated the industrial workforce necessary for a politics of the proletariat in the North and/or the West. Rather than acknowledging the historical importance of the peasantry in communist revolutions and parties, they presume a seemingly organic link between industrial worker and party as if factory organization automatically generated party organization or as if workers were naturally solidaristic. Part of the oddity of the claim that there is no social basis for the party is the way it inverts previous explanations for party identification. These explanations held that people join together in parties not because they already feel connected to others but because they don’t. Individualism, isolation, and the need to belong motivate people to join together.85 The same effect—party belonging—is thus attributed to connectedness and isolation, a prior solidarity and a prior individualism. When critics of the party use socioeconomic factors to support their claims for the obsolescence of the party form they treat isolation, fragmentation, and individualism as explanations for their own continuation. Previous analyses, however, understood these as problems party belonging redressed. Nevertheless, something about Holloway’s claim rings true. After all, if the party form were compelling now, wouldn’t we see something like a party exerting a force on the contemporary Left? His point that the idea of the party as the bearer of working-class consciousness no longer makes any sense at all has an element of truth. But what is this element? 125 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=125 | PRINTED_PAGE=126 As he positions Leninists as the subject supposed to know, Holloway implies that there was a time when the Party was the bearer of working-class consciousness. There was a time when people—workers, peasants, intellectuals, even capitalists—believed that the Communist Party was the bearer of working-class consciousness. More precisely, they believed that others believed that the Communist Party was the bearer of working-class consciousness. In the second half of the twentieth century, this belief collapsed. The slogan from the Cultural Revolution makes the point most powerfully: “the bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party.” This is the element of truth in Holloway’s claim that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of the party. Few today believe that the Communist Party is vanguard of a revolutionary working class. The assumption that revolutionaries used to know, however, points to the continuation of transference: Holloway doesn’t say that they never knew. He doesn’t say that the party never was a bearer of working-class consciousness. The space opened up and held by the party remains. It’s as if the party’s form as “enigmatic subject support” persists even as the working class no longer appears as a revolutionary subject.86 Such a support continues to exert an effect even in the claim that “the bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party.” The claim is reflexive. It is the party itself that opens the space for this criticism of itself. The party holds up the subject making this criticism, a point Holloway attempts to disavow but cannot not presuppose. He is right to say the party is not the bearer of working-class consciousness. In fact it never could be the bearer of such a fiction, the efforts of German Social Democracy to present it otherwise notwithstanding. The party is the support for the subject of communism. This subject has been variously figured as proletariat, peasantry, and divided people. The party operates as the support for the subject of communism by holding open the gap between the people and their setting in capitalism. The more the gap appears, the more the need for and perhaps even sense of a party impresses itself. This gap isn’t a void. It’s a knot of processes that organize the persistence of the unrealized in a set of structural effects: ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to know and believe the party as the Other space. This Other space doesn’t have its own interest, a correct line, or an objective science that tells it the truth of history. It is instead a rupture within the people dividing them from the givenness of their setting, a rupture that is an effect of their collectivity, the way their belonging works back upon them. Political experience shows that radical movements cannot simply avoid the state— the state won’t let them. It actively infiltrates, polices, and subverts them. To the extent that movements pose a serious challenge to state power, they encounter its reactive counterforce. That society can seize itself is a myth that has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had for the Left and become visible as the instrument of the expansion of capitalism.87 Gaining political control of the state thus remains an important goal because the state presents a barrier to political change. As the political instrument of capitalist class rule, the state enforces order in the interest of capital as a class, doing all it can to prevent, redirect, and smash opposition. In the face of militarized policing, not to mention the evisceration of the social gains of working-class movement, does it make sense to envision a political revolution that ignores the state, allowing the state to go on exercising its policing, repressive, and legal functions? If we do not think that the state should remain in the hands that it is in, then we lapse into the politics of the beautiful moment when we fail to factor it into our political perspective. 126 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=126 | PRINTED_PAGE=127 One might object that contemporary decentered, federated, and interlinked states are not in anyone’s hands and therefore cannot be seized. This objection, however, implicitly endorses a liberal technocratic view of the state. It proceeds as if the systems of laws and assumptions on which states are based are nothing more than neutral protocols. The classic communist ideal of the dictatorship of the proletariat confronts this lie directly. The liberal state is in actuality the dictatorship of capital. Its premises ensure that the benefit of the doubt, “common sense,” falls on the side of capitalism, that what feels like the right decision is the one that confirms the bourgeois mindset: protect private property, preserve individual liberties, promote trade and commerce. The goal of gaining control of the state takes aim at this underlying level of laws, practices, and expectations, targeting common sense to make it the sense for and of the common. Capitalists will not voluntarily reorganize processes of accumulation so as to put an end to proletarianization. They will not simply hand over control and ownership of the means of production. States will not just stop oppressing, arresting, and imprisoning those who resist them. Such fundamental changes will only come about through political struggle, carried out internationally. A Left that eschews organizing for power will remain powerless. This is why we are talking about the party again. 1 Gavin Walker, “The Body of Politics: On the Concept of the Party,” Theory and Event 16: 4, 2013. 2 In addition to the debate over the “new times” in Marxism Today discussed in chapter one, differing instances ofthis same turn can be found in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985; Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992; Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, New York: Autonomedia, 2010; originally published in French in 1985. 3 See the contributions to the debate “Communist Currents,” eds. Bruno Bosteels and Jodi Dean, South Atlantic Quarterly 113: 4, Fall 2014, 659–835. 4 David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990, 14. 5 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, London: Verso, 2010, 258. 6 Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, 57. 7 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, London: Verso, 1999, 353–54. 8 Jason E. Smith, “Contemporary Struggles and the Question of the Party: A Reply to Gavin Walker,” Theory and Event 16: 4, 2013. 9 Peter D. Thomas, “The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization,” Theory & Event 16: 4, 2013. 10 For example, Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis; and Joshua Clover and Aaron Benanav, “Can Dialectics Break BRICS,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113: 4, Fall 2014, 743–59. 11 Mikhail Bakunin, “On the International Workingmen’s Association and Karl Marx,” 1872. Available at marxists.org. 127 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=127 | PRINTED_PAGE=128 25 Ibid., 39. 28 Ibid., 25. 29 Ibid., 208. 30 Ibid., 210. 32 Ibid., 38. 33 Ibid., 42. 34 Ibid., 44. 35 Ibid., 42. 36 Ibid., 43. 37 Ibid., 45. 38 Ibid., 127. 128 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=128 | PRINTED_PAGE=129 129 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=129 | PRINTED_PAGE=130 130 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc.md?start=130&limit=10)