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# Crowds and Party
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Wright says that the charges against Ross aren’t brought until well into the evening. Those that bring them are not Central Committee members or high-level operatives. They’re Ross’s own friends. When it comes time for Ross to defend himself, he wilts, trembling and unable to talk. He calls no one to speak in his behalf.
The hall was as still as death. Guilt was written in every poor of his black skin … His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated. Yet he could not have been so humbled unless he had shared and accepted the vision that had crushed him, the common vision that bound us all together.55
Ross is guilty because his desire is so great, so magnified and intense, that it cannot not be betrayed. The superegoic force of the Party concentrates collective desire into an impossible, unshakeable desire for collectivity.
Ross confesses. He accepts his guilt, recounts his errors, outlines plans to reform. Wright makes it clear that
Ross had not been duped; he had been awakened. It was not a fear of the Communist Party that had made him confess, but a fear of the punishment that he would exact of himself that made him tell of his wrong-doings. The Communists had talked to him until they had given him new eyes with which to see his own crime … He was one with all the members there, regardless of race or color; his heart was theirs and their hearts were his; and when a man reaches that state of kinship with others, that degree of oneness, or when a trial has made him kin after he has been sundered from them by wrongdoing, then he must rise and say, out of a sense of the deepest morality in the world: “I’m guilty. Forgive me.”56
A ritual assembly for sundering becomes an intense experience of belonging. Even as it concentrates the enormity of global struggle and oppression, the Party provides a structure for relief from that pressure. It gives meaning to suffering. It supplies a vehicle for its redress. Something can be done, but it can only be done together. To insist on one’s own way is to do nothing at all because against all of capitalism individual efforts are worthless. In fact, it’s even worse: to insist on one’s own way is to support capitalism, racism, imperialism, and fascism, to join them in their war against the people. Alone, Ross would be left isolated in his confrontation with the impossible demands of the people. With his comrades, he could experience the power of these demands in forcing change.
As Wright depicts it, Ross’s trial has echoes of Socrates’ trial before the Athenians. Charges are brought by friends. The accused does not call on anyone to speak in his behalf. The real trial is before history: Who is actually guilty here? The Athenians? The Party? The difference is that unlike Plato, Wright expresses the ambivalence of collective power. The Chicago comrades were wrong, living blind and limited lives “truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of communism.” But a truth appears even through their “corrupted consciousness.” The experience of equality across raced division, the discharge Canetti associates with the crowd, cuts through the spectacle of misguided banishment. Seeing with the Party, viewing himself from the same perspective as his accusers, Ross is no Socrates. Where Plato isolates the moral perspective in the figure of Socrates and judges the Athenians from that vantage point, Wright maintains fidelity to the perspective opened by the Party even as it errs, even as it fails to apply this perspective to itself.
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Ross wouldn’t be going to jail, of course. The Party is a voluntary organization. But the choice goes in both directions: the Party that identifies those made out of “special stuff” also determines who is lacking. It can cut people out, cut them off from the epic struggle of the oppressed, push them out of the crowd and into isolation and anxiety. With language surprisingly evocative of Lacan, Wright confesses that he couldn’t escape the feeling that Ross “enjoyed” the trial. “For him, this was perhaps the highlight of an otherwise bleak existence.”57 The trial focused the immense affective apparatus of the Party onto Ross. The enthusiasm and commitment of millions was activated because of him, or at least in those moments he could feel as if it was, he could feel that his actions and choices were of world-historical significance. The feeling couldn’t endure. He was to be expelled, after all. But at that moment he was conjoined with the world like no other.
Wright describes the trial he witnesses as a spectacle of glory and horror. The ugliness of the Party is the other side of its service as a transferential object, its capacity to make the crowd felt after its dissipation. An engulfing crowd may be frightening. The release from the limits of the everyday may be too much. An apparatus for mobilizing emotional longing and generating affective attachment in the service of struggle, the Party wields power by exerting the force of the collective on its members. It wields this within the members themselves, as their own collective desire for collectivity. How else would the Party maintain a gap within its capitalist setting? Glory and horror are the same arrangement of intensity from two perspectives, the profound feeling of collective strength and the fear such strength can generate. Wright invokes the words of the Internationale, “Arise, you pris’ners of salvation!”
The trial exposes the gap of desire as perhaps no other element of Party infrastructure can. Desire is never desire for a specific obtainable object—desire cannot be satisfied. Lacan’s famous dictum is that “desire is the desire of the Other.” Desire opens up as a gap in the Other, as what the Other lacks. At times desire can become so overwhelming that it becomes concentrated in a singular place, such as a person imagined as a unified individual. The gap is filled in, the dream of justice truncated and distorted. Misdirected, thwarted back in on itself, desire becomes obscene. It pushes beyond need, beyond demand, into the destructive insistence of the drive. The desire for justice turns in on itself in the enjoyment of power.
The actuality of the Communist Party exceeds its errors and betrayals. It encompasses the hopes for justice and aspirations for equality invested in it. To reduce the Party to its excesses fails to recognize its indispensable capacity to generate practical optimism and collective strength. Such a reduction likewise reduces the world, contracting possibility into what can be done instead of forcing the impossibility of what must be done. The Communist Party enlarged the world. Expanding the crowd’s egalitarian discharge so that it can endure as the emancipatory push of the people, the party increases the crowd’s effects. It gives the crowd its meaning and takes this meaning as its own. The party continues the moment of belonging, intensifying and expanding it in solidary purpose.
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“Forjustice thunders condemnation”
How do and can we imagine political change under the conditions of communicative capitalism? Is political change just aggregated personal transformation, communism as viral outbreak or meme-effect, #fullcommunism? Do we think that autonomous zones of freedom and equality will emerge like so many mushrooms out of the dregs left behind in capital flight and the shrinking of state social provisioning? Or do we optimistically look to democracy, expecting (all evidence to the contrary) that communism, or even upgraded social democracy, will arise out of electoral politics? All these fantasies imagine that political change can come about without political struggle. Each pushes away the fact of antagonism, division, and class struggle as if late neoliberalism were not already characterized by extreme inequality, violence, and exploitation, as if the ruling class did not already use military force, police force, legal force, and illegal force to maintain its position. Politics is a struggle over power. Capital uses every resource—state, non-state, interstate—to advance its position. A Left that refuses to organize itself in recognition of this fact will never be able to combat it.
In communicative capitalism, individual acts of resistance, subversion, cultural production, and opinion expression, no matter how courageous, are easily absorbed into the circulatory content of global personal media networks. Alone, they don’t amplify; they can’t endure. They are easily forgotten as new content rushes into and through our feeds. We indulge in fantasies of the freedom of our expression, our critical edge and wit, disavowing the way such individuated freedom is the form of collective incapacity. Against states and alliances wielded in the service of capital as a class, diverse and separate struggles are so many isolated resistances, refusals to undertake the political work of pulling together in organized, strategic, long-term struggle. The constant churn of demands on our awareness disperses our efforts and attention. What the Left should be doing is coordinating, consolidating, and linking its efforts so that they can amplify each other. We don’t need multiple, different campaigns. We need an organized struggle against capitalism capable of operating along multiple issues in diverse locations.
Crowds push back. From the perspective of the party, we see them as the insistent people. Fidelity to the insistence of the egalitarian discharge demands that we build the infrastructure capable of maintaining the gap of their desire. The more powerful the affective infrastructure we create, the more we will feel its force, interiorizing the perspective of the many into the ego-ideal that affirms our practices and activities and pushes us to do more than we think we can. Radical pluralists and participatory democrats sometimes imply that there can be a left politics without judgment, condemnation, exclusion, and discipline. Denying the way that collective power works back on those who generate it, they suggest we can have the benefits of collectivity without its effects. But “working back” is an inextricable dimension of collectivity’s capacity to cut through the self-interest of individual needs and produce enduring bonds of solidarity. Collective activities always have effects in excess of their immediate goals. Rather than fearing these effects, rather than remaining stuck in the fantasy that an individual can change the world, and rather than remaining so gripped by fears of power that we fantasize a politics that can abolish it, we should confront the force of collectivity directly and take responsibility for generating it and using it. The party capable of building an affective infrastructure that can cut through the barriers of capitalist expectation will err. It is not, cannot be, and should not be believed to be infallible. Sometimes it may turn its immense energies on itself. If we can’t bear it, we aren’t the Left, the communists, we need.
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Anyone who is unwilling to talk about the party should not talk about political transformation.
1 Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, New York: Basic Books, 1977, 123–24. I am indebted to Jon Flanders for the gift ofthis book.
2 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984, 22, originally published in German in 1960.
3 Ibid., 29.
4 Ibid., 23.
5 Ibid., 197.
6 Ibid., 185.
7 Gavin Walker, “The Body of Politics: On the Concept of the Party,” Theory & Event 16: 4, 2013.
8 See my discussion in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, chapter one.
9 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 53.
10 Ibid., 64.
11 Ibid., 11.
12 Thanks to Bonnie Honig and James Martel for working out this formulation.
13 Gornick, The Romance ofAmerican Communism, 36.
14 Idid., 46.
15 Ibid., 52.
16 Ibid., 32.
17 Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism, London: Verso, 2006. The book is comprised of three essays originally published in New Left Review between 1985 and 1987.
18 Ibid., 7.
19 Ibid., 8.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 67.
22 Ibid., 171.
23 Ibid., 206.
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24 Ibid., 36.
25 Ibid., 106.
26 Ibid., 103.
27 Ibid., 108.
28 Ibid., 109 (italics in the original).
29 Ibid., 108.
30 Ibid., 120.
31 Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, 109–10.
32 Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 82.
33 Ibid., 86.
34 Ibid., 87.
35 Ibid., 88.
36 Ibid., 102.
37 Ibid., 103.
38 Ibid., 22.
39 For more comprehensive accounts of the history of African American involvement in and influence on US communism see Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990; Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making ofBlack Left Feminism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011; Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936, Jackson, MS: University Press ofMississippi, 1998.
40 Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, 123.
41 Ibid., 110.
42 Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, 189.
43 Ibid., 190.
44 Ibid., 191.
45 Ibid., 193.
46 Ibid., 116.
47 Ibid., 119.
48 Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism, 55.
49 Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist, Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977, 36.
50 Ibid., 40.
51 Ibid., 41.
52 Ibid., 42.
53 Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, 104.
54 Richard Wright, Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger), The Outsider, New York: The Library of America, 1991, 354.
55 Ibid., 355.
56 Ibid., 356.
57 Ibid., 351.
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Conclusion
For over thirty years, the party has been extracted from the aspirations and accomplishments it enabled. Even as “dogma” has been uniformly qualified with “party,” dispersed yet ubiquitous left dogmatism has turned the so-called obsolescence of the party form into the primary tenet of its catechism. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, reimagined—except for the communist party. It’s time to put this nursery tale aside and take up the challenge of actively constructing the political collectivity with the will and capacity to bring an egalitarian world into being. The party holds open the space for the emergence of such a will. It doesn’t prefigure a new world, but impresses upon us the gap between the world we have and the world we desire.
The innovation of Marxism was linking the political battle for socialism to workers’ economic struggles. Social democratic parties sought to expand democratic rights and use parliamentary processes to win political power for the working class. But bourgeois, liberal, and parliamentary democracy stood in the way of working-class power. As the political form of capitalist order, liberal democracy secures this order through principles and processes designed to individualize, disperse, and displace class antagonism. Encountering the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, revolutionary socialist and communist parties extended the political struggle beyond its electoral confines and pursued a wider range of tactics. Social democracy, nearly completely dismantled by neoliberalism and now confined to a certain fantasy of Sweden, proceeds by way of managing class antagonism. It denies the incompatibility of capitalism and the people as it finds ways to secure the compliance of the working class. In contrast, the promise of communism is the abolition of class and capitalism. The communist party pursues this abolition as a political struggle.
For Marx, “proletariat” names capitalism’s self-creation of what destroys it. This “what” that destroys capitalism is a collective subject, a force no longer dispersed in individual and local acts of smashing, sabotage, and disruption, but concentrated in solidarity. Of course, economic destruction alone is insufficient for the abolition of capitalism. The normal operation of the capitalist system is characterized by “uncertainty and instability,” “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and stagnation.”1 Contemporary capitalism has refined its capacity for wealth destruction: over thirty-four trillion dollars of market value was lost in the financial crisis of 2008. In the course of the recession that followed, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer: the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains made between 2009 and 2011.2 Not only was the 1 percent better able to weather the crisis than the rest of us, but it was also able to increase its share. So it’s not just economic destruction that’s at stake. It’s bringing to an end the capitalist cycle of creative destructive—the destruction of destruction. And this political destruction is brought to an end by the proletariat. It is not the task of the working class organized as workers. They are already organized as workers in the factory, which enables them to become conscious of their material conditions and the need to combine into unions. The abolition of capitalism depends on the organization of the proletariat as a party, a solidary political association that cuts across workplace, sector, region, and nation. The working class as a class is implicated in the success or stability of capitalism. Capitalism configures the working class’s struggles with the bourgeoisie. In contrast, the party takes as its horizon capitalism’s supercession in communism. For Marx, the party is necessary because class struggle is not simply economic struggle. It’s political struggle.
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Consider the famous passage from The German Ideology: “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs.” How should we understand this? Not as immediate insurrection or as prefiguration but rather as the expansion of voluntary cooperation. I say this because Marx explains that “the conditions of this movement [we call communism] result from premises now in existence.” The premises he is discussing involve the multiplication of productive force through the cooperation of different individuals as this cooperation is determined by the division of labor and not as an effect of people’s own united power. Abolishing determination by the division of labor is a matter of self-conscious collective action wherein cooperation isn’t forced, isn’t out of our control, but is instead willed commonly. Cooperation and concentration become self-conscious and willed rather than unconscious and determined. Collective desire for collectivity becomes stronger than the individual preferences determined by capitalism. As the movement which abolishes the present state of affairs, communism expands collective voluntary cooperation, the power of many exerted back upon itself. As an organization premised on solidarity, the party holds open a political space for the production of a common political will, a will irreducible to the capitalist conditions in which the majority of people find themselves forced to sell their labor power. Where work is obligatory, membership in the party (like participation in the movement) is voluntary, the willed formation of united power. Among its members, the party replaces competition with solidarity.
In a 2006 interview, Alain Badiou notes how, for Marx, “proletariat” is an identity that is a non-identity or an identity beyond all identities. In this sense, “proletariat” is “generic” rather than particular. Today, neither “proletariat” nor “working class” functions in the way that it did for Marx. “Proletariat” is less open to multiple particular contents. It doesn’t feel generic. Political struggles fought along raced and sexed axes of domination have made the liberation of the working class no longer appear as the liberation of humanity as such. Badiou concludes that the generic function of the working class is likely “saturated.” Moreover, he writes, “We cannot substitute a mere collection of identities for the saturated generic identity of the working class. I think we have to find the political determination that integrates the identities, the principles of which are beyond identity. The great difficulty is to do that without something like the working class.”3
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In the course of working-class political struggles in the twentieth century, such a generic identity did already appear: the people. Georg Lukács credits Lenin’s characterization of the Russian Revolution for transforming the idea of the people into a generic revolutionary identity: “The vague and abstract concept of ‘the people’ had to be rejected, but only so that a revolutionary, discriminating concept of ‘the people’—the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed—could develop from a concrete understanding of the conditions of proletarian revolution.”4 Mao and Third World people’s struggles further this characterization of the generic subject of communism. The “people” thus has a powerful legacy as a name for that political subject which strives for emancipatory egalitarianism.
Nevertheless, various ideologies speak in the people’s name. Constituting a subject in whose name it can speak is ideology’s primary function. Like communism, populism and democracy—sometimes filling themselves in as nations or races—claim the people as their subject. Communism is therefore not unique in its claim of the people as its subject. Its uniqueness consists in its presentation of the people as a divided subject. In contrast with populist emphases on the imaginary unity of the people and democratic reductions of the people to the ways in which they are given (outcomes of elections and polls, categories of demographic identity, media expressions of public and audience), communism presumes that the people are split—bourgeoisie and proletariat, oppressors and oppressed, few and many. Rather than some kind of organic community, society arises around a fundamental antagonism. “Class conflict” is the Marxist name for this antagonism. Lenin’s “revolutionary, discriminating concept of ‘the people’” asserts this division within the people. Communists recognize the people in and as that division. Instead of asserting unity, communists assert the gap.
The party is a form for this assertion. As Badiou emphasizes, Marx’s rendering of the proletariat as that generic group the liberation of which is a universal liberation is an “extraordinary invention.” Badiou notes that the history of this invention “was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather the history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party.”5 The problem today is thus not only the inability of “working class” to name a generic identity. It is also and relatedly a collapse of confidence in the party as a political organization capable of representing this identity.
The saturation of the generic political identity of the working class became manifest in the multiplication of political identities. From 1968’s intoxication with the politics of the beautiful moment, through the eighties’ embrace of civil society and the politics of society’s own self-targeting, into the “activistism” and “movementism” of the alterglobalization movement, the Left has claimed as a victory the symptom of its defeat: the erosion of working-class political power and the accompanying decay of its political parties. Defeated on the political plane—the name of this defeat is “neoliberalism”—the Left shifted to the social and cultural terrain. It fragmented into issues and identities. On some issues and with respect to some identities, there were political advances. At the same time, in jettisoning the struggle for political power, the Left lost the capacity to defend and advance the interests of the people. Economic inequality increased. Commitment to social provisioning—education, public housing, welfare, social services
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—collapsed.
Identity as an operator for a politics is now itself fully saturated. Symptoms of this saturation include the reduction of the space of change to the individual, the circulation of the momentary outrage in the affective networks of communicative capitalism, the practices of calling out and shaming that undermine solidarity, and the contradictory and destructive attachment to national and ethnic specificity. They include as well the complex mutual policing of who can claim what identity under what conditions and what authorizes such a claim.
When identity is all that is left, hanging on to it makes a kind of sense. The reality of the struggle to survive becomes the basis of an identity imagined as dignified because it has to produce itself from itself. Attachment to identity is pathological, nevertheless. It enchains us to collective failure, turning us ever inward as it holds back the advance of a politics capable of abolishing the current system and producing another one. Unfettered capitalism and the repressive state constitute real limits to cultural critique and social experimentation: exploitation, dispossession, incapacitation, incarceration, proletarianization, extermination. Perhaps the most striking symptom of the saturation of identity is thus the economic rupturing of identity categories, that is to say, the emergence of identities as themselves sites of class struggle. In 2014 and 2015, riots in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland pushed this struggle into mainstream discussions in the US.
Since Badiou’s 2006 interview, there has been renewed left interest in the party form. This interest results from the impasses encountered by the crowds and riots in the latter half of the decade. In cities all over the world, hundreds and thousands of people took to the streets and parks in a resounding “no” to the array of policies installed by the capitalist class to protect its interests. These protests signaled a new militancy and determination on behalf of opponents of austerity, precarity, state violence, and the neoliberal mantra of cuts, cuts, cuts. Then the protests ended. The crowds went home. Sometimes they made no demands. Other times they made impossible demands. And still other times they asserted truths both obvious and painful in the urgency of their assertion: Black Lives Matter.
The press of these crowds presents an alternative to Badiou’s “identity that is beyond identity.” The alternative is movement itself, the force of many where they don’t belong, the intensity of the egalitarian discharge. Marx and Engels link socialism not simply to the identity of the working class. They link it to working-class movement. In the nineteenth century, worker uprisings were pushing forward, coming together, and breaking out, disrupting capital processes of value extraction. This active movement incited Marx and Engels (and other nineteenth-century socialists and anarchists) to see in proletarian struggle more than demands for shorter working days, safer working conditions, and higher wages. They saw these struggles as the political process of the subject of communism. We can repeat their innovation not by looking for a generic identity (a search that already preoccupied Marcuse and returns in another form in Hardt’s and Negri’s multitude) but by emphasizing movement. In place of the saturation of identity, we should turn to the process of movement, recognizing the people as the subject of that process. The very fact of the active aggregation of crowds, the rise of political opposition and militancy, directs us to a collective desire for collectivity.
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The crowds and riots of the last decade have shown us the many coming to sense their collective power, the capacity of number to inscribe a gap in the expected. Debt, immiseration, policing, and dispossession have incited those proletarianized under communicative capitalism to revolt. Global demonstrations have also brought to the fore the crowd’s limitation. Its powers are destructive, creative, unpredictable, contagious, and temporary. The strength that comes with the indeterminacy of the crowd’s message is a weakness when the crowd disperses. The crowd lacks capacities of endurance, implementation, and execution. Without mediation, that is to say, absent a transferential relation to another space, it doesn’t know what it desires. The crowd doesn’t have a politics. It is the opportunity for a politics.
Some on the Left like to repeat Trotsky’s warning about substitutionism: the party substitutes itself for the class, the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the party organization, and the leader substitutes him or herself for the central committee. They present horizontalism as an alternative that can avoid these problems. Over the past few decades, we’ve encountered the limits of horizontalism as it fails to scale, endure, or replace capitalist state power. Far from solving a problem of left political organization, horizontalism is the name of a problem. Substitutionism, though, is not. The gaps substitutionism flags are the space of the subject. Neither the crowd nor the party is the people. The people is the gap between them. Political capacity always involves delegation, transfer, and division of labor. Not everyone can do everything. The very idea of a politics of everyone is a debilitating fantasy that denies the constitutive feature of the political: division goes all the way down.
The crowd enables us to build a theory of the communist party as a synthesis or movement party. Such a party is neither the movements’ vanguard nor instrument. It is a form of organized political association that holds open the space from which the crowd can see itself (and be seen) as the people. The communist party is the party faithful to the crowd’s egalitarian discharge. It doesn’t represent the movements. It transfers their egalitarian intensity from the particular to the universal. The communist party finds the people in the crowd.
Badiou treats the subject-effect as a knot of four concepts: anxiety, courage, justice, and superego.6 Canetti renders the crowd as a knot of four elements: growth, direction, equality, and density. In the party, the two knots intertwine as concentration, endurance, fidelity, and transference. The party does not represent the people as a collective subject. The party responds to this subject. Hence, it concentrates the subject-effects of anxiety, courage, justice, and superego into a transferential site from which they can work back on the collectivity. The party thus responds to the subject by recognizing it in the crowd and thereby making the crowd into something more than it is. It gives the crowd a history, letting its egalitarian moment endure in the subjective process of people’s struggle.
The party occupies the place of division opened up by the crowd. It minds the breach, maintaining it as the gap of desire of the people as a collective political subject. Without the perspective of the party, multiple resistances blur into the menu of choices offered up by capitalism, so many lifestyle opportunities available for individual diversion and satisfaction. The legacy of people’s struggle and crowd event are then carried only by university, culture, and momentary organizations, subjected to the demands of capitalism and deactivated as living resource. The gap of desire is sublimated into the circuit of drive. Without the party, there is no body capable of remembering, learning, and responding. Instead, dispersed individuals, absorbed in communicative capitalism and buffeted by competition, offer multitudes of opinions, suggestions, strategies, and critiques, the collective capable of response present only as an absent addressee. Providing the perspective from which the people can be seen and the space of its desire maintained, the party enables the people to appear in the rupture of the crowd event.
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