Crowds and Party

61 Ibid., 338.

63 Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, 11; Edwards, The Communards of Paris, 53.

64 Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, 13.

67 Ibid., 25. The Central Committee ofthe Twenty Districts aimed toward centralizing democratic and socialist forces in Paris; the Committee met in the headquarters ofthe Federation ofTrade Unions and the Federation ofthe International. Eugene Schulkind writes, “Potentially, this committee and the constituent vigilance committtees in each arrondissement were revolutionary organizations in the modern sense of the word, capable of mobilizing extensive popular support around a concrete programme and a long-range strategy as well as developing an experienced cadre for an eventual revolutionary government. In fact, a number of concrete efforts were initiated in this direction by some ofthe leaders, only to peter out soon in random activity and endless neighborhood discussions.” The Paris Commune of1871: The View From the Left, New York: Grove Press, 1974, 36.

69 Ibid., 279.

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More Than Many

Many on the Left think that the party is an outmoded political form. For them, what ’68 inspired and ’89 ostensibly confirmed is the conviction that radical left politics necessarily exceeds the constraints of the political party.

Often voiced as a criticism of specific parties, the conviction that the party is useless for the Left swallows up an array of historical particulars. The rejected communist party is not simply the ossified bureaucracy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the other ruling party-states of the former East. It is neither China’s Communist Party, unable to free itself from its inner bourgeoisie, nor France’s and Italy’s compromised and complicit parties. It’s the party form as such. Specific parties are rejected for errors singular or aggregate. They pushed for revolution at the cost of unnecessary violence and loss of life. They pulled back from revolution, selling out the working class and setting back the communist cause. Errors become evidence of the hierarchy, exclusion, and discipline irrevocably staining the party form as such, preventing it from being responsive to our changing times. Criticism of specific parties for the betrayals accompanying their acquiring of or participation in state power merges with a more general critique of the party as an ultimately authoritarian political association. The party is reduced to the actuality of its mistakes, its role as concentrator of collective aspirations and affects diminished if not forgotten.¹

Consider the shift in radical politics marked by “1968” and characterizing key tendencies over the next decades. Leftists turned away from the party politics targeting the state and toward the social movements targeting society.² This turn expressed itself in multiple ways, indeed, multiplicity can be said to be its primary characteristic. Whether highlighting oppression based in sex and gender, exclusion anchored in race and ethnicity, the disciplinary mechanisms of institutions (university, church, family, union, party, clinic), patterns of hierarchy in organizations ostensibly committed to its abolition, the stultifying effects of bureaucracy, the deadening normativity of consumerism, or the overarchingly machinic character of militarized industrial life, the critical project at the end of the sixties was marked by the rejection of the state and the constitution of a new terrain of struggle at the level of the social. How to live freely and authentically became a, if not the, primary political question, one that state politics could not answer. Remarkably, the rejection of party and state cut across state socialist and capitalist societies, across East/West and North/South divisions. Whether the critique was issued from a liberal, democratic, feminist, socialist, anti-racist, anarchist,

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Maoist, or militant perspective, the underlying supposition was the same: politics exceeds the narrowness of class and party; it thus requires turning away from the state and toward everyday life in all its unique specificity.

Forty years later, the suppositions of this critique continue to frame left politics. Despite their otherwise acute differences, communist theorists such as Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri beat the same anti-state, anti-party drums. Radical democratic activists emphasize global summits and events, NGOs and CSOs, communities and the local. Militants refuse and subtract, as if nothing had changed, as if politics were a matter of the micro-pure, as if the setting of politics remained that of a centralized state and dominant party instead of a combined and uneven mix of centralizing and decentralizing forces in various distributed combinations of state use of market and market reliance on state. The Left repeats a forty-year-old critique, as if its rejection of mediating institutions like the party did not serve capitalism’s interest in preventing the buildup of the solidarity necessary for the collective power of the proletarianized.³

The problem with the Left’s entrapment in repetition is not the repetition. It’s that the repetition prevents us from acknowledging how struggles at the level of the social come up against their limits in the state and market. David Ost’s account of the Polish Solidarity movement provides the best political analysis of this encounter with the limit. Documenting the deep connections between the spirit of ’68 and the Polish movement in the seventies and eighties, Ost describes its goal of a “permanently open democracy,” a political field irreducible to the oppositions between state socialism and market liberalism.⁴ Solidarity emerged as a postmodern anti-politics that deliberately abjured state power, seeking instead the strengthening of citizens in civil society. A left politics outside the party, Solidarity appeared as a fascinating experiment in a new political form, as Badiou puts it.⁵ What Ost makes clear is that the movement “became irrelevant the moment it succeeded.”⁶ Legalization, official recognition of an organization by a monopolistic state, was unavoidably an encroachment on that state. There was no way that Solidarity could pursue its program of societal democratization without touching state power, as it realized shortly before the December 1981 crackdown.

Slavoj Žižek makes an analogous argument with respect to capitalist societies. Antisexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and other such social politics founder against the hard rock of the market. Žižek writes,

The domain of global capitalist market relations is the Other scene of the so-called repoliticization of civil society advocated by the partisans of “identity politics” and other postmodern forms of politicization: all the talk about new forms of politics bursting out all over … ultimately resembles the obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in order to ensure that something—what really matters—will not be disturbed, that it will remain immobilized.⁷

Newness and experimentation, not to mention preoccupations with changes at the level of the individual and actions focused on media and culture, take the place of a politics targeting capitalism and the state, ensuring that they continue doing what they do. At some point, however, an encounter with the state or the economy becomes unavoidable as one or the other becomes a barrier to movement ideals. The fantasy of a politics capable of remaining focused on authentic social relations, a revolution in personal life, and flourishing cultural experiments occludes the legal and economic conditions that either make them possible or prevent their realization.

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The crowds, riots, occupations, and revolutions of the early decades of the twentyfirst century are demonstrating that the rejection of the party is itself outmoded. As Jason E. Smith rightly points out, “the question of the party-form can only take place with reference to, and indeed from within the dynamics of, contemporary struggles.” These struggles pose the organizational question of the party as “they run up against certain impasses that recur with such predictable if dispiriting regularity.”⁸ Confronting the challenge of generating, concentrating, and sustaining collective energies, political movement itself thrusts the problematic of the party back onto the terrain of left theory and practice. Peter D. Thomas writes,

it has been practical experience of the contradictory processes of left regroupment on an international scale—from reconfigurations over the last decade on the Latin American left, to the varying success of coalition parties in Europe such as Die Linke in Germany, Izquierda Unida in Spain, Syriza in Greece and the Front de Gauche in France, to the tentative emergence of new political formations across North Africa and the Arab world —that has firmly placed the question of the party back on the contemporary agenda.⁹

Movement actors increasingly recognize the limitations of a politics conceived in terms of issue- and identity-focused activisms, mass demonstrations that for all intents and purposes are essentially one-offs, and the momentary localism of anarchist street fighting. Thus they are asking again the organizational question, reconsidering the political possibilities of the party form.

This chapter supports contemporary efforts to concentrate and intensify the international Left by offering a theory of the party that emphasizes the psychodynamics of collectivity, the ways that our collectivity works back on us to make us more than many. I take up critiques of the party form contemporaneous with its emergence: the party is too centralized, too authoritarian. It’s a form by which the few dominate the many. In contemporary left discussions, such critiques are often voiced as if they were new insights born of recent experience. They aren’t. They were present already in the early years of working class political movement. I focus on the most thorough version of the critique of the party as it appears in the work of Robert Michels. Michels’s famous “iron law of oligarchy” applies not just to socialist parties. He extends it to democratic and anarchistic political formations as well. Political organization of any sort entails a gap between the few and the many. Rather than being constrained by Michels’s analysis, I treat it as an account of the enabling conditions of political collectivity, a way to understand the effects of collectivity on the collective. No party, class, or collectivity is identical with itself. Each is ruptured by an irreducible gap. Drawing from Lacan, I use concepts from psychoanalysis to theorize this gap as a social link or space, highlighting the relation of transference. Transference lets us see the dynamic features concentrated in the space of the Other. I close by putting my psychodynamic account of the party to work, illustrating it with examples from the Communist Party of the United States in the 1930s and deploying it in a critique of John Holloway’s argument against taking power. My goal in offering a psychodynamic theory of the party is to dissolve the hold that criticism of the party form still has on the Left such that we can accept again the responsibility of political organization.

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The Few Dominate the Many

Some current rejections of the party say its time has passed.¹⁰ Maybe at one time such a political form made sense for radical politics, some concede, but now is not that time. This rejection errs when it proceeds as if the critique of the party were something new, a response to objective changes in the mode and relations of production. The mistake is one of omission: left criticism of the party form is in fact coextensive with the emergence of working-class political movement. From the beginning, socialists worried about their organizations becoming centralized and authoritarian, and hence alienated from actual proletarian struggle.

The First International, the International Workingmen’s Association, which lasted from 1864 to 1876, split between the followers of Marx and the followers of Bakunin. Bakunin rejected the inclusion of a political plank in the platform of the IWA, specifically the assertion that “the conquest of political power is the first task of the proletariat.” Contra Marx, Bakunin emphasized the subordination of politics to the struggle for economic emancipation. Solidarity with respect to economic demands had to come first, the federations and sections of the International left free to decide the political question autonomously. On the one hand, Bakunin’s argument is pragmatic: because workers were coming together in struggle against capitalism, the insertion of political questions could make unity harder to achieve. On the other, the argument is rooted in a more fundamental rejection of statism. Bakunin rejects Marx’s political plank because he associates it with a strong state. In Bakunin’s words: “Marx’s program is a complete network of political and economic institutions rigidly centralized and highly authoritarian, sanctioned, no doubt, like all despotic institutions in modern society, by universal suffrage, but nevertheless subordinate to a very strong government to quote Engels, Marx’s alter ego, the autocrat’s confidant.”¹¹ Bakunin views the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as no different from any other statism under which the few would dominate the many.¹² For him, the political struggle, and its organizational form, is at best subordinate and at worst antithetical to the economic struggle of the working class.

Rosa Luxemburg transfers to Lenin the criticisms of centralism and authoritarianism that Bakunin levels at Marx.¹³ For Luxemburg, the problem is not with the party or the political struggle. Although she is celebrated for the mass strike and although she well understood the ways workers’ spontaneous initiatives could surge past their party’s capacity for action, Luxemburg always presumes that the energy of the masses needs to be directed. The energy of the masses can swell and grow, but they can only avail themselves of their power through leaders, “the executive organs of their will.”¹⁴ Even when critical of the party for failing to keep up with the masses, Luxemburg remains committed to the party as the form for concentrating and organizing political power. Moreover, Luxemburg assumes the necessity of the division of labor in “every socialist concern” for technical reasons of efficiency, discipline, and order. “Technical managers who know exactly what they are doing and give directions so that everything runs smoothly” are indispensible to the socialist economy.¹⁵ So Luxemburg rejects neither leaders nor the party. She rejects what she saw as Lenin’s particular version of the party.

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Writing in 1904, Luxemburg observes that the conditions of a highly developed bourgeois society that made the German Social Democratic Party organizationally possible are absent in Russia. Russia lacks the formal guarantees of assembly and press through which the masses can acquire political experience via participation in public life. Luxemburg points out that Social Democracy grew because Germany’s bourgeois democratic conditions allowed for the direct and independent actions of the masses. A class-conscious proletarian vanguard capable of organizing itself into a party, the heart of the German Social Democratic experience, is simply not present in Russia. Russian proletarians are atomized and isolated, not yet having educated themselves through class struggle. The problem with Lenin, Luxemburg argues, is that he proceeds as if he could simply command a vanguard into being by concentrating all party authority in the Central Committee. Rather than grasping the ways proletarian consciousness changes in the course of struggle, Lenin “mechanically subordinates” the class to the party and the party to the Central Committee. The Central Committee thinks and decides and everyone else carries out its commands. The few dominate the many.

Continuously repeated today, the charges of centralism and authoritarianism, the domination of the many by the few, are damning, striking at the very heart of people’s struggle. If the few dominate the many, then working-class struggle merely replaces one set of oppressors with another. The very organization indispensable to people’s political struggle stifles and deforms it.

Charges of centralism and authoritarianism, however, have not been confined to socialist and communist parties or even to the party form as such. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Michels levels these charges against democratic political participation most broadly: democracy itself leads to oligarchy. The conditions that make democracy possible also make it impossible, whether one is talking about a polity, a party, a union, or a council (syndicate or soviet). Michels’s analysis, which I consider in detail below, reminds us that it is a mistake to proceed as if critiques such as Bakunin’s and Luxemburg’s, critiques repeated ad nauseum on the Left, identify problems unique to Marxism or the party. On the contrary, we need to recognize them as attacks on mass, democratic, and people’s politics more generally. The charge of the few dominating the many thrown about so vigorously on the Left illuminates nothing specific to Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, socialism, or communism. Rather, it points to the challenges of organization, duration, and extension that persist after the dissipation of the crowd. The gap of politics is unavoidable. Repeating the critique of centralism and authoritarianism time after time, in setting after setting, reinscribes fantasies of a politics without politics, fantasies of a beautiful moment when the many immediately know and realize their desire. To the extent that the Left fails to recognize and take responsibility for the enabling condition of political collectivity, it will remain trapped in its own self-critique, unable to build or seize the organizations it needs.

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The Iron Law of Oligarchy

The best-known version of the argument that democracy leads to oligarchy comes from Robert Michels’s Political Parties, originally published in 1911.¹⁶ A student of Max Weber’s, Michels taught in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland; he was a member of the German Social Democratic Party, the Italian Socialist Party, and, later, Mussolini’s Fascist Party.¹⁷ Lenin dismissed him as “the garrulous Michels,” disparaging Michels’s Italian Imperialism as just as superficial as his other writings.¹⁸ Social science treats Political Parties as a classic, even “one of the twentieth century’s most influential books.”¹⁹

Political Parties explores the “nature of the party.” Michels deduces the nature of the party via an analysis of the “nature of the human individual,” the “nature of political struggle,” and the “nature of political organization.” On the basis of this analysis, he posits an “iron law of oligarchy” or rule of the few. Unlike ancient Greek visions of democracy as the response of the people against oligarchy’s owners of property, Michels construes oligarchy as intrinsic to democracy. Democracy, of any kind, tends to oligarchy. Democracy “necessarily contains an oligarchical nucleus.”²⁰ So while Political Parties concentrates primarily on socialist parties, particularly the German Social Democratic Party, Michels’s argument is broader, a political version of the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule: in any human association, the few will have more— whether this “more” is of goods, influence, or power—than the many.²¹ Parties one might most expect to incorporate rule by the workers in their basic structure, organizations animated by ideals of democratic participation, even groups with aspirations to anarchism, all ultimately take on a whole slew of oligarchical characteristics. Rule by the few is unavoidable. Michels surmises: “the appearance of oligarchical phenomena in the very bosom of the revolutionary parties is a conclusive proof of the existence of immanent oligarchical tendencies in every kind of human organization which strives for the attainment of definite ends.”²² Socialist parties and working-class organizations are not unique. They are representative, clear instances where oligarchical tendencies can be isolated and observed precisely because they conflict with party ideology. If democracy means rule by the many, democracy is impossible.

Michels presents tendencies to oligarchy as technical and psychological. Technical tendencies concern the indispensability of leadership in groups. Psychological tendencies involve people’s responses to leadership. They are effects of the fact of leaders back on the people. So there are tasks, means of accomplishment, and there are feelings about, responses to, and interpretations of these means of accomplishment. Both connect the party to the crowd. And both are matters of number: the problem and force of many, the complexity of mass organization, and the prestige accompanying that to

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which many adhere.²³

Michels orients his account of the inevitability of oligarchy in a theory of the crowd reminiscent of Le Bon’s. The crowd is suggestible, incapable of serious discussion or thoughtful deliberation, and susceptible to the influence of orators. Michels finds evidence of the crowd’s incapacity in the fact that most people avoid going to meetings unless the event promises some kind of spectacle or someone famous is speaking. Deindividuation is likewise a primary feature of Michels’s version of the crowd: “The individual disappears in the multitude, and therewith disappears also personality and sense of responsibility.”²⁴ And as we already learned from Le Bon, a crowd can go off in a panic or a flight of “unreflective enthusiasm.” It can be easily dominated, hypnotized, and intoxicated. Conversely, the crowd may be politically indifferent, hard to arouse, and a barrier to action. Number itself undermines direct democracy: thirtyfour million people cannot “carry on their affairs without accepting what the pettiest man of business finds necessary, the intermediation of representatives.” The crowd, Michels argues, needs “someone to point out the way and to issue orders.”²⁵ Tens of thousands of people can’t deliberate together directly and immediately. Basic considerations of space, amplification, and the time, duration, and frequency of meetings, not to mention preparing the agenda and carrying out decisions, point to the unavoidability of delegation.²⁶ So the crowd’s very nature makes it vulnerable to oligarchy. Not only can it not protect itself from bold power-seekers, but it relies on them. It needs leaders to get things done. It even enjoys them.

Michels narrates the slide into oligarchy as an ersatz “story of the Fall” as technical tendencies to oligarchy come to dominance in a group. This story applies to “every organization,” whether party, union, or other kind of association. From an initial equality, wherein delegates are chosen by lot or rotation, gradual change sets in as delegates’ responsibilities become more complicated:

some individual ability becomes essential, a certain oratorical gift and a considerable amount of objective knowledge. It thus becomes impossible to trust to blind chance, to the fortune of alphabetic succession, or to the order of priority, in the choice of a delegation whose members must possess certain peculiar personal aptitudes if they are to discharge their mission to the general advantage.²⁷

Demands arise for “a sort of official consecration for the leaders.” Leaders need to be vetted and trained, their expertise established. Accordingly, a system of examinations, and hence courses and schools, emerge. Educational associations produce elites with both skills for and aspirations to office. Michels concludes, “Without wishing it, there is thus effected a continuous enlargement of the gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.”²⁸ Even leaders originating from the masses become separated from them in the course of their acquisition of expertise, validation, responsibility, and experience.

Although the division of the leaders from the masses is particularly vexing to socialist parties, syndicalism and anarchism encounter similar problems with oligarchy, again, for technical reasons. By syndicalism, Michels means that socialist current which would replace the duality of party and trade union with “a completer organism”

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synthesizing political and economic functions.²⁹ This “completer organism” is the trade union reconceived as a revolutionary association aimed toward abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism. Syndicalists had been vociferous in their critique of the demagogic tendencies of democracy, whether in the German Social Democratic Party or in the trade union bureaucracy. Nonetheless, Michels argues, they also fall prey to the iron law of oligarchy. Leaders of any group can betray or deceive the rank and file, particularly in actions that involve secrecy and conspiracy. Strikes, whether economic or political, offer “to men with a taste for political life, excellent opportunities for the display of their faculty for organization and their aptitude for command.” The strike, “instead of being a field of activity for the uniform and compact masses,” facilitates the process of differentiation and favors the formation of an elite of leaders.³⁰ In effect, syndicalists have an even greater technical need for leaders than socialists do.

Anarchism, eschewing any form of stable or enduring political organization, would seemingly be immune from the problem of oligarchy insofar as there is no party hierarchy to climb or electoral office to seek. Not so, according to Michels. Three features of anarchism bring it under the “iron law.” First, like the syndicalists, anarchists favor direct action, which favors the heroic self-assertion of the few. Second, anarchists recognize the necessity of administrative work, “technical guidance of the masses,” in the administrative sphere. Federations of councils and communes, even when comprised of purely voluntary associations, would acquire authority over time, thereby falling into oligarchy. Third, anarchist leaders have their own “means of dominion,” the same means employed by the “apostle and the orator”: “the flaming power of thought, greatness of self-sacrifice, profundity of conviction. Their dominion is exercised, not over the organization, but over minds; it is the outcome, not of technical indispensability, but of intellectual ascendancy and moral superiority.”³¹ Michels’s point is not that there is something wrong with this dominion. It’s that anarchism does not escape the iron law of oligarchy. The few are still more authoritative than the many.

The larger the organization, the more powerful the leaders. For Michels, this is in part a technical tendency toward oligarchy, the challenge of organizing many. But it includes a corresponding psychological tendency as well, the psychic effects on collectivities of the fact of leadership. As we saw in Michels’s “story of the Fall,” a division of labor comes along with “modern civilized society.” In larger organizations, tasks become increasingly differentiated. Integrating them becomes complicated. Seeing the “big picture” becomes harder and harder. At the same time, voluntary organizations like unions and parties encounter constant turnover among their members. Members come and go depending on their stage of life—are they young and more interested in love and adventure? Old, jaded, and burned out? Most people have what feels to them as better things to do than spend their free time in political struggle. But not all: some, for varying reasons, attach themselves to organizational work. Some, particularly those who are paid and have acquired a vested interest in the organization, are more constant in their attentions to the group than are others. Those who are more constant and attached start to function as leaders. More than those whose engagement is temporary or sporadic, they know what the organization has done and is doing. They are the repository of organizational history, practice, and knowledge. Leadership can be less a matter of office than of the influence exercised by the regulars.

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As leaders emerge, the rank and file become less able to conduct or supervise the organization’s affairs. They have to trust those to whom they’ve delegated the various tasks, perhaps instructing them to provide reports on the work of the group. Generally speaking, most people like it that way. Michels notes that the majority rarely participate. They leave meetings and discussions and organizational tasks to others. “Though it grumbles occasionally,” he writes, “the majority is really delighted to find persons who will take the trouble to look after its affairs.”³² This delight is an affective response, a shared sensibility, what we might call relief in delegation or the pleasure that arises from pawning tasks onto others. What matters for my argument here is the flow from the technical to the psychological tendency to oligarchy. Michels argues that the majority reveres or even adores their leaders. Accompanying the crowd’s need for direction and guidance is “a genuine cult for the leaders, who are regarded as heroes.” So not only does the crowd need leaders for technical reasons, it is also affectively attached to them.

Michels’s account of this attachment is more suggestive than precise. But a decade before Freud, likely due to the influence of Le Bon and Tarde (he cites both), Michels anticipates key elements of Freud’s crowd psychology. The first is a primitive love. Michels attributes to the crowd the lofty moral quality of gratitude to the leaders for working on its behalf. He observes that leaders ask for gratitude as their reward for service and that the mass regards gratitude “as a sacred duty.”³³ Reelection or long-term support for party leaders displays this gratitude. At the same time, Michels describes an attachment to leaders exceeding the “sense of obligation for services rendered.”³⁴ This attachment is “an atavistic survival of primitive psychology.” Invoking the British anthropologist James George Frazer on myth and political power, Michels finds a latent “superstitious reverence” even for socialist leaders: “It reveals itself by signs that are barely perceptible, such as the tone of veneration in which the idol’s name is pronounced, the perfect docility with which the least of his signs is obeyed, and the indignation which is aroused by any critical attack upon his personality.”³⁵ He gives the example of Ferdinand Lassalle’s appearance in the Rhineland in 1864. Lassalle was received “like a god.” Garlands bedecked the streets; maidens threw flowers; the crowd overflowed with “irresistible enthusiasm” and “frenzied applause”—“Nothing was lacking.”³⁶ Michels notes that this fanatical devotion is not unique. Masses everywhere, in industrial as well as agricultural regions, England as well as Italy, “need to pay adoring worship.”³⁷ They exhibit, Freud might say, a horde mentality. At times the masses’ veneration of their leaders takes the form of an “imitative mania” that can grow into “absolute idolatry.”³⁸

Gratitude and reverence are not the only feelings that adhere the crowd to its leaders. The crowd’s admiration also stems from prestige and identification. The prestige of celebrity influences the crowd. Michels invokes Tarde, noting the way fame impresses with the number of admirers. Prestige is like fame insofar as it incorporates the views of many. It’s a matter less of talent than of the esteem held by the crowd. Even as the crowd responds enthusiastically to great orators, it responds even more to the enthusiasm of others, to others’ feelings and responses. These responses indicate the greatness of the oratory, not its content. People adhere with and to others in common admiration. One admires the leader because others do. When celebrity influences us, Michels explains with a quote from Tarde, “it is with the collaboration of many other minds through whom we see it, and whose opinion, without our knowledge, is reflected in our own.”³⁹ Unconsciously, we see through others. We take the perspective of the many. Our seeing is collective.

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