Crowds and Party

This seeing through others gives us a way to understand “imitative mania.” The object being imitated is not a specific person but prestige itself, the press and presence of the many, crowd, or mass. Lacan reminds us, “Whenever we are dealing with imitation, we should be careful not to think too quickly of the other who is being imitated.”⁴⁰ Imitating a leader or celebrity, the many act for each other, showing themselves in their admiring enthusiasm to themselves, making themselves the objects of their own collective gaze. When fans dress up as characters in a movie to attend a movie’s opening (as with the Harry Potter or Star Wars movies) or when they go in costume to fan conventions, they are doing it for each other. As they see themselves seeing themselves, they demonstrate the contingency and replaceability of the revered leader: any one of those imitatively adopting the leader’s characteristics is in the leader’s place.

Imitative mania, then, demonstrates the collectivity distorted in the pathology of “absolute idolatry.”⁴¹ The point of imitation is not the adoration of one, of a leader or celebrity. It is that the one is nothing but the thing enabling the many to experience its collective force. Enthusiasm arises out of this experience of collective imitation because the collective feels itself amplified, strengthened. Enthusiasm is nothing but this collective sense of collective power. In imitative mania, what is being imitated is not a person; it is prestige, the regard of the collective.

Identification is similarly unconscious. Michels observes that a powerful speaker can hypnotize the crowd “to such a degree that for long periods to come they see in him a magnified image of their own ego … In responding to the appeal of the great orator, the mass is unconsciously influenced by its own egoism.”⁴² Michels is ambiguous here, eliding the distinction between individual and crowd. Is his point that each individual separately identifies with the leader or that the crowd qua mass exhibits its own egoism? If the former, Michels loses the ability to say something about the crowd. If the latter, the speaker would be a vehicle for generating this other ego, this perspective capable of enduring, unconsciously, after the speech ends. The ambiguity, the slippage, affirms the latter point insofar as the speaker becomes an opportunity for collective force to exert itself.

Just as the distinctions between technical and psychological tendencies to oligarchy blur into and reinforce one another, so do the distinctions between crowd and leader, mass and party. Each twists into the other. Each ruptures the other from within, preventing it from achieving self-identity. For example, Michels emphasizes the importance of detachments from the bourgeoisie aligning themselves with the proletariat and animating its class consciousness. These members of the bourgeoisie —“philosophers, economists, sociologists, and historians”—help transform instinctive, unconscious rebellion into clear, conscious aspiration. Michels writes,

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Great class movements have hitherto been initiated in history solely by the simple reflection: it is not we alone, belonging to the masses without education and without legal rights, who believe ourselves to be oppressed, but that belief as to our condition is shared by those who have a better knowledge of the social mechanism and who are therefore better able to judge; since the cultured people of the upper classes have also conceived the ideal of our emancipation, that ideal is not mere chimera. 43

Bourgeois detachments, as a matter of fact comprising the majority of European socialist leaders, serve psychological as much as technical purposes: they enable workers to reflect on themselves; they provide a standpoint from outside the workers that workers can take toward their own condition.

This perspective that comes from without is also generated within the workers’ movement. Leaders come from among the workers, pushed up involuntarily by chance and circumstance. Michels quotes Le Bon, “The leader has usually been at one time the led.” Party work can separate the worker from the class to the extent that party functionaries are paid (and hence have a new source of income), to the extent that they acquire goals specific to the activities of the party, and to the extent that prestige attaches to leaders—the functionary is felt to stand for the many. Michels uses the party newspaper to illustrate the point: “the editorial ‘we,’ uttered in the name of a huge party, has a much greater effect than even the most distinguished name.”⁴⁴ The article or editorial is no longer linked to a single person. It is backed by the force of a collective to which it gives voice.

Michels concludes, “who says organization, says oligarchy.” Political enthusiasm— the joy of self-sacrifice, the thrill of struggle—inspires the crowd, but it can’t endure. The crowd disperses and people go home. Keeping the fight alive requires dedicated, professional cadre, a few who devote themselves to the cause. This very requirement separates the few from the many.

The socialist party is not identical with the working class. Workers are not automatically socialists and socialists are not necessarily workers. The party can have bourgeois and working class members (not to mention other classes). These members may be active or not, leaders or led. The class fragments into various interests, personal as well as political. Michels writes, “The party, regarded as an entity, as a piece of mechanism, is not necessarily identifiable with the totality of its members, and still less so with the class to which these belong.”⁴⁵ The party is more than the sum of the particular interests of its members. The very non-identity of class and party, the gap between few and many, produces something new.

We have hints about this “something new” in the ideas of prestige, identification, and that exterior point from which the working class can reflect back on itself. These ideas suggest that the party is a psychic space irreducible to its members and excreted out of the technical needs it fulfills. Michels recognizes this space, marking it with the party program. He writes, “A party is neither a social unity nor an economic unity. It is based upon its political program.”⁴⁶ The program sets out the party’s principles, ostensibly providing the missing point of unity in the “idea” of the working class. To be sure, this theoretical unity cannot eliminate the more fundamental class conflicts that express themselves in the party. “In practice,” Michels observes, “the acceptance of the program does not suffice to abolish the conflict of interests between capital and labor.” Put more broadly, the collectivity incorporated in the party will always be in excess of, never fully reconcilable with, a particular interest. A degree of alienation, of non-identity, is ineliminable. The very fact of a party—or any few carrying out some kind of organizational work—exerts a force counter to personal desire. If personal desire were enough, if it could simply be aggregated into happy outcomes, if the crowd had the capacity to know and get what it wanted, leaders wouldn’t emerge. But the gap is irreducible, a repetition in the party of the antagonism rupturing society.

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Mind the Gap

Psychoanalysis helps us understand this gap. It can let us see why the division between few and many should not be solidified as a division between real and ideal, pragmatic and utopian, but acknowledged instead as a constitutive, enabling split: impossibility is the condition of possibility for communist politics. The non-identity between people and party is what enables each to be more and less than what they are, for each to enable, rupture, and exceed the other. Michels specifies this gap as the crowd’s missing capacity supplied by the leader and the working class’s missing consciousness supplied by the bourgeois deserters. Acknowledging that these technical provisions remain incomplete, that organization is more than an instrument, he supplements them by attending to the psychological tendencies of crowds. As gratitude, prestige, imitation, and identification demonstrate, leaders are means through which the crowd can feel and enjoy itself. Michels’s own gestures to the unconscious thus provide an entry point for psychoanalysis.

Lacan associates the Freudian unconscious with a gap, a gap where something happens but remains unrealized.⁴⁷ It’s not that this something is or is not there, that it exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, the unrealized makes itself felt; it exerts a pressure. The communist party is a political form for the press of the unrealized struggles of the people, enabling the concentrating and directing of this press in one way rather than another.

That the subject of politics is collective means that its actions cannot be reduced to those associated with individual agency, actions like choice or decision. Instead, as chapter three argues, the collective subject impresses itself through ruptures and breaks and the retroactive attribution of these breaks to the subject they expressed. The punctuality of the subject could suggest that it is only evental, only disruptive, utterly disconnected from any body, creation, institution, or advance and thus without substance or content. But this would ignore the persistence of the subject in the press of the unrealized. This persistence needs a body, a carrier. Without a carrier, it dissipates into the manifold of potentiality. Nevertheless, with a carrier some potentiality is diminished. Some possibility is eliminated. Some closure is effected. This loss is the subject’s condition of possibility, the division constitutive of subjectivity. Political forms—parties, states, guerrilla armies, even leaders—situate themselves within this division. Although they can be and often are fetishized (positioned so as to obscure the loss or perfectly remedy it), the fact of fetishization should not deflect from the prior condition of the gap and its occupation.

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The psychoanalytic concept of “transference” depends on and expresses this gap. In clinical practice, the transference involves the relation between the analyst and the analysand. What sort of feelings and affects are mobilized in analysis and to what kind of structure do they attest? For example, does the analysand want the analyst’s approval? Does she want to seduce him, fight with him, obliterate him? Lacan acknowledges multiple ways of conceiving the transference, but rejects the idea that analysis proceeds via an alliance between the analyst and the healthy part of the subject’s ego (an idea found in some American versions of psychoanalysis). “This is a thesis,” Lacan writes, “that subverts what it is all about, namely the bringing to awareness of this split in the subject, realized here, in fact, in presence.”⁴⁸ The function of the transference in analysis is forcing the gap. Through the transference different unconscious agencies in the subject become manifest. As the analysand learns to attend to the transference, she can come to recognize and address the Other within, the way, for example, a parental or social other has configured her desire.

The transference is important for a theory of the party because of its function “as a mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious.”⁴⁹ The transference registers the effects of an Other beyond analyst and analysand: the analytic relation is not reducible to the interaction between them; it is the site of the appearance of an Other. Transference contributes to a theory of the party in this precise sense of a “mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious.” The party is a form that accesses the discharge that has ended, the crowd that has gone home, the people who are not there but exert a force nonetheless. It is thus a site of transferential relations.

Of course, the party is not an analytical session. Leaders and cadre are not psychoanalysts. This does not mean, however, that something like transference is not at work in the relation between crowd and party. In fact, Michels’s emphasis on gratitude points to a transference effect, a love that, counterintuitively, underpins people’s adherence to the leaders of an organization. Michels argues that those who have felt like no one was fighting on their behalf generally feel gratitude toward their champions. We could add here the way that people in a group are often grateful to those who step up, do the work, and take responsibility onto themselves. The feeling of gratitude makes leadership appear like a kind of gift, but one different from that which the king bestows on the people. Rather, insofar as he is focused on leadership in democracies, Michels suggests a leadership that the crowd produces contingently out of itself to give to itself. These are the leaders toward whom people feel gratitude.

Even a gift the crowd gives itself is not without cost. Žižek notes that for Lacan language is a dangerous gift: “it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.”⁵⁰ The gift establishes a link between giver and receiver.

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Acceptance creates a bond. It binds the receiver to the giver. “Gratitude” signals the binding power of the link, the felt force of the relation between giver and receiver, the pressure that renders a gift more than an exchange. What matters, then, is this link that is an effect of the gift and the force that it exerts. The gift constitutes a sociality that itself makes demands on us over and apart from those of the giver.

Lacan refers to this sociality as the Other or the symbolic. The transference reveals various components of it, unconscious processes and perspectives contained within the Other. The space of the Other is a crowded, heterogeneous space, a mix of shifting feelings, pressures, and attachments. It has structural features, dynamic features, processes that advance and recede, flow into one another and shift in importance. Multiple, different figures inhabit and en-form these structures and processes.

Features of this Other space that Lacan highlights include the ideal ego, the ego ideal, and the superego. As Žižek explains, Lacan gives a very precise inflection to these Freudian terms:

“ideal” ego stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, the way I would like others to see me); Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and impels me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize; and superego is this same agency in its vengeful, sadistic, punishing aspect.⁵¹

The ideal ego is how the subject imagines itself. The ego ideal is the point from which the subject looks at itself. And the superego is the judge that torments the subject as it points out its inevitable, unavoidable failure to achieve either of these ideals. These three points are tied together: the ego ideal verifies the image of the subject. Since the ego ideal is supposed to provide this verification, the subject has certain investments in it. The subject needs the ego ideal for its stability or sense of autonomy. Because of this need, it is resistant to recognizing that the ego ideal is nothing but a structural effect and resentful of the ego ideal’s simultaneous power and inadequacy. Moreover, in trying to live up to the expectations of the ego ideal, the subject may compromise its own desire. It may give up too much, which explains why the superego can exert such an extreme, unrelenting force: it is punishing the subject for this betrayal.⁵²

While these features of the space of the Other may appear individual, this appearing is nothing but a Freudian residuum. Not only are the features common, but they attest to the workings of collectivity that Freud encloses in the individual psyche. Such features operate in all collectives as groups compete with other groups as well as look at themselves from the perspective of other groups. Cities and nations, schools and parties all have self-conceptions formatted via the processes and perspectives of the Other.

The transference that takes place in psychoanalysis reveals two additional features of the Other space: the subject supposed to know and the subject supposed to believe.⁵³ These elements are configuring suppositions within the subject, structural features that the subject posits as supports for its desire. The subject supposed to know is the figure that holds the secret to desire. It knows the truth. God, Socrates, and Freud as well as institutional roles such as parent, teacher, expert, and priest can function as such a locus of knowledge for and of a subject. Consider, for example, the opening of an editorial in the Guardian by left journalist Paul Mason:

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One of the upsides of having a global elite is that at least they know what’s going on. We, the deluded masses, may have to wait for decades to find out who the paedophiles in high places are; and which banks are criminal, or bust. But the elite are supposed to know in real time—and on that basis to make accurate predictions.⁵⁴

Mason literally presents the global elite as the subject supposed to know. Not only does the elite know the obscene truths of paedophilia and expropriation, but they know them as they happen, “in real time,” while the rest of us remain deluded. In fact, a persistent question following the economic crisis of 2007–08 was why didn’t the elite know. How come no one saw the crisis coming?

Lacan writes, “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere … there is transference.”⁵⁵ Analysis depends on transference: the analyst has to function for the analysand as the subject supposed to know. The analysand starts talking about her symptoms, doing the work of analysis, because she thinks that the analyst knows the truth, when in actuality it’s her work that produces the truth. Analysis can end as the subject recognizes that the analyst doesn’t know after all.

Žižek introduces the subject supposed to believe as a more fundamental version of the subject supposed to know.⁵⁶ He explains:

there is no immediate, self-present living subjectivity to whom the belief embodied in “social things” can be attributed, and who is then dispossessed of it. There are some beliefs, the most fundamental ones, which are from the very outset “decentered” beliefs of the Other; the phenomenon of the “subject supposed to believe” is thus universal and structurally necessary.⁵⁷

The subject supposed to believe refers to this unavoidable displacement of belief on to some other. Concrete versions include the maintenance of the fiction of Santa Claus for the sake of children or the positing of some ordinary person who believes in community values. Michels’s description of those detachments of the bourgeoisie who join the proletariat provides another example. Through them, the proletariat believes that their situation is not just unfortunate. It is profoundly unjust.

Žižek emphasizes the asymmetry between the subject supposed to know and the subject supposed to believe. Belief is reflective, a belief that another believes. He writes: “‘I still believe in Communism’ is the equivalent of saying ‘I believe there are still people who believe in Communism.’”⁵⁸ Because belief is belief in the belief of the other, one can believe through another. Someone else can believe for us. Knowledge is different. That the other knows does not mean that I know. I can only know for myself. No wonder, then, that a frequent refrain in contemporary capitalist ideology is that each should find out for herself. Capitalism relies on our separation from one another so it does its best to separate and individuate us at every turn.

Institutions are symbolic arrangements that organize and concentrate the social space. They “fix” an Other, not in the sense of immobilizing it but in the sense of putting in relation the emergent effects of sociality. This “putting in relation” substantializes the link, giving it its force, enabling it to exert its pressure. A party is an organization and concentration of sociality in behalf of a certain politics. For communists this is a politics of and for the working class, the producers, the oppressed, the people as the rest of us. “Party” knots together effects of ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to know, and subject supposed to believe. The particular content of any of these component effects changes over time and place even as the operations they designate remain as features of the party form.

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The ideal ego in communist parties is typically imagined in terms of the good comrade. The good comrade may be a brave militant, skilled organizer, accomplished orator, or loyal functionary. In contrast, the ego ideal is the point from which comradeship is assessed: how and to what end is bravery, skill, accomplishment, and loyalty counted? The party superego incessantly charges us for failing on all fronts, we never do enough, even as it taunts us with the sacrifices we make for the sake of the party, we have always done too much. Each of these positions can be varyingly open and closed, coherent or contradictory. Insofar as the party is situated in an antagonistic field, insofar as it is not the state but is a part, other ideals and injunctions enter the mix: this is class struggle within the party, the challenge presented by capitalist consciousness. At the same time, the situatedness of the party means that the space it provides necessarily exerts effects beyond party members, providing images and reference points for those who might join, for allies and fellow travelers, as well as for former members or enemies.

The ideas of subject supposed to believe and know are particularly useful for thinking about these effects beyond party members. Critics of the communist party chastise the party for claiming to know, for functioning as a location of scientific or revolutionary knowledge. This ostensible expertise has been derided not only as monopolistic but also as false: the knowledge of living with, responding to, and fighting against oppressive power belongs to the people and cannot be confined into a set of iron laws of historical development. Given this critique, which came to be widely shared on the Left in the wake of ’68, it’s surprising that the collapse of the Soviet Union dealt such a mortal blow to communist and socialist organizing in the US, UK, and Europe. By 1989, only a tiny few defended the Soviet Union anymore. Most agreed that its bureaucracy was moribund and that it needed to institute market reforms. Why, then, did its collapse have such an effect? The “subject supposed to believe” helps make sense of this strange reaction. What was lost when the USSR fell apart was the subject onto whom belief was transposed, the subject through whom others believed. Once this believing subject was gone, it really appeared that communism was ideologically defeated. As a further example, we might consider the prototypical accounts of Communist Party officials with their dachas and privileges. These functioned less as factual exposes than as attacks on the subject supposed to believe: not even the Party believes in Communism. Where the attacks failed, however, is in the fact that they were waged at all. Insofar as they had a target, they affirmed its ongoing function as the subject supposed to believe. The flawed, dessicated Party could still believe for us.

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Once it utterly collapsed, we lost the other through whom we could believe.

The Party Organizer

Writings from the 1930s in the Party Organizer, a publication of the Communist Party of the United States for the internal use of unit and district organizers, display the array of dynamic and structural effects knotted together in the party.

A first example illustrates the intertwining of ideal ego and ego ideal in the Party. The writer vividly narrates how his CP-organized block committee fought to get food relief for a needy woman and her children. As he tells it, the workers “stood up like a solid wall, demanding food.” The cowardly relief supervisor, “a capitalist tool,” called the police, who rushed in and grabbed the CP organizer. “But the roar from the workers and my determination to fight back put fear into the hearts of the police.” The police called for reinforcements and brought “the big fat Judge Mendriski” with them. With a heroic image of himself, workers, and Party standing up to the capitalist relief supervisor, police, and judge and fighting to keep a woman and her children from starving, the organizer recounts, “I looked right at him and said: ‘What the hell are you here for, to help this serpent deny this mother with her three children? You don’t care … you with your belly packed with steak.’” The judge orders the police to lock up the organizer. But the police, “seeing the determination of the workers,” are forced to let him go.⁵⁹ The workers appear as a crowd, a roaring steadfast wall. Their appearing compels the police to take the perspective of the CP and recognize that the united workers are stronger than any judge and his order.

A second example brings out the superegoic dimension of the Party. In the early 1930s, the Party Organizer filled itself with articles on how to recruit and retain new members. Month after month, the writers—many anonymous, many district-level organizers—express excitement about gains in new members and dismay over the party’s failure to retain them. They worry that their meetings are too long, that they don’t start and finish on time, that they aren’t “snappy enough.”⁶⁰ They advise one another on the best design for a party meeting: no more than two hours, not to exceed two and half hours, three hours at the absolute limit. District organizers are advised to pick up members at their houses and bring them to meetings. Members are reminded to talk to new recruits. The CP organizers writing in the magazine sense the “enthusiasm and earnest desire of the workers,” but blame themselves for the fact that the workers drop out:

The recruit comes into the average unit of the Party and finds there a group of strangers speaking a jargon which he does not understand. No one pays much attention to him and he is therefore left very much to himself … enthusiasm cools, he becomes discouraged, loses his enthusiasm and finally drops out of the Party.⁶¹

“Jargon” is a symptom of the problem. “Jargon” means that the people and the Party are not speaking the same language. It marks a division between workers and Party members, even when Party members are workers. The language that members share, the ideas that enable them to see the world in terms other to capitalism’s, enhance and hinder belonging at the same time. The very activities they pursue as communists— reading, discussing, meeting, leafleting, organizing, training—separate them from the workers. What makes them communists, what separates them from capitalism’s constraints as it provides them with political capacity and conviction, inscribes a gap in the givenness of economic belonging. They are not just economic producers. They are political producers creating not commodities but collective power.

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One recommendation for overcoming this division is imagining oneself as a comrade, not a professor.⁶² Organizers are advised to speak “not as a soap boxer or a seasoned Communist theorist” but just to “be one of the workers, which indeed you are.”⁶³ Other recommendations include better development of cadres, more effort at education. Still others highlight a kind of transferential relation that can arise from “visiting the workers at least two or three times a week, getting to know them by name and their individual problems, and have them call you by name and feel you are one of them.”⁶⁴ Imagining oneself as a comrade, particularly when accompanied by instructions to do what one would normally do, involves a reflexive turn onto the everyday as one looks at what one does from the Party perspective.

The same desire that leads people to join the Party separates them from the crowd. Once they have become communists, they see themselves and the world from the perspective opened up by the Party. They look at the world differently from how they did before. Yet they also have to continue to imagine themselves as the workers they are, bound to the economic struggle. Hence the advice: “Little by little from the conditions in the shops go on to the speed up, wage cuts, unemployment and then to the need for organization. Don’t appear too insistent at first.”⁶⁵ The organizer has to begin from the perspective of the worker and guide the worker to a shift in perspective, to seeing from a different place. The superegoic dimension of the Party is inseparable from its capacity to provide an ideal ego and ego ideal.

The internal criticisms that the Party Organizer raises are unrelenting. For every success in increasing membership, there is an injunction to do more, to do better. One article will take up the ways problems are being addressed. The next will hammer home the problems that persist. The demands they place on themselves never let up—another membership drive, more focus on the trade unions, intensification of reading, more thorough reporting. They acknowledge small victories, but every victory—in true superegoic fashion—inspires yet more self-criticism. One writes, “Our influence among workers has increased ten-fold within the last few years, but the membership of our Party has remained practically stationary. Why do the workers come and leave our ranks? What is wrong with us?”⁶⁶

Throughout 1932, the conversation in the Party Organizer, particularly in the section on mass work, centers on “concentration”—concentration in the shops, concentration in the neighborhoods, concentration in the stockyards of Chicago. “Concentration” is approached from different angles, the emphasis on subjective factors explained in light of objective factors.⁶⁷ By February 1933, critical reflection turns round upon “concentration.” In “Concentration—A Means of Winning the Workers in the Key Industries,” J. P. observes that “concentration” has become a Party term: “we concentrate feverishly.”⁶⁸ But the formality and sectarianism of the approach to concentration has become itself the problem, the actual barrier to growth and increase. The Party has had the wrong conception of “concentration.” What is necessary is more intimate contact with the workers. Six months later a disgusted Party member laments, “we have never taken concentration seriously.”⁶⁹

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The Party Organizer reveals a party in the process of exerting pressure on itself, of imagining itself and struggling as it produces a place from which to see itself. This place is in flux, unstable, sometimes occupied by idealized revolutionary workers and sometimes the place from which workers are idealized. The stronger the Party feels itself becoming, the fiercer and more intense the demands it puts on itself. A letter from an active Party comrade in Chicago expresses the pressure of the relentless injunction to do more:

I will be criticized next Tuesday night at the organizers meeting because the unit is not larger; because I have not done more; because I did not attend some meeting or other … I do the best I can. However, no matter how much I do, I always hate to show my face because there are things I do not do that I was told to do. Directives, directives, directives. An organization letter sometimes of three pages. Hell, I could not do one tenth of it. I am getting tired. I am just as much a Communist as ever, but I am not 10 communists.⁷⁰

Žižek observes that the symbolic space of the Other “operates like a yardstick against which I can measure myself.”⁷¹ The communists appearing in the Party Organizer measure themselves as many. The desire that expresses itself in the urgent demands they make on themselves is collective—ten communists—even as it is felt as impossible superegoic command.

Political Organization and its Discontents

Thus far I’ve emphasized the psychodynamics of collectivity. Whereas critics of the party tend to fault the form itself for its centralism and authoritarianism, I’ve used Michels’s discussion of the technical and psychological tendencies to oligarchy in any political group to assert the unavoidability of a gap between few and many. Organizing crowds involves division, delegation, and distribution. Number—being many—has affective force, as we see in prestige, imitation, and identification. Further, I’ve drawn from psychoanalysis to theorize the gap as a link, a social space knotting together unconscious processes and perspectives. Inserting the party in this gap, I’ve shown collectivity’s work back upon its members. Their very association alienates them from their setting, opening up the possibility of another perspective on it and separating them from how they are given under capitalism.

To be sure, that political organization means a gap between many and few is unavoidable does not imply that the same people should be on one side or the other of it.

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