Crowds and Party

The need for the party stems from the fact that the people are split between the ways we are given, positioned, within capitalism. We are situated within a field that tells us who we are and what we can be, that establishes the matrix of our desire (Žižek’s definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle. Capitalism strives to separate and individuate us, to instill in us the conviction that selfinterest matters above all else, that freedom results from individual choices made for individual goals. It blocks from view the systemic determination of choices and outcomes, not to mention the power of collectives in rupturing these systems. When leftists assume the individualism of the dominant ideology, reiterating its emphases on uniqueness and trying to cultivate a politics out of individuated decisions, we undermine our own best impulses to collectivity and egalitarianism. The party asserts the truth of our division. It speaks from the position of this truth and offers another field of possibilities.⁷ In opposition to capitalist desire, it opens up a terrain for the desire of a collective political subject. The party doesn’t know everything. It provides a form for the knowledge we gain through experience and analyze with our eyes on the communist horizon. Such a party works to extend the collective desire for collectivity after the crowds go home. When it enables the crowd to endure as a rupture with capitalism (rather than a continuation of or contribution to it) and when it directs the crowd-feeling toward its own constitutive equality, the communist party can hold open the gap for the people as the collective subject of politics.

At different points over the past hundred years, the party has attempted to abolish capitalism and usher in communism in various ways—revolutionary seizure of the state, participation in parliamentary processes, training of cadres and education of masses in order to be prepared when the time comes, support and development of people’s cultures and capacities. The communist party has never been simply an organization aimed at achieving a set of economic reforms aimed at restraining capitalism’s extremes and providing workers with welfare guarantees. That this is the case is clear when we note the justified sense of betrayal voiced by communists when their parties compromise and retreat. They feel betrayed because the party gave way on communist desire, the very desire its wide array of organizations hold open, the desire underpinning solidarity and comradeship.

The array of classic party organizations—newspapers, literary magazines, clubs, trade associations, sports teams, schools, theater troupes, women’s groups, industryfocused councils, to mention but a few—reminds us that communist parties have always exceeded the binary of state and factory, actively engaging on multiple social, cultural, and economic fronts as elements of one struggle. As a red thread throughout the movements of the oppressed, communists connected divergent issues and experiences, enlarging them into a common world and mobilizing the collective desire for collectivity. Unlike standard parliamentary parties claiming representative authority, the work of the communist party involves substantialization, concentration, extension, and transference. Hence communist values of comradeship, solidarity, enthusiasm, and courage support the building of a political organization capable of responding in a revolutionary situation and enduring in less propitious times. Through the party, members push each other into modes of being and acting that appeared impossible before, when they were alone against capital and its state.

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The problem the Left encounters today is less a matter of organizational details than it is of solidary political will. As the will emerges, people will figure out the structure in light of the challenges we face in specific contexts, challenges such as expanding militant pressure in ways that inspire and educate cadres while at the same time straining the resources of the state and breaking the confidence of the financial sector; abolishing private property and the capitalist banking system while advancing international coordination in an uneven environment; and increasing popular support of and developing a program for common management of production, health, transportation, communication, food, housing, and education all in the setting of a changing climate, to mention but a few. Responding to these variable challenges generates new knowledge that can be integrated and shared. There is no reason to assume that every component of the party must have the same structure. A global alliance of the radical Left, or, better, a new party of communists, can be knit together from the concentrated forces of already existing groups: militants skilled at direct action, artists adept with symbols and slogans, parties experienced at organizing, issue groups knowledgeable about specific areas of concern, mutual aid networks addressing basic needs. Such a concentration would let people who want to be engaged in radical politics but aren’t sure what to do have a place to go, a place to start.

More importantly, such a concentration would amplify specific and local achievements as collective victories in the broader struggle for communism. At the most minimal level, if we are to have a chance of reformatting the basic conditions under which we live and work, we have to share a name in common as a fundamental marker of division. If not, our names will be given to us by capital, which will seek to fragment and distract us. In the movements of the last few years, we’ve seen growing recognition of the power and need for a name in common as a marker of division—We Are All Khaled Said, Occupy, We Are Seneca Lake. A frustrating dimension of localized political work is the way that it seems not to register (particularly if it occurs outside of major metropolitan areas). When local and issue politics are connected via a common name, however, successes in one area advance the struggle as a whole. Separate actions become themselves plus all the others. They instill enthusiasm and inspire imitation. They provide a sense of directionality and movement: which way is the struggle going? Simply multiplying fragmented, local actions isn’t enough—they have to be felt as more than what any one of them can be in isolation, indications of the enduring struggle of the people.

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In addition to a common name, we have to build solidarity, to extend the bonds of commitment beyond local ties and small networks. Without solidarity, a common will cannot emerge. Immiseration, precarity, defeat, and betrayal as well as ongoing patterns of sexism, racism, and homophobia have made us deeply suspicious. One way a party helps deal with this is with explicit criteria for membership and expectations for members. It supplements personal relations with relations to an organization, holding members accountable to expectations. Relations between comrades overlay and replace particularized relations anchored in individual preference. Practices of regular reporting help install these expectations. Another way a party builds solidarity is by acknowledging different skills and expertise, providing training and education, and delegating tasks. Developing and respecting one another’s skills and knowledge is essential if we are to form ourselves into a political force capable of taking on and replacing global capitalism. In practice, this suggests the utility of working groups in multiple locales and issue areas, groups with enough autonomy to be responsive and enough integration via practices of reporting to formulate and carry out a common purpose. It points as well to the active development of the organizational and political capacities crucial to multi-scalar communist self-governance.

Left anti-party dogma mobilizes anti-authoritarian convictions. Yet this mobilization has resulted in the intensified authoritarianism of global capitalism. Today authoritarianism is less that of centralized state power than it is of power decentralized, dispersed, and extended via private contracts, interbank and interagency cooperation, and the extensive network of treaties, agreements, and provisions enabling capital flow and global trade. National states act as the police force protecting the global capitalist class. We encounter the fragmentation, dissolution, and decomposition of some elements of the state, and the concentration and intermeshing of other elements of states and markets, as in finance, security, and media. Capital as a class has worked to smash the bureaucratic state machine for us, to convince us that it is useless, even as it strengthens parts of it for its own ends. For too long, left politics in the US, UK, and EU has mirrored neoliberal economics, urging decentralization, flexibility, and innovation. Even the neoliberal push to privatize is reflected in left politics: not only do we hear ad infinitum that the personal is political, but the micro-politics of self-transformation and DIY takes the place of building and occupying institutions with duration. In this vein, some on the Left have abandoned social change entirely. Wary of “totalizing visions,” they cede society and the state to a capitalist class that acts as a global political class intent on extending its reach into and strengthening its hold over our lives and futures.

The crowd has pushed this Left aside. Rising up in opposition to the decentralized authoritarianisms of interconnected states and markets, it has occupied, blockaded, and rioted. And it has come up against the limits of its capacity to give social struggles political form. The challenge we face is becoming the Left the crowd deserves, a Left that, faithful to the crowd’s egalitarian discharge, works to make it endure. A Left that speaks the language of radical change but refuses its forms is no Left at all. It’s the means by which political energy and conviction is displaced into styles and practices that make us feel good by making us feel radical. To advance, we need to organize. We need to be a party for the people in the crowd.

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1 Karl Marx, Capital, abridged edition, ed. David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 275.

2 Bonnie Kavoussi, “Top One Percent Captured 121 Percent of All Income Gains During Recovery’s First Years: Study,” Huf ington Post, February 2, 2013.

3 Alain Badiou, “The Saturated Generic Identity of the Working Class,” interview, Chto Delat 15, chtodelat.org.

4 Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity ofHis Thought, trans. Nicholas Jacobs, London: Verso, 2009, 22–3.

5 Badiou interview.

6 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, London: Continuum, 2009, 278.

7 Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, London: Verso, 2002, 185–89.

164

80/20 rule 13, 171
1968 162–3, 256
abandonment, fear of57
absolute idolatry 177–9
Adbusters 2
adulthood 44–5
advertising 33–5
affective intensification 95
affect theory 219–20
African Americans 228–33
agency 73
aggression 50
alienation 90
Althusser, Louis 73–4, 76–81, 85, 87–91, 113–14
anarchism 69, 174, 175
anarchist individuality 140
anonymity 142
antagonism 14
anxiety 148–9, 259
Argentina 2
association 94
Australia 20
authenticity 40, 42
authoritarianism 167–70
autonomous struggles 24
autonomy 2, 42, 73, 78, 106
individual 29, 63–4
Badiou, Alain 5, 68, 89, 135–6, 144–9, 149–52, 157, 158, 158–9, 163, 164, 254, 255, 257, 259
Bakunin, Mikhail 167–8, 170
Balibar, Etienne 91n
band-wagoning 8, 15, 96
Barabási, Albert-László 12–13
Bargu, Banu 68
beautiful moment, politics ofthe 125–6
becoming, modes of24
belonging 81–2, 121, 122, 204, 210–13, 233, 234–8, 248
Benjamin, Walter 7

Index

165

Bensaïd, Daniel 5, 198, 202
Berardi, Franco 56–7
Berlant, Lauren 219–20
Beslay, Charles 131
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 97–9, 101n, 105–6, 107, 108
Bosteels, Bruno 89, 150
boundaries, destruction of122
bourgeois equality 121
bourgeois ideology 79–81, 86–7, 88, 113
bourgeois individual, the 62–3
branding 33–5
Brazil 18
Brophy, Enda 17–18
Brunt, Rosalind 53–5
bubbles 8, 14, 96
Buford, Bill 118–20
Busi, Frederick 131n
Butler, Judith 78, 81–2
Canada 123
Canetti, Elias 5, 6, 32, 64–6, 120–3, 127–8, 214–16, 217, 242, 246, 259
capitalism 23, 54, 67, 140, 251–2 abolition of252–3 and adulthood 45 creative destruction 252–3 and individuality 37, 41–2 late 42–3 monopoly 44 neoliberal 47 promotion ofthe individual 32 uneven development of25 unfettered 256–7 welfare 40 see also communicative capitalism
capitalist realism 67
career management 47–8
cascade effects 15, 96
Castells, Manuel 70–1
celebrities, identification with 42
centralism 167–70
Chicago Communist Party 243–8
choice 52
circuits ofexploitation 17–18
citizen-subject, the 62–3
civil society 62–3
class 181, 220, 223
class analysis, failure of23
class conflict 255
class consciousness 179–80, 182, 192, 198–9, 203–5, 212–13, 223
class politics, failure of22–3
class struggle 14–22, 134–5, 157, 181–2, 201, 253–5
Coca-Cola 143 “Share a Coke” advertising campaign 34–5
cognitive diversity 11
collective being 9, 94
collective desire 105, 108, 112, 214, 234–42, 260–1
collective doers 197
collective energy 4
collective intelligence 11
collective mind 101
collective movement 6
collective power 10, 29, 258
collective responsibility 50
collective strength, loss of3–4
collective unconscious 100
collective voice 180
collectivity 8, 9, 22, 60, 64, 65, 90, 113, 114, 116, 200, 222–3, 235, 249 assault on 31–72 and constraint 73 and cooperation 253–4 and force 124 fragmentation of32 impossibility of69–70 and leadership 175–6 left realism and 67–72 political strength from 25–9 power of72 and the unconscious 100 undesirable 67–8
commanded individuality 31–2, 50–5, 63, 72
commonality 4
common belonging 81–2
commons 13
communication multitasking 58 networked 13–14, 57–9
communication networks 15–16
communicative capitalism 6–7, 10, 11, 14, 31, 123–4 circuits ofexploitation 17–18 class struggle 16–22 class war 16–17 core 17 crowds under 28 inequality 50

166

167

networks 14–15 the party under 217–18 and personal uniqueness 32–5, 56 political change under 248–50 communicative production 20 communism 255 Communist Party ofChina 161 Communist Party ofGreat Britain 50–1, 219, 222–7, 238–9 Communist Party ofthe Soviet Union 161 Communist Party ofthe United States 166, 190–5, 210–13, 219, 221–2, 227–33, 235–8, 239–42, 242–8 Communist Party, the 28, 205, 251–2 activity 222–33 actuality of242–8 belonging 210–13 commanded individuality in 50–5 dynamics 209–50 endurance 217–22 energy 242 knowledge and beliefs 189–90 law 243 as movement party 259 need for 261–2 organizational passion 223–7 role of5 solidarity 213 transference 217 trials 243–8 ugliness of 247 communist politics, reimagining 24–5 complex networks 12–13, 14 concentration 193–4, 253–4 confirmation-bias 96 conformism 38–9 connectivity, pathological 60–2, 63–4 consensus, theology of4 consumption 41 contagion 15, 95, 102–4, 112 control, society of62–3 cooperation 253–4 Corbyn, Jeremy 27 corporate culture, loss of43 courage 34, 148–9, 232–3, 259 Cowie, Jefferson 31 creative destruction 252–3 crowd desire 116–20 crowd gap, the 14 crowd pathology 92n

168

crowd psychology 177
crowds 4–6, 84, 249, 264–5 absorption in 64–5 amplification ofcourage 34 and class struggle 14–22 as collective being 9 collective intelligence 11 under communicative capitalism 28 conceptions of6–14 democratic reading 6–7, 8, 9–13 demographics 18–19 density 215 destructiveness 122 direction 215–16 dynamics 8, 214–16 effects 8 emergence 120–1 energy 120–6 freedom ofaction 4 Freud’s account of100–5, 105–12 and individuality 64–6 influencing 99 Le Bon’s account of66, 93–7, 101–5, 114 limitation 258 majority rule 214–15 mental unity of96 Michels’s analysis 172–3, 182, 184–5 missing capacity 182 networked 65 political 117–18 and political expression 7 political subjectivity 115–16 political vitality 7–8 politicization 145 politics 14–22 power 95–6, 258 primary characteristic 9 primitive 14 Ross’s account of139–43 rupture with the state 145–6 sea metaphor 127–8 subject-effects 259 theories of8–9, 11–14 and transference 184–5 transformative dimension 104–5 unconscious 99, 113, 214 violent 118–20

169

virtual 65–6
wisdom of12, 13–14
crowd unconscious, the 216, 217
cruel optimism 220
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 61
cultural anchors 44
cultural narcissism 59, 62
Cultural Revolution, the 205
cybertariat 17
decentralization 11
de-individualization 95
de-individuation 121–2, 139–40, 141–2, 172
Deleuze, Gilles 62
democracy 9, 248
crowds and 6–7, 8, 9–13
justification 10
Michels’s analysis 171
opposition to 9–11
Democracy Now! 123
demographics 18–19
Dennis, Peggy 239–40, 242
dependency 37, 40, 41–2, 45, 47, 48
desire 123, 127, 247, 260
collective 105, 108, 112, 214, 234–42, 260–1
crowd 116–20
destructiveness 122
dictatorship ofthe proletariat 207
dignity 46
disciplinary society 62
discipline 84–7
decline of62–3
diversity 68–9
Dolar, Mladen 78, 87, 87–8, 91, 99–100
Dr Pepper, “Always One ofa Kind” advertising campaign 33–4
drugs 56–7
Dufour, Dany-Robert 59–60
education 19
egalitarian discharge 5, 6, 259, 264–5
ego ideal 185–6, 189, 206
Egypt 15, 123
enclosure 81–7, 91
Engels, Friedrich 70, 257–8
enjoyment (jouissance) 6
enthusiasm 15, 224
equality 6, 121–2, 215, 248
Erikson, Erik 58

170