The Party and Communist Solidarity

Abstract

This essay, based on a talk given at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, defends the idea of the party by setting out the conditions that make it necessary. Rather than imagining a national, mass-electoral party, it envisions a solidary, militant, international organization. Against left realists who claim that the party is an outmoded or “fully saturated” political form and that we are relegated to momentary acts of resistance or small reforms that leave the capitalist system intact, our conditions push us to rethink and renew that form of political organization through which communists think collectively about political power, act together in order to generate it, and inspire one another to use it for the collective determination of the world we produce in common. Capitalism pushes us apart. Left politics, instead of emphasizing difference, should assert and build commonality. The party is a form for this assertion.

Key Words:

• Communism
• Communist Party
• The Left
• Occupy
• Politics

Notes

1 See, for example, Gibson-Graham (2006).

2 On neoliberal governmentality, see Foucault (2008). For an example of rejection of the party, see Hardt and Negri (2000).

3 For a discussion of communicative capitalist ideology see Dean (2002).

4 See my discussion in The Communist Horizon (Dean 2012).

5 See my essay, “Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong” (Dean 2011).

6 Alain Badiou (2009, 8) has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notes the internal split in the working class between its “true political identity” and “its latent corruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices.” He writes, “The practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of its specific bourgeois inversion … This unity of opposites is determined … by the general bourgeois space” (9). Also, “The bourgeoisie makes a subject … the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people” (42).

7 See my discussion in Zizek's Politics (Dean 2006).