What follows is a revised version of a 2018 text that precedes the Lacanian theory of the political party that I develop in “The Children of Gramsci and Pepsi: The Hegemonic Party in Times of Anti-Communism Left, Right and Centre,” which was published on Communis in February 2025. Written as a chapter for my book Don’t Network: The Avant Garde after Networks, this earlier essay was titled “What’s in a Programme More than a Program?” An abridged version was published in 2019 in the International Journal of Žižek Studies. Although this extended rendering was revised in May 2025, I have overlooked shifts that have taken place since 2020.

 

“Communist politics and the vanguard party do not coincide perfectly with the working class. The working-class hysteric knows that it is valuable to politics, and so, although politics is at times an obscure knowledge, the party-as-analyst listens to the working class. The knowledge that the party possesses has been acquired by listening to the people over a long period of time. The party, however, is faithful to the idea of communism and is not directly faithful to the people.”

 — Marc James Léger

We will remain faceless because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity, because we are everyone, because the carnival beckons, because the world is upside down, because we are everywhere. By wearing masks, we show that who we are is not as important as what we want, and what we want is everything for everyone.

– Summit of the Americas sign, cited by David Graeber in Direct Democracy

Give us your ideas on organisation, if you have any … and we will decide who is “average,” who above average, and who below. But if you have no organisational ideas of your own, then all your exertions on behalf of the “masses” and “average people” will be simply boring. You must realise that these questions of “politics” and “organisation” are so serious in themselves that they cannot be dealt with in any other but a serious way.

– V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?

A radical strategy of emancipation today proposes democracy from below, as is now the zeitgeist with new social movements and activist protest. Along with horizontalist and autonomous politics comes the critique of political representation. As Tiqqun puts it, today’s cybernetic social systems seek to do away with socialism and now include the direct and participatory democracy of citizens’ movements, which replace political programme, class struggle and the critique of political economy with ecology and economic democracy.¹ Such cyberpolitics sometimes proposes a capitalism from below, as in the eco-socialism movement’s 1975 “Ten Commandments for a New Economy,” for which collective intelligence would give itself the task of preserving biodiversity and multicultural difference, increasing complexity as well as containment. According to Tiqqun, the “third way” alliance between capitalism and socialism that was developed through cybernetics in the 1970s corresponds to the social regulation ethos of the anti-globalization movement and biocapitalist protest, with its critique of authority and political representation.² This “cybernetic hypothesis” that seeks to do away with socialist and communist parties has had much success with hashtag movements and so-called Facebook revolutions, but it has also run a deficit in terms of the ability to challenge corporate control and state repression.

Tiqqun makes the intriguing statement that they do not want more transparency – “citizens more ideally coupled with their devices” – but more opacity and intensity for a non-citizen, anti-social and anti-state politics. They do not want to resolve the social question by making cybernetics, “the last possible socialism,” into a communism for robots.³ Counterposed to this is the possibility of communism as “the end of” the cybernetic hypothesis. This cybernetic eschatology perhaps says more than Tiqqun intends, throwing out the ecology baby with the dirty cybernetic bathwater, against which they otherwise propose experimenting alongside cybercapitalism with a panoply of tactics: random manipulation, interference fog, insinuation, redesigning protocols for experimentation, escaping representation, causing panic situations and inefficient collective behaviour, producing a heterogeneous ensemble of noises, information spamming, bifurcation, non-conforming acts, secrecy as a means to modulate force, luddite sabotage, deliberate slowdown, encounters, extending background interference, establishing zones of opacity, spontaneous subversions and reaching critical mass.

The ecstatic politics of Tiqqun’s “invisible party,” later baptised The Invisible Committee, returns us to Foucauldian notions of power and resistance, generating a creative chaos they believe will irreversibly disrupt cybernetic equilibrium from within. From a more mundane perspective, would something like a Bernie Sanders presidency not be more of an interference in American hegemony than al-Qaeda and its various mutations, who are just as often the beneficiaries of the Pentagon than its ostensible enemy? How can the left overcome the false choice between old left communist parties and resistant networked anarchism? The death of Fidel Castro, for example, caused Slavoj Žižek to speculate about what might now be possible for Cuba: 1) preserve the state-party system and make pragmatic concessions to free market capitalism; 2) follow the Chinese model and make the communist party responsible for managing a free market system; 3) abandon communism altogether.⁴

If today’s socialist left wishes to resist pragmatic compromise with bourgeois politics, we must build the new kinds of social organization that can address the need for mass mobilization beyond the dispersed forms of activist protest. A different kind of communism is possible. The “idea of communism” that has been discussed in the last decade by various left intellectuals must, of necessity, find some form of organizational expression beyond populism and beyond the neoliberal bipartisan endgame. This has led some scholars to rethink the idea of the party, which we could otherwise refer to as the question of leadership on the left. The autonomist Marxist Michael Hardt has proposed three options: critique through an objective analysis of the conditions that prevail, hierarchical party organization or dispersed leftist disruption.⁵ To the extent that the latter is deemed ineffective, the idea of the party implies not only the experiences of twentieth-century state communism, but also a consideration of how it is that the concept of the party survives because of the “spectral features” of the idea, its irreducibility not only to historical experience, but to its own notion.⁶

These three options for leftist praxis, political economy, leftist horizontalism and communist party form, can be problematized through the development of a Žižekian-Lacanian approach. The argument that ideological belief is interpassive – I believe something because others believe it – subtends the possibility that communist parties are best explained in terms of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Discourse of the Analyst and that political vanguards, which may or may not take a party form, are characterized by the Discourse of the Master.⁷ Because the master is a stage in the passage to the analyst, the two are essential to any psychoanalytically-informed notion of communist organization. Žižek’s theory of the party as analyst suggests that such a political organization can occupy the otherwise non-existent place of a neutral knowledge of the objective demands of history, for instance, by prioritizing the socialization of capitalist surplus and the democratization of politics through demilitarization and a concerted effort to tackle global warming. The reference to objective conditions and to the social totality is what distinguishes Lenin, who allowed for improvisation with regard to circumstances, from Stalin, who sought to fuse orthodoxy with arbitrary and irrational opportunism, ignoring objective conditions and producing secrecy as the Real of historical movement.⁸ A radical party organization cannot be the big Other as such, nor an all-powerful and all-knowing master, but is an organization whose task it is to respond to the issues of the day and lead society in the direction of a communist overcoming of capitalist social relations. Nor can pretence to full knowledge of objective conditions be made into a big Other, justifying the party’s function at all costs. Like the analyst, the party does not stand in for or represent the people. However, through its leadership, the party registers a minimal difference from the technocratic Discourse of the University, which does not believe that capitalism is an effective system of social reproduction but cynically insists on it all the same. The party is also different from an anti-capitalist Discourse of the Hysteric that repudiates the conditions that prevail but without presenting a serious solution to the capitalist system.⁹

The principal weapon of the party vanguard is knowledge of revolutionary theory and history. Politics cannot be a matter of asserting an identity. In this sense communism proposes a short-circuit between interestedness and disinterestedness, a paradoxical ideological neutrality through which one can evaluate questions of truth. Although he rejects all politics that are based on state power, and therefore the form of communist parties as we know them, Alain Badiou contends that today’s communism is not at all unconcerned with the fate of the party. On the contrary, he argues, in the 1960s in France it was essential for radicals to take a position towards the French Communist Party, the CGT labour union and the Algerian War, an inquiry that was later followed by the critique by Maoist intellectuals and workers of PCF revisionism and then by the creation of autonomous organizations. In the 1970s and afterwards, the political capitulation of the nouveaux philosophes brought a premature end to the question of communism and in their wake have come the “inhabitants of the immanent ‘multitudes’ of ‘Empire’.”¹⁰ The problem that confronts the left today is for Badiou a matter of reconstruction that cannot be limited to anti-capitalist protest. What, then, after the reduction of twentieth-century communist parties to “actually existing” state socialism, are the prospects for the idea of communism and its organization?

The Situation and the Paradox of Organization

The problem of the left is not simply the problem of the last redoubts of communist party rule, but of all who suffer and resist the depredations of global capitalism. The question of political organization, of “what is to be done and who is going to do it,” begins with the analysis of what, exactly, is happening in the global economy.¹¹ Wolfgang Streeck, who is mentioned by Hardt as someone who does not believe in a privileged mediating subject, argues that the crisis symptoms of global capitalism involve three mutually reinforcing long-term trends: a decline in economic growth in capitalist countries, the increase in wealth inequality, and the rise of household, industrial and government debt.¹² The resulting problem, Streeck argues, is that capitalism no longer requires democracy and no longer seeks the hegemonic consent of the working class. What David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by dispossession” has replaced the postwar consensus based on Keynesian redistribution. Even when people are interested in politics, neoliberal governance is beyond citizen control.

Given the disastrous conditions that prevail, Streeck believes that we should prepare for the end of capitalism, but without pretending to know what will replace it. He writes: “While we cannot know when and how exactly capitalism will disappear and what will succeed it, what matters is that no force is on hand that could be expected to reverse the three downward trends in economic growth, social equality and financial stability, and end their mutual reinforcement.”¹³ He adds to this that both social integration as well as system integration seem implausible and that instead new levels of disintegration, uncertainty and obscurity will outpace the quick fixes of crisis management.

Under the present circumstances, if abandoning communism seems inevitable, so does abandoning capitalism. Whither cyberpolitics? For Streeck, the left can neither defeat capitalism through party politics nor rescue capitalism through local self-determination. The absence of an organized left unexpectedly contributes to the decline of capitalism by freeing it from such countervailing powers as labour laws, environmental regulations and financial regulations that in the twentieth century mitigated its worst tendencies. Capitalism becomes its own worst enemy.

Beyond Streeck’s bleak vision, the left nevertheless has several options for preventing further stagnation and inequality. Managing a transition to a zero-growth economy, according to Harvey, implies either socialism or communism and the end of capitalism as we know it. Since the neoliberal solutions to the 1970s economic crisis (automation, wage repression, global competition, third-worldization of markets, debt financing, market bubbles), along with their ideological attributes (free markets, free trade, entrepreneurialism) are no longer tenable, any alternative would imply re-connecting surplus capital and surplus labour so that capitalism is not saved at the expense of social, cultural, political and environmental welfare.¹⁴

Twentieth-century alternatives to capitalism have been either socialist, regulating capitalism and redistributing its benefits, or communist, controlling production through systematic state planning. Harvey notes the tendency of the anti-globalization left to reject any return to the latter form of state communism:

Contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically abjure state control and look to other forms of collective social organization to displace market forces and capital accumulation as the basis for organizing production and distribution. Horizontally networked as opposed to hierarchically commanded systems of coordination between autonomously organized and self-governing collectives of producers and consumers are envisaged as lying at the core of a new form of communism. Contemporary technologies of communication make such a system feasible. All manner of small-scale experiments around the world can be found in which such economic and political forms are being constructed. In this there is a convergence of some sort between the Marxist and anarchist traditions that hark back to the broadly collaborative situation between them in the 1860s in Europe.¹⁵

The situation and the question of organization are co-implicated. As anti-capitalist movements emerge worldwide, Harvey argues, they will require a solution to the mutually enforcing “double blockage” of not only who will be the agent of change, but of what needs to be done. In other words, beyond Streeck, a situation involves not only systemic processes but also questions of praxis. The limits to endless capital accumulation and growth imply that revolutionary politics must negate the capitalist system of monetization as the motor of human history and take over the governance of the production and distribution of surplus. According to Harvey, this implies an awareness of the interconnection and coevolution of seven fields of analysis: 1) the technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption, 2) relations to nature, 3) social relations between people, 4) symbolic and mental conceptions of the world, 5) geographical and labour processes, goods and services, 6) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements, and 7) the everyday life of social reproduction.¹⁶ Clearly, for such a programme, the singular focus on networks and social media fails to address the dialectic between these different “moments,” a term that Harvey borrows from Henri Lefebvre. In Metaphilosophy, Lefebvre defined the project of revolutionary humanism as a form of poiesis, the creation of works and the appropriation of nature, including human nature. For Lefebvre, interestingly, technology remains outside the field of poiesis since it does not meet the needs of humans to appropriate their own nature. The decision to change life, he argued, means creating a programme that takes up its moments, the residues of God, will and spirit, thereby constituting a total, planetary humanity.¹⁷

“The first rule for a global anti-capitalist movement,” Harvey says, “must be [to] never rely on the unfolding dynamic of one moment without carefully calibrating how relations with all the others are adapting and reverberating.”¹⁸ This means that anti-capitalist movements must seek alliances among people in different sectors rather than purity around specific issues or areas of expertise. The emphasis should be on self-realization and equality in social relations, respect for nature, common interest, self-management in labour processes, technology and organization oriented to serving the public interest, that is, rather than corporate profit and government control. For Marxists, Harvey adds, the ideas and ideology of the ruling class must be replaced with revolutionary theory and radical currents of thought. This for him implies challenging the narrowing of radical theory within academia to multiculturalism and identity politics. Moreover, the technocratic politics of many of the new systems of thought in the universities, whether in business or economics, render the current knowledge industries and mass media illegitimate.

Harvey makes the important point that radical change cannot take place peacefully and without active struggle. On this score, sectarianism divides the left into political factions: non-governmental organizations that are pragmatic, reformist and meliorist at best; self-organizing autonomist tendencies that prefer horizontal networking and solidarity economies, and which are limited in their effectiveness and reluctant to scale up their activism, such that their anti-capitalist politics becomes self-defeating; and a third option of traditional labour organizations and political parties, from social democratic to communist and Trotskyist parties, which are willing to negotiate state power but whose social welfarism and proletarian vanguardism are now in question. If one is serious about a communist or post-capitalist transition, however, Harvey insists that one cannot avoid the seizure of state power and the transformation of its existing legal and institutional structures. He writes:

Inter-state competition and geoeconomic and geopolitical struggles over everything from trade and money to questions of hegemony are also far too significant to be left to local social movements or cast aside as too big to contemplate. How the architecture of the state-finance nexus is to be re-worked along with the pressing question of the common measure of value given by money cannot be ignored in the quest to construct alternatives to capitalist political economy. To ignore the state and the dynamics of the inter-state system is therefore a ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to accept.¹⁹

As Sam Gindin argues, states establish and enforce the rules of globalization and manage the crises of market relations. The level of state power therefore must be addressed:

the disinterest in and even hostility to acknowledging that politics must ultimately reckon with state power prevents us from confronting power where it is most concentrated and tends to train our focus on protesting capitalism, not replacing it. The issue is not taking over a capitalist state and administering it as best we can (…) but of transforming state institutions in the deepest democratic sense. That is, imagining and struggling for a state whose main function, at national, regional, and municipal levels, would be to support and develop our collective capacities to democratize the economy and all aspects of our lives.²⁰

Arguing that non-governmental organizations, grassroots and autonomous organizations, communist parties, social movements of resistance and identity struggles are the main tendencies of leftist political action, Harvey concludes with the enigma that the Communist Manifesto constitutes as communist anyone who understands the destructive tendencies of capitalism. He adds: “While traditional institutional communism is as good as dead and buried, there are by definition millions of de facto communists active among us, willing to act upon their understandings, ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives.”²¹

In more abstract but simpler terms, Erik Olin Wright suggests that the economic ecology, if we are speaking of anti-capitalism, is distinguished between three forms of power: economic power, state power and social power.²² Different modes of production allow for ecosystemic variations on which of these forms of power determines the production process. Socialism envisions the collectively organized exercise of social power to determine the ways in which work relations and economic surplus will be socialized. Socialist forms of economic organization can emerge as important aspects of systems that are dominated by capitalist social relations. Olin Wright argues against the notion of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in favour of the gradual erosion of capitalism. His reason for this is that a system-level rupture today would not create favourable conditions for alternative socialistic economies but would more likely lead to long-term economic decline resulting in popular opposition, which would then induce political repression by either the left or the right. The achievements of social democracy indicate that state mechanisms must be used to create improved economic relations in such a way as to gradually erode the dominance of capitalism, a process that is required if we are to confront global warming. In the next decades, the climate challenge and automation will require a transition away from neoliberal policy and greater state responsibility for maintaining standards of living, most likely by introducing a universal basic income that would create conditions for socialist economic relations. None of this can be achieved, however, without social struggle and political mobilization.²³

If another communism is possible, as Harvey contends, and if to be serious one must be prepared to organize the transformation of state power, then the contingency of today’s end of capitalism implies that another communist party is possible. This means, minimally, that the subjective, agential mediation of horizontality and verticality suggested by Hardt cannot be limited to the question of networks. Here political theory replaces cybernetics with what Žižek describes in his 1996 essay on “The Fetish of the Party” as the means by which a communist party is involved in what I have defined in my theory of avant-garde art as sinthomeopathic practice.²⁴ Sinthomeopathy defines a praxiological overidentification with the symptoms of capitalist decline. Recognizing symptoms does not imply an obsession with causes, or talking endlessly about one’s symptoms, but rather a traversal of the fantasies that keep us trapped in double binds, false choices and faulty solutions. For example, in the first few weeks of the first Trump presidency, and after Donald Trump signed executive orders that threatened foreign relations with China, trade relations with Mexico and Great Britain, and that banned Muslim refugees and immigrants to the United States, it was not difficult to see that protests generally failed to recognize that these measures were less a crisis of leadership than a crisis of capitalism. To overidentify with the Trump symptom does not imply going along with what he does. It implies understanding that the symptom does not lead directly back to its cause, but rather to contradictions that symptoms appear to resolve. In more simplistic terms, it means shattering the myths that only magically resolve social contradictions. The Trump myth, not unlike the proto-Nazi slogan Make America Great Again, does not lead to Russia and China, as the presumed causes of the Trump spectacle, but back to the myths of American exceptionalism, economic nationalism and the promise of globalized capital.

In such situations psychoanalysis and ideology critique can help to change perceptions. It is often presumed that psychoanalysis refers only to individual subjects and cannot be extended to social formations. This argument misses the point of how it is that subjectivity mediates what can be referred to as a naïve or metaphysical understanding of reality. If the big Other for Harvey and Streeck is “what is to be done” in the context of the end of capitalism, then the political party as analyst can stand in as the instantiation of this neutral knowledge of human needs. It is through the fetishistic aspect of representation, as opposed to any ontologically grounded guarantees, that only communists, as Žižek puts it, are atheists who nevertheless believe. One can see the difference here between the capitalist realist who does not believe that capitalism is an effective system of social reproduction, but who cynically insists on it as the only game in town, and a communist who understands how it is that capitalism is the concrete universal that shapes the conditions and ideologies that prevail. The short-circuit between the party and the masses does not lead directly to pure knowledge, which is understood by Lacan as a signifier without a (pathological) determination. Just as for Kant a judgement of taste does not require that one conduct an opinion poll to discover what one considers to be beautiful, the political party does not need to conduct a referendum to know that a nuclear war with Russia and China is off limits. What if the result of a referendum turned out to be yes, let’s go ahead and blow ourselves up? By the same token, Žižek argues that there should be dogmas in a society’s common culture, such as the prohibition of rape, torture or genocide, which go unquestioned and that are accepted as normative social principles. Such a paradoxical point of intersection between inside and outside is not determined once and for all by assigning to the party the means to represent, or better still, to embody the will of the masses, but rather, through a process of permanent overcoming, to mediate between the “left deviation” of relativistic horizontality and the “right deviation” of authoritarianism. On the basis of revolutionary theory, the communist party replaces capitalist metalanguage with leftist metapolitics.

As a short-circuit between interestedness and disinterestedness, metapolitics relates directly to what Badiou has defined as the generic and universal aspects of politics as a truth procedure. The principle of equality, for example, is not a matter of voluntarism or nomadic errancy, as is the case with excessive state power, but requires a thought that is available to all subjects beyond historical and geographical limitations. Politics is therefore inherently collective and it is in this way that we can speak of all genuine politics as metapolitics. People who recognize and acknowledge this fact are referred to as the militants of a truth procedure. The term that Badiou associates with the generic truth of politics is that of an ‘event’ that retroactively posits its legitimacy as a universal construction. Nazism, he argues, cannot be considered an event because, as a deranged form of politics, it is not premised on generic sameness but on absolute difference. Nazism has no means to build a universality since its core ideology is nihilistic destruction. Communism, in contrast, is conducted in the name of the creative flourishing of planetary humanity.

In The Rebirth of History, Badiou argues that the cycle of protests from 2011 involved three kinds of political event. The first, which he defines as immediate riots, responded to state coercion in ways that are either “blindly progressive or blindly reactionary.”²⁶ These could set off similar riots but usually remain a local incident that is limited to the destruction of symbols of the despised regime and as such are dominated by the kind of destruction that is subjectively non-universalizable. Latent riots, such as strikes and occupations, extend beyond the narrow concerns of the rioters and therefore challenge associations with criminality by creating links between social strata that are normally separated by the divisions of labour, allowing for new subjective typologies.²⁷ Thirdly, historical riots go beyond localization towards peaceful occupations that have a qualitative extension that unifies the people in anticipation of progressive social changes.²⁸ For Badiou, the victorious aspects of the 2011 historical riots in Tunisia and Egypt belie the pessimism of the postmodernists who abandoned metapolitics in the 1970s. It is these events and not the pessimism of French intellectuals that act as the guardians of the “communist hypothesis” in the context of the long “intervallic period” that began in the 1980s.²⁹ The awakening of History by riots opens onto the labour of the new truth of organization, which lies at the intersection of an Idea and an event.³⁰

The growing tendency of the state is to manage crises through greater military and police repression, control of communications media and security measures against any form of autonomous political organization. For Joshua Clover, the politics of fighting capitalism through labour struggles has been replaced by forms of riot against the police state. Responding to Badiou’s The Rebirth of History, Clover suggests in Riot. Strike. Riot that Badiou’s theory of the communist hypothesis is too specifically French to be able to address uneven developments such as the overlap of the riot and the strike in the wave of protests in the United Sates in the 1960s.³¹ Clover seeks to qualify the historicity of class struggle with a distinction between the labour-based strikes of the early twentieth century and the cycle of crises since the 1970s, a periodization that he refers to as strike-riot prime – the return of riots after the decline of strikes.³² That he gives greater attention to economies of race in his theory of this new wave of riots does not alter what he otherwise recognizes as the growing tendency of the state to manage crises through greater military and police repression, a situation in which the police state and riots come to presuppose one another. The politics of capital versus (surplus) labour are thus replaced by (police) state and riot. Clover’s use of a Marxist standpoint to argue that changed social conditions make for the historical inevitability of ultra-left and post-left riots provides a deterministic gloss on an otherwise divided left that has more than riots in its repertoire of strategies. For Badiou, the contradiction between the masses and the state cannot be resolved by the emphasis on material conditions, or what he refers to as the situation. The logic of scission implies change and something new in the situation.

Clover affirms the riot as the answer to the crises of capitalism and its racialized dimensions. He also suggests that Badiou’s “generic communism” does not register the necessary changes in the new conjuncture. Is the opposite not the case? Whereas Clover argues in a circular manner that riots are overdetermined by historical transformations that make them inevitable, the persistence of the dialectic in Badiou’s theory of emancipatory politics looks for what is discontinuous in the situation.³³ According to Bruno Bosteels, who seeks to clarify misconceptions concerning Badiou’s work, Badiou does not simply oppose situation and event.³⁴ The organization of politics does not close the gap between base and superstructure, but thinks politics as disjoined from History. Vanguard experiments, for Bosteels, are wagers on the new rather than devolution towards acts of violence.³⁵ The essence of Badiou’s metapolitics is to overcome the kind of political philosophy that defines politics as an instance of the situation and that instead brings philosophy and thinking to bear on politics.³⁶

The idea of communism is internationalist in inspiration and looks beyond the bourgeois state and beyond the differences among citizens. Philosophy does not simply provide a materialist account of the riot but sets up a prescriptive ideal for non-philosophical domains like politics that can identify, for instance, the notion of a world freed from the law of profit, from unbridled capitalist exploitation and parliamentary corruption. Such politics and philosophy are linked, for Badiou, by “the positive universality of the construction of a truth.”³⁷ To suggest, as Clover does, that Badiou’s politics has little sense of determinacy comes around to the question of ideology and political leadership. The notion of the political party, for Badiou, or what he prefers to call the political organization, leads to a creative, disciplined and principled resolution of the problems “within the people.” This is opposed to hierarchical, authoritarian and mindless armies that make use of tyrannical means to resolve contradictions. Resisting activist histrionics means reversing Antonio Gramsci’s maxim, such that optimism of the intellect combats the pessimism of a will to power that does little more than obscure its failure to ask and answer the question: what is to be done? This perception echoes Žižek’s argument that to think the political means for the party to think and also for the party as thought itself.³⁸ Clover’s fear that Žižek’s critique of the riots of the Parisian banlieues might give the task of leadership to “a philosopher” makes one suppose that there should be no leaders, that there are no leaders, that philosophers cannot be leaders, or, at the very least, that if philosophers should be leaders they should not be Badiou or Žižek.³⁹

One could expect from some social critics that we should ignore or not overrate Badiou and Žižek since they are European white males. Discussing the problem of the absence of a worldwide democracy, which would provide simple solutions to economic inequality by taxing the wealthy, Žižek argues that the decolonial critique of Eurocentrism gives ideological cover to the rejection of what is worth fighting for in the European legacy.⁴⁰ The censure that is enacted with charges of Eurocentrism becomes all the more plausible in the context of the decolonial movement in education, where for instance the National Union of Students in the U.K. calls for the decolonization of curriculum, a process that led the student union at the prestigious London School of Oriental and African Studies to call for the removal of “white” philosophers from the curriculum. Such decolonial studies associate the Enlightenment concept of universality with both colonialism and totality, reducing politics to questions of power and the function of education to the promotion of social mobility for a small fraction of individuals within ascribed identity groups.

The communist party does not serve particular interests but leads the struggle against capitalism. When it ceases to do that, it ceases to be a communist party. In keeping with Badiou’s critique of democratic materialism, the communist party has no substantive community, neither as a national community, as a religious group, or as the tribune of diverse identity groups. Nor does the party have the social base as its ultimate foundation or telos. Not even the current ecological crisis gives the party its raison d’état. The party thus mediates the relation between the proletariat, or those forces that struggle to actualize the idea of communism, and the empirical population. In any existing communism, the concept of democracy is recast as the struggle between the correct political tendencies and the reactive tendencies that cause the masses to betray their own interests. This distinguishes communism from the post-political hysteria that substitutes agonism for the need to bring about significant social change.

Metapolitics opposes dialectics to the circularity of metaphysics and to arbitrary notions of becoming. Whereas the idea of the multitude locates politics in the history of the process of production, the party synthesizes the abstract universality of the multitude and its negation. In this sense the focus on networks as a deciding factor in political leadership misses the point that the party does not seek to positivize itself in organs of power. One could say that the object of the communist party is not “the people,” as is the case for instance with Paulo Gerbaudo’s notion of soft leadership, or Chantal Mouffe’s left populism, but simply objet a, the object-cause of ideological jouissance.⁴¹

A mise-en-scène of metapolitics was generated in 2016 by Al Jazeera journalist Mehdi Hasan through his vituperative drilling of Žižek after he provocatively claimed that he would rather vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton since he understands the entire situation, and not only its epiphenomena, as a failure of neoliberal capitalism. How many people must die, Hasan asked Žižek, for his vision of communism and his repudiation of liberal capitalism to come about?⁴² Such red baiting should be seen for what it is. Žižek’s tactic was to take the bait, revealing the liberal hysteria that refuses to acknowledge what is happening and what is to be done. Although the media chafed at Žižek’s boldness, his reaction to the Trump presidency was entirely consistent with his previous claims that the liberal expression of shock and worry about the triumph of the right in Europe is a feigned naivety. As he put it in a 2014 article, the rise of Nigel Farage in the U.K. and Marine Le Pen in France is the obverse of the decline of the left: “Walter Benjamin’s old thesis that behind every rise of fascism there is a failed revolution not only still holds today, but is perhaps more pertinent than ever.”⁴³

Hasan attempted to gainsay Žižek’s argument by later asking Noam Chomsky about Žižek’s idea that the crisis provoked by Trump’s election could possibly shake the status quo.⁴⁴ To be clear, Žižek’s argument is that the kind of disruption caused by Trump inside the Republican Party has created the conditions for a similar kind of disruption inside the Democratic Party. This process is not entirely symmetric since only the Sanders disruption could cause a break with neoliberal globalization. Chomsky replied that Žižek was making the same mistake that leftist intellectuals made in the 1930s at the time of the rise of Nazism. The question of whether this is accurate is largely beside the point for Hasan, whose pitting of one radical left intellectual against another failed after he then attempted to portray the Obama presidency as partly successful. Chomsky disputed the few achievements of Obama against his administration’s propagation of international terrorism, which would likely get worse under Trump. The irony of Chomsky’s interview is that he relativized the problems with Hillary Clinton’s policies in light of the worse policies of Trump, leading to his endorsement of Clinton as the lesser of two evils. Whereas during the Obama presidency of 2008 it was Žižek who celebrated the advent of the first black U.S. President as part of universal human emancipation, it was Chomsky who warned that we should have no illusions about Obama and the Democratic Party.

The Sanders campaign of 2016, which received the endorsement of both Chomsky and Žižek, was the first campaign in several decades to represent the interests of the working majority against those of the neoliberal establishment. The paradox was that only a democratic socialist could save what was left of liberal democracy. On this score, Žižek argued that the failure of the Democratic Party to change course after 2016 confirmed his decision to not endorse Clinton.⁴⁵ Note that most so-called “Bernie Bro” supporters of Sanders felt the same way about a Joe Biden or a Michael Bloomberg candidacy for 2020. Despite the fact that Žižek made clear over and over again his absolute repudiation of right-wing politics – as though this should ever have been in question – his flouting of the symbolic injunctions of liberal ideology not only led to censorship on the part of the mainstream but also by many on the anti-intellectual left. Žižek’s argument, which hardly lacks evidence, was that the neoliberal establishment in the Democratic Party would prefer a Trump victory to a Sanders administration.⁴⁶ Lacanian in inspiration, Žižek’s demystification of ideology led many commentators to think that he, rather than global capitalism, is the problem. The sort of show trial atmosphere that ignores Žižek’s contribution to the left and pegs him as a problematic figure is more than adequately described in Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle.”⁴⁷

The question of politics cannot be limited to correct policy choices, however, but involves, in Žižek’s analysis, surplus enjoyment. This is what distinguishes Žižek from Chomsky and a communist party from a state bureaucracy. Class struggle not only dissolves the bourgeois class but with it all class relations.⁴⁸ The paradox is that capitalism generates class struggle as the Real of ideology. The function of the party is therefore to replace capital with socialism as the universal medium. Neither can social relations nor the forces of production be thought of as exceptions to politics. The idea of the party provides a solution to the four political problems that were identified by Jacques Rancière as endemic to contemporary democracies: the archi-politics of an organic communitarianism that denies politics; the para-politics that reformulates political struggles in terms of competition between fields of technocratic expertise; the meta-politics that limits politics to economics or some other arena within a fully self-transparent system; and the ultra-politics that eliminates politics by reducing problems to matters of conflict and militarization.⁴⁹ The fetish of a metapolitical party replaces the fetishism of commodities and the “invisible hand” of the market. It has no substantive community as either its point of reference or telos, and it looks beyond the servicing of goods in terms of its communist decision to change life.

In practice the political establishment under any communist regime comes to be despised as the bureaucratic mediator between the empirical majority and the working class as the universal agent. But communism attempts to keep up with the owl of Minerva. In any actually existing communism, the potential of political subversion is recast as the struggle between the correct tendencies and the reactive tendencies that seek a return to less developed social relations. In order to move beyond the historical failures of communism we need not avoid the socialization of the forces of production but rather the fantasy that party directives can overlap perfectly with the whole of society. This means abandoning the kind of regulated immanentism that is proposed by cyberpolitics, which forecloses the possibility that metapolitical organizations can have universal validity.

How Do We Get There?

If political parties are to mediate the organizational structures of the living labour that embodies the contradiction between capital and labour, we must avoid the false choice between horizontality and hierarchy, which ignores how it is that networked communication appears to resolve this contradiction. Instead, the militant political organization – assuming for the time being that we can call it the communist party – would become the deciding factor in the conflict between the fragmentation of social struggles and the destructive tendencies of capitalism. The following describes three different perspectives on the communist party, beginning with leftist and rightist deviations, followed by a dialectical revolutionary humanism that takes up the best elements of both but that does not presuppose any vapid notion of synthesis.

1. Precarious Communism

As an instance of left communism, Richard Gilman-Opalsky has put forward the notion of “precarious communism,” which he defines as an autonomist détournement and critical redeployment of the Communist Manifesto in an era for which revolution demands a multiplicity of connections in a revisable and evolving politics.⁵⁰ Gilman-Opalsky takes it as given that today’s radicals do not call for the creation of parties but rather put forward new communist desires beyond sovereignty and beyond certainty in theory and practice. Such “precarious communism,” he argues, is honest about the history of communist state regimes and is consequently less ideological and orthodox. It does not propose to change the world but looks instead for new ways of being-in-the-world that are differentially developed within the context of revolts. He is therefore concerned that this be a new experiment and not a repetition of the communisms that have already been attempted. His approach takes up the critiques from the 1960s, including Raoul Vaneigem’s rejection of any organized struggle that separates people from their individual desires. Such desires do not ignore the ways that capitalism expropriates people from their brains and bodies in a 24/7 information economy that seeks “total access to the conscious energies of everyday people.”⁵¹ The existing state of being-in-the-world has combined subjectivity with technology in a capitalist “technontology.”⁵² For him, the fact that our social and technological capacities have not been developed in a communist way does not prevent a class critique of neoliberal fantasy, which sets the precarious in motion though riots and protests.

Precarious communists are minor, a small part of the global precariat whose basis is the commons of association, which incorporates rather than eliminates exchange relations. For Gilman-Opalsky, communism is not a form of government but the free association of independent producers as the best means to destroy alienation. “We are far too uncertain,” he argues, “to try our hand at rearranging your life.”⁵³ While he considers that philosophy bridges the gap between anarchism and communism, he takes a page from autonomism and Gilles Deleuze with Félix Guattari to propose the “standpoint of a materiality constituted in the networks of productive cooperation” as a plane of indeterminacy and a becoming-ungovernable:

Precarious communists don’t want to run the government. We have been running from or against the government everywhere in various ways for a very long time. And we cannot follow the lead of those fake libertarians who oppose the government, yet do not oppose capitalism, for they haven’t noticed the colonization of government by capital, which is largely what has made government so dangerous.⁵⁴

Precarious communists want a rich everyday life of human association, autonomy and dignity. The bourgeois delusion of living according to principles and the gratification of needs should be retained within communism as, strangely enough, “nodal points in the development of an uncertain movement against capital, toward something more dignified, autonomous, and communist.”⁵⁵ As with Zapatismo and the Gilets Jaunes, this nomadic communism cannot be limited to the nation-state but exceeds every existing political order.

Gilman-Opalsky finds both a critic and a supporter in Fredric Jameson’s discussion of the Leninist party. Jameson would fault Gilman-Opalsky’s vision for repressing the question of the party according to the belief that a new conjuncture requires a new idea of political organization.⁵⁶ This suspicion and rejection of party politics is more or less the tendency among today’s new social movement activists. What philosophy can do for both communists and anarchists, according to Jameson, is defend the postwar achievements of social democracy and the welfare state, not because they can succeed against state capitalism, but because their failure is part of the pedagogy of the masses, a lesson about the system and about how revolution is a seemingly impossible “delinking” from the shackles of political thinking.⁵⁷

2. Crowd Communism

Mark Fisher has defined “capitalist realism” as the belief that not only is capitalism inevitable but that it is not even possible to imagine an alternative to it. In response to this, Jodi Dean has proposed the existence of a “leftist realism” according to which not only is capitalism considered the best means to secure the interests of the radical democratic multitude, but that it is consequently no longer possible to imagine revolutionary collectivism.⁵⁸ By proposing a return to communist collectivism as a means to fight global capitalism, Dean has made a strong case for the party form, going against some of the postulates of Badiou and Žižek, as well as Jacques Rancière, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In two of her books, The Communist Horizon and Crowds and Party, Dean has put forward arguments that are relevant to any theory of the communist party today, least of all the need for an organizational answer to pressing social and ecological problems. Her most recent work relies on the category of the people, or the crowd, as a basis for a theory of the party. In contrast to Gilman-Opalski’s ultra-leftist work, Dean’s crowd-based theory of the communist party could be thought of as an instance of rightist deviation. Since it is a rare defence of party politics in today’s world of postmodern academic theory, I am offering here a comradely critique of its strengths and weaknesses.

the communist horizon

In The Communist Horizon, Dean argues that today’s left has lost sight of the communist horizon, which she defines as “a discourse and a vocabulary for the expression of universal, egalitarian, and revolutionary ideals.”⁵⁹ There are many points in Dean’s book that are valid for any theory of the communist party, including the notion that the left should critique and reject the emphasis on consumer choice and aesthetic self-fashioning, micropolitics and identity politics, as well as the notion that sharing, affectivity and creativity are instances of productivity beyond capitalism. The left should indeed reassert solidarity and a collective “we” in the shift towards a militant opposition to capitalism. Dean is correct to state that the alterglobal left’s anti-representational rejection of a common political line or programme is a post-politics that replaces class struggle and disperses political energies in the direction of inclusion and participation.

Dean’s party is a flexible and adaptive form, accountable to the people, and is not an instrument through which communists carry out the iron laws of History.⁶⁰ Nor is the party form discredited by the invocation of historical failures and fiascos, from Stalinism and the Gulag to Chinese neoliberalism. Such reductionism, she argues, conflates history with politics.⁶¹ Against the liberal ideology of democratic inclusion, society is not reducible to a fully transparent and metaphysical immanentism.⁶² This insight extends to assemblage theory and various contenders for critical theory in contemporary intellectual debates on not only the status of the subject, but also theories of what constitutes politics. One example of postmodern capitulation is Wendy Brown’s notion of “left melancholia,” which Dean rejects outright. Brown’s idea that identity politics, discourse theory and postmodernism have displaced orthodox Marxism, and that this displacement is the unconscious source of “left melancholia” and incapacity, can be referred not only to the passing of a Marxist “ideal ego” (how the left sees itself) but also a Marxist “ego ideal” (how the left is perceived by society) wherein post-structuralism represents only one of the two deaths of the left: first as Stalinist fiasco, second as postmodernism. The passing of epochs makes it such that the class critique of capital must not be abandoned, as Brown advises, but redefined, with communism as the name, or Master Signifier, of the commitment to egalitarianism. Postmodernism’s refusal of a communist metapolitics and its alternative valorization of “biopolitical” struggle has secured the inevitability of capitalism.⁶³ Against Brown’s acquiescence to neoliberalism through discourse theory, Dean makes use of psychoanalysis in her rejection of the notion that the left has or should abandon revolutionary ideals.

Given the Lacanian framing of her theory, and with regard to a Žižekian approach to the party as analyst, there are aspects of Dean’s work that are not essential to a theory of the party, beginning with her assertion that the party is premised on the sovereignty of the people. While there is no analyst without analysand, the purpose of analysis is to make the function of analyst unnecessary. Until that moment, the premise of the party is communism. In Dean’s estimation, the people are communism’s political and economic cause, and she rightly states that not all mass and popular revolts are communist in nature.⁶⁴ While we should blame capitalist crises on capitalism, and not the demands of the people, and while the people are increasingly demanding socialist alternatives to the corporate state, Dean’s theory of “the people as the rest of us,” which she presents as an alternative to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude, tends to diminish the Marxian analysis of proletarianization on a global scale and to assert the particularities of a post-Fordist context like the United States.⁶⁵

It is not necessary to avoid the notion of the proletariat in favour of “the people,” even if the latter term is defined by Dean as a non-empirical, non-substantive, non-positive, divided and divisive force.⁶⁶ Communism de-ontologizes class difference and understands class as a contingent historical phenomenon. Communists do not “perform” collectivity, as Dean puts is, which would reduce the tension between labour and capital to questions of norms and to the binary opposition of individual and collectivity.⁶⁷ Although she correctly notes that capitalism privileges individual freedom more than democracy, there is no reason to reduce (formal) individual freedom to the (concrete) non-freedom of exchange relations. Dean tends to make individualism the target of her communist anti-capitalism.⁶⁸ This contrasts, for example, with the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood, which criticizes capitalist democracy from the point of view of class analysis rather than on the basis of its ideology of political liberalism.⁶⁹ As Dean puts it: “Over thirty years of unbridled capitalism made egoism and individualism the order of the day such that collectivity was already viewed with suspicion.”⁷⁰ And again: “The Right emphasizes the individual, individual survival, individual capacity, individual rights. The Left should be committed to the collective power of the people.”⁷¹ As it happens, National Socialism also advocated the collective power of the people, associating individual rights with bourgeois decadence. Marxism proposes instead that communism would bring about the conditions for the realization of individual as well as community prosperity and discovery. For Marx, the goal of communism must be the free development of each as compatible with the free development of all. In relation to this, Georg Lukács advanced the concept of reification in relation to the fetish character of commodities, arguing that the rationalization of bureaucratically controlled production had been turned against the individual producer, whose work and needs are alienated, and whose personality is sold on the market.⁷² In communism, humans return to themselves as social beings and are not turned against themselves for the sake of collectivity. Communism strives to make a place for individualism and particularity in a way that capitalist spectacle, competition and exploitation do not.⁷³ Capitalism does not sanction individualism but rather rugged and possessive individualism, inclusive of nationalism and identitarianism, under conditions of conformity and competition.

crowds and party

Dean’s 2016 text, Crowds and Party, is one of the most developed counterpoints to the autonomist analysis of the real subsumption of labour as the political basis for political organization. The concept of networks appears in the introductory pages of Dean’s text in reference to free markets and the kind of self-organizing political choices that lead to ever more social hierarchy. As she puts it: “Networked communication doesn’t eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us.”⁷⁴ Dean therefore associates networks with her concept of communicative capitalism.⁷⁵ Whereas contemporary scholars often emphasize the horizontalist notion of infrastructural commons, Dean’s theory of a communist infrastructure of political party organization is developed in relation to the social force, movement and energy of crowds. However, just as it is possible to question the populist overestimation of the social base as the singular source of political sovereignty, one can question Dean’s crowd theory of politics. All the same, her work is highly relevant to our discussion insofar as her theory of the political party has Lacanian premises that allow us to think of both artistic and political vanguards in terms of sinthomeopathic practice. It offers, on the one hand, a solution to the opposition between horizontalism versus hierarchy, but it falls back, unfortunately, on the false choice of collectivism versus individualism.

Although Dean’s Crowds and Party provides a political theory of organization that is not determined by forces of production, this theory, I argue, and despite its use of psychoanalysis, presumes an ideology without a subject. As such, her work harbours a tendency towards political coercion. If hers is not a “left realism,” as she puts it, it is potentially a new version of socialist realism, which defines the party as the politically conscious vanguard of the working masses.⁷⁶ Unlike Stalinism, Maoism and Castroism, Dean’s crowd communism is not concerned with nationalism, religion or cultural traditions, which would come to bear on what people consider a desirable world to live in. It is first and foremost a latter-day Blanquism, for which the overriding goal is the overthrow of capitalism and its revolutionary replacement with a more progressive political system. One might say that we are not dealing here with realism, and certainly not a social realism that reflects on politics from the point of view of human suffering. It is rather a kind of communist futurism, the sort of total project that separates the masses from pre- and counter-revolutionary ideas, which are denounced as bourgeois ideology. The means and ends of such a politics are party allegiance. Unlike Leninism, Dean’s crowd theory makes little room for individual initiative, inclination, thought or fantasy.⁷⁷ Nor is it, in terms of the book’s discussion, very much concerned with the kind of political programme that is outlined by Harvey.

Before addressing some of the more complicated points in Crowds and Party, let us begin by outlining its general argument. Dean states that today’s era of riots and protests has caused the left to re-examine the question of organization. The crowd event, which opens a site of struggle, produces what Elias Canetti refers to as an “egalitarian discharge” that becomes the basis of a desire for collectivity that is then expressed psycho-dynamically by the political party. The party is a means to overcome the problem of reform versus revolution and alternative versus radical. The function of the party is to channel this egalitarian discharge of the crowd. By itself, the crowd does not have a politics. Rather, she argues, it becomes an opportunity for politics.⁷⁸ Crowds reclaim the field of politics from both the capitalist state and from individual interests, which are presently combined in the form of communicative capitalism. Dean does not consider networked experiments in decentralized self-organizing to be effective alternatives to social hierarchy. In actuality, network logic reduces the potential for politics through its organizationally self-interested units. Moreover, exploitation proliferates through networked communication, providing capitalism with the raw materials of capital accumulation. Parties, in contrast, have the ability to consolidate mass power in addition to, and in spite of, the spontaneity of individual desires and splinter groups. Collectivity expresses class struggle rather than micropolitics, identity politics and clicktivism. By being faithful to the crowd event, a political party can scale up according to various geographical levels of involvement and provide the bureaucratic steering that is required for sustained struggle.

Several thematic issues in Dean’s work are worth addressing in detail, including: the understanding of the event in its Badiouian and Deleuzian forms; the avoidance of developments in Western Marxism; the hypostatization of subject formation in the form of individualism; the hypostatization of collectivity; and lastly, the avoidance of political economy and the consequent emphasis placed on crowd vitalism. In addition, Dean makes some rather contrarian, if not dubious, uses of Lacanian theory. My interest in Dean’s work, nevertheless, is its engagement with Lacan and Žižek in her approach to politics and the party.

the event

Crowds and Parties has many interlocutors. Its most immediate reference point is Badiou, whose theories of being and event and whose notion of the idea of communism is dramatically altered by Dean. Whereas both Žižek and Badiou have required that we rethink Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which concludes that philosophers have only interpreted the world, Dean brings us back to more familiar territory, emphasizing the need to change the world. Unlike Badiou, and to simplify his complex theories to the extreme, Dean considers that ideas can too easily be resignified and ironically redeployed.⁷⁹ On the whole, the theoretical effect of Dean’s work is often to reverse engineer the communism of Žižek and Badiou into the more familiar frameworks of postmodern theory while at the same time avoiding postmodernism’s apolitical thrust.

Dean’s theory of the crowd event is at odds with Badiou’s theory of the event. If being for Badiou is the infinite multiplicity of subjectivity, and if a political event is established in the generic set of politics, what Dean’s theory of the communist party proposes is fidelity to the crowd event, defined as the “intense experience of substantive collectivity.”⁸⁰ As she writes: “I make fidelity to this [crowd] event the basis for a new theory of the communist party.”⁸¹ In the case of Badiou, the event does not require a substantivized collectivity, but could be encapsulated in something as abstract as the invention of the principle of equality, the fidelity to which would either be taken up by the masses of people or not. Dean begins with the crowd rather than with historically evolved principles, demands or concepts. Although it might be disingenuous to think so, the crowd event stands in for what in Badiou’s work is simply the mathematical condition of ontology. For Badiou, fidelity to a crowd event would mean nothing in itself and would rather have the trappings of an impossible fidelity to material becoming, a theory that Badiou ascribes to the vitalism of Gilles Deleuze.⁸² As was mentioned previously, a riot for Badiou requires the possibility of linking subjectivities to a universalization beyond localization. This is only one instance of the many ways that Dean has more in common with the transcendent empiricism of Deleuzians than with dialectical thinkers like Lacan, Žižek and Badiou.

Why make the crowd event rather than the idea of communism, or the communist hypothesis, the basis of a new collectivity? According to Dean, ideas such as “freedom” and “justice” are for crowds little more than empty signifiers.⁸³ As a force of aggregation that cannot be reduced to its parts, nor to ideas, crowds defy democratic procedure and create a breach in the existing social order, generating affectivity and reclaiming the political field from existing authority. Unlike the Hegelian Marxist notion of proletarian communism, Dean’s crowd does not dissolve politics but acts instead as a kind of non-discursive guarantee for the discursive authority of the party. The unmediated crowd is construed as the presupposition of the party’s consolidation of power and political will. For Dean, a crowd formation can become an event because it opens a breach, creates a rupture and introduces a gap where, ostensibly, there was none. One cannot help but notice the post-structural logic that this kind of argumentation rests upon. The notion of a pre-existing power as a premise for radical politics should be rejected as a typically postmodern mining of the grounds of possibility.⁸⁴ While this is essential to any kind of critical theory, it is difficult to see how it operates as dialectical materialism. Whereas Lacano-Žižekianism considers the gap to be constitutive, an inherent antagonism against which such social phenomena as crowds and parties are an inevitably incomplete response, Dean inverts these terms and considers that crowds have the ability to introduce a split in the social order, a division that she defines in some cases as class struggle but elsewhere as crowd event: “the communist party holds open the gap through which the people appear as the political subject.”⁸⁵

individualism and marxism

On the question of individual subjectivity, Dean associates what she calls the “individual form” with capitalism. Inasmuch as the left is concerned with the problems of the individual, she argues, it remains tied to capitalism rather than emancipatory egalitarian politics. The work of Christopher Lasch, Richard Sennett and Jennifer M. Silva is used to describe the advent of a culture of narcissism, the therapeutic society, the critique of bureaucracy and psychic survivalism. These motifs are compounded by the Cultural Studies, left individualism and radical democracy of the 1980s that redefined social welfare in terms of neoliberal consumerism, which encouraged strategies of individuated citizenship that were waged against “neocons” rather than capitalism. For “left individualism,” the market could better meet individual needs than could communist parties. One could hardy disagree with Dean that this postmodern left outperformed the right in its denunciation of twentieth-century communism and Marxism. Recycling socialist critiques of Freudianism as a bourgeois ideology, Dean interprets the rise in mental illnesses and pharmaceuticals as a problem caused by individualism rather than as social ills produced by capitalism. “The real pathology,” she says, “is the individual form itself.”⁸⁶ What Badiou describes as the infinite multiplicity of ontology is described by Dean as ideological capture by capitalism.⁸⁷ For Badiou, however, the critique of democratic materialism does not require a rejection of the ontology of subjectivity since not everything that happens is on the order of an event, or to put it in terms of the French formula that Žižek systematically gets wrong: tout ce qui bouge n’est pas évènement.

Rather than pathologize individualism, which is a nonsense from the point of view of psychoanalysis, and for which there is no such thing as a normal state of subjectivity, one could instead question the exaltation of strength, drawing from such sources as Walter Benjamin’s critique of the fascism of Ernst Jünger or Theodor Adorno’s critique of the authoritarian personality. Harbert Marcuse rejected the repressive desublimation produced by crowds and valorized instead the notion of inwardness as a move away from exchange relations.⁸⁸ Note also that Dean’s discussion has little in common with Lasch’s work, who argued in The Culture of Narcissism against the ways in which modern bureaucracies undermine individual autonomy and the capacity for local action. Like Dean, he criticizes the supposed “cultural radicalism” of the counterculture, whose encounter group morality and therapeutic sensibility is premised on consumer age anxiety and restlessness. Lasch’s critique of the internalization of bureaucratic demands would hardly satisfy Dean’s notion of communist collectivism.⁸⁹

The idea that the Marxist tradition is limited when it comes to social theory was advanced by so-called Western Marxists who criticized the repressive bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe. Following the influence of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci, this perception inaugurated a new wave of theoretical analysis that was admittedly specialized and largely inaccessible to the masses. Theory became more abstract in the postwar period as the masses and mass parties accommodated themselves to state capitalism. Western Marxist notions of the proletariat are difficult to appreciate without emphasizing the inordinate influence on the postwar generation of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which were published for the first time in 1927. These texts address the contradictions of the production economy, explaining how it is that objectification through the production process leads to subjective devaluation and alienation, which partly accounts for the interest of Western Marxists in the aesthetic as an aspect of species being. Beyond animal needs (eating, drinking, sleeping), humans live on art’s inorganic, free activity. Under capitalist labour relations, however, the alienation of human needs has the appearance of emancipation. An appreciation of twentieth-century Marxism is necessary if one is to discuss avant-garde aesthetics and vanguard politics.⁹⁰ On the other hand, the pessimism of Western Marxism, on the basis of which Louis Althusser deemed that ideology is the permanent, indispensable and necessary condition of existence, derived from the failures of the proletarian revolutions.⁹¹ Beginning with the decline of the Second International after WWI, and after the isolation of the Third International by the fascist counter-revolution and WWII, leftist theory has been in search for a new unity of theory with practice. Since then, the question of strategy has been constantly displaced by the dynamism of capitalist transformation, with the left, including its communist party regimes, reduced to pragmatism and accommodation. Only the catastrophism of capitalism abstracts from theory. The crowd is waking up but without theory its energies may well be directed against itself.

“Blessed are the organized,” says Cornel West, adding that the grassroots will be comprised of conscientiously maladjusted individuals and not astroturf networking.⁹² Here we come to a key point in Dean’s argument, which is that the communist party is organized along the axis of the Symbolic-Real rather than what thinkers like West and Žižek privilege, which is the Imaginary-Real. The injunction under capitalism to be oneself, she argues, favours the Imaginary-Real. To favour the Symbolic-Real relation over the Imaginary-Real link, however, prevents subjectivity from serving as a support for radical praxis and tends instead towards the kind of theoretical anti-humanism that one associates with Foucault or Guattari.⁹³ Although Dean acknowledges that a subjective dimension is essential to the Marxist tradition, her mechanical approach defines subject as a being that is “traversed” by solidarity and collectivism, that is, a subject that is not a subject. On these same terms, could it be that the secret of theoretical anti-humanism is the very same postwar communicative capitalism that Dean rejects?

interpellation

Dean’s main theoretical innovation in Crowds and Party is to reverse Althusser’s theory, according to which ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. She does this so that all individualized understanding, defined as an “ideological mechanism,” can be removed from her theory of the collective political subject.⁹⁴ Ideology, she counters, interpellates subjects as individuals. In contrast to Lukács’ reading of the early Marx, Dean argues that the communist destruction of exchange relations is not for the sake of the emancipation of the individual but rather the elimination of the individual form once and for all. However, unlike Lukács, and unlike Althusser, Dean avoids here the question of mode of production and focuses instead on social relations at an abstract and purely ideological level. In doing so, she advances, against the grain of Althusser’s work, and without saying so directly, the communist party as an ideological state apparatus. In the process, Dean mobilizes some fairly standard post-structuralist themes: the idea that individual autonomy is illusory; the notion that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the individual form as a basis for political subjectivity; the redundant claim that interpellation fails to transform subjects into individuals because the individual form is subtended by collective social ideas, affects, desires and drives; and the idea that human subjects, as subjects of language, can never be guilty enough of social structures, including but not limited to class struggle.⁹⁵ Whereas the post-structuralist critique of autonomy is typically wielded against liberal humanism as well as communism, Dean develops a more confounding alloy: anti-humanist communism.

In terms of Lacanian theory, it is not only that the psychoanalytic subject guarantees ideological failure, an approach that inverts Althusser’s idea that subjectivity is what makes ideology work, say, through a process of ideological suture, but that these are two sides of the fact that interpellation fails. From the perspective of anti-capitalist mobilization, the important question is why does interpellation fail? Interpellation does not fail because behind subjectivity there is collectivity, social rituals and social structures, as Dean argues. Rather, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, behind the subject there is void, from which derives both the need for and the impermanence of social rituals and structures. This implies the inevitability of alienation, which would not in the least prevent anyone from becoming, despite the best effort at party discipline, a unique individual. According to a Žižekian-Hegelian reading of the failure of interpellation, one should transpose the ontological impossibility of both the individual form and the collective form into any consequent theory of politics. This much does not seem to be a problem for Dean, but she makes the post-structuralist mistake of limiting subjectivity to an effect of ideological and material structures.⁹⁶ Ignoring the Lacanian concept of impossibility, or of the immaterial materiality of the big Other, upon which she could then more firmly build her theory of the party on the Discourse of the Analyst, and because she wants to avoid the dialectics of desire and drive in favour of what she has elsewhere developed as “communist desire,” she offers a formula that repeatedly comes around to $ (split subject) = a (objet petit a), or $ as an effect of a, otherwise defined by Lacan as hypnosis and the myth of Oedipus.⁹⁷

Žižek’s discussion of Althusser’s theory of ideological hailing helps us to understand how it is that in Dean’s work the individual has a similar function as does the Jew in anti-Semitism.⁹⁸ The question revolves around the conflict between labour and capital, an antagonism that is projected onto a third element that is used to obfuscate the fact that “there is no ideological relationship.” Although Dean does not believe in an organic order of society and argues that the people are inherently divided, the individual appears in her work as a fetish whose function it is to objectify and embody this social antagonism. No wonder then that she concludes The Communist Horizon with the fantasy scenario of a crowd tearing into an effigy of a “fat cat high net worth individual,” which subtends the promise-threat that a communist party would not steal our enjoyment but give license to revolutionary terror, entreating us to “smite our enemies” and “take all their possessions” as we reassure one another that we are “on the right side of history!”⁹⁹ This is certainly not a decaffeinated politics that is deprived of its harmful ingredients. The question for us here is not how communism eliminates capitalism, misleadingly condensed into the figure of a greedy individual, but how communism incorporates subjectivity as part of an emancipatory universality. Communist anti-individualism is no better than fascist anti-Semitism. In fact, anti-individualism has more in common with fascist and racialist critiques of Enlightenment than it does with the best aspects of the left tradition. The difference between communism and fascism resides in the logic of class struggle, in which competing classes are caught in an antagonism that is inherent to the entire social structure. Political violence is not the telos or premise of communism and should not be construed as the hallmark of political radicalism.

For Althusser, the individual subject of political interpellation is a cipher for the notion of ideology. According to Žižek, Althusser’s drama of police hailing, “hey, you,” to which the subject responds with incredulity or with submission, has a dual structure of disavowal that involves both narrative temporality and atemporality. For Althusser, individuals are first, entities who are constituted as subjects of the state, and second, subjects who deny this as a function of interpellation. In other words, subjects respond to interpellation with guilt feelings. In Dean’s account, the interpellated subject would respond with the denial that they are what the communist collectivity tells them they are: individuals who by definition are selfish entities. For Žižek, the timelessness in Althusser’s drama renders invisible a more complex sequence and makes Althusser’s account a kind of show trial on behalf of ideological clarity. The feeling of guilt in this structure is a purely formal and non-pathological kernel of jouissance that Žižek argues weighs most heavily on those who have nothing on their conscience. In this sense a good communist, for Dean, would be someone who experiences a deep sense of anxiety, knowing they are guilty of individual selfishness and seeking to correct their ways through perpetual self-criticism. Those who would be most guilty in such a communism would not be those who ignore the accusation of individualism, but those who do not understand it: how, after everything I have done, could I be accused of individualism?

The dramaturgy of communist collectivism results in people coming to the realization that the best thing to do in a regime that demands self-sacrifice and self-criticism is go along with what the authorities want you to say, even if you ultimately do not agree with them or understand the crowd’s zealotry. For Žižek, the feeling that I am guilty but do not know why is essential to the Lacanian notion of the subject and exists prior to any social determination. This subject is divided between innocence and abstract guilt, which coincide in all social mediation. Dean’s version of this ideological drama mobilizes ideological guilt in order to individualize subjects. The structure is similar to the way in which racialists claim that capitalism racializes subjects, which simply perpetuates the ascriptive logic of race. It duplicates the capitalist individualization of guilt structures, replacing one set of desires with another. The castrative anxiety of what I am for the party as big Other is derived from the need to impose political correctness in the class struggle. To identify with communist desire at the level of symbolic mandate, the subject would need to be able to eliminate the impenetrable level of pre-ideological interpellation, or pre-ideological jouissance. Crowds and Party seeks to do away with this problem of subjectivity by transposing it onto para-populist theories of the crowd.

drive and desire

Jodi Dean’s use of the Lacanian notions of desire and drive is perhaps what is most debatable in her theories of communism and capitalism. The concept of Lacanian ethics, according to which one should not give way on one’s desire, does not justify defining communist struggle in terms of desire, and this, against her definition of communicative capitalism as a matter of drive.¹⁰⁰ As she correctly states, drive amounts to arranging one’s enjoyment by missing its goal, keeping the subject involved in the loop of repetition.¹⁰¹ She adds: “In the contemporary networks of communicative capitalism, drive is a feedback circuit that captures our best energies. Invigorating communism as a political alternative requires amplifying the collective desire that can cut through these affective networks.”¹⁰² Dean thus associates desire with communism and drive with networked capitalism and its individualizing effects. Although she is aware of the fact, it is nevertheless the case that psychoanalysis does not and cannot be used to marshal politics in this way.¹⁰³ Psychoanalysis can elucidate the ideological link, but it does not set out to orient the symbolic order or provide guarantees for its veracity. By the same token, communism does not have a privileged relation to either desire or drive. Although Dean asserts that drive keeps us caught in the circuits of communicative capitalism, producing value for capitalists, it is also the case, psychoanalytically speaking, that only communist drive describes a political separation from our alienation in capitalized communication and spectacle.¹⁰⁴ As Dean herself acknowledges, “drive and sublimation might be understood more dialectically, that is, not merely as the form of accommodation but also as substantive practices of de- and reattachment, unmaking and making.”¹⁰⁵

Here is another occasion in which Badiou’s theory of the event is helpful in de-linking the universal truth of a generic event from its presupposed moorings in the situation of capitalist production. The truth of communism is not immanent to the world. If it were we would not have fascism. In Dean’s estimation, it is not the truth of an event that defines the “non-coincidence of communism with its setting,” but communist desire.¹⁰⁶ However, politics cannot be positivized in or determined by the desire of the Other. This is why commodity fetishism functions less in terms of individual desires than in terms of their constant revision. The same is true for group formations. The only way for collective desire to function as a telos would be to accept something like Hardt and Negri’s notion of the immanence of communism within capitalist productivity. On that score, one could dispense with Lacan in favour of Tiqqun and likeminded theorists of communization. A revolutionary communism, however, represents a revolution within modernity and not the engineering of desire. In Lacanian terms, the party as analyst does not involve people in a collective version of ego psychology or in a Jungian version of the collective unconscious. But Dean prefers the notion of division-of-and-in-the-common to that of a dialectics of autonomy and solidarity across struggles. Her notion of the desire of collectivity is of necessity oriented towards, as she puts it, the destruction of the “self-enclosed circuit of drive.” This impossible task points the weakness of a theory that associates capitalism with drive and communism with desire.¹⁰⁷ It indirectly reinscribes the logic of Cold War cybernetic theories that are premised on closed and open systems.

The extent to which Dean wishes to define collectivism against the individual is noticed in her rejection of Badiou’s notion that the truth procedure of communism prescribes a subject of this truth, defined as an individual who actively makes the unselfish decision to become part of a political truth procedure.¹⁰⁸ For Dean, in contrast, such a decision must belong to the collective, to the “common action and will of those who have undergone a certain proletarianization or destitution, of those who relinquish their attachment to an imaginary individuality.”¹⁰⁹ Whereas Badiou’s set theoretical understanding of ontology is consistent with Lacan, Dean’s is not. What Badiou understands as subjectivization in relation to a truth procedure is construed by Dean as something more akin to C.B. Macpherson’s notion of “possessive individualism,” which postmodernists like Arthur Kroker knowingly flipped into its opposite as the post-humanist structure of the “possessed individual.” The subject of psychoanalysis, however, does not relinquish its imaginings in favour of symbolic mandates; the unconscious is not something that is to be shifted to the register of consciousness, whether collective or not. Moreover, from a Lacanian point of view, all subjects of language have undergone a certain destitution. From a Marxist point of view, capitalists are also alienated, even if they are not exploited in the same way and to the same degree as workers. Wishing to eliminate subjective mediation, Dean has not negated the negation of capitalism but has rather inverted capitalism in a non-dialectical manner. The matter is not settled by shifting the notion of subject from an individual to that of a concept, as proposed by Hegel, or to a class subject, as in Marx. Communism cannot totalize the field of social existence as a singular plane of immanence, which is why for Badiou there are different orders of truth.

the people divided

One of the strengths of Dean’s theory of politics is that it rejects the idealist notion of unity, which can be used for completely different and antithetical causes, without rejecting the notion of emancipatory universality. People are not simply divided because they hold different beliefs. People are inherently divided in the Lacanian sense that everything is barred and inconsistent. In other words, the people are alienated from even themselves. The notion that the people are divided and marked by a gap (the people are not-All), should not lead to the attempt to positivize this gap. Instead of the structure of people and party that Dean proposes, it would be better to work with the familiar structure of class antagonism, with relations of labour and capital mediated by the communist party. Rather than two competing classes, or in Dean’s terms, “the rich and the rest of us,” we have the two classes and the party, which stands in for the project of universal emancipation.¹¹⁰ A communist party that does not fight capitalism is a communist party in name only.¹¹¹ The communist party emphasizes, first of all, the predominance of capitalist relations; secondly, labour exploitation; and lastly, class struggle – not as a conflict against our individual selves and others, but against class inequality and property relations.

Reversing the Althusserian account, from the interpellation of individuals as subjects to the interpellation of subjects as individuals, offers very little to communist theory, except for a bit of semantics that could be used to bypass liberal rights discourse and justify subjection in the name of collectivism. Even at that, any critique that we can make of the individual form could and should also be applied to the collective form. If the individual is not natural or inevitable, then neither is the collective form – and neither of these should be defined in ahistorical terms, which of course is a privilege of psychoanalytic theory. If the individual is a form of capture, as Dean argues, then we could rewrite the Althusserian formula to say: communist ideology represents the imaginary relationship of crowds to their real conditions of existence. The “phantom-like subjectivity of the individual” that Dean compares with Marx’s phantom-like objectivity of the commodity could be reformulated as the “phantom-like objectivity of the individual” in the crowd aggregate and the different ways that different people relate to crowd desire – an untidy problem that Dean wishes away by associating subjectivity with terms like enclosure and foreclosure, which she defines as the “linguistic condition” of existence.¹¹² Common belonging might be harmonious if only language was not for psychoanalysis a medium of alienation rather than enclosure. If the communist party, like the subject, holds open a place, as Dean argues, this then is precisely what creates problems, whether we wish to refer these to individual pathologies like anxiety and aggressivity or to collective problems like disagreement and dissent. What both subjects and collectivities require, if they are to be what Badiou refers to as worlds, and not random aggregates, is a modicum of closure and social norms, according to which it is possible for social life to be intelligible.

Commons and the collective interest are a matter of shared meaning, culture and praxis, and not the gleeful destruction of a hypostatized self-same subject, propagandized as a term of abuse by those who consider individual subject formation as nothing but a reactionary bourgeois concept. Any such notion of collectivity denies rather than applies the insights of psychoanalysis. For Dean, “the individuality of agency is a fantasy occluding the material and collective conditions for action, contracting them into an imaginary ego.”¹¹³ This sentence collapses several different concepts and concerns. One obvious problem with Crowds and Party, then, is the fact that it simplifies leftist politics by designating individualism as the enemy. And it simplifies psychoanalysis by reducing the question of political formation to a desire for collectivity mediated by the party. One could contrast this with Žižek’s discussion of Bertolt Brecht’s The Measure Taken, which expresses both the absolute and the imperfect knowledge of the communist party. In reprimanding a young comrade, the party reminds him that although he might be right in his disagreement with the party line, he should, as a collective political subject, fight for his position within the collective and not outside it. As Žižek puts it: “if the young comrade is right, then the Party needs him even more than its other members. What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our “I” in the “we” of the Party’s collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line – just don’t do it alone, outside the Party.”¹¹⁴ Of course there are limits to this fighting for one’s own perspective, which is why the role of the party as mediating agent appears both arbitrary and absolute. Against this, Dean emphasizes strict adherence to party discipline, as exemplified by the murder in The Measure Taken of a fellow comrade, with this military necessity taken instead as the measure of communist collectivism.¹¹⁵ This version of vanguardism implies that in certain circumstances it may be necessary to give way on one’s desire for the sake of the drive of collectivity. More than a logic of practice, we are speaking here of a logic of praxis, whose dispositions are learned in struggle.

A theory of communism cannot be limited to the question of collectivism but needs to also contend with the alienations of the value-money relation. How does value flow through infrastructures? When value ceases to flow, Dean argues, the crowd emerges. Yet value flow also produces crowds in the form of surplus populations, which are structural to global capitalist production. Individualism is despised insofar as it is associated with bourgeois ideology as the source of the alienations of capitalism. Yet capitalism inheres not only in individualism but in all of social existence, including sociality, relationality and affect. How can the party remediate all of the contradictions of capitalized society? How can the party mediate the laws of motion of capital and how can different parties interact across time and geography? A further difficulty, beyond questions of value and capital accumulation, is that communism is no longer confronting bourgeois ideology directly but indirectly through the refraction of a planetary petty bourgeoisie for which the transformative aspects of value regimes operate according to a post-Enlightenment ideology.

It is ironic, insofar as Dean mentions the processes of enclosure that Michel Foucault associated with eighteenth-century power-knowledge, that she does not include the political party and bureaucracy among such dispositifs as the factory, prisons and schools. Today’s university training, for instance, is oriented towards an entrepreneurialization of the flexible self in a risk society that is a deeply and profoundly social relation, however unequal, and based on the cooperative and collective labours of masses of workers within global information, service and production supply chains. If Foucault considers that subjects are little more than the effects of the material conditions of production, Dean counters that according to psychoanalysis, the gap that sustains the individual prevents us from reducing the subject to the network of social relations. In this she would seem to deflect discourse theory’s rejection of the transcendental break with metaphysics. However, even if the Real of antagonism intervenes in conditions of production and social relations, it is not quite clear the extent to which her notion of subject implies “a cause that is not present in the field of its effects.”¹¹⁶

As a mean to avoid the ideology of individualism, Dean presumes, much like Foucault, that the individual is a historical anachronism. The distance she takes from individualism, her non-belief, is one way she gets caught in its ideological loop: stepping away from the ideology of individualism is the form of entrapment within its predicament in the sense that the formal aspect of every ideological structure is distance, understood as a defence against interpellation. However, one should not only appreciate but also reject this double blackmail of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. For an ideology to be effective, belief is not necessary. Individualism can not only be undermined through denial, but through full identification, which covers up the trauma of social existence. What matters in ideology is not the individual or the collective form, but the question of form itself as the mechanism of belief, the trans-ideological and obscure presuppositions that are anchored in jouissance. Ideological enjoyment is external to the positively determined realities of both individuals and collectivities. Psychoanalysis is therefore not concerned with the individual form, but rather with the way in which the social, or the-people-as-divided-subject, is an answer to the deadlock of form qua belief. Collectivism deprives us of the passivity of our individual selves and prepares us for endless political activism. However, the collective form, even if deemed preferable to the individual form, has no foundation inside the symbolic order. As radical negativity, the collective form of communism confronts rather than subtends the Symbolic-Real. Collectivism, when it appears in the form of politics, emerges as Imaginary-Real.

the crowd

Individuality is not a fully immanent enclosure. This has nothing to do with the literal, objective fact of being a materially delimited being. One can think of subjectivity as the dimension of virtuality in Žižek’s description of counterfactuals. When a man in a restaurant orders coffee without cream, the waiter replies: we are out of cream today, so I can’t give you coffee without cream, but I can give you coffer without milk. However, individuality is not simply the Real of lack either. Dean wonders how it is that an institution can persist if, as Mladen Dolar and Žižek contend, the subject represents the limit to interpellation and the reason why every ideology fails. For Dean, both heroic acts and subjective inconsistency are politically unsatisfying, insisting that the subject is inherently collective: “where bourgeois ideology fails the fact of collectivity impresses itself.”¹¹⁷ The materialism of collectivity implies that bourgeois ideology either leads to individualism (as the success of bourgeois ideology) or collectivism (as the failure of bourgeois ideology). This is simply the obverse of a successful communist ideology, defined in terms of communist desire. This formulation transforms the Real, understood as something external to the subject, into the positivity of the collective. As Dean puts it: “the subject is a gap in the [social] structure because the people are the subject of politics.”¹¹⁸ Politics for Dean consists in forcing the non-identity between the people (the crowd) and their self-governance (the party) towards the occupation of the gap in the people as an inconsistent political subject. Note that Dean’s suggestion that ‘the people’ does not refer to an ontological category simply avoids the definition of ontology in terms of inconsistency, whether we understand this in Žižekian or Badiouian terms.

The condition of politics, for Dean, is the inconsistency between the people as a collectivity and as a political subject, defined as the effect of the collectivity and its expectations towards its constituent elements. The not-All character of the people goes all the way down, Dean argues, in the sense that the people do not know what they want and are not fully present to themselves. Much of what could be gained by making use of Lacanian theory is then refuted with the following: “An understanding of the subject as interpellated as an individual resonates with linguistic ideas of the subject, better fits with Althusser’s own description of ideological recruitment, and attends to the historicity of the individual in bourgeois modernity.”¹¹⁹ This statement involves three questionable assumptions: that the subject is an effect of language; that Althusser’s notion of ideological interpellation presumes the structure of the individual (which makes ideology work) rather than subject (which makes ideology fail); and that with the notion of the subject (as a basis for collectivity) we gain a better understanding of the historicity (as opposed to the historicism) of bourgeois modernity.

The gap of historicity is emphasized by Dean in her approach to the inconsistent desires of the crowd. Having based her theory on a twist to Althusser’s formula, according to which the interpellation of the subject as an individual fails because behind the individual there is a collective subject, Dean substitutes the collective form, wherein the subject emerges from the collectivity, for the Lacanian notion of a “fundamental form,” which argues that the “subject emerges from the relation of one signifier to another,” and wherein objet a opens and sutures the chain of signifiers at the same time that it represents lack.¹²⁰ This subject, for Lacan, is not to be confused with the concept of the individual. The question then is whether subject can be effectively – politically – confused with party? Dean’s effort to make the party stand in for the gap that divides the crowd from itself, as opposed to the formula I suggested earlier that the vanguard party mediates the inconsistency between the universality of capital and the contingent aspects of the social link, finds its most problematic expression in Dean’s theory of the crowd, which she reads through Sigmund Freud’s discussion in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and in the writings of the arch-conservative Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).

The subject of the crowd in Dean’s Crowds and Party addresses the question of group behaviour in the context of worker militancy and strike activity. The rise of labour militancy caused turn-of-the-century authorities to fear crowds. The irony of Le Bon’s conservative fear of the rabble is that it acknowledges the crowd characteristics that are of interest to Dean and that Freud otherwise sought to explain away through reductively individual suppositions. Whereas Freud considered that the crowd-as-horde exploits libidinal instincts against an Oedipal obstacle, creating group psychology as a temporary alliance forged in negative solidarity, and involving individual psychological elements such as jealousy and competition, Le Bon views the leader as a passive conduit within the provisional crowd. What is important for Dean is that for Le Bon the crowd is a collective force that is brought together through conformity, affect, contagion, intensity and de-individualization – a heterogeneous mass ego that produces hallucinatory subjection to the kind of mimetic suggestibility that is indifferent to truth, reason or leadership. Its causes, not unlike Badiou’s immediate riot, are known only retroactively. The fact that the crowd has no ideas makes it easier for Dean to reiterate her tacit formula of $ = a, citing Le Bon, who considered that the crowd feels itself instinctively and irrationally powerful, that its activity brings about a hypnotic effect of contagion that then causes people to act in ways that they themselves would not normally consider. Suggestibility within crowd formations implies the absence of conscious individual will, allowing the crowd to have a common direction.¹²¹

The fact that the Freudian unconscious is not strictly individual seems to be lost on Dean, who holds that bourgeois ideology views collectivity negatively, an argument that is hard to fathom when in practical terms the bourgeoisie is the most cohesive and self-conscious social class, whose political will is embodied in the state. It is working-class collectivity that the bourgeoisie views negatively. Dean sidesteps this with an amorphous approach to the subject of ideology as inherently collective: “the crowd expresses the paradoxical power of the people as subject.”¹²² The advantage, one supposes, is that the bourgeois class is a quantitatively smaller collectivity. However, as a political subject that temporarily stands in for the desiring people, the crowd has for Dean no particular orientation. How does the revolution know that its “joyous belonging” is correct? ¹²³ It doesn’t. Its experiments can only be assessed retroactively and since “nothing is off limits because there are no limits,” the questions it asks will be informed by its desublimations.¹²⁴ This is one reason why the questions of political doctrine and party programme are largely absent from Dean’s theory of the party and consequently why it is primarily concerned with power, defined e ipso facto as emancipatory politics.

In addition to Le Bon, Dean raises the findings of another conservative tract, Robert Michels’ 1911 book Political Parties. She does so with regard to the question of the inevitability of hierarchy in any democratic politics. This has been proven by the problem of hierarchy and leader dependency in revolutionary parties as well as virtue heroism in anarchist councils. On the left, professional guidance and experience competes with reverence, devotion and imitative mania. In contrast to Michels, who considered crowds to be unreflective, Dean argues that crowds perceive unconsciously through one another and that such perception is collective. To argue that perception is interpassive and transferential is accurate, but to say that such seeing is inherently collective is mistaken. For Dean, imitation, contagion and suggestibility, down to Le Bon’s hypnotism and intoxication, are ways to acknowledge crowd desire. Her concern is that crowd desire should endure through to party formation. The party is the opportunity for collective force to continue to exert itself after crowd activity has subsided. The blurring of distinctions between the crowd and the party, however, effects a simplification of dialectics. The unconscious cannot be located within the collective and then shifted over to the conscious principles that are developed by the party. The unconscious is external and does not provide clarity for the party any more than it does for the crowd. In fact, one could argue the opposite, as one might experience in Stalinist show trials, purges and executions. For Dean, this inconsistency, the non-identity between the crowd and the party, which redoubles the inconsistency within the crowd itself, produces “something new.”¹²⁵ In actuality, this inconsistency produces, in Žižek’s terms, less than nothing. It provides the space for something to emerge but does not determine what that will be.

the commune

The test case in Crowds and Party is the experience of the Paris Commune, an important event in the history of communism and for Dean an example of fidelity to the egalitarian rupture of the crowd event. In The Civil War in France (1871) Marx criticized the Commune for prematurely decentralizing control among disorganized people, eliminating the Central Committee and the National Guard, and ultimately failing to march on the capital. Regardless, Marx considered the proletarian self-government of the Commune to mark a significant break with the existing social conditions. For Dean, this multiplicity of the people poses the problem of its sovereignty:

The point is not to fetishize rupture or celebrate the pluripotentiality of infinite modes of becoming. It is to see in the overlap of the commune form and the crowd event the specificity of an emancipatory egalitarian politics. Because it is a form for the free expression of the people’s desire, the commune is necessarily lacking.¹²⁶

In practical terms, for radical change to occur, vanguards must organize crowd events that allow the people to perceive their collective power and come to believe that they can replace capitalism with something better. For Dean, a rupture cannot be predicted or pre-determined by a programme since this would remain on the order of an already existing situation. In this respect she apostatizes the virtuality of the event for the sake of a populist theory of crowds.

Dean contrasts her account of the Paris Commune with the more “Situationist” version put forward by Kristin Ross in her 1988 book The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.¹²⁷ At the basis of Ross’s evaluation is an emphasis on anarchist individuality, which ties in with the 1960s generation’s shift from revolutionary party politics to the leaderless revolution of everyday life, as defined by intellectuals like Henri Lefebvre and Raoul Veneigem.¹²⁸ The preoccupation of the left with the abuse of state power by communist regimes seems to Dean a misplaced concern given the current weakness of the left. She credits Ross for at least recognizing that the Commune was more than a matter of state power. Ross was indebted in this respect to Lefebvre’s La Proclamation de la Commune (1965), which describes how the Commune had transformed the practical and material routines that organized Parisian daily life. Lefebvre’s emphasis on the conjunctural was shared with the Situationists and both contributed to the study of the production of social space, looking to events like the Commune as moments, or situations, that exceeded the structures that contained them.

The study of the production of space develops the study of the mode of production to elucidate everyday life in a bureaucratically controlled consumer society. It does so, however, with a perspective that is informed by experiences of struggle and within a general theory of Marxism. It is less existentialist than it is praxiological and premised on concepts that address the increasing complexity of various dimensions – the past, the human, nature, the possible – but that do not resort to postmodernism’s speculative indeterminacy. The production of space was a new concept at the time that it was developed by Lefebvre in the 1960s. The history of the Commune was a means for him to counteract the way that the postulates of the French Revolution were projected retroactively onto each new event. Lefebvre’s book focused on March 26, 1871, the day of the proclamation of the Commune and a moment of insurrection in which it could not be known if the victory would hold. Unlike Dean’s approach, Lefebvre’s study was oriented towards overcoming the contradiction between partisans and adversaries, refusing the singular emphasis on the passion of the crowd and seeing the whole as an ensemble of facts that contributed to the transformation of economic relations, social relations, social institutions, as well as the relations of politics and culture – an ensemble of forces, intentions and wills. What the praxis of revolution opens retroactively is the totality of the contradictory historicity of human experiences.

It is in this optic that Ross’s more recent book on the Commune, Communal Luxury, which is not mentioned by Dean, considers that the 2011 occupations and encampments refashioned an internationalist conjuncture that can in fact be illuminated by what Ross refers to as “Communard thought” – the virtuality of the Commune unmoored from both national French Republican history and state communist history.¹²⁹ The ways in which the commune was imagined, and as detailed by Ross, are somewhat beyond the concerns of Crowds and Party. This includes: local autonomous units within an internationalist horizon; disidentification from the state as the basis for a new political subjectivization; the dismantling of state institutions; the assertion of political principles beyond the mere fact of uprising; the anarchist communism of mutual aid, self-sufficiency and freely associated labours. These political arrangements call on us to consider the ways in which anarchist communism proposes how it is that equality enables individualism. They also point to the reversal that the Commune caused to Marx and Engels’ Manifesto, in which they argued that the working class cannot simply seize the state machinery for its own purposes. Marx nevertheless considered that the Commune failed because it prematurely destroyed state mechanisms. The lesson that Lenin drew from the Commune, and which informs his reflections on the 1905 Russian Revolution, is that a party is needed to focus the energies of the proletariat beyond the general strike. The party, Dean surmises, learns the lessons that come from the uprisings of the people and so party politics cannot be limited to the problems of the state.¹³⁰ On the other hand, the people themselves are no longer a simple rabble of apolitical peasants who assemble primarily in times of crisis or at carnival.

the party

The party can be understood as an agency that relieves us of individual responsibility for political decisions that affect the collectivity. The party as big Other would thus become the guardian of subjective destitution – or, to put this another way, the party becomes the guardian of the secret of the individual form. The paradox is that to be effective, the party must openly interpellate us as individuals, reminding us of our narrow interests and our collective human needs, so that we organize ourselves as social, political and historical beings. In contrast, fascist regimes offer immortality through barbaric forms of heroism. If one wishes to shore up the strength of collective solidarity, one must be able to do the same for individual autonomy. As the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen declared: liberty consists in doing anything that does not harm others and society. Or, as the slogan of the International Workers of the World has it, an injury to one is an injury to all. Regardless, ideology remains external to subjectivity. This is why Žižek privileges the axis of the Imaginary-Real over that of the anonymous rules of the Symbolic-Real. In the same way Marx privileges value over capital, even if in capitalism what we know about value cannot be expressed without the alienation of money exchange. It is the Imaginary that allows us to contend with the traumatic core and the inconsistency of ideology. This is not simply a matter of individual psyche, as Dean presumes, since subjectivity emerges only in a realm that both confronts and keeps a distance from the Real of enjoyment.¹³¹ People endorse reactionary crowds, demagogic leaders and tyrannical state regimes because they cannot confront the realities of human frailty and the void of existence. They attempt to transform meaninglessness into a religious, cultural or political substance.

What is at stake in a party is not the form of government or the simple question of political representation. Dean argues that the “movement” from the people to a party may lead the party to direct the people against themselves.¹³² Rather than resolving the contradiction between capital and labour, this theory of the party form presumes that the alienation of capital can be ejected from the Symbolic-Real: “[t]he crowd event is the Real that incites the people as a collective, partisan subject.”¹³³ Carl Schmitt would no doubt agree. In Lacanian terms, however, the party that Dean advocates cannot be the same kind of party that is presumed by Žižek’s notion of the party-as-fetish since Dean’s party does not mediate the intersection of Symbolic and Imaginary, but rather seeks to bypass the Imaginary-Real in favour of the crowd’s phallic Symbolic-Real enjoyment and non-sense.¹³⁴ Whereas the Imaginary-Real presumes a desired politics, the Symbolic-Real represents a situational ego-ideal contradiction of subjectivity. This symbolic suturing would be necessary since the Real limits rather than subtends the crowd’s affective discharge. A more likely prospect is the party as an institution that is faithful to the idea of communism by mediating the Imaginary-Symbolic and by introducing meaning, a Master Signifier, into the conflict between labour and capital. Introducing a Master Signifier does not imply building the party on the basis of the Discourse of the Master, culturalizing politics, as it were. For a communist party, it means producing, or uncovering, the master that is the cause of the people’s affliction. This is why Marxism remains the principal articulation of knowledge in the party as analyst.

The gap that Dean identifies within the people is formulated in terms of the impossibility of the people as the basis for communism. This notion of the incomplete subject could be defined instead in terms of the party as objet a, an element that is external to the division of society into different classes.¹³⁵ In a communist society, people would be less alienated in desire, in part because they would live according to real needs that have for the most part been satisfied. They would continue to be driven by a goal they never reach, through cultural practice or scientific research, because broad-based social needs would have by and large been met.

Contra Dean, the party does not occupy the gap between the people and itself-as-government, nor does the party function as a vehicle to maintain the gap of communist desire.¹³⁶ The party as objet a is a third element that stands for and mediates the conflict between labour and capital. It is not only that the people are divided, but that the party externalizes the impossibility of the people ever constituting an organic whole. This impossibility is not the basis for communism necessarily. It is not only that the people are incompatible with capitalism, as Dean has it, but that the people are incompatible with communism as well, which is why we need a party.¹³⁷ It is not enough that the people assert lack in the fact of exploitation and then redouble lack by alienating it in communist desire. This redoubling of lack is what happens when disillusioned voters switch their party allegiances or what occurred after the dissolution of the Soviet Union as former communists became neoliberals and neo-fascists. The communist party is not the overlapping of two lacks but rather stands for the impossible-Real that cuts across and eludes the symbolic order that apportions the distinction between the individual and the collectivity. Collective and individual, like universal and particular, are abstract, mutual opposites; they are not by themselves definitional of class struggle. The party registers antagonism as Real rather than as desire alienated in symbolic mandates.¹³⁸ If the party occupies anything it is the function of mediation between the competing interests that are constitutive of society. If division is irreducible, as Dean argues, then it cannot be the privilege of any one part of the whole, or the will of the people towards emancipatory goals.¹³⁹ That is why today, when there are few existing communist parties, the people remain, in all their bewildered, disoriented and conflictual relations. The proletariat, in contrast, is this same figure of division that stands for the universal – a paradoxical universal class.

vitalism

The vanguard party is not concerned with the crowd as the expression of movement, nor is it concerned with power per se. It is more concerned with revolutionary organization and social emancipation. Theoretical doctrine is the truth and supposition of the party. Whereas Dean’s crowd and party can map onto Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between “desiring machine” (the crowd as a wilful machinic desire and productive force) and “war machine” (the party as ideological vanguard movement that maintains a ‘nomadic’ exteriority to the people, unfolding in a movement of desire and directed against the state), a communist vanguard rejects the reduction of theory to practice and material processes. The question for a vanguard would not be the desire of the crowd as unconscious collective will, but rather the emergence of social intelligence from out of social processes. The party does not enhance the crowd’s desire for power; it channels the crowd’s negativity into organizational means. Or as Žižek puts it, organs without bodies.

Although Dean does not discuss the concept of vitalism, her crowd theory can be said to be susceptible to it. According to Benjamin Noys, philosophies of life have gained ascendancy in recent years over philosophies of the concept.¹⁴⁰ Vitalism, he argues, responds to the absent or failed politics of the left with desire and with vitalism as a kind of placeholder for communist aspiration. The desire and the will of crowds represents an excess that cannot be reduced to the capitalist subsumption of living labour. The contingency of life as excess defines the crowd as a productive force of association. Whereas for Marxism the proletariat represents the negation of capitalist relations, vitalism offers a non-negative, affirmative communism that is at variance with the notion of negation and that is essentially non-dialectical. According to Noys, affirmationisms of various sorts associate negativity with failure. Affirmationism seeks to avoid that which is negated – namely, capitalist relations and forces of production. Marxism, in contrast, seeks to revolutionize the forces of production, not escape them. Affirmation, Noys argues, has become the common horizon of today’s left, from Deleuze and Negri to Agamben and Badiou. Because the negativity of labour has been subsumed as the motor of capitalist development, vitalism redefines labour as a hyper-negativity that affirms an excessive will to power and that tears free from contradictions.¹⁴¹ Noys argues that the consolations of vitalism merely overcome contradictions at the level of myth, inscribing experience at the level of bodies, which become definitive of ontological grounding – a politics of human beings caught in a context in which capital has structurally abandoned responsibility for the reproduction of life and living labour in favour of the non-human. As a placeholder for a missing communism, the fetishization of crowds substitutes for the kind of political activity that does not sufficiently exist today. As Noys says, it is as if communism has already happened in the life of the crowd. The poverty of vitalism, he argues, is that it is a philosophy of defeat

enjoy party politics

It would seem then that one task for today’s vanguard party is to help the masses work through the problem of post-party vitalism. Here I fully agree with Dean that the left needs to worry less about accusations of organizational hierarchy, discipline and the occupation of state power. I also agree with her critique of the limitations of politics that are conceived in terms of identity-based activism. Dean’s emphasis on the psychodynamics of collectivism as a way to dissolve the hold of counter-productive criticism of the party form brings her very close to Žižek’s theory of the vanguard as Discourse of the Analyst. For Dean, the problem of hierarchy that was addressed by Hardt as one approach to leadership and otherwise resolved through networked mediation is redefined through the party form, now understood in terms of a transferential relation to the people. This implies a shift away from the singular obsession in autonomist theory with forces and relations of production as the basis for a critique of party politics.

If collectivity were to be built around the lack of desire, it would refer to the party as analyst, and not the people. Collectivity built around lack, as with the Discourse of the Analyst, would not produce a common desire, but a loss of the Master Signifier of politics itself. As analyst, the party mediates the division of interests among the people. Žižek’s often repeated slogan la révolution ne s’autorise que d’elle même speaks to the fact that the party, if it is to have a leadership function, must define for itself – and not simply for the people – a course of action. Only in this sense can we speak of revolutionary knowledge and revolutionary leadership. This more than explains the repulsiveness of today’s left populist parties that have abandoned revolutionary theory for compromise with the enemy.

Rather than resolving the contradictions between capital and labour, the party form, for Dean, presumes that the alienation of capital has been overcome through the jouissance of the collective as a partisan subject.¹⁴² If we are to think in terms of the Discourse of the Analyst, however, we must consider that the party is and is not the apparatus through which the crowd reflects back on itself. Dean is correct to say that the party is a psychic space (or rather that the relation between the party and the working class is a psychic space), but she is incorrect to suggest that the party fulfils the needs of the crowd. On the level of practice, we could say, the crowd must go through the experience of hystericization (Discourse of the Hysteric) before it can enter a transferential relation with the party-as-analyst.¹⁴³ By the same token, the party must assert its authority (Discourse of the Master) so that it can assume the function of analyst. The master, in and of itself, has no desire to know anything about the people and their needs, which is why the master only opens a space of possibility. The masses, in their desperation, do not want to exchange a capitalist master for a communist master, which means that a truly vanguard party is irreducible to its programme since, as Lacan puts it, “we do not understand each other [simply] because we have signifiers.”¹⁴⁴

Communist politics and the vanguard party do not coincide perfectly with the working class. The working-class hysteric knows that it is valuable to politics, and so, although politics is at times an obscure knowledge, the party-as-analyst listens to the working class. The knowledge that the party possesses has been acquired by listening to the people over a long period of time. The party, however, is faithful to the idea of communism and is not directly faithful to the people. The party does not provide the external, missing point of unity so that the working class can effectuate, through the party, a guilt-free dictatorship of the proletariat. However, the idea of communism and the knowledge that the party acquires and disseminates makes it such that unity is immanent to political thinking. Perhaps the real issue today is that knowledge is occupied by the Discourse of the University, which renders useless the knowledge of the people, not its willpower. And so, we have the conundrum that Dean identifies as the fact that the crowd does not know what it wants. But we also have, in addition to this, the identification of the University Discourse, which serves the state-capitalist tyranny of knowledge rather than the people. In terms of the party-as-analyst, it is not the people but knowledge that is in the place of truth. Such knowledge is not grasped at the level of crowd sensationalism, nor is it reducible to the institutions of knowledge production. Absolute knowing, Lacan argues, implies the abolition of the crowd’s jouissance inasmuch as the crowd’s desire must be interpreted rather than obeyed.¹⁴⁵ As Lacan puts it: “The intrusion into the political can only be made by recognizing that the only discourse there is, and not just analytic discourse, is the discourse of jouissance, at least when one is hoping for the work of truth from it.”¹⁴⁶

Lacanian ethics is thus not simply a matter of (communist) desire since, as praxis, it is dedicated to knowing truth. The paradox of the vanguard party is that like the analyst, it must organize its own obsolescence. To become the analyst the party must renounce knowledge-jouissance. The party does not possess the truth. The work of the party thus begins by prohibiting something of the crowd’s hysteria. If communist politicians are not to become demagogues, they must not legitimize crowd vitalism. According to Žižek, the fascist or Stalinist leader is a demagogue who manipulates people’s desires and who pretends to know better than the people what they want, who imposes change on people against their will. A true master, in contrast, is faithful to his or her own desire, refusing to compromise on it, allowing people to discover through the master what it is that they want, thereby disturbing the people into freedom.¹⁴⁷ Insofar as it shifts from the position of master to analyst, the party does not have the task of control but of winning freedom and emancipation for the mass of society and through their struggle to know their symptom.

If today’s party has as one of its tasks putting an end to the extraction of fossil fuels, for example, it must by the same token put an end to the crowd’s excess. Dean is correct to say that a certain degree of alienation and non-identity is unavoidable. The party not only acknowledges the crowd’s desire but steers it. As she says, the party directs the unrealized struggles of the people in one way rather than another.¹⁴⁸ We could say then that if communism is our shared fantasy, the drive of the party responds to the desire of the crowd. Insofar as the party leads the masses, it is only through a momentary identification with the lack in the people. Because the people are needy, they seek the love of the party, which the party must not and cannot provide if it is to work for the people. The party must not seek to fill in the lack of the people. Rather, the party provisionally substitutes for this lack. The party as fetish, as Dean recognizes, does not “deflect from the prior condition of the gap.”¹⁴⁹ However, the party does not directly occupy this gap. Postmodern formulas of the ‘always already’ and emphasis on pre-individual material structures miss the point of the critique of metalanguage. The party-as-analyst does not force a gap, configuring the crowd’s desire with a new configuration, which could give reason to the people to mistrust the party. The vanguard party does not totalize the field of politics but rather seeks to alter the existing conditions of social pathology, a condition it has learned about by listening to the people and yet resisting to directly support its desire. As Dean says: “The party does not know. It organizes a transferential space offering the position of the subject supposed to know.”¹⁵⁰

The people know their desires all too well, even if they do not know what they want. Capitalism works by filling in the void in the masses, giving the people what they want and creating new desires. For the benefit of the people, the communist party must resist giving in to the desires of the masses where those desires prevent them from being anything more than exploited. The party does not second-guess the people – it does not mistrust them. It rather understands that the people must “traverse the fantasy” and exit transference by themselves and for themselves. Only the masses can decide what master signifiers, what ideas, principles and programmes they will give themselves.¹⁵¹ The rule of experts in the University Discourse mimics the Discourse of the Analyst insofar as experts also presume that the crowd does not know, but in this case it is not that the crowd does not know what it wants, but simply that the crowd does not know because the University Discourse is the supplier of endless knowledge. Precarious subjects survive in this context by becoming small-time suppliers of knowledge and cultural products rather than people who are engaged in politics, either as artists, intellectuals or organizers. The inadequacy of the University Discourse is clear enough when a highly educated population gives itself a Trump presidency. Leadership, Dean says, “is a gift that the people give themselves.”¹⁵² Is it the case then that the progressives who supported Clinton rather than Sanders deserve the outcome of the 2016 elections? Was the Sanders campaign not a party for the people? A communist party, however, a strategic thinker and a critical dialectical realist cannot be satisfied with moralism and the promise of reform.

comrades

If the avant-garde artist is supposed to overcome the alienation of art and the vanguard party is supposed to make the argument for what is to be done, in the postmodern era the artist is supposed to protest and the party is supposed to obey the protesters. This at least speaks to a certain “structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere,” as Jürgen Habermas put it in the early 1960s, but not yet the organization of an anti-capitalist transition since, supposedly, there are still too many people around who enjoy as individuals. As Dean recognizes, when someone is presumed to know, say, the University or the Analyst, there is transference taking place. When the analysand, who is supposed to believe, realizes that the populist left party does not listen and that the University has churned it out as one of its byproducts, her or she is compelled to rely on their own psychic resources. For Dean, someone who seeks to know things for themselves implies separation from other people and the movement. However, we can never fully know reality, whether we question things on our own or collectively. A vanguard party must remind itself of this so that it does not confuse solidarity with sycophancy.

The party is not involved in a mass exercise of ego psychology. There is no fixed point of exteriority from which one can determine who is and is not a comrade, a problem that plagues all forms of organized politics, least of all due to intentional infiltration.¹⁵³ The ideological contradictions of postmodern post-politics produce their own versions of Stalinist paranoia, falsification and purges. To take one example, the manipulation of censure has been one of the consequences of Žižek’s celebrity. Such accolades as the so-called ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ and ‘most dangerous philosopher in the West’ cause many, including Žižek himself, to shudder. The desire to take Žižek down a few notches was noticed in Marcus Brown’s April 2016 Guardian article, which compared Žižek’s high theory critique of political correctness to the knavery of Trump, going so far as to suggest that Žižek may very well be a “cryptofascist.”¹⁵⁴ One month later, Žižek was challenged by protesters at the Left Forum in New York City, who distributed flyers that pretend to call him out for making racist and sexist jokes. The problem with the protest is that it neglected to demonstrate any understanding of Žižek’s work and he more than kindly addressed each of the accusations that was listed on the flyer.¹⁵⁵

A similarly wrongminded attack on Žižek is the essay “What Is Žižek For?,” which has as its subtitle: “The celebrated ‘leftist’ ‘philosopher’ is a racist and reactionary whose intellectual product is worthless. The left should have nothing to do with him.” The essay was published by Thomas Moller-Nielson in the journal Current Affairs, which is edited by journalist Nathan Robinson.¹⁵⁶ Žižek replied to some of the specific points in the article, as he often does, not by refuting petty smears but by elaborating his arguments against racism and his theory of the solidarity of struggles. One of Moller-Nielson’s claims is that Žižek plagiarizes himself by repeating certain ideas in his books. The banal retort would be to say that despite all this repetition his critics are none the wiser.¹⁵⁷ The more generous reading, for fans and followers of Žižek, is that like the East European manner of telling jokes, the repetition of jokes and to different effects is not only part of the pleasure of reading Žižek, but also demonstrates his philosophy.

Activists and journalists who are not concerned with debating Žižek’s philosophy from a leftist perspective simply want to diminish its political impact by tarnishing his reputation through meme warfare, a left-liberal equivalent to Tea Partiers who denounced Obama as a socialist. The matter seems to me equally problematic when people attack Žižek for things he never said and that are for any knowledgeable reader anathema to his thinking.¹⁵⁸ Defending himself against recent criticisms of his theories regarding sexual politics, Žižek commented how “tweet culture” is mired in self-righteous political correctness, blending “official tolerance and openness” with “extreme intolerance towards actually different views.”¹⁵⁹ Today’s so-called social justice warriors, to borrow the term of abuse that is wielded by conservatives, combine the narcissism of the counterculture with the political indeterminacy of postmodernism, making any prominent figure on the left who knows what they are talking about, and who does so with unusual competence or flair, ripe for jealous attacks. A similar fate befell David Harvey in the 1990s when he came under attack by postmodern feminists, which did not prevent him from re-emerging in the 2000s as one of the leading and most popular Marxist intellectuals. The same kind of hostility has been shown by many progressives towards Julian Assange. Such attacks, when they are made in the open and not designed for the sole purpose of intrigue or self-aggrandizement, usually fall flat. Žižek’s debates with Will Self and Jordan Peterson are cases in point. What inflames the animosity of adversaries is the fact that people like Žižek, not unlike Marx and Engels in their day, have adapted radical theory to new circumstances, making it practically unassailable by intellectual nonentities, who are better at making Facebook friends and so-called allies than arguments.

The conceit that Marxism is a science, narrowly attributed to Althusser, has left postmodern relativists ill-equipped to either defend the claim or challenge it. There is nevertheless enough accumulated intellect in the Hegelian Marxist canon to keep people as busy with social theory as literary scholars working on Finnegan’s Wake. Brecht said that communist literature should be easy enough for a donkey to understand. It is an irony that the Surrealists, most of whom were communist party members, produced conservative and cerebral art and literature, whereas the Situationists, who denounced all communist party discipline and led mass student revolts, also produced some of the most obscure leftist theory and art of their era. In both cases, the difficult art and theory they produced has outlived the political forms these movements were associated with. Dean considers that comrades are those workers who “see themselves and the world from the perspective opened up by the party.”¹⁶⁰ The rest are fellow travellers or simply somewhat sympa. The history of communism is littered with Marxists who were expelled from parties because they rigorously applied Marxist theory. They were, in the terms of Alexei Yurchak, activists, which refers to people who took communist regimes more seriously than those regimes took themselves. Žižek’s work mitigates racism by explaining how it functions. This contrasts with so-called culture warriors who prefer the enjoyment of denunciation to the more sober work of analysis. One example of this is Adolph Reed Jr.’s demystification of the anti-racist professional-managerial class, which caused him at one point to come into the crosshairs of Democratic Socialists of America members.

Lacan was censored by the International Psychoanalytic Association because he followed Freudian theory more rigorously than the profession cared to know. Bernie Sanders might at one time have done something similar within the Democratic Party. Presuming that the Democrats are able to govern in the interest of the majority of the population and not only the class of billionaires, Sanders caused careerists in the establishment and the media to use every conceivable argument as to why he was unelectable. When it comes to party discipline, Lacan described the superego task of excommunication: “But if the truth of the subject, even when he is in the position of master, does not reside in himself, but, as analysis shows, in an object that is, of its nature, concealed, to bring this object out into the light of day is really and truly the essence of comedy.”¹⁶¹ The notion that the party can provide a comprehensive vantage point from which the working class can see itself is, as Dean acknowledges, an impossible superego demand. As she puts: “that the gap is unavoidable does not imply that any given instantiation of the gap is permanent or justified. There are better or worse parties and leaders.”¹⁶² This much is obvious, but it holds for collective social formations much more than it does for individuals, and it involves self-reflexive critique if the party is to be more than a system of command, control and communication.

In a discussion of John Holloway’s Change the World without Taking Power, Dean argues that the perspective of the party comes from the fact of collectivity and fidelity to crowd discharge. This is the point I am arguing against. Holloway, for his part, and not unlike Negri, is happy to say goodbye to “Mr. Socialism” as the subject supposed to know, fighting to keep the position of the big Other unoccupied and mistrusting anyone who might try. Dean’s point that there are better or worse political organizations hardly needs defending. But Lacan also fights to keep the position of the Other unoccupied. We need a party that understands that you cannot occupy the place of the big Other but that this is also a necessary task. Without this understanding we return to the problems that plagued Stalinism. To put this in other terms, both Holloway and Dean are wrong, one for denying power and the other for affirming power. The political legitimacy of the communist party is not based in power (metalanguage), but in emancipation (metapolitics).

Dean’s description of the life and work of political organization makes perfect sense in terms of human praxis. What she describes as party enthusiasm – the cultivation of sensibility and belonging, common will, feeling that one matters, self-sacrifice, the desire to grow, the state of absolute equality, the love of density and strength, the need for direction and the feeling of infallibility – has also been wielded by fascist movements. It is therefore good to keep in mind how the political right has appropriated the corporatism of socialist movements. It did so not for the sake of the people, even when it proclaimed the dignity of the volk, but in order to save capitalism.¹⁶³ It is because of this best to avoid any substantive notion of the crowd, along with political essentialism, identitarianism, vitalism, spontaneism and the fetishism of movement at the expense of programme and principles.¹⁶⁴ Forcing people to choose collectivism over and against individualism is a Faustian bargain. As Dean herself admits about the crowd: “It doesn’t have a politics any more than does an anthill, forest, or heap of stones.”¹⁶⁵ Why should individuals be treated any differently?

Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge argued in Public Sphere and Experience that political parties are not unlike corporations in the ways in which they turn proletarian experience into raw material for production public spheres.¹⁶⁶ Are we to be interpellated as a collectivity so that we are not interpellated as individuals? If the collective is not to be reduced to mere means of production and if it is not to contribute to more worldlessness, how does the collective avoid becoming another deception? As Negt and Kluge argue, the production public spheres of the radical intelligentsia fail to achieve a concrete relation to proletarian contexts of living. Against this, communist parties seek a negation of interests through the kind of abstraction that valorizes only that which overthrows the whole of capitalist society, an aim they say that is sustained by a pure will that interrupts the dialectic between individual interest and social interest, contradictions that are already present in the workplace, schools and other institutions. The political duplication of reality diminishes the capacity for action insofar as parties coexist with the overall conditions of political legitimation, in particular state power. Where large-scale political fronts are unable to take any concrete steps, there can be no criteria for the integration and instrumentalization of individual and group interests. The organic links among activists simply verify the decay of bourgeois social conditions.¹⁶⁷ Because Dean’s party must destroy the individual in all of us, by any means necessary, her theory of the party is less a theory of communism and more a theory of power, or what Sartre referred to as “fraternité-terreur.” In some ways her crowd stands in as the obscene underside of the party, the unconscious desire enjoyed by the party in power. In the absence of an Idea, such a party would serve to satisfy the narcissism of the crowd, transferring its intensity from the particular to the proletariat as universal subject. The question of how this makes any difference in the world subtends the meaninglessness of existence, against which the party is supposed to be the answer.¹⁶⁸

3. A Self-Authorized Communism

Without abandoning those aspects of Dean’s theory that are workable – the rejection of imaginary unity and the understanding of the party in terms of the Discourse of the Analyst – how might the idea of the communist party-as-fetish takes us beyond the left deviation of precarious communism that avoids the party altogether and the right deviation that organizes the party in accordance with collective desire? Against postmodern anti-humanism, the core programme of the radical left must do more than champion formal democracy and must struggle to create new kinds of social relations that respond to a radically altered global situation. The revolution remains a historical necessity, but it must provide an organizational response to the new conditions of class struggle. The strength of Dean’s project is that it accepts the political challenge of anti-capitalist class struggle and the confrontation of state power. Dean understands that the superego aspects of struggle introduce an imperative of ethical duty and jouissance. If we are to understand the party vanguard in terms of dual power, however, we might consider that the subject of interpellation is the subject of drive.

Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes argues against the false opposition of individualism versus collectivism, which obscures capitalist hegemony and the ways in which those terms are wielded by the post-political left.¹⁶⁹ The background to anti-representational politics is the digital commons of post-Fordism, a communism of capital based on the smooth, second-order, non-striated spaces of capital flows. Such immanentism, however, abstracts from the limits of autopoietically self-organized commons. Frictionless capitalism replaces labour time with cooperation among knowledge workers in socialized production. The new forms of exploitation are said to replace labour struggles with new social movements, an orientation that does not abolish capitalism but makes capital aware of our common concerns.¹⁷⁰ According to Žižek, the gap that separates the crowd from itself is defined by Marxism as the exclusion of the worker from control of the production process.

Unlike autonomism, Dean’s work abstracts from production processes to posit a political party organization that is directly mobilized by the crowd event. The virtual flow of the multitude’s becoming, to put things in Deleuzian-Negrian terms, is substantialized in the party as a system of power. For Dean this is not a strict matter of economic process but relates to the appearance of a political event. The question that Žižek asks is how to break out of the paradigm that opposes the mode of production and the ontology of politics. One way to think about this is to consider that the mode of commodity, knowledge and cultural production is replaced in this case by the production of organization. In keeping with cyber-capitalism more generally, the party form desubstantializes identity and subjective experience. The party virtualizes capitalist reality and human becoming. The point of contact between the party as a mode of production and the real subsumption of labour is the socio-political factory. Here the party appears as both the neutral ground for the people’s (meta) self-overcoming and an inevitably alienating state apparatus (politics). For Žižek, the communist party does not seek legitimation from the people through negotiation but assumes state power directly in the form of political universality.¹⁷¹ As he puts it in his book on Lenin, “the infamous ‘knowledge’ to be introduced to the working class from the outside by the Leninist party is of the same nature as the (supposed) knowledge in psychoanalysis” and constitutes a universal partisan truth, excluding dialogue with rightists.¹⁷² The production cycle is realized when workers endorse the party’s revolutionary governance. The party officially serves the people and the people unofficially endorse its sovereignty. The people accept a minimum of alienation – representation and leadership – so that politicians can do their work of service and organize processes of social reproduction. Where this distance is cancelled, he argues, when the interests of the people are directly reflected in the practices of the party is where you have totalitarianism. The fascist leader, for example, is expected to directly embody the identity of the people as well as their true authentic interests. If capitalism simply supplies people what they want in terms of confused material desires, the political form of the communist party, in contrast, involves a minimum of alienation that “transubstantiates” the self-contradictory character of the people’s interests in defence of those who are most exploited.¹⁷³

In response to the contradictions of capitalism, the first paradox of communism is that revolution must enact its own principled forms of exclusion, beginning in the realm of economy, where, for instance, the essential services of a company like Google would be socialized and provided for free through public infrastructure. A proposal that is close to this is already in place with Jeremy Corbyn’s Digital Democracy Manifesto, which proposes high speed broadband and mobile connectivity for every household and organization in Britain, overseen by the public sector through a National Investment Bank and providing unlimited use at low cost through the coordination of telecommunications companies. The manifesto further proposes free online resources, learning resources for media skills, trade union membership for media workers, security of personal data as a human right, open-source licensing for publicly funded research and the cooperative ownership of digital platforms.

A second paradox is that the choice of centralized party apparatus, in addition to or as opposed to grassroots initiatives, would be recalibrated once such a party comes to power. Assuming it is legitimate in its egalitarian promise, it would begin to stimulate and encourage those same grassroots efforts and thereby legitimate its leadership. The obvious example here is the importance of the Soviets in guaranteeing the legitimacy of the Bolshevik Party at the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution. These two paradoxes, the first having to do with forces of production and the second having to do with relations of production and political ideology, appear together already as the contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism has been a desperate effort to overcome its own limitations. This, Žižek argues, is where Marx got it wrong. Marx’s emphasis on capitalism’s self-revolutionizing of its own material limits and inherent contradictions presumes that communism could overcome the crises of capitalism by bringing productivity to its full capacity. The communist fantasy of unleashed productivity beyond capital, Žižek argues, is inherent to capitalism.¹⁷⁴ To overcome the limits of productivity is to lose sight of the drive to productivity as such. What links the two paradoxes – the socialization of surplus as the task of the party – is the propensity of today’s ideology to include all of human existence in the webs of post-Fordist productivity.

As a matter of ideology critique, the goal of a communist party is to traverse the fantasy of liberal pluralism and capitalist democracy.¹⁷⁵ While Žižek endorses excess and criticizes those who want a revolution without revolution, he does not locate this excess in the crowd but rather in the sphere of capitalist production. Politics for him must repoliticize the economy and disturb capital, rather than individualism, as the fundamental fantasy. This makes Žižek’s work different from Clover’s notion that the riot is a direct expression of capitalist accumulation. Why, ask Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi, is communist metapolitics not simply a matter of limiting politics to economics? They argue that for Žižek the dialectical interrelation of economics and politics implies a critique of the various forms of anti-capitalist post-politics that seek to preserve liberal democracy and its social democratic compromises. The new political organizations must begin with a critique of the ways in which liberal democracy blackmails us by associating radical politics with totalitarianism. The political and economic levels must therefore be understood as separate instances of a unified approach.¹⁷⁶

Today the discourses of the University and Hysteric compel us to leave behind the ideology of class struggle in favour of new arrangements of power-knowledge and pseudo-Gramscian forms of hegemonic contestation. The foreclosure of radical politics in favour of liberal consensus, on the one hand, or of nomadic resistance, on the other, leads to the dominance of neoliberal technocracy and with it the reactive outbursts and demagogic manipulation of the crowd. One cannot oppose global capitalism to the resurgence of racism, nationalism, xenophobia, fascism and fundamentalism since the one generates the others. For Žižek, the only way to break out of particularisms is to emphasize class struggle and the critique of political economy as the primary contradiction in the solidarity of struggles.¹⁷⁷ On this issue, Dean’s Crowds and Party echoes Žižek’s notion of transferential authority:

The paradox to be fully endorsed here is that the only way to abolish power relations effectively leads through freely accepted relations of authority: the model of a free collective is not a group of libertines indulging their own pleasures, but an extremely disciplined revolutionary body.¹⁷⁸

For Žižek, the notion of revolution is an act that can alter the coordinates of a situation. An authentic act is neither determined by the existing situation, nor is it a form of obscene destruction. In other words, it is not an “inherent transgression” that is conditioned by the forces already at play, as is the case with Foucauldian theories of micropolitics or with Deleuzian theories of the multitude. “Like the Lacanian analyst,” Žižek writes, “a political agent has to engage in acts which can be authorized only by themselves, for which there are no external guarantees. An authentic political act can be, in terms of its form, a democratic one as well as a non-democratic one.”¹⁷⁹

Feldner and Vighi mention that in 1990 Žižek ran for office in Slovenia as a Liberal Democrat and against the alliance of former communists with nationalists. Although people criticize him for this, one should not ignore how the governments of the former East have almost all of them become far-right regimes. Žižek’s criterion for acts that are self-authorized may very well bypass the party form, but they are certainly not justified by the mere numerical superiority of the masses. This has caused a great deal of consternation among people who limit politics to party membership, dogma and discipline. Even though Žižek believes that to counteract today’s waning of symbolic authority we require fixed ethical reference points and codes of conduct, or in Badiou’s terms, Master Signifiers that counteract atonal worldlessness, a Žižekian act, much like Badiou’s notion of an event, changes the rules of the game. In this regard, Žižek argues for the necessity of vanguards as catalysts of revolutionary change.¹⁸⁰ Žižekian politics return us to the modalities of dialectical negation that that many on the left today, including Dean, abjure as impractical. Unlike the forms of disciplinary power defined by Foucault, negativity has no direct cause and implies a separation from the order of the Symbolic-Real, which Žižek argues, is the universality of capitalism. The purpose of the party is to transpose the knowledge of the vanguards of communism into enduring organizational, which is to say, social forms.

 

Notes

1. Tiqqun, “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” Tiqqun #2 (2001) 39.
2. They write: “Everywhere there is only horizontality of relations, and participation in projects that are to replace the dusty old hierarchical and bureaucratic authority, counter-power and decentralization that is supposed to defeat monopolies and secrecy. Thus the chains of social interdependence can extend and tighten, chains which are sometimes made of surveillance, and sometimes of delegation. Integration of civil society by the state, and integration of the state by civil society more and more work together like gears. It is thus that the division of the labor of population management necessary for the dynamics of cybernetic capitalism is organised – and the affirmation of a ‘global citizenship’ will, predictably, put the finishing touches on it.” Tiqqun, “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” Tiqqun #2 (2001) 39. On the question of networked horizontalism, see for example, Jeffrey S. Juris, “Anarchism, or The Cultural Logic of Networking,” in Randall Amster et al., eds. Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy (London: Routledge, 2009) 213-23, and Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolution (London: Verso, 2012).
3. Tiqqun, “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” 42, 50, 52. At the twilight end of this sentiment, see the last film by Jean-Marie Straub, La France contre les robots (2020).
4. Slavoj Žižek, “The Left’s Fidelity to Castro-ation,” In These Times (November 29, 2016).
5. European Graduate School Video Lectures, “Michael Hardt. The Leadership Problem. 2014,” YouTube (January 28, 2015).
6. Slavoj Žižek, Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (London: Verso, 2017) lv.
7. See Jacques Lacan, Lacan in Italia, 1953-1978 / Lacan en Italie, 1953-1978 (Milan: La Salamandra, 1978); Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” in Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 (London: Verso, 2002) 167-336; Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014).
8. Žižek, Lenin 2017, 176-82.
9. In Incontinence of the Void, Žižek argues that today’s Discourse of the Capitalist oscillates between the University and Hysteric Discourses. See Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017) 208. My version of this argues that the discourses of the Hysteric (activist class) and University (creative class) are competing factions of a global petty bourgeois hegemony. See Marc James Léger, Don’t Network: The Avant Garde after Networks (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2018). See also Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, “An Interview with Slavoj Žižek: The Belated Actuality of Lenin,” Crisis and Critique 4:2 (November 2017) 429-48. Hamza and Ruda published their interview after I had written my chapter on the idea of the party.
10. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2006) xxxv.
11. The phrase is the title of one of the chapters in David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
12. Wolfgang Streeck, “How Will Capitalism End?” New Left Review #87 (May/June 2014) 35.
13. Streeck, “How Will Capitalism End?” 47.
14. David Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition,” Davidharvey.org (December 16, 2009.
15. Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.”
16. See David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 123.
17. Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy, trans. (London: Verso, [1965] 2016) eBook, 46.
18. Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.”
19. Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.”
20. Sam Gindin, “Unmaking Global Capitalism: Nine Things to Know About Organizing in the Belly of the Beast,” Jacobin (June 2014).
21. Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.”
22. Erik Olin Wright, “How to Think About (And Win) Socialism,” Jacobin (March 27, 2016).
23. For instance, Benoît Hamon, a candidate for the leadership of the French Parti Socialiste had on his 2016 policy platform the introduction a €600-800 per month universal basic income. Polls indicated, however, that two thirds of the French population opposed this plan. See Alice Laurençon, “Benoît Hamon wins Socialist Party presidential primary in France,” World Socialist Web Site (January 30, 2017). The subject of UBI was taken up by Andrew Yang in his bid for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination. However, his plan, which focused on the “fourth industrial revolution” did not have any of the social democratic provisions that would make UBI anymore more than another means to increase corporate wealth. Bernie Sanders, for his part, preferred a jobs programme to UBI. While transition to a green economy and the rebuilding of infrastructure are essential to any socialist programme, the problem of overproduction cannot be addressed without also finding solutions to the redundancy of labour on a global scale and in a political economy that challenges some of the tenets of the labour theory of value.
24. Slavoj Žižek, “The Fetish of the Party,” in The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006) 67-93. See also Marc James Léger, Brave New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012).
25. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? (Winchester: 0 Books, 2009).
26. Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, [2011] 2012) 21-5.
27. Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 30-1.
28. Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 33-5.
29. Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 63.
30. See Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010). For a summary of Badiou’s theory of the event, see Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2005).
31. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2016).
32. Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, 81.
33. Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, 81.
34. Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) 6.
35. Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, 14.
36. Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, 19-20.
37. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 39.
38. Žižek, “The Fetish of the Party,” 67-93.
39. See Slavoj Žižek, “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Urban Violence in Paris and New Orleans and Related Matters,” in BAVO, ed. Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City (Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007) 12-29.
40. On this issue, Žižek cites Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin, White Masks rejects the racialist orientation of contemporary cultural politics. See Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014) 162-3. See also Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
41. See Paulo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012) and Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).
42. Al Jazeera English, “Žižek: Electing Trump will ‘shake up’ the system – UpFront,” YouTube (November 16, 2016).
43. Slavoj Žižek, “Only a Radicalized Left Can Save Europe,” New Statesman (June 25, 2014).
44. Al Jazeera English, “Noam Chomsky on the new Trump era | UpFront Special,” YouTube (November 25, 2016).
45. Slavoj Žižek, “Was I right to back Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton? Absolutely,” The Independent (July 26, 2019).
46. Slavoj Žižek, “Truth is many Democrat ‘moderates’ prefer Trump to Sanders in 2020 White House race,” RT (August 2, 2019).
47. Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Open Democracy (November 24, 2013).
48. Žižek, “The Fetish of the Party,” 82.
49. See Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: The Lesson of Rancière,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, [2000] 2004) 71.
50. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Precarious Communism: Manifest Mutations, Manifesto Detourned (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2014) 3.
51. Gilman-Opalsky, Precarious Communism, 23.
52. Gilman-Opalsky, Precarious Communism, 28.
53. Gilman-Opalsky, Precarious Communism, 113.
54. Gilman-Opalsky, Precarious Communism, 121, 122, 123.
55. Gilman-Opalsky, Precarious Communism, 126.
56. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009) 292.
57. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 299-301.
58. Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016) 54-5.
59. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012) 8.
60. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 20.
61. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 32.
62. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 104, 113-14.
63. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 174.
64. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 186.
65. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 75. See John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: The Globalization of Production, Super-Exploitation and the Crisis of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
66. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 80.
67. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 12.
68. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 42.
69. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1995) and Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso, 1998).
70. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 53-4.
71. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 60.
72. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1968) 97-8.
73. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972) 66-125.
74. Dean, Crowds and Party, 13-14.
75. See Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
76. On this subject see C. Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London: Macmillan, 1973).
77. James, Soviet Socialist Realism, 12.
78. Dean, Crowds and Party, 8.
79. Dean, Crowds and Party, 143.
80. Dean, Crowds and Party, 5. Note that Dean’s membership in the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which combines socialism with racialist “liberation,” makes for some compatibility with Stalinist notions of nationality, on the one hand, as well as various aspects of post-New Left identitarianism. This makes Badiou’s theory of the generic anathema to the PSL programme, which is adapted to the postwar history of the American left. Note also that substantivism is anathema to Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is one of the reasons why Badiou’s work is more compatible with “orthodox” understandings of Lacanian theory than Dean’s unorthodox transmutations.
81. Dean, Crowds and Party, 5.
82. See Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, eds. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004).
83. Dean, Crowds and Party, 21.
84. See Slavoj Žižek, “The Crisis of Determinate Negation,” In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) 337-80.
85. Dean, Crowds and Party, 28.
86. Dean, Crowds and Party, 57.
87. Dean, Crowds and Party, 69.
88. See Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays, War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jünger,” New German Critique #17 (Spring 1979) 120-8; Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (London: Verso, [1950] 2019); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, [1964] 1991). See also Marcuse, A Study on Authority, trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, [1936] 1972) and The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, [1977] 1978).
89. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979).
90. See Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, [2005] 2007).
91. See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
92. Formerly available in “Cultivating Critique,” YouTube (December 10, 2016). The phrase is a reference to Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
93. Dean, Crowds and Party, 60, 62.
94. Dean, Crowds and Party, 76.
95. Dean, Crowds and Party, 74, 78, 80.
96. Dean, Crowds and Party, 77.
97. For a critique of Dean’s approach to Hegelian negation, see Marc James Léger, “Drive in Cinema: The Dialectic of the Subject in Daisies and Who Wants to Kill Jessie?” in Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics (Bristol: Intellect, 2015) 49-78.
98. Slavoj Žižek, “A Reply to My Critics,” Philosophical Salon (August 5, 2016).
99. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 248. This Narodnik logic was expressed by fans of Luigi Mangione, the politically disoriented murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. In the cultural sector, metaphors of “wealth” are wielded against monogamy or “normative” sexuality by postmodernists who now advocate Incel logics as well as confused notions of heteropatriarchy that have no moral, political or scientific value. I refer to this and similar anti-universalist trends as microfascism.
100. On the theory of communicative capitalism, see Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) as well as Dean, Blog Theory.
101. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 65.
102. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 67.
103. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 66.
104. On the conditions of exploitation in the networked society, see Christian Fuchs, Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York: Routledge, 2014) and Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London/Toronto: Pluto Press/Between the Lines, 2015).
105. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 177.
106. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 190.
107. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 187.
108. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 194.
109. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 195.
110. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 85.
111. See A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). McAdams’ study is written as a “rise and fall” account of communist parties in the twentieth century. He defines the problem of the communist party as a conflict between the party as an “idea” and as an “organization.”
112. Dean, Crowds and Party, 77. The term linguistic, derived from the work of Judith Butler, does not here refer to language as it is understood in the conventional sense as a cultural and national vernacular, but in a purely structuralist sense, which entails its own set of criteria and problems.
113. Dean, Crowds and Party, 82.
114. Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” 188.
115. See Jodi Dean, “A Comrade for the Anthropocene,” in Marc James Léger, ed. Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (London: Routledge, 2023) 174.
116. Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi, Žižek Beyond Foucault (New York: Palgrave, 2007) 22.
117. Dean, Crowds and Party, 88.
118. Dean, Crowds and Party, 88.
119. Dean, Crowds and Party, 91.
120. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, [1991] 2007) 13.
121. The formula of $ = a finds its corollary in Joshua Clover’s social-deterministic account of the riot and strike as a “full social power” that embodies negation in the worlds of production and consumption: “One might say that riot and strike are collective personifications of circulation and production at the limit.” Even more problematically, he says that in 1968 at least, “Negroes are blackness is riot,” thereby ontologizing what is presented as a political theory. Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, 203 205.
122. Dean, Crowds and Party, 91.
123. Dean, Crowds and Party, 122.
124. Dean, Crowds and Party, 122.
125. Dean, Crowds and Party, 181.
126. Dean, Crowds and Party, 136.
127. See Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
128. See Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, [1947] 1991); Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Rebel Press, [1967] 2001). See also Rémi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle (Paris: A.M. Métaillé, 1988).
129. Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015) 2-3.
130. Dean, Crowds and Party, 155.
131. Feldner and Fabio Vighi, Žižek Beyond Foucault, 43.
132. Dean, Crowds and Party, 157.
133. Dean, Crowds and Party, 157.
134. For those Lacanian processes that are located in between the Imaginary, Real and Symbolic, see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: Joyce and the Sinthome, trans. Cormac Gallagher, available at www.lacaninireland.com.
135. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 205.
136. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 207.
137. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 230.
138. See Slavoj Žižek, “The Sexual Is Political,” The Philosophical Salon (August 1, 2016).
139. Dean, The Communist Horizon, 111-12.
140. Benjamin Noys, “The Poverty of Vitalism (and the Vitalism of Poverty),” unpublished essay.
141. This function of excess and vitalism is also at play in Clover, who not only equates blacks with riots, but views blackness as a surplus rebellion that always exceeds the order of state, law and market. One thinks in this regard of the contrast between the nativist vitalism of Aimé Césaire and the revolutionary radicalism of Frantz Fanon. Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, 205.
142. Dean, Crowds and Party, 157.
143. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 33.
144. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 33.
145. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 35.
146. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 78.
147. Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 46.
148. Dean, Crowds and Party, 183.
149. Dean, Crowds and Party, 183.
150. Dean, Crowds and Party, 199.
151. See on this subject, Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
152. Dean, Crowds and Party, 184.
153. This essay was written before the publication of Jodi Dean, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (London: Verso, 2019). Around 2012 I attempted to put together a book titled Comrades: Cross-Ideological Collaboration on the Left. The book was to present anecdotal accounts by social movement actors of instances where differences among anarchists, socialists and social democrats were put aside in broad-based anti-capitalist actions and campaigns. Almost none of the people I initially wrote to replied to my invitation. This unified front project was consequently abandoned.
154. Marcus Browne, “Slavoj Žižek: ‘Trump Is Really a Centrist Liberal,” The Guardian.com (April 28, 2016). Žižek’s views on the matter, despite the philosophical complexity that he brings to issues, are not so different from the more moderately liberal and leftist views of people like Thomas Frank and Tariq Ali. See for example Tariq Ali, “Trump or Hillary?,” The World Today with Tariq Ali (October 2016), and Thomas Frank, “Donald Trump Is Moving to the White House, and Liberals Put Him There,” The Guardian (November 9, 2016). See also Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre: A Warning (London: Verso, 2015) and Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016).
155. See Bill Lewis, “2016 05 22 Zizek Conflict,” YouTube (May 24, 2016).
156. Thomas Moller-Nielson, “What Is Žižek For?” Current Affairs (October 18, 2019). Žižek has suggested that Robinson was encouraged by Noam Chomsky to criticize him. See TCDPhil, “Slavoj Žižek | Full Address & Q&A,” YouTube (January 26, 2020).
157. Slavoj Žižek, “Can One Be a Hegelian Today?” The Philosophical Salon (October 28, 2019).
158. See for instance the defamatory article by Andre Damon, “The Idiot Speaks: Slavoj Žižek Endorses Donald Trump,” World Socialist Web Site (November 9, 2016). This could be updated to include mention of Gabriel Rockhill’s smear article, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek” in CounterPunch (January 2, 2023),. See my response to this in Léger, “Just Stop Žižek: Gabriel Rockhill’s Rant,” academia.edu (January 2023).
159. Slavoj Žižek, “Reply to My Critics, Part Two,” The Philosophical Salon (August 14, 2016). A case in point is the spectacle of Žižek having to defend the left from attack by a churlish Tyler Cowen on the occasion of Žižek receiving the 2019 Holberg Prize. See HolbergPrize, “Slavoj Žižek: ‘Why I Am Still A Communist’. The 2019 Holberg Debate with Slavoj Žižek & Tyler Cowen,” YouTube (December 7, 2019).
160. Dean, Crowds and Party, 193.
161. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, [1973] 1998) 5.
162. Dean, Crowds and Party, 196.
163. For a discussion of the potential flaws of party formation, see Daphne Lawless, “Mind the Gap! Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party,” Fightback (May 25, 2016).
164. Dean, Crowds and Party, 215, 257. Jacob Johanssen’s argument that because Dean provides examples of the ways in which individuals relate to party activism she should therefore emphasize “individual desire” as well as identity politics as an affective aspect of collectivism sidesteps the Lacanian aspects of her argument. See Jacob Johanssen, “The Subject in the Crowd: A Critical Discussion of Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party,” tripleC 14:2 (2016) 435.
165. Dean, Crowds and Party, 216.
166. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1972] 1993).
167. Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 88-9.
168. Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 90.
169. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) 346, 348.
170. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 358.
171. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 377.
172. Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” 185.
173. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 378.
174. Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014) 146-7.
175. Feldner and Vighi, Žižek Beyond Foucault, 43.
176. Feldner and Vighi, Žižek Beyond Foucault, 56.
177. Feldner and Vighi, Žižek Beyond Foucault, 57.
178. Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004) 118-9.
179. Žižek, Iraq, 87.
180. Feldner and Vighi, Žižek Beyond Foucault, 62.

Featured image: Alexander Kosolapov’s Lenin-Coca-Cola, Symbols of the Century (1988). Public domain image chosen and provided by Marc James Léger.

Marc James Léger