Lineages of the Party, Bensaid Over the last two years, we have all become familiar with the mainstream media response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the indignados, to the printemps érable, to the demonstrations and uprisings that have sprung up around the world in social movements from Chile to Egypt to Québec, relentlessly brought up again and again like a mantra: “they lack concrete demands,” “what do they really want?,” “they have no program,” “they have no organization,” and so forth. This response has been based on a set of conceptions of the relation between social movements and organization, between uprisings and the concept of “program,” between “demands” and slogans. The more difficult problem, which generally this mainstream media response has been incapable of confronting, is the possibility that politics itself can never be simply encompassed within this framework, that “organization” is a much more complex question than merely the formation of a program, that even the seemingly obvious notion of “party” is itself an extremely heterogeneous concept with a long and complex theoretical history. Often, we assume that “the party” means an ideologically-centered form of organization, grouped around a program, a line, a set of arguments, political prescriptions, future policy positions, a specific leadership, and so forth. But we can also find in Marx and Engels’ work a quite different concept of this term “party.” In excavating a series of theoretical concerns related to this term, and with the help of certain political clues from the work of Alain Badiou, I would like to attempt to expand and investigate this alternate understanding of the party in Marx’s work in order to return our attention to the specificity of the organized politics implied by the critique of political economy, that is, I would like to attempt to draw out another possibility for thinking the relation between the theoretical inside of capital, a social relation that dominates the situation in which we live, and the historical outside of politics, the possibility of new subjective interventions into the supposedly smooth and closed circuit of capitalist society. It has become almost a statement of common sense in our historical moment to insist that the “party-form” has been exhausted, fully saturated by the crises and failures of twentieth-century revolutionary politics.3 But is this truly the case? What is at stake in thinking seriously the concept “party”? What do we even mean when we utilize this word? My essential thesis here is that we in fact have not exhausted this term, that the concept “party” remains capable of a variety of theoretical and political developments, that it is not the “party-form” as such that has been saturated by the grim experience of the long twentieth-century; rather what we face is a failure of our political imagination to truly rethink the possibilities of organization, the possibilities of the party-form today. I want to therefore think these possibilities around three separate instances of the party: the temporality of the party; the question of the party as a part, something partisan, an apparatus of division and scission; and finally, I want to think the paradox of the party – its consistency or persistence, as an apparatus of division that nevertheless must hold together. How can this peculiar form, which constitutes the body through which politics proceeds, be understood today, in our current moment?
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 18:00:00 +0000
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