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How Do Communists Party?Joseph G. RamseyPublished online: 16 Jul 2015.

To cite this article: Joseph G. Ramsey (2015) How Do Communists Party?,Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 27:3, 381-384, DOI:10.1080/08935696.2015.1042692

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How Do Communists Party?

Joseph G. Ramsey

This essay responds to the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. By shifting ever so slightly thedebate about “whether or not we need a communist party” to the question of whatsuch “communist partying” actually entails, it seeks to focus attention on thequestion of communist method, practice, and responsibility. What does it mean to“party” like a communist? What are the key tasks that a communist party needs totake up, and which of them can we—as individuals and as members of existingorganizations and networks—take up where we are now? How can we transform ourpraxis, our organizations, our audiences, and ourselves in advance of the formation ofa formal communist party?

Key Words: Communism, Jodi Dean, Organization, Party, Politics

Among the key figures in a resurging communist current, Jodi Dean stands out for theconsistency, accessibility, and force with which she has made the argument that, inorder to break out of the melancholic loser’s slump the Left has been in for the pastfew decades, we need to (re)create something like a new communist party.Dean’s (2015) argument for the party is pitched not so much as a defense of a

particular political form but as a defense of the necessity and possibility forcommunist revolution as such. Her call is a defense of thinking big, of organizing ona mass scale (especially in an era where mass culture and politics have becomefragmented and atomized), and of mobilizing people to consciously confront the rootcontradictions of the system—all against the idea of settling for what appears“realistic” within the current coordinates of twenty-first-century capitalism. We needto constitute a revolutionary subject, she insists; we need to overthrow the logic ofthe entire capitalist system, not (just) to construct resistant or alternative niches inits seething pores and margins. And so we need to develop a coherent strategy andcoordinated approach that is up to this task—locally, nationally, internationally. Weneed to construct a new Communist party!Pending the establishment of such a party, I want to propose that we find ways to

party like communists.It may be useful, I think, to shift our thinking so that party is understood not just or

not primarily as a noun (a thing) but as a kind of verb (a mode of being, acting, andorganizing). Not as simply a matter of affiliating with a particular structure or form oforganization but as a method of political praxis, a way of orienting theory andpractice across diverse locations and organizations in light of a common communist

© 2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

Rethinking Marxism, 2015Vol. 27, No. 3, 381–384, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042692

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horizon.1 Such a verbal shift (playfulness aside) has the immediate virtue offoregrounding not just the question of what communists or communist parties werebut what they did (both with success and with failure). Not just the question of whoor what we should form or join but what we should do and how we should do it. Whatare the tasks that need to be accomplished today, and how can we go aboutaccomplishing them? What would be the things that an effective mass communistparty would do (and that other parties have done, or failed to do, in the past)? Whatfeatures would distinguish party work?In short, how should communists party today, in (and beyond) the United States?Dean’s recent work has helped foreground some of these key party tasks, tasks

that, she argues, have been neglected by most of the contemporary Left (including,alas, the Occupy movement, despite its great promise). Among these necessary partytasks are the following: Demonstrating to the masses the fundamental inability ofcapitalism to meet the needs of the common people. Providing long-term vision andstrategic direction to activists to counter the pull of “capitalist realism.” Encouragingand enforcing discipline and accountability while (on that basis) building trust amongcomrades (and between comrades and the people). Organizing in ways that canendure and that can scale as well as coordinate beyond the spontaneous and thelocal. Creating accessible structures that give the newly activated or curious a way toplug in and get involved. Collectively summing up political experiences andexperiments: immediate and historical, local and distant and making those summa-tions widely available. Institutionalizing political memory so that lessons can bepassed on from place to place, struggle to struggle, generation to generation.Cultivating the desire for communism—that is, for a new order of being and not onlya reformist improvement in present-day particular interests (pressing as these oftenare). Countering isolation, individualism, sectarianism, and the entrepreneurial“small-business mentality” that divides and demoralizes the Left. Building networksof solidarity for the defense of those in the crosshairs of capitalist assault. Giving ourdisparate struggles a name in common so that essential points don’t get lost in thecloud of competing codes and enemy propaganda.Who could deny the necessity of these tasks without giving up on radical egalitarian

social transformation altogether?But a question I would like to ask here is this: Can’t we in some ways begin taking

up these party-like tasks now, where we are, even prior to inaugurating or announcing(or waiting for someone else to found) some new formal organization? Aren’tthere tasks that we can integrate into our current praxis where we now stand?

1. I would distinguish this notion of communist partying from Stephen Healy’s (2015) notion of“communism as a mode of life.” The chief difference would be that the praxis I envision is to beunderstood as politically and overtly antagonistic to capital, whereas Healy’s appears to beprimarily economic and alternative. Of course, a key question would now be: What is therelationship between the antagonistic and the alternative to it? Between the movement thatabolishes the current state of things and the enclave that incorporates or encourages modes oflife that differ from the dominant one? One of the goals of such communist partying could andperhaps should be to work out in concrete praxis the correct way of relating these two poles ofactivity: zones that, while different, need not necessarily be conceived as opposed and may incertain contexts be brought into mutually enriching alliance.

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Can’t we begin to party like communists even before joining (or being invited to join)an official communist party (with formal leadership, a platform, a strategicplan, etc.)?Another virtue of the verbal shift to communist partying is to hold a mirror to those

who call themselves communists (or revolutionary leftists) and to prod us to askourselves and one another, honestly and concretely: where and with whom do we“party”?Here I am uniting with Dean when she pointedly asked Stephen Healy, the RM

audience, and academic radicals more generally, “Whom is the [theoretical] work [wedo] for?” In a way, her call for the formation of a party is a call for transcending (if notexploding altogether) the cloistered and isolated nodules of existing left academicand activist “communities” and for finding ways, in theory and in practice, to engagethose who live beyond the bubbles of conferences and seminar rooms, suffering if notdrowning in the seething seas of this society. What are we doing, concretely, to makesure that our ideas connect (or at least have a chance of connecting) with thestruggling masses of this planet—to connect not only through how we speak but howwe listen and respond? What are we doing to assure that emancipatory ideas are (orat least have a chance of) being taken up, tested, and transformed by actual massesof people and that we in turn are responding critically and collectively to the lessonsof this praxis? Dean reminds us, as communist intellectuals, of our responsibility notjust to “get it right” theoretically but to connect with the people, to help the peopleget it right practically, and to have the people help us get it right theoretically.Without this, politically speaking, little else that we do matters. Even the most astuteMarxist analysis or humane communist ethos will not become a material force ofhistory unless and until it is given a form that can be taken up by the people as theirown tool and their own weapon.In closing, I want to also sharpen a point Dean makes regarding what communist

praxis should consist of today. Dean describes the essence of communist activity as“the expansion of voluntary cooperation” (to be understood as different from theforced cooperation of working-class subjects compelled by the domination ofcapital).2 But what I would like to restore here is precisely Dean’s emphasis onaudience and on the need to stretch or even burst the bounds of existing left self-segregation and isolation. For lack of space here, let me simply rewrite herdefinition/directive as follows: Communist praxis consists of the strategic expansionof voluntary cooperation that abolishes the present division of labor, (creating a newand emancipatory division of labor) with an eye on the communist horizon.3

2. Dean’s key point here—one that (re)connects with Badiou’s Theory of the Subject—is toemphasize the difference between organizing “working-class interests” within the field ofcapital and rupturing this field altogether, organizing workers and the otherwise oppressed notaccording to particular interests but as the harbinger of a radically new society, creating a newfield of desire and possibility, a communist horizon. It is an important point, albeit one I don’thave space to address here.3. In his recent book, The Rebirth of History, Badiou (2012) refers to this incipiently communistshaking off of the division of labor—in the crucible of a “riot,” which may or may not become asubject-anchoring Event proper—as the “lightning displacement” of people from their usualplaces within the existing order. I would add here that one of the things that was so exciting and

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To emphasize the key aspect, we must find ways to meet the masses where theyare at and to entice them to meet us where we are at. We must extend a partyinvitation to the people. We must get outside our comfort zones, break through ourconference and seminar walls, and subvert the leftist subcultures that guarantee ourcontinued (self-)marginalization and irrelevance. We must transform not only thepeople but also ourselves, abolishing the division of labor inherited from capitalismwhile constructing a new division of labor that is oriented toward the horizon ofcommunism. “The educators must be educated!” Or to rephrase it dialectically, thereare great teachers everywhere; we had best be doing all we can to learn from them.

References

Badiou, A. 2012. The rebirth of history: Times of riots and uprisings. London: Verso.Dean, J. 2015. The party and communist solidarity. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3):

332–42.Healy, S. 2015. Communism as a mode of life. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 343–56.

promising (as well as practically empowering) about Occupy itself was just this displacement:the way that, for a time, people from very different backgrounds, locales, job descriptions, andeconomic status, with different experiences, social networks, and skill sets, were able to cometogether at the level of practice, place, and basic ideas (the 99 percent versus the 1 percent), atleast for an extended moment.

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