Whose lessons? Which direction?

[Pictured: Poster, 1962, by Nina Vatolina. The text reads: 'Peace, Labor, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, Happiness.']

By Jodi Dean

Republished from Liberation School.

As obituaries for neoliberalism pile up on our nightstands and Antonio Gramsci’s adage that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears newly profound, we turn to the past for direction. What successes should guide us? What can we learn from our failures? If we are to advance politically in the twenty-first century, we need to learn the correct lessons from the twentieth. But what are they?

For some on the left, the problems we face today are as they have ever been failures of organization and collective commitment. A disciplined and organized working class could do more than compel concessions from capital; it could transform society. What’s needed is the revolutionary party. Others on the left blame labor’s political weakness on refusals to compromise. Militant organizations aren’t solutions. They’re errors. Only when unions and left parties accept capitalist social property relations do workers earn their seat at the table and engage in the bargaining that increases their share. Communist parties hinder such acceptance.

Forty years of neoliberalism reveals the bankruptcy of the latter perspective. Capital makes concessions only when it has no other choice. Ruling classes across the Global North have dismantled public sectors and decimated middle classes rather than provide the tax support necessary for maintaining social democracy. They’ve rolled back hard-won political and social gains, treating basic democratic rights as threats to their power. While strong tendencies on the right recognize radicalization as necessary for politics in a period of uncertainty and double down on their various illiberalisms, opponents of revolution insist that the lesson of the twentieth century is the necessity of compromise. Presuming there’s no alternative to capitalism, left Thatcherites declare that progress depends on leaving behind our communist baggage.

One instance of this perspective is Jonah Birch’s “The Cold War Made it Harder for the Left to Win” [1]. Criticizing Gary Gerstle’s argument in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Birch rejects Gerstle’s claim that it was the communist threat that made significant reform possible in the twentieth century [2]. With homogeneous Sweden as his example of social democratic success, Birch asserts that conditions were worse for labor in countries with large communist parties. He concedes that the socio-economic context that led to economic growth after World War II is unlikely to reappear. Nevertheless, Birch advises the left to accept the lesson that communists hurt the working class.

The struggle against white supremacy and fascism is class struggle

Birch’s deeply conservative message moves to the right of mainstream liberal recognition of the impact of the court of world opinion during the Cold War. It is widely accepted that competition with the Soviet Union for hearts and minds pushed the U.S. to take steps toward the abolition of Jim Crow apartheid and institutionalized white supremacy. The denial of voting rights and violent repression of activists damaged the country’s reputation as democracy’s global defender. As soon as one acknowledges the multiracial and multinational character of the working class, one realizes how the Swedish fantasy operates (even in Sweden, as Tobias Hϋbinette demonstrates in a recent piece in the Boston Review) to make a small subset of struggles—the wage struggles of white workers—stand in for the broad array of struggles of the diverse multinational working class [3].

In the U.S., for example, communist involvement in the fight against lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow was more than a propaganda point in the Cold War’s great power conflict. From its early years, the Communist Party recognized that workers would only prevail if they were united. So long as Black workers were paid lower wages than white workers and so long as Black workers excluded from unions were available as strikebreakers, the position of all workers was insecure. The struggle against white supremacy was thus central to building the collective power to win the class struggle. This analysis of the national composition of the working class under conditions of white supremacy and racism committed communists to deepening engagement in “Negro work” in multiple arenas. These arenas included organizing agricultural and domestic workers, taking on legal campaigns on behalf of the falsely accused, and drawing out the connections between the conditions facing Black people in the U.S. and oppressed and colonized people all over the world. Even more broadly, the Party demonstrated how anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements for peace were indispensable to class struggle insofar as they all took aim at U.S. monopoly capital [4].

Communists were at the forefront of the struggle against fascism and its doctrine of Aryan superiority. Birch treats the French and Italian Communist Parties as divisive organizations. He blames them for splitting the labor movement in their respective countries, thereby marginalizing the left and isolating the working class. On the one hand, Birch’s charges are belied by his own evidence: in both countries the communists regularly won around twenty percent of the national vote in elections, hardly an indication of marginalization and isolation. Multiple localities and municipalities had communist leaders. On the other hand, Birch’s myopic focus on the expansion of social programs as the single measure of political success leads him to neglect central communist contributions. The partisans who gave their lives in the war against European fascisms, the thousands who carried out a heroic resistance in occupied countries, are erased from view. Surely their achievements are as noteworthy as the collective bargaining institutions, and generous social services that preoccupy Birch. And since Birch concedes that the economic conditions that prevailed in the post-war heyday of social democracy are unlikely to appear again, what is the political cost today of failing to acknowledge and learn from the courage of communist resistance?

Internationalism as the ground of struggle

The significance of the communist contribution continues to expand as we zoom out from a narrow focus on Europe. No one can deny the role of communist-led national liberation movements in the colonized world. In virtually every liberation struggle Marxist-Leninists played an indispensable part. Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and China are not insignificant data points just because they are not from Europe.

For decades critics of colonialism and neocolonialism have pointed out that the capitalist class has been able to secure the political passivity or even support of a large layer of the working class in the imperialist core through benefits accrued from the global exploitation of Black and brown people. These critics continue a line of argument already prominent in Lenin’s analysis of the enormous super-profits generated by imperialism. That capital is international and the struggle against it must be as well is a lesson from communists in the twentieth century that remains indispensable in the twenty-first. Workers couldn’t afford nationalist myopia then and surely cannot in today’s setting of global supply chains, mass migration, and climate change.

In the U.S., Black women in and around the Communist Party in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated the practical implications of internationalism in their organizing. As early as 1928, Williana Burroughs emphasized concrete tasks related to engaging foreign-born Black workers in the U.S. (West Indies, South America, Cape Verde Islands, Africa) and using anti-imperialism as a point of connection (“Thousands of Negroes from Haiti, Cuba, British possessions, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have felt the iron heel of British or American Imperialism”) [5].

The Party took the view that Black workers in the U.S. were an oppressed national minority with a right to self-determination. While controversial within and without the Party, this line constituted a fundamental ground for unifying Black and white workers because it recognized the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. Organizing Black workers meant organizing Black women because most Black women worked for wages to support their families. Organizing Black women meant organizing immigrants and farm workers and attending to the housing, education, and neighborhood conditions impacting workers’ lives. Organizing immigrants and farm workers meant building an understanding of the patterns of oppression and resistance facing all workers. Internationalism was more than an expression of solidarity. It was a principle with repercussions for domestic organizing.

Claudia Jones’s famous International Women’s Day speech from 1950 described the global peace movement and signature campaign against the A-bomb, Marshall Plan, and Atlantic war pact. Jones noted women’s organizations’ opposition to NATO, “which spells misery for the masses of American women and their families.” She advocated rousing the internationalism of American women in protest against “Wall Street’s puppets in Marshalized Italy, in fascist Greece and Spain.” And she linked the Justice Department’s attack on the Congress of American Women as “foreign agents” with the group’s long-standing advocacy of women’s equal rights, Negro-white unity, and child welfare and education [6].

The resolute internationalism of communists in the twentieth century was indispensable to confronting imperialism and colonialism. We build the power of the working class by emphasizing the patterns of oppression and resistance, linking struggles, and targeting capitalism as the system to be defeated.

Anti-communism is the enemy

Over the last decades of neoliberalism, the right has advanced. In the U.S., UK, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere, conservative parties use nationalism to reach out to those left behind by globalization. When socialists take as their measure of success the wages of an outmoded, masculinist, and Eurocentric image of the working class, they undermine their capacity to build mass unity, strengthening the hand of the right. Insistence on the multinational composition of the labor force of all the so-called developed countries gives the lie to nationalist and isolationist fantasies as well as to the patriarchal conceptions of the family that support them.

A component of right-wing advance has been its relentless assault on communism. Thirty years after the defeat of the Soviet Union, conservatives attack even the most common sense of public measures as communist plots. More subtle but no less reactionary are the epistemological dimensions of anti-communism, what Charisse Burden-Stelly theorizes as intellectual McCarthyism [7]. Anti-communism persists today in the suppression of knowledge of the continuities between anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles. Instead of the site where those struggles were unified, communism is treated as a dangerous and alien ideology. Its role in the fight against white supremacy domestically and internationally is buried.

For anti-communists disorder is foreign—the refugee, the immigrant, the Black, the Muslim, the Jew. Anti-communists disavow the capitalist disorder of competition, markets, innovation, dispossession, foreclosure, debt, and imperialist war. Dramatic changes in the character of work, communities, and life that accompany disruptive and ubiquitous technology; urbanization and rural depopulation; shifts from industry and manufacture to services and servitude; the intensification of competition for decreasing numbers of affordable houses and adequately compensated jobs—these all congeal into a disorder to be dealt with by the assertion of police, family, church, and race. Anti-communism remains the lynchpin of this assertion.

The fear that anti-communism mobilizes is a fear of loss, a fear that what you have will be taken from you, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “theft of enjoyment” [8]. Marx and Engels call out this mobilization of fear in The Communist Manifesto when they address charges that communists want to take people’s property. They write, “in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths” [9]. The anti-communist mobilization of fear conceals the absence of property, wealth, job security, success, sovereignty, and freedom. It posits that we have them by positioning them as stolen. Communism is what prevents you from being rich, widely admired, having lots of sex, and so on. The “theft of enjoyment” fantasy obscures the fact that under capitalism a handful of billionaires have more wealth than half the planet. By positing communism as a source of deprivation, as an ideology based on taking something away, anti-communism conceals that we don’t have what is ostensibly being stolen.

Anti-communism is not confined to the political right. It often seeps into progressive and self-described socialist circles. Left anti-communists proceed as if communism were the barrier to workers’ success, as if we would all live in a Swedish social democratic paradise but for those damned communists. Not only does this deny the multiracial and international reality of the working class, but it conceals broader left political division and weakness. Virtually nowhere does the left face the choice of reform or revolution. Virtually nowhere is the left in a position where class compromise is on the table. Anti-communism obscures this basic fact.

Communism is that modern political ideology always and everywhere on the side of the oppressed. When labor begins to appear strong, when those who have been racially, sexually, ethnically, and colonially oppressed become more visible, more organized, and more militant, anti-communism intervenes to set up barriers. On the left as well as the right, anti-communism attempts to structure the political field by establishing the terrain of possibility: which political paths are available, which are unthinkable. Even in settings where communism is dismissed as itself impossible, anti-communism mobilizes social forces to oppose it. This fight against the impossible is an ideological signal: the discussion isn’t aimed toward seriously evaluating lessons and goals. It’s about shoring up the status quo, disciplining working-class imagination by preemptive arrest of any challengers to capitalist social property relations.

The political and economic situation that prevails today differs significantly from the postwar era. The U.S. has lost both its preeminent economic status and the moral position it assumed following the end of WWII (a position always fragile and contested given the U.S.’s use of atomic weapons, backing of dictatorships, imperialist and neocolonial foreign policy, and domestic police state). Unions have lost their prior bargaining power and workers their hard-won rights and benefits. Today the issue is building organizations and movements with power sufficient to compel the socialist reconstruction of the economy in the context of a rapidly changing climate. This fight is multinational and international or it is lost.

References

[1] Jonah Birch, “The Cold War May It Harder for the Left to Win Social Democratic Reforms,”Jacobin, 15 November 2022. Availablehere.
[2] Gary Gerstle,The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order(Oxford University Press, 2022).
[3] Tobias Hϋbinette, “Race and Sweden’s Fascist Turn,”Boston Review, 19 October 2022. Availablehere.
[4] See the contributions toOrganize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, ed. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean (London: Verso, 2022).
[5] Williana Burroughs, “Negro Work Has Not Been Entirely Successful,”  inOrganize, Fight, Win,21-25.
[6] Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” inOrganize, Fight, Win,181-197.
[7] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “OnBankers and Empire: Racial Capitalism, Antiblackness, and Antiradicalism,”Small Axe24, no. 2 (2020): 175-186.
[8] Slavoj Žižek,Tarrying With the Negative(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 200-237.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1988/1967), 237.

The Actuality of Revolution

By Jodi Dean

This essay originally appeared at Liberation School .

Revolution today names more a problem than it does a solution. We know that revolutions happen, but we have a hard time believing in revolution. We have a hard time believing in revolution because we are no longer confident that the revolutionary process leads in an emancipatory egalitarian direction. There are revolutions, but they are not for us, not the revolutions we were hoping for, not proletarian revolutions.

We no longer believe in revolution because we no longer adopt the perspective from which we see ourselves as revolutionaries, the perspective of the communist party. Absent this political perspective, only capitalism with its permanent crises, innovations and transformations appears as capable of effecting revolutionary change. Fortunately, the crowds and demonstrations of the last decade suggest that a new party perspective may be emerging. The collective practices and intensities exhibited in current struggles, as well as the limits against which these struggles falter, are renewing the salience of the party question on the Left. As people experience their collective power, the desire for something like a party is reemerging, a party as the organized site of our belief in revolution.

In this essay I focus on two, seemingly opposed, approaches to organization and revolution. I begin with Georg Lukacs's account of the Leninist innovation: the realization that the core of historical materialism is the actuality of the proletarian revolution. The force of this innovation comes from anticipation, the capacity of the future revolution to coordinate the actions that will bring it about. I then turn to the present and the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The problem with their account is that it precludes the temporality - or conception or logic of time - that would produce revolutionary practice. Revolution is present as potential, a possibility that flows out of what we are already doing. There is no revolutionary break, no negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials in the forwarding of emancipatory egalitarian aims. Theirs is thus a "revolution without revolution." In contrast, the future projected in Lenin's assumption of the actuality of revolution coordinates political action to bring revolution into being. The party anticipates the revolution, materializing the belief that makes revolution possible not just as an outflow or overflow of present possibilities, but as an effect of the negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials and the forcing of others.

My argument relies on Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion of "projected time." Dupuy introduces "projected time" as a name for "coordination by means of the future," that is, as a term for a temporal metaphysics wherein "the future counterfactually determines the past, which in turn causally determines it. The future is fixed, but its necessity exists only in retrospect"(1). From the perspective of the future, what led to it was necessary. It could not have been otherwise because everything that happened led to it. Before an event occurs, there are possibilities, options. After something happens, it appears inevitable, destined. Projected time assumes a future inevitability, establishing this inevitability as the fixed point from which to decide upon present actions.

Projected time might seem strange. Dupuy explains that it is actually "the temporality peculiar to someone who carries out a plan that he has given to himself to carry out"(2). Planning makes clear how projected time is not a prediction of what will happen, a fantasy about what one wants to happen, or a set of proposals regarding what should happen (3). Instead, a certain outcome generates the processes that lead to it. Again, in this temporal metaphysics, the future is not the inevitable effect of a chain of causes. The future is itself the cause. The future produces the past that will give rise to it.

Dupuy developed the metaphysics of projected time in the context of an investigation of catastrophe. People have a hard time believing in imminent disaster, even in the face of abundant information that the worst is about to happen. Dupuy concluded that the obstacle preventing people from acting is not one of knowledge but one of belief. They know what will happen, nevertheless they do not believe that it will happen. Projected time addresses this level of belief. Dupuy wagers that since it is "more difficult to reject a fate than to avoid a calamity, the threat of catastrophe becomes far more credible if it appears to be something that is inevitable"(4). That very inevitability can mobilize the determination and imagination necessary for avoiding the inevitable.

A view from the future

Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought is Lukacs' account of the enormity of Lenin's theoretical contribution: Lenin realized Marxist theory in practice. Because he grasps "the actuality of the revolution," Lenin can explain the events around him in its terms. He posits a certain future - the revolution - and lets this future guide action in the present. Lenin thus identifies the mechanism through which organization mediates between theory and practice. The projected future of revolution generates the practices that materialize the belief necessary for its realization.

Projected time tells us how to read Lukacs's claim that "the proletarian revolution constitutes the living core of Marxism" (5). The revolutionary future determines the actions that bring it about. Historical materialism is not primarily an account of the past. It is a relation to a specific future, one where "revolution is already on its agenda" (6). A distant future lacks coordinating capacity. Lenin, however, made the actuality of revolution into the point from which actions are considered. This certain future enables choices and decisions. It cuts through the manifold conflicts of groups and individuals within the masses, as well as the economic fatalism that contributes to capitalism's own response to crises.

The actuality of revolution is the presupposition on which Lenin's concept of the party rests. The projected future of proletarian revolution causes the Bolsheviks to select "single-minded revolutionaries, prepared to make any sacrifice, from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole." The party does not make the revolution. Nor does it try to pull along inactive masses and present them with a fait accompli. Instead, it anticipates the revolution. Given that the period is revolutionary, that the proletarian revolution is on the agenda, what form of organization follows? Lenin's answer is the "strictest selection of party members on the basis of their proletarian class-consciousness, and total solidarity with and support for all the oppressed and exploited within capitalist society" (7). Why? Because of the way the proletariat develops its own class-consciousness and becomes able to put it to use in the context of revolutionary upheaval.

In the course of its revolutionary movement, the proletariat encounters differences within and without it. The internal differences involve economic differentiation within the proletariat (e.g., the infamous "labor aristocracy"). The external differences refer to the other classes that are part of the revolutionary alliance. Differences within the proletariat hinder class unity. Some workers, perhaps those with more education or experience in union leadership, tend to see their interests as allied with the bourgeoisie. Differences between the proletariat and other social strata create confusion, particularly as crises intensify and the revolutionary period gets nearer. The multiplicity of interests within the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed pulls them in different directions. Not every potential present in the masses forwards the revolution. Figuring out the correct path, and keeping together the alliance through which all can win, becomes increasingly difficult.

Lenin's model of the party responds to the pull of these differences by providing an independent organizational space for the "fully conscious elements of the proletariat." Lukacs writes, "It is this that demonstrates that the Leninist form of organization is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution " (8). In the party, even the most seemingly trivial decision becomes significant, that is, made in light of the projected future of proletarian revolution. A party decision cuts through myriad possibilities, directing action in one way rather than another.

Lukacs's account makes clear that even as this view of the future provides the party with its organizational form, it is the party that sustains the view. He addresses the debate between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Kautsky argues that the party is the precondition of revolutionary action. Luxemburg argues that it is the product of revolutionary mass movement. Lukacs finds each view one-sided: "Because it is the party's function to prepare the revolution, it is - simultaneously and equally - both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement" (9). The party's role as producer is itself a product of the projected future of proletarian revolution. The party is a product not only of events as they unfold and to which it responds but also of the future that calls it into being, the future that enables it to guides its responses toward it.

Crucial to Lukacs's argument is the party's combination of flexibility and consistency. The party has to learn from the struggles of the masses, adjusting its interpretations and practices as necessary. Responses to the present in light of the projected future are inscribed into party structure and theory. Learning from the struggles of the people is possible because of the party's anticipation of the revolution. The party thereby unites the discoveries that arise from the mass struggle with the actuality of the revolution. Belief in revolution arises out of the combination of theory and action: actions appear as revolutionary because the future revolution is calling them into being.

In sum, Lukacs presents the actuality of revolution as a projected future. Every decision, every tactic, every compromise anticipates the revolution. To the extent that party practices are coordinated by the future, they both manifest belief in it - as opposed to the more abstract knowledge of revolution posited by social democrats - and help bring it about. Lukacs insists that the actuality of revolution distinguishes Lenin's position from both social democrats and left-wing purists. From the perspective of the former, the revolution is always too far off, the proletariat never mature enough, the unions still too weak. From the perspective of the latter, the ripeness of the moment dictates a pure politics, a radical insistence on principles without compromise. Unlike either, the actuality of revolution involves the political time of anticipation and struggle, a time when the future guides the party prepared to usher it in.

Revolution today

In the final volume of their influential trilogy, Hardt and Negri announce: "Revolution is now, finally, becoming the order of the day" (10). Their theory of revolution arises out of an account of the biopolitical character of capitalism in the late twentieth century. Networked communications have transformed the process of production, contributing to its homogenization, decentralization/deterritorialization, and informatization. Knowledge, affect, and communication play a greater role; labor has become "increasingly immaterial" (11). The result is a fundamental change in the relation between production and the reproduction of life: rather than separate from and subordinated to the demands of productive work, "life infuses and dominates all production" (12). With its biopolitical turn, capitalism subsumes the entirety of the social.

On the basis of their analysis of changes in production, Hardt and Negri claim that today "the perspective of revolutionary action has to be conceived on the biopolitical horizon" (13). Such a revolution is a "revolution in life," that is, a revolution that exceeds the range of demands and expectations associated with the labor movement.

Biopolitical revolution has a distinct temporality. In contrast to the projected future provided by the actuality of revolution, revolution today "is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the future but has to live in the present, an "exceeding" present that in some sense already contains the future within it" (14). Instead of a future with the capacity to coordinate action in the present, revolution coexists with and within non-revolution. Unable to imagine a future revolution, we cannot use its actuality to decide our tactics. As a distinct component of political action, tactics falls by the wayside, displaced by potentials within biopolitical production.

Hardt and Negri imagine revolution as an analogous "kind of simultaneity," the excess and limit to capitalist command over the biopolitical production it can never fully capture or control. Biopolitical labor is generally autonomous from capitalist command, emerging out of networked cooperative practices. Capital seeks to capture, expropriate, and discipline these practices, even as it itself depends on the creativity that their autonomy unleashes. Bypassing commodification, capital extracts value directly from social relations themselves.

Hardt and Negri highlight the democratic dimension of biopolitical labor: the same networked, cooperative structures that produce the common generate new democratic capacities, and even "make possible in the political sphere the development of democratic organizations" (15). For this reason, Hardt and Negri reject "vanguard organizations." The vanguard party corresponds to a different, earlier, structure of labor (a different technical composition of the proletariat). According to their periodization, the vanguard party fits with the early twentieth century's professional factory workers. The deskilled workers of the mid-twentieth century fit with that period's mass party. The political form appropriate to biopolitical labor, the one appropriate to us now, they argue, must be democratic, cooperative, autonomous and horizontally networked. The vanguard party is inadequate, "anachronistic," because it doesn't look like the networks of contemporary biopolitical production.

This argument is not convincing. Complex networks are not the horizontal, cooperative and autonomous forms that Hardt and Negri imagine. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's work on complex networks demonstrates, free choice, growth and preferential attachment produce hierarchies, dramatic differences between the one that is most chosen and preferred and the many that are not (16). The most popular node or item in a complex network generally has twice as many links as the second most popular, which has more than the third most popular and so, such that there is very little difference among the crowd of those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. This hierarchical structure is pervasive in communicative capitalism. Blockbuster movies, best-selling books, and giant internet hubs like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Baidu all reflect the power law distribution of links in complex networks. The few get a lot; the rest get very little, almost nothing. The idea appears in popular media as the "80/20 rule," the "winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the economy," and the "long tail" of the many. The ostensibly creative, cooperative and democratic character of networked communication does not eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us. And, as Barabasi's work on complex networks makes clear, this hierarchy is not imposed from above. It is an immanent effect of free choice, growth and preferential attachment.

A political form mirroring biopolitical production would not be horizontal and democratic. Its democracy would produce power-law distributions, unequal nodes or outcomes, winners and losers, few and many. We see this phenomenon on Twitter as people fight through trending hashtags: hashtags provide common names that serve as loci of struggle. When they trend, they rise above the long tail of the millions of unread, unloved Tweets coursing through the nets. The democratic element - people's choice to use and forward - produces the inequality that lets some hashtags appear as and even be, for a moment, significant. The fact of emergent hierarchies suggests that an emergent vanguard may well be the political form necessary for struggles under biopolitical conditions.

The structure of the complex networks of biopolitical production indicates that, contra Hardt and Negri, a vanguard party is not anachronistic at all. It is instead a form that corresponds to the dynamics of networked communication. This structure indicates an additional problem with Hardt and Negri's rejection of the vanguard party. They characterize Lenin's party as involving an organizational process that comes from "above" the movements of the multitude. Historically, this insinuation is clearly false. The Bolsheviks were but one group among multiple parties, tendencies and factions acting in the tumultuous context of the Russian Revolution. They were active within the movements of the oppressed workers and peasants. The movements themselves, through victories and defeats, short- and long-term alliances, new forms of cooperation, and advances in political organization gave rise to the party even as the party furthered the movements.

Finally, Hardt and Negri criticize Lenin's party on the grounds of identity. For them, the party is a "new identity," and they think that revolution today must aim at the abolition of identity (17). Lenin's party is not an identity; it is a process whereby the distinctions of what Hardt and Negri associate with identity are smoothed out and a collective revolutionary will is generated (18). The party functions through the installation and maintenance of a gap within the field in which identity is given, not as a new identity.

For Hardt and Negri, the goal of revolution is "the generation of new forms of social life" (19). They describe revolutionary struggles as a process of liberation that establishes a common. Such a process, they argue, consolidates insurrection as it institutionalizes new collective habits and practices. Institutions, then, are sites for the management of encounters, extension of social rupture, and transformation of those who compose them.

The resemblance between these institutions and the vanguard party is striking. The party involves a common name, language, and set of tactics. It has practices that establish ways of being together. Its purpose is occupying and extending the gap within society that class struggle denotes. As Lukacs insists, Lenin's concept of party organization prioritizes flexibility and consistency; the party has and must have a capacity for self-transformation. What Hardt and Negri describe as the extension of insurrection in an institutional process is another way of theorizing the party.

Because they disavow the party, their version of democratic organization lacks a position that can anticipate the revolution and thereby materialize belief in its actuality. The future does not exercise coordinating capacity. Hardt and Negri emphasize that revolution is "squeezed in the vise between past and future, leaving it very little room for maneuver." They write, "even when revolutionaries think their actions are sufficient to launch us into the future, the past bursts through to reimpose itself." And they conclude, "Revolution's creation of a new form of government holds off the past and opens toward the future" (20). Rather than products of the revolution they produce, revolutionaries in Hardt and Negri's version remain at a distance from the future. Their actions seem disconnected from it, uninformed by it, and hence all the more under the sway of the past. Revolution opens to the future, but a projected future does not call into being the forces that will have produced it.

Lacking a vision of the future capable of orienting action, Hardt and Negri outline instead a platform of demands without a carrier, without a body to fight for them. Their model of institutions suggests that a party or parties could be such a carrier, but rather than presenting their platform as a party platform, Hardt and Negri present them as demands to be made to existing governments and institutions of global governance. The demands are for the provision of basic means of life, global citizenship and access to the commons. They acknowledge that "today's ruling powers unfortunately have no intention of granting even these basic demands" (21). Their response is laughter, "a laugh of creation and joy, anchored solidly in the present" (22). No wonder they do not present their demands as the platform of a party. The demands are not to be fought for. They mark potentials present already in the biopolitical production of the common, limits to capitalist control.

The identification of egalitarian potential in what generally seems a bleak and miserable present is laudable. Absent a party oriented toward its realization, though, it is hard to believe that this potential is stronger than, say, a neo-feudalism of globally connected fortress-cities surrounded by impoverished scavengers competing for access to a better life via networked gaming platforms and desperately defending their last bits of fresh water and arable land from refugees fleeing ever intensifying resource wars while the tiny class of global billionaires eat caviar in gold-plated jets. No practices coordinated by means of the future materialize this belief. Precisely because our setting is one of exploitation, ownership, competition and struggle, our sense of the present has to be tied to the future that results from the realization of some potentials rather than others. The party is the form for this realization insofar as through it the future can produce the actions that will have brought it about.

Conclusion

Across the globe, crowds are rupturing the status quo, the actuality of their movement displacing the politics of identity. These mobilized crowds are forcing the Left to return again to questions of organization, endurance, and scale. Having come up against the limits of immediacy and horizontality, activists and organizers alike are thinking again about institutional forms like the party.

Hardt and Negri imply that the party form is outmoded. I have argued that not only do contemporary networks produce pow- er-law distributions of few and many but that emergent hierarchies - particularly when understood in terms of the vanguards and practices that already emerge out of political movement - point to the ways that party organizations emerge. Current examples of this tendency include the adoption of common tactics, names and symbols that bring together previously separate, disparate and even competing struggles. When local and issue politics are connected via a common name, successes in one area advance the struggle as a whole. Separate actions become themselves plus all the others. They instill enthusiasm and inspire imitation.

A global alliance of the radical Left, or, better, a new party of communists, can be knit together from the concentrated forces of already existing groups: militants skilled at direct action, artists adept with symbols and slogans, parties experienced at organizing, issue groups knowledgeable about specific areas of concern, mutual aid networks addressing basic needs. If this new party is to be an agent of revolutionary time, it will have to continue to foster and even amplify the common practices and tactics capable of materializing revolutionary belief. This fostering and amplification requires discipline, choices, conscious planning, and decisions regarding what to prioritize and how to allocate resources and energies. Precisely because of the multiplicity of the experiences of the oppressed, we need the party as the form through which we discipline ourselves, through which we produce the collective political will that will push revolutionary tendencies in an emancipatory egalitarian direction.

Many of us are convinced that capitalist crises have reached a decisive point. We know that the system is fragile, that it produces its own grave-diggers, and that it is held in place by a repressive international state structure. Yet we act as if we did not know this. The party provides a form that can let us believe what we know.

References

1 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Economy and the Future, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014, 110.
2 Dupuy, 116.
3 Projected future thus functions differently from the program put forth by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future,
London, Verso, 2015.
4 Dupuy, 129.
5 Luka�cs, 12.
6 Ibid. (italics in original)
7 Luka�cs, 30.
8 Luka�cs, 29.
9 Luka�cs, 32.
10 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 344.
11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, Empire 365.
12 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 365.
13 Commonwealth, 239.
14 Commonwealth, 242-243.
15 Commonwealth, 354.
16 See my discussion in Crowds and Party, London, Verso, 2016, 12-13.
17 Commonwealth, 334.
18 As Luka�cs writes in �Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,� �the Communist Party as the revolutionary form of consciousness of the proletariat is a process by nature,� 316, italics in original; and, �the party exists in order to hasten the process by which these distinctions are smoothed out,� 326�the distinctions Luka�cs is referring to are stratifications within the class.
19 Commonwealth, 354.
20 Commonwealth, 360.
21 Commonwealth, 382.
22 Commonwealth, 383.

This essay was originally published in our book, Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World , published on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Stand Against Torture: Political Scientists Refuse to Legitimate Torture

By Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean

Since 2004, we have known that that the United States Government has been responsible for torture. We have known that the legal memoranda written by Berkeley law professor John Yoo during his tenure in the US Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel provided the legal arguments that enabled torture to become a matter of United States policy in the "global war on terror." (GWOT). Many have been shocked, outraged, or ashamed that the United States has banished itself from the most fundamental norm of the post-World War II international order and, some would argue, American constitutionalism and the rule of law itself. [1] Human rights organizations have struggled to discover how this system of torture has functioned, to remove victims from exposure to torture, and to hold key officials and private contractors (such as psychologists) responsible for their conduct. Despite support for these efforts, the success of organizations like Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International (AI), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has only been limited. Both the Bush and Obama administrations frustrated and blocked their work. Others have moved on, out of cynicism, exhaustion, or preoccupation with other horrors. Nevertheless, the necessity of confronting and rejecting the US's institutionalized torture regime remains. We cannot and must not be a country that tortures.

Upon hearing that John Yoo was scheduled to appear at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), held August 31 - September 3, 2017, a number of Political Scientists organized a response. The theme of the annual meeting was "The Quest for Legitimacy: Actors, Audiences and Aspirations." The goal of the organizers was to ensure that the APSA did not legitimate torture by providing institutional cover for Yoo. Our response included protests at the two panels on which Yoo was speaking, both organized by the Claremont Institute, an affiliated group that participates in the annual meeting. When Yoo got up to speak, we stood and turned our backs on him. We held signs, "Stand Up Against Torture." We remained silently standing until the end of the panels. Our response to Yoo's participation in our annual meeting also included getting measures passed at the APSA business meeting that would instruct and enable the ethics committee to bring the association's concern with abuses caused or experienced by political scientists together with its stated commitment to human rights.

In an article posted on the blog of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, Samantha Hill and Roger Berkowitz express "unease" about the APSA Yoo protests. Hill and Berkowitz seem to know that torture occurred. They recognize that Yoo's memos legally enabled the construction of a torture regime. They excerpt at length Corey Robin's summary of the public record. Yoo was not offering the idle speculations of an academic, Robin reminds us, he was issuing legal memoranda whose interpretations of law were binding on the executive branch unless overturned by the Attorney General himself. Yoo was bureaucratically central to the GWOT. According to Jane Mayer's sources, "it's incredible, but John Yoo and David Addington [legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney] were running the war on terror almost on their own." [2] Nevertheless, Hill and Berkowitz oppose those Political Scientists who stood in silent protest when Yoo rose to speak.

Hill and Berkowitz echo some of Yoo's supporters, arguing that he should be allowed to speak at APSA because he has not been convicted of the crime of torture. This objection goes to the heart of the problem of uncheckable executive power that Yoo enabled and the key point of the protest. No one can face criminal charges unless the executive branch prosecutes those who violate the law. Obviously, the Bush administration was committed to evading, rather than enforcing, US law criminalizing torture. Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald has reported , the Obama administration actively avoided prosecuting, or otherwise holding accountable, those responsible for the practice of torture. That the state failed to act, however, does not absolve its citizens for inaction. Citizens, too, can and must take action to prevent the normalization of torture. Hill and Berkowitz are disingenuous when they argue APSA should provide Yoo with a platform until he is convicted of war crimes. They can appear to oppose torture, without having to take a stand against torture, as they wait for Yoo's prosecution.

Hill and Berkowitz miss the point of the protest. Surely Hill and Berkowitz are familiar enough with the basics of law to know the difference between a profession's code of ethical conduct and the state's criminal law. The APSA protest was targeted less at Yoo than it was at APSA. Political scientists were insisting the ethical guidelines of our profession do not permit enabling torture. The American Psychological Association (APA) has amended its code of ethics to make this clear (if it wasn't before). The APSA protest announced that it is time for APSA to catch up to the APA. Hill and Berkowitz are playing a shell game by seeking to fool their readers insofar as they criticize the APSA protest because Yoo has not yet been found criminally liable.

Hill and Berkowitz may miss the point of protest period. They say that democracy requires the work of persuasion. Yet they appear not to grasp that protests are tools of persuasion. At APSA, the protests were accompanied by discussions at Council and business meetings about changing APSA policies. Throughout the meeting, not to mention on social media before and after the meeting, there were numerous discussions regarding the appropriateness of having an architect of the US torture regime speak at APSA. The protests were central to the debate over the professional ethics of political scientists.

Hill and Berkowitz are at their worst when they offer a comparison between Yoo and Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who enabled horror at a mass scale. Any torture regime requires a bureaucracy. Eichmann and Yoo are the kind of bureaucrats who transform the worst of what is humanly imaginable into a mundane institutional practice. For Hill and Berkowitz, Eichmann is unlike Yoo and was rightly punished because he "set in motion the mass murder of innocents because of their religion." In contrast, Yoo "legally rationalized the torture of a small number of terrorists who may or may not have had information that might lead to the saving of thousands of American lives." Eichmann is evil because people were killed on account of their religion - because of their identity or imagined race. Yoo, they suggest, was rationalizing the torture of terrorists to discover information to save American lives. Hill and Berkowitz use religion, ethnicity, or an imagined race, to say nothing of nationalism, to rationalize torture.

Anyone familiar with Abu Ghraib - the key event in the discovery of the Bush torture regime - knows that 70-90 percent of those detained in that space dedicated to torture were ordinary civilians and not terrorists. [3] During the GWOT, 780 people were detained at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Only three of those ever convicted by military commission are currently detained there, and there are plans to prosecute only fourteen of all those held at that detention camp. Here we see the double standard deployed by Hill and Berkowitz. We must listen to Yoo and treat him as part of the community - knowing his legal work enabled torture - because he has not been convicted for participating in a torture regime. Yet such generosity does not extend to the overwhelming majority of those Muslims and Arabs who have been victims of the torture regime. They are all (potential) terrorists and their torture is, apparently, permissible.

The Hill and Berkowitz comparison of Yoo to Eichmann is striking for its repetition of the torturers' lie: the terrorist might have information. While Hill and Berkowitz spare us the "ticking time bomb" in this scenario, the torturer can never be certain whether the victim does have "information" before inflicting torture. Afterwards, one does well to doubt that the anguished confessions provided anything reliable. [4]

Hill and Berkowitz mischaracterize Yoo's legal work as "opinion," although it was meant to be "binding" on other executive branch bureaucrats in the torture regime. They treat Yoo as rationalizing torture whereas Eichmann set it in motion. This is a lie. As Mayer makes clear, US torture policy came from the lawyers in the Justice Department. Hill and Berkowitz say, "Yoo is the kind of person we need to argue with head on." A debate over torture's merits violates the fundamental ethical and legal injunction against torture. It concedes that torture might sometimes be permissible. Hill and Berkowitz are thus open to the possibility that torture was acceptable in the GWOT. The political scientists protesting Yoo refuse this possibility.

Hill and Berkowitz inoculate Yoo from accountability. They even draft Hannah Arendt into the service of their sorry endeavor, situating Yoo in an Arendtian "space of appearance" where words and actions are recognized. This misappropriation ignores Arendt's own verdict on Eichmann: he should be banished from the world. The APSA protests did not call for Yoo's banishment or execution. They called on APSA to refuse to legitimate the author of US torture policy by providing him with institutional cover. They called on political scientists to stand against torture.

Originally published at Public Seminar .

Paul A. Passavant is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

Jodi Dean is the Harter Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

Notes

[1] Jeremy Waldron, "Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House," Columbia Law Review 105 (October, 2005).

[2] Corey Robin, "When Political Scientists Legitimate Torturers," August 25, 2017 (Online: coreyrobin.com, accessed September 5, 2017), citing Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

[3] Mark Danner, "Torture and Truth," in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 3.

[4] Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 21.