Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

How Do Communists Party?

Joseph G. Ramsey
To cite this article: Joseph G. Ramsey (2015) How Do Communists Party?, Rethinking Marxism,
27:3, 381-384, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2015.1042692
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042692

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

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Date: 27 September 2015, At: 20:02

Rethinking Marxism, 2015

Vol. 27, No. 3, 381384, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042692

How Do Communists Party?

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Joseph G. Ramsey
This essay responds to the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the
2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. By shifting ever so slightly the
debate about whether or not we need a communist party to the question of what
such communist partying actually entails, it seeks to focus attention on the
question 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 to
take up, and which of them can weas individuals and as members of existing
organizations and networkstake up where we are now? How can we transform our
praxis, our organizations, our audiences, and ourselves in advance of the formation of
a 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 the
consistency, accessibility, and force with which she has made the argument that, in
order to break out of the melancholic losers slump the Left has been in for the past
few decades, we need to (re)create something like a new communist party.
Deans (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 for
communist revolution as such. Her call is a defense of thinking big, of organizing on
a mass scale (especially in an era where mass culture and politics have become
fragmented and atomized), and of mobilizing people to consciously confront the root
contradictions of the systemall against the idea of settling for what appears
realistic within the current coordinates of twenty-first-century capitalism. We need
to constitute a revolutionary subject, she insists; we need to overthrow the logic of
the entire capitalist system, not (just) to construct resistant or alternative niches in
its seething pores and margins. And so we need to develop a coherent strategy and
coordinated approach that is up to this tasklocally, nationally, internationally. We
need 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, and
organizing). Not as simply a matter of affiliating with a particular structure or form of
organization but as a method of political praxis, a way of orienting theory and
practice across diverse locations and organizations in light of a common communist
2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

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RAMSEY

horizon.1 Such a verbal shift (playfulness aside) has the immediate virtue of
foregrounding not just the question of what communists or communist parties were
but what they did (both with success and with failure). Not just the question of who
or what we should form or join but what we should do and how we should do it. What
are the tasks that need to be accomplished today, and how can we go about
accomplishing them? What would be the things that an effective mass communist
party would do (and that other parties have done, or failed to do, in the past)? What
features would distinguish party work?
In short, how should communists party today, in (and beyond) the United States?
Deans 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 party
tasks are the following: Demonstrating to the masses the fundamental inability of
capitalism to meet the needs of the common people. Providing long-term vision and
strategic direction to activists to counter the pull of capitalist realism. Encouraging
and enforcing discipline and accountability while (on that basis) building trust among
comrades (and between comrades and the people). Organizing in ways that can
endure and that can scale as well as coordinate beyond the spontaneous and the
local. Creating accessible structures that give the newly activated or curious a way to
plug in and get involved. Collectively summing up political experiences and
experiments: immediate and historical, local and distant and making those summations widely available. Institutionalizing political memory so that lessons can be
passed on from place to place, struggle to struggle, generation to generation.
Cultivating the desire for communismthat is, for a new order of being and not only
a reformist improvement in present-day particular interests (pressing as these often
are). Countering isolation, individualism, sectarianism, and the entrepreneurial
small-business mentality that divides and demoralizes the Left. Building networks
of solidarity for the defense of those in the crosshairs of capitalist assault. Giving our
disparate struggles a name in common so that essential points dont get lost in the
cloud 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: Cant 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? Arent
there tasks that we can integrate into our current praxis where we now stand?
1. I would distinguish this notion of communist partying from Stephen Healys (2015) notion of
communism as a mode of life. The chief difference would be that the praxis I envision is to be
understood as politically and overtly antagonistic to capital, whereas Healys appears to be
primarily economic and alternative. Of course, a key question would now be: What is the
relationship between the antagonistic and the alternative to it? Between the movement that
abolishes the current state of things and the enclave that incorporates or encourages modes of
life that differ from the dominant one? One of the goals of such communist partying could and
perhaps should be to work out in concrete praxis the correct way of relating these two poles of
activity: zones that, while different, need not necessarily be conceived as opposed and may in
certain contexts be brought into mutually enriching alliance.

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CRAFTING COMMUNISM

383

Cant we begin to party like communists even before joining (or being invited to join)
an official communist party (with formal leadership, a platform, a strategic
plan, 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 ask
ourselves 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 [we
do] for? In a way, her call for the formation of a party is a call for transcending (if not
exploding altogether) the cloistered and isolated nodules of existing left academic
and activist communities and for finding ways, in theory and in practice, to engage
those who live beyond the bubbles of conferences and seminar rooms, suffering if not
drowning in the seething seas of this society. What are we doing, concretely, to make
sure that our ideas connect (or at least have a chance of connecting) with the
struggling masses of this planetto connect not only through how we speak but how
we listen and respond? What are we doing to assure that emancipatory ideas are (or
at least have a chance of) being taken up, tested, and transformed by actual masses
of people and that we in turn are responding critically and collectively to the lessons
of this praxis? Dean reminds us, as communist intellectuals, of our responsibility not
just to get it right theoretically but to connect with the people, to help the people
get 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 astute
Marxist analysis or humane communist ethos will not become a material force of
history unless and until it is given a form that can be taken up by the people as their
own 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 the
forced cooperation of working-class subjects compelled by the domination of
capital).2 But what I would like to restore here is precisely Deans emphasis on
audience and on the need to stretch or even burst the bounds of existing left selfsegregation and isolation. For lack of space here, let me simply rewrite her
definition/directive as follows: Communist praxis consists of the strategic expansion
of voluntary cooperation that abolishes the present division of labor, (creating a new
and emancipatory division of labor) with an eye on the communist horizon.3
2. Deans key point hereone that (re)connects with Badious Theory of the Subjectis to
emphasize the difference between organizing working-class interests within the field of
capital and rupturing this field altogether, organizing workers and the otherwise oppressed not
according to particular interests but as the harbinger of a radically new society, creating a new
field of desire and possibility, a communist horizon. It is an important point, albeit one I dont
have space to address here.
3. In his recent book, The Rebirth of History, Badiou (2012) refers to this incipiently communist
shaking off of the division of laborin the crucible of a riot, which may or may not become a
subject-anchoring Event properas the lightning displacement of people from their usual
places 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 they
are at and to entice them to meet us where we are at. We must extend a party
invitation to the people. We must get outside our comfort zones, break through our
conference and seminar walls, and subvert the leftist subcultures that guarantee our
continued (self-)marginalization and irrelevance. We must transform not only the
people but also ourselves, abolishing the division of labor inherited from capitalism
while constructing a new division of labor that is oriented toward the horizon of
communism. The educators must be educated! Or to rephrase it dialectically, there
are great teachers everywhere; we had best be doing all we can to learn from them.

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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):
33242.
Healy, S. 2015. Communism as a mode of life. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 34356.

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, and
economic status, with different experiences, social networks, and skill sets, were able to come
together at the level of practice, place, and basic ideas (the 99 percent versus the 1 percent), at
least for an extended moment.