That the crowd event necessitates the party is Dean’s main point, and there is a lot she has to say in this regard. She moves on from her analysis of crowds to a discussion of Badiou’s theory of the subject, connecting it back to her own development on the theory and reinforcing the claim that the party is necessary to provide a political subject for the rebellious crowds. She points out, by engaging with analyses of the Paris Commune, the ways in which theories of the carnivalesque, pure rebellion, the “beautiful moment” of crowd chaos, are all insufficient for a productive politics since, without a party project, these crowd moments are easily absorbed and indeed promoted by what she calls “communicative capitalism.” In her quite brilliant intervention with Kristin Ross’s anarcho-communist analysis of the Paris Commune (that, following the Situationists, celebrated the carnivalesque aspects of the rebellion while rejecting the politics of the mature Marx) Dean concludes:

Ross positions the ‘half-real, half-fantastic’ crowd as an alternative to a politics rooted in the well-defined interests of the class. It’s not an alternative. The beautiful in-between of infinite potentiality can’t last forever. People get tired. Some want a little predictability, reliable food sources, shelter, and medical care. Others realize they’re doing all the work. Without a politics that targets capitalists as a class, the rest of us continue to be exploited… Common work, knowledge, achievements, and resources are expropriated from us and channeled into the coffers of the very, very few. (Dean, 142)

Hence the party becomes the necessary moment that produces the political subject of the collective, that declares meaning on an event. Without it there is transitory rebellion that lacks revolutionary direction. The party “is a form for the expression and direction of political will. It concentrates disruption in a process in order to produce political power: these acts are connected; they demonstrate the strength of the collective. It endeavors to arrange the intensity unleashed by the crowd, to keep it present as fervent desire.” (Ibid., 158)

But it is here, despite all the excellent arguments Dean has made for the necessity of the party (I particularly like her notion of “enlarging the world”), that we reach an impasse. Indeed, rather than continue with a summarization of Dean’s arguments regarding the party’s necessity that remain firmly ensconced within theoretical debates about the concept (which admittedly possess their own importance) I want to step outside her discussion of the party’s necessity and political subjectivity so as to ask: what does this party look like concretely? This is a question that Dean cannot answer satisfactorily.

First of all, she treats the party’s relationship to state power as a non-issue, or at best an issue that is not immediate. Barely dealing with Lenin’s arguments in State and Revolution, despite her use of Lenin elsewhere, she claims that “[t]o worry about our seizing the state, then, is a joke, fantasy, and distraction from the task at hand… What matters for us here and now is the galvanization of political will.” (Ibid., 150) But the galvanization of political will without a revolutionary strategy (and a revolutionary strategy always has to do with the question of state power) transforms any party politics into a sequence without a destination. We’re catapulted back to the problems caused by her conception of “the communist horizon” and expected to believe that these will solve themselves without a partisan strategy. But as T. Derbent and others have pointed out, any and every revolution movement must think the problematic of revolutionary strategy far in advance or it is disqualified as a revolutionary force.

Which leads to the second problem: without bothering to think through the problem of capturing or not-capturing state power, but instead delaying this problem until a time when we are ready (when we have galvanized the political will), Dean in fact ends up implicitly endorsing the revolutionary strategy of insurrectionism without thinking it through. [This was, of course, my argument in “Quartermasters of Stadiums and Cemeteries” and Dean’s Crowds and Party has confirmed my earlier critiques.] We cannot help but be struck by the ways in which she describes the insurrectionary logic imposed on the Paris Commune and derived from the October Revolution as fundamental to her description of crowds necessitating parties and parties giving meaning to crowd rebellions. Indeed, she valorizes the insurrectionary moment where the military sides with the people, as if this is not an option foreclosed in modern capitalist modes of production where the military has become something different. (Ibid., 128–129) The trajectory is linear and its dialectic is one dimensional, a single line snapping back upon itself: crowds emerge, necessitate a party, a party either emerges or a pre-existing party is consummated, and in retrospect the meaning of the crowd event is ordered according to political subjectivity. Party elements might precede a rebellion; they give this insurrection a political dimension and then declare the meaning of the rebellion in fidelity to the event. But what about other movements of crowds that are not found in Occupy and the rebellions touted by the very social media networks Dean problematizes? What about people’s wars that can unleash multiple and disparate crowd events, claim still more, double-back, spiral, blossom a growing circumference of counter-hegemony while also growing a party core? But such a strategy is one that ties organization to the capture of state power in a different way than the theory of insurrection, and it is the latter that Dean assumes is normative while simultaneously decrying any discussion of state capture.

The third problem, then, is that Dean’s consideration of the party is that it is more idealist than materialist. While it is indeed important to point out the ways in which the party is not about membership, and is in fact a significant theoretical concept (which, to be fair, is what my essay is also about), there are points where Dean seems to imply that the growth of party cadre is less important than the party as an idea: “Marx describes the Commune as a glorious achievement of ‘our Party.’ This is not a descriptive empirical claim regarding membership in a political organization. It is the point from which he responds to the subjectivization effected by the Commune event, positioning it within a process oriented to justice.” (Ibid., 149) Although it may be the case that crude empiricism should be avoided, and that the meaning of the party concept should be preserved over and above a role call of party members, in concrete terms there can be no effective party without dedicated party cadre. Unless we are to imagine that the party is just an idea that will impose itself on the collective will of crowds in revolt, party membership is required. Dedication to such political project will make it sustainable beyond each and every revolt; the party (or parties) cannot exist as a one time event or it will collapse the moment the rebellion from which it was imagined also collapsed.

Fourthly, when she does engage with concrete examples, Dean tends to seek justification for the communist party’s necessity in the business of revisionist parties. It is in fact truly bizarre that in the fifth chapter of Crowds and Party (Ibid., 209–250) Dean attempts to find the meaning of party political subjectivity in the experience of Communist Party-USA cadre in the 1970s. This was a time when the anti-revisionism of the New Communist Movement temporarily eclipsed the stale party politics of the CPUSA, along with its contemporaries throughout the world, so as to demonstrate that political subjectivity was being mobilized in other party projects. In this period it was not a partisan of the CPUSA, devoted to the peaceful co-existence with capitalism thesis, that was communicating with rebellious crowds but in fact those engaged in projects such as the RU/RCP-USA and other anti-revisionist eruptions. [To be clear, I am not arguing that we should support the RCP-USA now which, in my opinion, has degenerated into a Marxist cult.] In 1977 in the US the meaning of the CPUSA partisan was made clear: an individual outside of struggle, unable to declare meaning upon any crowd event, a depressing fossil. The brief moment of anti-revisionist struggle was in fact a transitory opening of party necessitation because it had penetrated further into the masses by communicating with the crowd struggles unleashed in the 1960s. But maybe Dean’s temporary flight back into the arms of a moribund party project is telling; it informs us that, as she herself warned at the outset of her book, she is not necessarily interested in defining the communist party as vanguard. If the qualification of vanguard is unimportant, then one might as well treat the CPUSA as significant in a period where its previous claim to vanguard status was ameliorated: they are no more or less important than those party projects eclipsing them, briefly pulling in the more advanced activists of the working class.

[In fact, Dean seems to be unaware of the New Communist Movement in that she sees “the shift in radical politics” where the concept of the party was replaced with movementism as “marked by ‘1968’.” (162) But the end of the New Left in 1968 actually resulted in nearly twenty years of a return to the party form with the anti-revisionist movement that erupted throughout the world. Indeed Wang Hui recently wrote of the significance of 1968 in terms of the Cultural Revolution and its effect on the worldwide radical movement. Hence, the “turn[ing] away from party politics” happens in the mid-1980s when the NCM collapses, not as early as Dean suggests.]

Fifthly and finally, Dean’s refusal to endorse a vanguard conception of the party has to do with an attempt to shoe-horn every disparate struggle into a vague communist project. She complains about a “left realism” that is fragmented into “an ever-expanding array of populist, liberal, progressive, trans, pluralist, green, multiculturalist, anti-racist, radical democratic, feminist, identitarian, anarchist, queer, autonomist, horizontalist, anti-imperialist, insurrectionist, libertarian, socialist, and communist persuasions.” She treats this fragmentation as “symptomatic of such a realism… [that is premised on the assumption] that collectivity is undesirable and that collectivity is impossible.” (Ibid., 67) Her desire, as opposed to this identity politics of difference and separation, is solidarity; but we should ask what this solidarity means. There is, after all, a reason why the revisionist parties were rejected in the 1960s-70s by the anti-revisionist movement: the solidarity they demanded was a solidarity with the peace of capitalism, a refusal to grasp the explosion of new and rebellious movements. Dean is correct to recognize that a politics that begins by focusing on difference rather than solidarity will be doomed to failure, but it is also correct to recognize that a project of solidarity must begin by drawing clear lines of demarcation in the realm of politics and deciding upon what must be excluded from this basis of solidarity. Beginning with a big tent socialism of the 99% will ignore all of these distinctions that will, if forced into a false unity, produce the most cynical form of solidarity: my comrades are not imperialists, racists, homophobes, TERFs, misogynists, etc. And any movement that attempts to enforce a solidarity between all of these contradictions, thereby ignoring the material fact of actual oppression and exploitation, will possess the most cosmetic unity and collapse under the weight of its multiple contradictions, incapable of generating actual solidarity.