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It is commonplace to observe that the post-crash era is defined by the rise of populist movements on both the Left and the Right, amid a trend of growing political polarization. Yet rather less remarked upon is the return of the party as a central actor in the political arena. Across the West, and in Europe in particular, we are witnessing a resurgence of the political party. Both old parties, like Labour in Britain, and new ones, like Podemos in Spain and France Insoumise, have experienced spectacular growth in recent years, while also undergoing important organizational innovations. This revival of the party-form is remarkable given that for many years sociologists and political scientists almost unanimously predicted that the political party was losing its primacy in a globalized and highly diversified digital society. In fact, the current left resurgence has itself belied such forecasts. For digital technology has not supplanted the party. Rather, activists have used its advances in order to develop innovative mechanisms for appealing to citizens, even as they assert the party-form anew as the main instrument of political struggle.

Botched Forecasts That political parties are undergoing a revitalization is first of all evident in the growing number of party members, a clear turn from the long-falling memberships that many historical European parties experienced beginning in the 1980s. In Britain, the Labour Party is on course to hit 600,000 members, after having touched a nadir of just 176,891 in 2007 at the end of Tony Blair’s leadership. In France, Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Insoumise movement counts 580,000 supporters, making it the largest party in France, just a year and a half after its foundation. In Spain, Podemos, founded in 2014, stands at over 500,000 members, over double the figure for the Socialist Party. Even in the US, a country that for most of its history has lacked mass parties in the European sense of the term, we can see a somewhat similar trend, as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the country’s largest socialist formation, has grown to 50,000 members in the aftermath of Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic nomination in 2016. This spectacular growth in the membership rolls of left-wing parties — many of which are new formations — strikingly contrasts with the forecasts that had until recently been made by many political scientists. Between the 1990s and the period just before the 2008 financial crisis, scholars concurred in predicting the ultimate demise of the political party. Amid growing voter apathy and declining memberships, the political party seemed to many an outmoded type of organization — a stubborn relic of a bygone past. In 2000, famed political scientists Russell Dalton and Martin Wattenberg argued that “today mounting evidence points to a declining role for political parties in shaping the politics of advanced industrial democracies. Many established political parties have seen their membership rolls wane, and contemporary publics seem increasingly skeptical about partisan politics.” Irish scholar Peter Mair asserted that we were witnessing the passing of the “age of party democracy,” arguing that a number of phenomena, such as the volatility of the electorate and the rise of a widespread “anti-political sentiment” pointed to the decline of political parties. Besides being a commentary on the decline of the membership of historical mass parties, such a diagnosis was often informed by postmodern theories about “the end of history”; a prophecy which for many also meant that the party — in most traditional Marxist theory, the decisive historical actor — had met its end. Amidst the extreme differentiation and individualization of the “network society” described by sociologist Manuel Castells, with its increasing room for individual autonomy and flexibility, all organizations would approximate the horizontal morphology of the network, rather than the vertical structure of the pyramid that dominated industrial-era organizations. This did not seem to bode well for the future of the political party, which by its nature involves the presence of a centralized leadership structure, demanding discipline and submission of individual wills to a collective goal. Added to this was the perception of a crisis of partisan identification. Class identities were seen as no longer capable of mobilizing voters, and parties were becoming “catch-all” organizations, opportunistically seeking votes wherever they could find a gap in the “electoral market.” This sociology of extreme complexity, individualization, and class disintegration was accompanied by the argument that in a globalized world, the party would lose importance for the simple reason that the nation-state — the party’s traditional object of conquest and framework of operation — was losing power in favor of global governance institutions. Self-proclaimed “Marxian” maîtres à penser Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt celebrated the shift from nation-states to a global empire, not too dissimilarly from the way in which New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman waxed lyrical about the impending victory of globalization over nations. The global condition seemed to favor other types of collective organization, operating transnationally and focusing on “single issues”: networked protests, social movements, charities, and NGOs. It is significant that the World Social Forum, the main gathering of the anti-globalization movement, explicitly excluded parties, as if they were not just outdated but also morally reproachable.

Anti-Party Suspicion This strong anti-party sentiment that has shaped the political education of past generations of left-wing activists was informed the form’s authoritarian distortions over the twentieth century. Nazism and Stalinism demonstrated the extent to which the party could be turned into a cruel machine bent on manipulating its members and commanding unswerving obedience. Film and literature have handed down vivid portrayals of the malign psychological and political effect of party obedience, such as the abomination of Hitler’s Nazi Party or the show trials and persecutions conducted by Communist parties in the Soviet bloc, as dramatized in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. More benign social-democratic “mass parties” also engendered widespread disappointment. But what was problematic was the way in which this justified criticism became allied with a longstanding liberal resentment toward the political party, underpinned by an anti-democratic fear of the organized masses and their demands of democratic control and economic redistribution. This liberal discourse has a very long history that harks back to the origins of modern democracy. Personalities as different as James Madison, Moisey Ostrogorski, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Simone Weil vocally criticized the political party. They attacked political parties for subjecting the individual to obedience and uniformity, and argued that rather than serving the general interests of society parties ended up defending the narrow interest of a faction. Emerson, for example, famously argued that “a sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking,” while Christian anarchist Simone Weil wrote that political parties led to a situation in which “instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind.” In neoliberal times, this preoccupation with individual freedom has found new currency in the frequently heard celebration of entrepreneurship and of the spontaneity of unregulated market forces, making all forms of collective organization look like an illegitimate impediment. In The Constitution of Liberty Friedrich Hayek, the most important philosopher of the neoliberal “pensée unique” (“single thought”) famously expressed his disbelief in the organized order (taxis) and trust in the spontaneous order (kosmos) of society, modeled on the supposedly “free exchanges” taking place in the market. The political party, like the state, is thereby represented as a gray and bureaucratic Leviathan that undermines freedom, authentic expression, tolerance, and dialogue. Dispiritingly, this single thought came to be unwittingly absorbed by many anti-authoritarian movements emerging in the aftermath of the student protests of 1968, echoing neoliberals with their denunciation of collective organization and their bureaucracy, in the name of autonomy and personal self-expression. Ironically, much of the distaste people nowadays feel towards political party is itself the product of neoliberal ideology, and of the way in which over the 1990s and 2000s this ideology facilitated the transformation of the old mass parties of the industrial era into new “liquid parties” styled after American “professional/electoral parties.” These parties, whose cynicism has been captured in the public imagination by TV series such as House of Cards and The Thick of It, have substituted the old apparatchiks with spin doctors, and party cadres with pollsters and communication consultants. Thus, when people of different persuasions rail against political parties, they may well have very different sorts of parties in mind. However, they seem to think there is something inherently wrong in the party-form as such.