Saying ‘We’ Again: A Conversation with Jodi Dean on Democracy, Occupy and Communism | Critical Legal Thinking

B&C: Can you say some­thing about the insti­tu­tional or organ­iz­a­tional struc­tures that the move­ment against cap­it­al­ism and for com­mun­ism would have to have? You argue that we have to renew the idea of the party. Many will regard that with some skepticism!

JD: First on the idea of the party. Lukács is really great in his book Lenin: A Study on the Uni­city of his Thought in recog­niz­ing that the party is a form for the actu­al­ity of revolu­tion, which means that it is a form that we need because of the mul­ti­pli­city of people who become mobil­ized when a move­ment starts. Of course, they are going to bring all kinds of dif­fer­ent forms of con­scious­ness to the move­ment and that can eas­ily be redir­ec­ted and become a kind of pop­u­lism. So a party can be use­ful in try­ing to respond to this — not dog­mat­ic­ally but flex­ibly, try­ing to push and steer a little bit. But it should not and can­not get ahead of the people. It has to have a much more respons­ive rela­tion­ship to it, try­ing to dir­ect in a respons­ive way. So with regard to the first ques­tion I think that a party is neces­sary and that we can recog­nize even in the old his­tory of Com­mun­ist parties it was never as dog­matic, unre­spons­ive or rigid as the crit­ics want us to think. Second, not a whole lot of people are excited about the party idea; I’ll admit to that. But I think the exper­i­ence of Syr­iza can be made more inspir­ing for people out­side of Greece. Because they see that there is a flex­ible left coali­tion that was able within four or five months to func­tion as a party and make real pro­gress. That would be dif­fer­ent in the United States because we do not have a par­lia­ment­ary sys­tem, so the incent­ives for the party form are not really there, which is a real prob­lem. On the other hand, one of the exper­i­ences that has come out of ‘Occupy’ is that there needs to be a more expli­cit under­stand­ing of how lead­ers func­tion and arise so that lead­ers can be account­able and dif­fer­ent people can move in and out of lead­er­ship pos­i­tions, in an open, trans­par­ent and account­able way. So I would hope that over the next year some more cohes­ive organ­iz­a­tional form can emerge and I do not think that it hurts to call it a party.

B&C: His­tor­ic­ally the role that Com­mun­ist parties have played has often turned out to be anti-​revolutionary not only with respect to e.g. the more anarch­ist cur­rents in these revolu­tion­ary move­ments but also in other ways. One might think that the coun­cil sys­tem would be a good altern­at­ive to the party form in terms of organ­iz­ing the movement.

JD: I don’t think that the party form is opposed to coun­cils, cells or sovi­ets. In Octo­ber, I was read­ing Lenin’s April Theses and thought that the gen­eral assem­blies of Occupy are a new form of soviet. All of these are units in which a party can func­tion or which can be com­pon­ents of a party. They are not opposed to each other. I think Anarch­ists are too reduct­ive here because they treat the party as some­thing on top rather than some­thing within: an organ­iz­a­tion of voices within a broader field. I think it is a mis­take to build up this dichotomy.

via criticallegalthinking.com