Neither Class Nor Party

I wish to thank X. Rivera Maya, J.E. Morain, and Julian Assele for their editorial contributions to this essay and the clarity they offered in helping me to understand the argument I wanted to make.

“During the long months of solitary confinement, I decided once and for all to become a professional Party worker.” - Cecilia Bobrovskaya, Twenty Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik1

This was Cecilia Bobrovskaya’s resolution following her first arrest in 1900. She had spent the year prior with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s (RSDLP) Kharkov Committee, primarily supporting and distributing literature amongst workers in railroad workshops, which culminated in a general strike demonstration on May 1st that drew police repression. She was arrested in a raid on her home and incarcerated during the police investigation into the Committee. She was released after several months when she began refusing to take food, to be placed under surveillance pending the Committee’s trial. Upon arrival home, she immediately escaped abroad to Zurich. There she formed ties with those emigrants that cohered around Lenin and Martov’s Iskra group, and their base in Zurich became a hub for those making their escapes from prison and exile as far as Siberia.

In 1902, Bobrovskaya returned to Russia as a member of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary underground. She was destined for Kostroma, where she was to make contact with comrades and form a nucleus that could restore the organizational presence of the Party through the development of contacts with influential workers and the formation of small workers’ circles in the factories. Her account of this era of underground activity is one of a daily life attuned to movement under constant surveillance, surrounded by a robust network of police and spies, as well as suspicious and unsympathetic individuals of various classes. What organization could be made had to be done through establishing communication with the remnants of recent waves of repression and raids. While caution and discipline had to be exercised at every turn, it could not give way to isolation from the proletarian masses. In her reflections upon this time, she writes:

“It was the period when the object of our entire Party work was to create a centralized, well-knit organization and not merely an isolated, limited, local organization stewing in its own juice, as it were. It was very clear to us even then that Lenin’s plan–an organization of revolutionaries–was not merely the idle fancy of a theoretician who had isolated himself from our Russian reality as the Workers’ Cause group and, later, the Mensheviks, tried to convince us. The necessity for a centralized revolutionary party was very keenly felt in our daily work.”2

What does it mean for a form of organization to be felt as a necessity in our own activity, in all that we do every day to sustain the development of a communist movement? An iteration of this is occurring in our own moment, even as the prospects for such a movement appear dim to some, or absurdly imminent to others. The emergent recognition of a need can also be obscured by the extant means of its satisfaction. What adopts the name of the Party today often possesses no connection to that which appears to us as the real movement. Even still, that history which bears the name of the Party is often so unsavory as to carry with it a stigma that cannot even tolerate consideration. The question of organization then assumes what it cannot become at the outset, and we relate to the history of communist revolution as a series of faulty choices, rather than objective limits that remain to be collectively overcome.

This question of the Party haunts every inquiry into the concern of revolutionary organization, and it becomes most acute at those heightened stages of the class struggle’s development when the extent of repression from the forces of reaction, both inside and outside of the capitalist state, intensifies. With such developments, the balance of forces in contention are more sharply contrasted and come into greater focus, thus too informing the recognition of this necessity with a concern of its content. The proletariat emerges as an immanent revolutionary potential in fleeting bursts, receding as suddenly as it entered once again upon the stage of world history. The class then return to the daily grind of exploitation, seemingly unable to preserve the advances made in the heated moment of an uprising. As such, the need that is felt for the Party can still be refused, for some yet have no reason to acknowledge this necessity. At this stage, the path forward still appears indeterminate to some, and so its investigation becomes ripe for any number of doctrinaire experiments. These pretend to offer liberatory prescriptions, but in their own rejection of what is determinate of our conditions, they only result in an articulation of activity capable of justifying the present state of things. The best of all possible worlds is never far from hand.

Rodrigo Nunes sets the stage for himself to commit this very error when he states his intention for Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization:

“I do not wish to build a universal theory of organization, but merely to mobilize a broader perspective in order to think the question of political organization specifically. So how is that question to be defined, if we are to put an end to its automatic association with the party-form or with building organizations?”3

Nunes’ intervention arrives with a sense of its conjuncture, “the global economic crisis that began in 2007, and the crisis of political legitimacy arising from governmental reactions to it; the crisis of liberal democratic institutions, whose long-term hollowing out those reactions put under a sharp light; and accelerating climate change.”4 The question of organization in our time is articulated as “what can we, as a species that is increasingly aware of how our everyday decisions undermine our own conditions of existence, do in order to avoid the worst?”5 These interlinked crises and the failures of the uprisings and social movements of the past nearly two decades is the specific occasion that calls forth this effort on “how to think about organization and strategy,” one that is “less concerned with finding solutions than with providing adequate definitions of problems.”6

Taking up the present in the wake of the various “leaderless” mass mobilizations of the post-2008 Global Financial Crisis era, the much-vaunted egalitarianism of such movements has not brought any emancipatory horizon to fruition. These movements, largely interpreted as “horizontalist” in their lateral configurations of organizational linkages (and by certain commentators, such as Vincent Bevins, deliberately so), have not been able to overcome the force of the capitalist state or the compulsions of the world market, only challenging capitalist social relations through the prism of specific, largely localized, issues confined to their immediate aims. Even mild reforms articulated by the more coherent formations within them have been met only with intensified austerity and increasingly repressive forms of governance.

Counterposed to these apparent weaknesses of “horizontalism,” calls for greater organizational cohesion have resounded. Yet the formations that so often raise the banner of organization have found themselves typically too rigid to even respond to relatively spontaneous moments, the greatest share of their activity during and in-between moments of popular uprisings betraying the reality that so many attempted revivals of past forms of mass organization are still unable to overcome the form of the sect. This “verticalist” end of the spectrum is often criticized for its inertia and inability to engage and develop the energy of mass revolt into a definite movement with a coherent political objective. As isolated sects that cannot overcome this barrier, obsessions with organizational hierarchy create conditions ripe for abuse, such as the covering up of sexual misconduct and assaults of members. Yet even an informal version of this persists in decentralized, non-hierarchical milieus, as interpersonal relationships and an absence of the capacity to enforce formalized processes for intervention create cover for people to wash their hands of any responsibility in such matters. In the end, people are traumatized by the experience of organization.

In such accounts, the coordinates of class and party appear anachronistic to the contemporary reality of an abstractly-perceived “movement.” Nunes’ effort to discern a theory of political organization adequate to the mediation of these categories does so while adopting this very assumption of class and party’s inadequacy to the conjuncture. What pertains then instead is a partial recognition of a definite socially objective reality of interrelated, interdependent actors and formations to be evaluated according to principles established at the outset of his investigation. The first of these principles is that “a theory of organisation had to be a theory of what organisation is before it could be a theory of what it ought to be […] The question of organisation thus ceases to be an arena for the endless reiteration of fixed positions and becomes instead a shared worksite in which everyone has to deal with the same set of problems, even if coming at them from different angles.” The second of these principles is that political organization is to be thought “as part of, and in fundamental continuity with, ‘organization’ in the broadest possible sense—that is, natural organization (if we understand ‘nature’ in a Spinozan sense)” And finally, the third principle that he has set for himself is that the text “should provide an account of self-organization not as seen ‘from above’—from a supposedly objective perspective—but as seen from the inside […] This is, in fact, precisely why the question of organization matters, as it concerns the problem of assembling, expanding, coordinating and deploying the collective capacity to act.”7

However, a theory of organization reduced to what it is at the outset risks being a solely descriptive approach that loses sight of how the prescriptive ought is always present in the very orientation of description. That is to say, all forms of political organization are already evaluated on the terms of what it claims to be, who its subject is, what its intentions are, and the efficacy of its practices towards achieving those ends. Thus political organization, conceived by Nunes according to Spinoza’s “nature,” as a self-acting substance, is already in danger of losing sight of the particular reasons for definite forms of organization, the conditions to which such activity is taken in response to, and the specific social relations from which this response is formed. This initial confusion permeates the whole of Nunes’ presentation, as is seen in the manner by which he must continually betray his own assumed principles in order to advance his theory.

Where this is most apparent is in Nunes’ primary contribution of “thinking organization ecologically,”8 a prescription that is largely justified by way of continual exhortation rather than any basis in the conditions for political organization. In his presentation, we first encounter the notion of “ecology” through an axiomatic treatment of political organization’s functions. Whenever we speak of it, there are distinct senses in which we speak of organization. One is “inflexibly substantival: an organization is some concrete assemblage of people, structures, practices, procedures, resources, roles, identities, analyses, directives, and so on.” They are “concrete assemblages whose immediate aim is not ‘political’ […] but the collective management of the reproduction of life.” This refers “to the way in which people, despite not belonging to any clearly delimited organizations, come together in a space of appearance as a social force” and “the work of the individuals or groups whose activity is instrumental to creating the conditions for that coming together.”9 This means that “organization thus entails a nested structure of ever-expanding relations in which what counts as an organization on one level can be taken as an element on a higher level,” and it is from “this way of conceiving organization […] that the analysis that can be made of any particular reality is always dependent on scale.”10 According to this account, “collective action properly speaking would refer to those cases in which people not only perceive themselves as participating in a broader common identity—that is, as belonging to a collective subject—but also intentionally come together and engage in processes of deliberation, planning, assessing, intervening, and so forth.”11

This collective subject here resists definition, and thus too the direction of its action. The instrumental treatment of organization at this stage has yet to adopt a coherent end. The abstract object of inquiry as organization in-itself is understood in the register of the production of effects without any reason for cause. Nunes’ attempt “to pose the question of organization from outside any particular political tradition or doctrine”12 assumes a coherence of the collective subject absent any social qualities of its constitutive relations. With this, his discernment of the stakes of relation in the matter of organization betrays a greater concern than its mere substance. A recognition of the existence antagonism emerges for him, as he states “the fact that I disagree with someone does not make their actions any less capable of producing effects that I have no choice but to deal with. But even if it is unlikely that any two people would be in total agreement as to what the precise contours of ‘the movement’ were, participants and outsiders still had a sense of something that was sufficiently organized—whose relations were sufficiently constant—for it to be spoken of as a single thing.”13 This partial recognition of a coherent, socially objective sense of a “movement” is then developed to address the category of the proletariat that has historically been the basis of this notion of a collective subject in the context of left-wing revolutionary organization, that political tradition to which Nunes sets his sights but cannot claim. Where “the on-the-ground, in-itself reality that corresponded to the idea of a globe-spanning for-itself—the conscious, organized world proletariat—always looked quite different depending from where one looked, and included a plethora of smaller groupings, ad hoc coordination, networks of relatives, neighbors, colleagues and friends, as well as the local initiatives of countless individuals,” these movements are then understood not as differentiated instances of interdependent social relations in a common mode of production, but rather “nebulae or networks; it is only the degree to which they are centralized that varies.”14

This spatial conception of organization’s substance resisting its subject then culminates in the concept of “distributed action: the common space in which collective and aggregate action combine, communicate, relate and establish positive and negative feedback loops with one another.”15 Thus “it is distributed action, not organizations, that must therefore be the point of departure for a theory of political organization.”16 This is intended to address the fact that “historically debates on political organization have tended to have a prescriptive orientation: they asked what kind of organization one should have in order to achieve one’s aims, whatever those were.” And so Nunes states that “distributed action is not a model to be realized, but what already exists; it is what happens anyway. Thus instead of beginning with the question ‘what ought to be?’ one starts from what is and constantly tests the question ‘what do we want?’ against the more basic problem: ‘given what is, what can be?’ […] the idea that there is a single form that could be shared by all organizations, or a single organization to which everyone tendentially should belong. Instead, one takes ecological plurality as a point of departure, without supposing that it could or even should be homogenized or collapsed into a single entity at any point.”17

Political organization is then evacuated of its reason for existence, and thus ceases to have any discernible content to this form that it is to take. Nunes’ recognition of a broadly-conceived “movement” then claims a universal legitimacy in which every instance of organization concedes to each other’s effects. The social relations of organization have been disarticulated from an abstract concept of the practices that constitute organization. The subject recedes from view, leaving us with a substance that resists coherence at the same time that it is claimed to have a definite objective existence. If we are to take ecological plurality seriously as a point of departure, where can it lead us? What is the ultimate social horizon of this intervention in political organization?

To answer this we must turn to Nunes’ more thorough engagements with this ecological pluralism, which arrives by way of another series of axiomatic declarations that follow from slight historical examples. First is that

“There need be no kind of coordination or even direct contact among the different components of an ecology for them to interact with one another […] agents also create enabling conditions and opportunities for one another, and that their actions can become mutually reinforcing rather than detrimental […] An obvious example here would be the way in which social democratic parties in the Global North channeled upper-class fear of the Russian Revolution into the construction of the welfare state, and the welfare state then set the conditions for a flourishing of radical working-class culture and politics in the 1960’s and 1970’s.”18

Nunes reserves his ire for those radicals that would see in this rather an outcome resulting from non-identical political objectives. The flattening of substance and subject here attempts to establish an identity in their non-identity, yet does not recognize the antagonism that remains between revolutionary development and the attempt to curb this prospect in reform’s consolidation of political movement. Designating this process as one of “mutual reinforcement” while the ends of such agents remain non-identical then problematizes the very notion that any of this organization is “political” at all. In other words, if this is to remain a theory of political organization, the further elaboration of the relation between the form of ecological pluralism and its content would have to reveal the capacity to enact a definite end, which is to say that it would need to have a definable social horizon to which “thinking organization ecologically” could lead us in the practice of this mode of thought.

The necessity of a definite end is implicit in the “functional differentiation” that “is one of the key features—and strengths—of an ecology.”19 Yet he has already established that this functional differentiation is supposedly happening between elements of the ecology that need not be in direct communication, or even strategic alignment, with each other. What is there then to even consciously establish the different functions that are present, how they are to be deployed, and by whom? If there is no agent that can differentiate functions, then this remains an immanent potential that cannot be acted upon, and thus such functions could not be differentiated in any strategic manner. Absent the organization towards a defined objective, it is just as empty to declare that “the ‘wealth’ produced by each node or cluster never belongs exclusively to them, but is also to some extent the ecology’s.”20 Yet this invocation of wealth as something already held in common betrays Nunes’ own ignorance of the essential moment that gives rise to the necessity of political organization: the social relations that produce wealth in forms peculiar to a specific form of society, and the means by which these social forms of wealth are appropriated.

Nunes’ methodological rejection of antagonistic social relations allows him to say confidently of the problems facing political organization that “nothing breeds competition like competitiveness,” as if it were merely a choice on the part of the “radicals” of how to engage with the “ecology.”21 The critique of competition here does not account for why such formations may experience others in relations of competition. As such, the account of what organization is also deftly becomes an ought, contrary to Nunes’ intention, and without any explanation as to why this ought to be the approach taken by anyone in this case. A difference of political objectives is to be addressed without being mediated, let alone directly confronted. This conciliatory mode of engagement is what unites each of Nunes’ distinct points on “thinking organization ecologically.” Where doing so “necessarily implies a shift away from conceiving [of political organization] solely as a zero-sum contest” and the declaration that “no one wins on their own,”22 there is no essential means of discerning what exactly it means here to “win.”

This notion of victory absent a definite end is continually frustrated by Nunes’ further elaboration of the “ecology.” Where “a critical mass of people thinking about strategy ecologically makes it more likely that it could happen more often, in more targeted and effective ways,”23 according to Nunes this very activity still lacks the ability to define a target that can be acted upon, for in the course of its development “no single agent has full control over any outcome in an ecology, [and so] the opportunities that agents create for one another are often ambivalent: they raise the probability of a desired result but potentially diminish the control one can have over it.”24 This critical mass then becomes formless in the methodological deferral to define its content, and thus becomes more of an inhibition to the development of political activity than a means of developing it:

“An ‘ecology’ is less than an organism and more than an organization […] components co-evolve contingently, rather than being exhaustively and necessarily determined by their mutual constitution, and they retain a fair degree of autonomy […] an ecology is not intentional […] if an ecology is a spontaneous order that envelops deliberately made ones, be they formal organizations or informally adopted patterns, there is no agreed global protocol, let alone an overarching decision-making mechanism, according to which its components interact. Procedures are always local […] and so is deliberation.”25

If there is no intention that can cohere from an ecology, then there is no objective towards which the activity of political organization can be directed. This very resistance to the definition of political organization’s object then exists in tension with the very recognition of ecology as a socially objective condition of political organization. That Nunes must make this declaration and introduce to the local specificity of deliberation within this form betrays his own denial of intention by way of communicating his own. In preserving his initial principles against the necessary development of the concept, the ecology increasingly becomes a brake on any capacity to act:

“An ecology is neither an assembly where everyone deliberates together, nor a mass that follows a recognizable leader; it is the absence of either a recognized leader or a global procedure for collective decision-making […] not indicators of an absence of organization, but of the presence of a form of organization in its own right, albeit one that lasts only for as long as it manages to inhibit ‘the installation of stable powers in favor of a fabric of immanent relations.’”26

Even as he recognizes, in the absence, a very function that remains to be fulfilled, Nunes insists upon immediately elevating this very absence to the status of a virtue in its own right. Where his own analysis leads him to the recognition of a condition of political organization that is negated by the current state of affairs, he simply affirms the negated existence. Where for Nunes “the leadership function is never fully stabilized in the hands of any individual, concentrated in a position or formalized into a selection procedure,” it is expressed as an expectation that “this does not mean that the leadership function has ceased to exist but rather that, instead of being fixed, it circulates.”27 Yet this is communicated as a process that happens without any notion of it being consciously administered as such, and thus the circulation of leadership capacity in this instance could only denote an indeterminacy in which such a function would likely not become evenly distributed, but rather unevenly cultivated in disparate concentrations. This is indeed what actually happens in an “ecology” where such practices are not formalized by self-conscious and engaged participants, the much-maligned “tyranny of structurelessness” in which the mere appearance of leaderlessness only serves to obscure informal concentrations of social power and infrastructure.28 Such formulations by Nunes as “leadership is a ubiquitous phenomenon of diffusion happening at different scales, with a variable reach and different degrees of complexity” then are not communicative of anything concrete, and thus continue to misrecognize the very content of its concept.29

As the tasks of the ecology in our current conditions of struggle become more concrete, so too does the extent of Nunes’ misrecognition of what is in fact becoming necessary:

“While it is possible to influence the behavior of others even accidentally simply by routing information, it is obvious that more precise and elaborate effects depend on the work of honing a message, building alliances, setting up basic infrastructure, producing and circulating material, creating strategically targeted channels and platforms (face-to-face meetings, websites, online forums, social media profiles), and so on [….] The kind of organization provided by mass organizations has not disappeared; like most other things, it has just been downsized. The uprisings of the last decade invariably owed their initiation (and much of their early success) to the action of relatively small organizing cores. As the element of surprise wears off, repression and manipulation tactics evolve, and movements go from largely consensual oppositional targets to looking for a positive agenda, so grows the need for more organizing cores endowed with strategic sophistication, diverse aptitudes, the capacity to plan and execute more complex tasks, and therefore also greater consistency.”30

The recognition of real needs that are readily recognizable in the context of political organization imply a degree of development required for their functional execution that is merely implicit in the enumeration of these capacities. An “organizing core” that exists within the “contingently co-evolving” “ecology” that can achieve “greater consistency” across these disparate elements must form coherence and directly articulate and coordinate these differentiated functions within a movement of a determinate political character, seeking a definite objective. It would appear that Nunes has come to articulate political organization precisely that association he sought not to affirm: the form of the party.

In recognizing that “even a tiny organizing core with no previous history is thus capable of exercising influence well beyond the size of its membership or reputation,”31 Nunes now faces the form of the party and its vanguard formation. Nunes articulates that “‘vanguard’ is essentially a relational concept,” relevant “only if there is something else that follows and eventually fuses with it. It is an advanced detachment, but only temporarily.”32 The question, then, is in relation to what? For if “the notion of vanguard is in fact a logical consequence of the very principle that emancipation must be the work of proletarians themselves,” where the advanced detachment of the proletariat that constitutes the class in its revolutionary formation “should eventually organize itself as a party,”33 then we have arrived at a recognition of the exact problem facing these organizing cores and their incoherence within the milieu of an “ecology,” that of the relationship between the class of the proletariat and its party.

The re-emergence of the coordinates of class and party in Nunes’ presentation complicate the objective to think organization ecologically, for the political objective now becomes something determinate. Vanguard detachments have only been intelligible historically according to specific social relations in the development of the struggle between antagonistic classes. An ideological vanguard within a pluralist “organizational ecology” and a vanguard that emerges from the relations that reproduce a definite form of social life are distinct moments of this form, partial recognitions of a need that exist in a state of separation. Two co-constitutive terms concretize the abstract notion of the “critical mass” that Nunes refers to above: the qualitative transformation that these disparate sites of organization must necessarily realize, and its necessary base within a definite class. The necessity of these coordinates emerges from Nunes’ presentation for the fact they are the forms of being of the class struggle in the capitalist mode of production’s constitutive social relations. The ecology then contains an antagonism that it must address. In order to save the concept of the ecology itself, Nunes can only resort to the hypothetical in rejecting what is necessary:

“What happens, however, if we sever the idea of the vanguard from its association with historical necessity and the knowledge thereof? In this case, a vanguard initiative will not be conceived as the action supposed to establish the correct connection between the present moment and the future after which one strives. Instead, it appears as an effort to explore the ‘adjacent possible’ of a situation—the virtual paths that it makes available—with a view to finding those that are both viable and could lead farthest in the desired direction. It does not try to discover an underlying necessity, but to bring into being something that was not there before: to open a direction.”34

As soon as the vanguard formation is named as that which recognizes a definite necessity, it now no longer need be the articulation of any necessity, but the opening of direction without determination. Without any necessary basis for relation, such formations cease to be a vanguard. The concept cannot be preserved in the notion of “vanguard-functions,”35 for there remains no means by which functions are differentiated from or brought in relation to each other. Organizing cores are simply means of “setting up spaces for collaboration that condition but do not determine results.”36 For Nunes, “the point is not to fully produce but to induce effects by framing collective effort in such a way that establishes a space for collaboration that is open without being totally indeterminate, focused without being exhaustively defined.”37 As the ecology becomes increasingly incapable of any determination on Nunes’ own terms, the concession to the party becomes inevitable:

“From an ecological perspective on organization, the return of the party poses no problem in itself; the question is rather how it is to be understood. To assume that it means that movements have started once again to run the full course course from infancy (loose networks and social protest) to maturity (party-building and institutional change) would be to endorse a teleological conception of organization wholly at odds with the account I have proposed throughout this book. According to the latter, after all, there is no necessary developmental path, organization is irreducibly plural, and that is why it must be conceived in ecological terms. But even worse is the conclusion that the teleological narrative implies: that maturity amounts to putting all our eggs in the basket of the one and only party. This is to forget that a degree of plurality is a necessary safeguard against domination, be it in the guise of one-party rule or of the ‘they have nowhere else to go’ logic that has allowed many a formerly working-class party to sell its social base short again and again.”38

Thus he has an apparently contradictory ambivalence towards the party, but a clear antagonism in relation to its form. What form of party is it exactly then that poses no threat to Nunes’ ecology? Where, according to him, it is the case that “the question regarding parties is not whether they have a place in a movement ecology—they exist anyway, so they do—but what kind of relation they have or ought to have with it,”39 it is premised upon the condition that “the party offers the ecology the possibility of intervening at the level of the state” and that “the ecology offers the votes and engagement that can give the party a core base from which to build electoral coalitions.”40 We now can see exactly what this has led us to in the end. Nunes has, after all, no opposition to the existence of the bourgeois party of the capitalist state. The ecology, in its irreducible plurality, is in fact an ideal means of organizing electoral coalitions. For where it is incapable of any determination of the content of its activity or any deliberative capacity beyond the local scale, the capitalist state remains implicitly necessary to preserve a consensus amongst antagonistic classes. Where there is no communist party of the revolutionary proletariat, there is no defined relationship to the capitalist state. Thus Nunes’ ecology in practice can only be a means of applying pressure within a condition of bourgeois class dictatorship.

In this way, Nunes’ presentation finds itself indirectly recognizing the conditions for political organization that have been an absent concern up to this point. The unconscious arrival of class dictatorship in the ecology is the result of a prior, conscious methodological rejection of that which would have rendered the objective condition intelligible. As all becomes the undifferentiated mass of the ecology in Nunes’ presentation, the self-movement of the concept only becomes a justification of the present state of things, and political organization has severed the conscious development of its means from any end. Form has come to dominate content, yet without any investigation into the nature of this content itself, and so it becomes a formless construction. The political indeterminacy of the ecology is a consequence of the collapse of the substance and subject of organization into an identity that does not contain the non-identity of these constituent moments in its concept.

The subject of political organization is elaborated upon and forsaken by Nunes in the engagement with that very position that is most crucially a theory of the subject of revolution in the relations of the capitalist mode of production. The encounter with Marxism is the stage upon which Nunes seeks “to assume the contingency of history and the limits of our capacity to predict the future,”41 renouncing any teleological conceptions of revolution’s inevitability. The refutation of Marxism’s teleology rests upon the problematization of the “transitive relation between the positions people occupy within social structure (class, age, race, gender, etc.) and the ideas that they have,” where transitivity “refers to the idea that there is a deterministic connection between social structure and revolutionary subjectivity in the sense that some social groups, by virtue of their structural position, are both endowed with a unique capacity to transform that structure and determined to become politically conscious and active.”42 According to Nunes, Marx identifies this property in the proletariat according to certain deductions. The first is “logico-conceptual,” in which the class’ “very destitution […] makes it universal, since, deprived of all property and reduced to the bare capacity to work, it has no particularity to defend against the interests of other classes. A revolution led by the proletariat is therefore not a revolution to replace one class power with another, but to abolish all classes.”43 This, however, “only tells us that the proletariat is by right the only force that could produce universal emancipation; it does not guarantee that it has the power to do so.”44 The second deduction is “historico-materialist,” in which this logico-conceptual one reaches its limit by recognizing that

“it is still not enough to know that the proletariat can make the revolution; it is necessary to know that it will. It was this final task that transitivity was called to fulfil. Making the development of the proletariat’s revolutionary consciousness a part of the necessary unfolding of things themselves ensured that workers would gradually become aware of their historical role and be ready for it when the hour of capitalism’s final collapse came. Transitivity produced assurance that the proletariat’s collective consciousness not only would accumulate and develop over time, but would do so in a necessary direction.”45

It is here where Nunes summarizes the full-breadth of transitivity as he has conceived it and as it arises in this account of Marxism as “a position of universality determined by social structure, a capacity determined by historical development, a consciousness determined by accumulated collective experience.”46 Where Marxism’s propositions regarding the proletariat have here been disembedded from a mechanistic conception of the basis of subjectivity in relations of production, they have been rearticulated by Nunes into premises that aim to establish a notion of certain processes of political subjectivation by drawing upon the works of Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe and Alain Badiou:

“Whether the subject is the result of a hegemonic articulation or of a militant response to an unforeseeable event, what matters in both these examples is how they foreclose the possibility of an automatic passage from the objective to the subjective. In doing so, they offer a good illustration of what a politics without the assumption of transitivity might be. Political subjectivation, and the concrete forms that it can take, do not follow necessarily from a position in the structure. They are contingent and must be composed; they must be organized.”47

Yet what can only be offered here is the proposition of organization post festum, awaiting the appearance of a subject instead of identifying the potential for organization. Where Marxism’s propositions have been collapsed into a critique of transitivity, the methodological separations of form and content, of the political and the economic, have brought Nunes once again to a notion of political subjectivation without any determinate political or social objective. Foregoing the historical actuality of social relations of class struggle in the capitalist mode of production as the basis for political organization has again created an indeterminate subject that is passive in relation to its conditions, and organization that is primarily reactive in the conscious development of its activity. No initiative can be taken, no history made, for the rejection of teleology has not opened an emancipatory openness of possibility, but rather foregone any means of recognizing the conditions that make political organization necessary, and for whom such activity is necessary and why. The teleology of Marxism’s presuppositions and formal conclusions are thus for the reason that the capitalist mode of production is a form of social life with a definite telos, the production and appropriation of surplus value through the reproduction of the commodity of labor-power, a condition guaranteed by bourgeois class domination of the proletariat. For this reason, the communist objective must be sought within the definite conditions created by capitalist development that also immanently produce the necessity of communism for reproducing an emancipatory social life, and its primary political means the dictatorship of the proletariat that is necessary for the class to abolish class society itself.

Thus, if all we are reliant upon is a series of organizing cores of various political subjectivities absent any material grounds for the intelligibility of their politics, then we have no political organization that is self-consciously developed from the means by which our society actually reproduces itself. If we have no means of identifying where organization must occur according to the satisfaction of the needs of the people that themselves have developed the need for political organization, then there is no direction that is actually necessary, and thus we are merely discussing a movementism that exists for anything, and thus effectively nothing. The ecological plurality of organization offered by Nunes becomes but another form of nihilism.

Cecilia Bobrovskaya’s recognition of the need for the Party and her commitment to the realization of that objective arrived in her own experience of struggle under conditions of escalating state repression. A similar moment faces partisans now, as the coherence of global reaction amongst capital and its allied classes has provoked renewed interest in not only the question of organization, but the form of the Party. The stakes are increasing for all forms of political activity, even those that appeal to their own legality for protection, and the intensity of repression that can fall upon those engaged in them. As a recognition emerging early still, it is still a matter of caution as to how the formation of the Party proceeds. The exact form itself yet remains obscure, but the necessity of its task as a vehicle for revolutionary class struggle is readily apparent. The coherence of a communist political objective will necessarily arise amongst many distinct tendencies, encountering plurality and heterogeneity as a condition of its initial consistency. It will, however, require the ongoing mediation of these differences through structured and intentional conflict aimed towards constructive synthesis and the coordination of strategic objectives across different contexts. The elaboration of strategy will necessarily increasingly be a matter of collective debate that will require organs capable of rendering decisions and mediating dissent. The class struggle will have to create institutions that not only develop the means of developing political organization, deliberating and enacting strategy, but also that establish the conditions for the social relations of a communist ethical life.

These cannot form in isolation from the conditions of the proletariat in its various struggles. Only through attention to these conditions can we form viable strategies of political organization, for without such lucidity of our own conditions of existence, every course of action or strategic wager is reduced to the arbitrary status of choices made by arbitrarily-formed groups. At this point, we remain at the level of simply apprehending the socially and historically objective necessity of consciously developing the relationship between class and party. This condition for revolutionary activity is given by the relations of the capitalist mode of production and its characteristic form of state. The question of developing a determinate communist content within this constellation is to be decided in the course of its development in the class struggle, and is the current state in which this recognition is dawning amongst partisans of our moment across different tendencies. This work is that of the cultivation of that very content that will constitute the form of political organization, i.e., the development of proletarian organization in the class struggle, amongst both its vanguard formations that emerge in the uprisings that are characteristic of our time, and in the pursuit of forging such potential from those fractions of the class that the study and engagement of its conditions makes apparent. The course of this process will necessarily be an intense period of integrating the self-activity of the class as practice, deliberation, and decision into an iterative and transformative process of revolutionary development. It must have as its aim the disintegration of the distance we experience now between that of the partisan as a distinct political subject and the class, instead forming the proletariat itself as a partisan condition through the development of forms of mass political struggle against capital and the state.

Through such an effort, the Party is a necessary means of articulating the class as a distinct formation across its different forms of appearance, though in the course of its advances towards both the assertion of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its abolition of itself as a class, the Party becomes in practice a historical, and thus vanishing, necessity. A necessity vanishes when a need is satisfied, impermanent in the course of historical time. Yet a need can only be satisfied if it is recognized and properly tended to. The rejection of what is necessary in our time will merely pursue what we lack into a moment of crisis from which we may never recover. This is the simultaneous objective that has to be retained at the same time as the Party is constructed in practice. It is nothing less than the active creation of social relations capable of struggling for and advancing communist measures in the class struggle. We may tentatively call this process one of communist development.