This essay is a part of Negation's Organizational Culture Dossier. The rest of the collection can be found here. 

At the outset, I feel it urgent to clarify what this essay is not: it is not an attack on the party form, nor Lenin, nor Leninism. Even less is it an attack on actual, living, revolutionary movements, on the enclaves which struggle to bring forth the new, who unite in its affirmation. What this essay intends to explore, to problematize, to exceed, is a particular phenomenon in the current landscape which one may refer to in any manner of ways, but which I am opting to call here, ‘the Correct Ideas Club.’ At play are History,[1] politics, depoliticization, friendship, care, and desire. Ultimately, this is an attempt to re-introduce Spinoza’s old question to the current conjuncture. It is to take a position on the theoretical battlefield: why do men fight for their servitude as though it were their salvation?

Initiation

We’re building a new world
All of my friends and me
It’s not an exact science yet
But we have the technology 
— Wingnut Dishwashers Union 

Every year, thousands of students anxiously arrive on campuses for their first semesters. For many of them, it will be their first time away from the influence of the patriarchal family, their first tastes of self-determination. The first few weeks are chaotic, with student union-sponsored events, bureaucratic frustrations, and an endless barrage of posters and pamphlets competing for the attention of newcomers. Some are recruiting for recreational groups, others for cultural or religious clubs. But the discerning student looking for meaning, for a community not only concerned with change but capable of making it, might be lucky enough to encounter the Correct Ideas Club. 

Should the encounter stick — more often than not, it doesn’t — the student will find themselves embraced by an already existing community. They’ll immediately be put to work for the Club, be it putting up posters, convincing friends to come to meetings, selling literature at rallies, or building consciousness through supervised reading with comrades. Through their labour, they’ll find that they’ve truly entered a new world, one with meaning, direction, certainty, which makes the old one seem empty, moribund, or even perverse. In this way, one finds their place, commits to it, and endows the inciting encounter with a retrospective necessity, an inscription of their name in History, the elevation of a reified existence to an inevitable Historical Becoming under the Being of the Club.  

From here, one is kept occupied with internal work with ensuring the Club can fund itself and its developing cadre of professional revolutionaries, themselves kept busy with internal work. The role calls for the total subordination of one’s personality — as Lukács once put it[2] — and so we should subordinate ourselves to support those who subordinate themselves so wholly on behalf of the Club. It is nothing other than a solemn dedication to the tasks assigned by History. But this solemnity is not all consuming. What is the point of struggling for a party if it is not also a struggle for partying with comrades? Not even the Bolsheviks were sober when their day came.[3] Either way, only those inducted can grasp the whole and understand.

To varying extents, the student leaves behind their old world — lest they be left behind by the new, shut out of History, not even worth relegating to its dustbin. It happens bit by bit, as one’s social circles either become absorbed by the Club or dissipate. Reactionaries and liberals, even if also brothers or friends, disappear  from the scene. Some may have issues with the Club’s Idea, or simply its ideas on accountability. But one is not a coward, and so one must hold to their commitments. One must not tolerate one’s enemies. One must know who one’s enemies are, and the Club identifies them with scientific precision.

Years become measured in internal events, sometimes mirroring the structure of an academic year plus summer camp. If it’s a good year, the calendar will be punctuated by the high holidays — March 8, May 1, November 7. At different paces some will be elevated to leadership, others will be filtered out completely. Some might be allowed to contribute or even to edit a piece for publication on the Club’s platforms. A few may last very many years in this cycle. They may even thrive. Of interest for us, at the outset of this essay, however, is the one who asks — not performatively, but really sincerely — why are we doing this?

Of course, such a ‘why’ question is difficult to answer because the object of inquiry is itself obscured by the thought in which it is raised. The Club obviously has a purpose — that is, in some sense, to transform society towards a political end. The purpose of the Club, what the Club understands itself as, is a class struggle organization which in some sense aims towards producing, intervening, or taking part in a revolution. So, a first possible answer has to do with a subjective purpose, an Idea. But again, why this

The first kind of answer responds to the question as if it were posed as to what end? In this case, the answer is given in the register of a principle or Idea. If the Club is a machine (it is), this is the question of its master code. As such, these answers can be summarized as essentially, “for communism.” Such a question does not put the Club itself in question, and indeed, it serves as the most fundamental basis of unity. This is the end to which the Club aspires, that is why it exists and has members. There is a fact to be accomplished and the Club is determined to accomplish it and so it is an absurd question to bring up anywhere other than in recruiting and agitating — in intercourse with the ‘outside’. This first kind of answer is expected to occur at the ‘limit’ of the Club because it is a question of value, a discriminating line according to which one can identify potential friends and enemies.

The second kind of answer hears the question as ‘how does our Club make progress towards this end?’ or, if you like, what is to be done? But that formulation is to jump ahead of ourselves. Anyway, all clubs have to be founded sometime, somewhere. The consequence of which is the fact that any given Club will have been produced within a specific conjuncture, under a specific thought (or code), bearing the marks of its specific fidelities. In a few words, this type of answer will provide the genealogy of the organization as both the necessity of its becoming and the process through which its guiding thought, theory, traditions, etc. were not only constituted, but proven fundamentally correct, as opposed to other Clubs or individuals, which serve as mere bearers of enmity or error, whether or not they still meaningfully exist. 

This second kind of answer brings us closer to danger, but it is only apparent. If the question is posed by an outsider and answered in this fashion, that is because the outsider is from another Club. It is the calling into question of the Club itself by an enemy. This in itself is not too troubling though — indeed, external enemies tend to produce internal cohesion, and only the Club can meaningfully call itself into question. The identification of external enemies in fact serves to confirm the correctness of the Club. However, for the question to be raised by a member of the Club, it is potentially a traitorous calling into question of the Club by a part of the Club itself, the unleashing of a line of inquiry that can reveal friends as always-already having been enemies. It is not only ‘why this Club and not that one?’ but also ‘why does this Club exist?’ The danger is that of an apparent partisan war machine being revealed as nothing more than a secularized bible study group. 

The third possible answer to the question we will consider is that which responds to the question, ‘granted I agree with the Club’s ends and its programme, having been a member for years, why are we not seeing a meaningful impact outside of our circles?’ This question is asked from within the thought of the Club, generally amidst a crisis of faith. It is a question which brings forward that which is unseen, or passed over in silence, a questioning of the connection between the absurdities of the Club and its signifying chain. Because of this, the answer can only be that of a denial, deflection — moral outrage at the suggestion that comrades have been mistaken, their work and dedication for nothing (tales of the devout asceticism of the leadership abound), accusations of subjectivism and vulgar empiricism (“calm before the storm, just wait until next congress, you can’t rush this, stop reading so much postmodernist/whateverist nonsense”), or fatalistically running head first into the immanence of the Club’s thought (“so we should just do nothing? Have you been keeping up with our newspaper? You only feel this way because you haven’t been as active lately, you better have a proven systematic alternative we can adopt”). To betray even in a whisper that one has thought the question makes one suspect. To raise it in the space of the Club is to declare somberly, at the threshold of one’s evacuation from History — O comrades, there is no comrade.  

But this is already too much. We have gone from the first days on campus to years in the future, and have assumed a series of questions and answers. We have proceeded by way of generality and semi-fiction. Quite the collection of categories have been called to stage. These are of great importance here, but what is most scandalous is the rarity of the posing of this third question. The rarity of the posing and the stakes inherent in doing so are our point of departure. The subject position is that of a Club member, invested in its world, straddling the divide between the Idea and the Club. The stakes are that of excommunication — not only from the Club, which will account for the majority of this member’s social investment, but from History itself. That is, excommunication, or death — not only death, but the second, eternal death reserved for the absolute enemy.

And so we begin, with a partisan standing alone before her comrades, uncertain of how her world will change once she begins to speak and ask in earnest: We have not only understood the world, but for years have sought to change it. Do the results of our practice confirm our theory? Comrades, how do we know what is to be done? What else can we do? — Why are we doing this?

Fidelity

Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process.
— György Lukács

… the basic task of our epoch has not changed, for the simple reason that it has not been solved.
— Leon Trotsky

When we talk about Lenin, we literally talk in different tongues. Each Club has its own, it has its own experiences, its own myths and meanings, its own teachers, which, since they are in the register of science, are also immanent (‘this Lenin, this and no other). However, for our purposes, the differences between these ‘Lenins’ are no more than quirks or flavours (some have meetings on Wednesdays, others on Thursdays). To that end, this section will restrict itself to two: 1) the sequence of politics inaugurated with What is to be Done? in 1902 ending in 1917; 2) the multiple intellectualities referred to as Leninism — that is, the network of terms which circulate among disparate Clubs (it does not matter if behind the Lenin mask lurks a Stalin or a Trotsky or vice-versa). The former is ‘in interiority’ since it is of the order of the subjective and singular, while the latter is ‘in exteriority’ since it is of the order of the objective and universal or scientistic rationality. Both pertain to fidelities to the same events but in different senses and to different effects. In explicating both, we will be nearer to answering our partisan’s question.

To begin, what Sylvain Lazarus terms ‘the Bolshevik mode’ of politics begins in February 1902 with the publication of What is to be Done? and ends in October 1917. After this, the party becomes part of the state, and the soviets — as a new form of social organization at a distance from the state — disappear. The process completed, the sites of the mode disappear, its historicity ceasing and leaving only a multiplicity of intellectualities I referred to above as ‘Lenin’ in the second sense.[4] The singular aspect of this mode is the conditionality of politics, which is to say,

[Proletarian] political capacity is neither innate, nor spontaneous, nor structural, but in its obligation to state its own conditions of existence. This condition convokes the party, but the party is not the expression of a class, it is itself conditional: it does not forge itself except as proportionate to consciousness of antagonism […] The condition of the party, in other words, what formulates the party, is the condition of its adequacy to situations. 

Essentially, Lenin enunciates the closure of a prior sequence of politics and opens a new one, producing the party form which would characterize the 20th century. This is in contrast with the ‘classist mode of politics,’ which Lazarus associates with the proper name ‘Marx’. In this mode, Marx enacts a separation of philosophy and history, and a fusion of politics and history,  meaning that, for Marx, it was the very operation of history according to which politics took place that History could be read, diagnosed, and given a prognosis. Here, History is a process that produces the proletariat, inherently among which are communists; in play is a consciousness of History or of classes in history. Analysis pertains to ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ or ‘what happened’ and ‘what could have happened.’ This presents a persistent gap between politics and history, although with the knowledge of a revolution to come, since it is a law of history.[6] For Lenin, the party is the condition which makes politics possible — History only produces spontaneous consciousness, revolutionary consciousness must come from outside. Thus, in Lenin there is a separation of politics from history. ‘History is clear; politics is obscure’ i.e., inter-imperialist war is the default without intervention of a party.[7] The party is to establish a hardened core of full time professional revolutionaries under the discipline of a centralize leadership and aim to transform the proletariat into a political class through its work “as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators, and as organizers.”[8]

Key here is this notion of separation, division, and invention — it is all of the order of thought which effectively raises its prescriptions for itself where it is its own end. The term ‘politics’ is understood as singular, rare, inventive, thought, at a distance from the State.[9] This is opposed to ‘the political,’ which is primarily of the order of the state, its governmentalities, and intellectualities.[10] Lazarus constantly stresses that there can be no continuous evolution between sequences, since positing this continuity effaces these subjective, inventive, non-statist aspects — they are only understood in reference to something other than themselves. In other words, the mode of politics in interiority only occurs once; it produces novel social forms and thoughts (terms which begin to circulate outside the mode in its historicity), and it reveals that the world as it is is not necessary. Terms and intellectualities pertaining to the sequence can re-appear in other modes (indeed, the party form is one such example), but they are not identical to their specific existence within the mode in interiority nor can one posit a kind of dialectical evolution proceeding from them.

To further demonstrate this distinction, the question ‘what was thought in the thought of the Bolshevik mode?’ can only be approached on the condition that one not turn their attention to causes, effects, successes, failures, which only refer to that which came before, or after the sequence. Likewise, when one posits that ‘social conditions determine social consciousness’ and aims to understand politics entirely in terms of ‘political economy’ they at best come up with a rationalization for outcomes which may raise the truth value of their particular ‘scientific’ views or honour their canon (if only it was him and not him calling the shots…), discrediting their tradition’s Great Betrayer, the comrade-brother lying in wait (is he in all of us? Better to be on guard). In other words, one fails to appreciate the sequence itself and renders it inaccessible to thought except in terms of the very determinations which it exceeded, transformed, and granted new meaning to. More simply, one is asking ‘what was new, what happened here?’ instead of ‘what conditions made that happen? What conditions made its failure or success inevitable?’

Perhaps best exemplifying the second ‘Leninism’ is György Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. Written some years after the lapsing of the sequence of the Bolshevik mode, one sees within its essays the expression of a doctrine that does not represent subjective invention at a distance from the state, but is itself a step in the incorporation of its novelties into the political. In a few words, Lukács argues essentially that History has produced a theory only the proletariat is capable of understanding, in order to understand History itself, and subsequently carry through the mission History has assigned to it — all of History has led up to this; it is the very meaning of History as a ‘total process’, although this meaning is only accessible to the subject-object of History, the proletariat. 

His starting point is Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach, and he proceeds to develop his system according to a dialectic of theory and practice, taking into account Lenin’s postulates regarding spontaneity — that there can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory. Since the historical process which gives rise to the proletariat as a class does not produce the proletariat as a political class, consciousness is required and theory is its prerequisite. The steps required here are that, for theory to be made effective, it must grip the masses and be transformed into a “vehicle of revolution.”[11] That is, “… the emergence of consciousness must become the decisive step which the historical process must take towards its proper end…”[12] The historical function of theory (for Lukács, the ‘dialectical method’ itself) is to make this ‘decisive step’ possible in practice.[13] He writes,

Only when [1] a historical situation has arisen in which a class must understand society if it is to assert itself; [2] only when the fact that a class understands itself means that it understands society as a whole and [3] when, in consequence, the class becomes both the subject and the object of knowledge; in short, only when these conditions are all satisfied will the unity of theory and practice, the precondition of the revolutionary function of the theory, become possible.

Which is to say, if theory is to realize its revolutionary function, it must not only understand society (the theoretical pole), it must seek to change it (the practical pole); they must form a unity of theory and practice. The theory must be “essentially the intellectual expression of the revolutionary process itself,” to the extent that “… every stage of the process becomes fixed so that it may be generalized, communicated, utilized and developed.”[15] Indeed, “… the theory does nothing but arrest and make conscious each necessary step, it becomes at the same time the necessary premise of the following one.”[16] In other words, the dialectical method will develop along with History understood as a total, single, process. It illuminates ‘stages’ and ‘steps’ which can then be generalized. Revolutionary theory, is by definition, only possible on the basis of this posited accumulation and generalizability — the function assigned theory here is the flattening of the singular into the general, it is the fetishization of method as a guarantee of an affinity between truth and thought. 

This method fetish is worth considering for a moment. It seems that this is centered around the category ‘totality’ since it “… is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science”[17] and “determines not only the object of knowledge but also the subject.”[18] Especially since the “totality of an object can only be posited if the positing subject is itself a totality; and if the subject wishes to understand itself, it must conceive of the object as a totality.”[19] Since only a totality can grasp a totality, it is impossible for an individual to do so, leaving classes as the points of view proper to historical transformation. Indeed, Lukács cautions us: “… the moment you abandon the point of view of totality, you must also jettison the starting-point and the goal, the assumptions and the requirements of the dialectical method.”[20] This is because the “whole system of Marxism stands and falls with the principle that revolution is the product of a point of view in which the category of totality is dominant.”[21] It should be stressed that ‘revolution’ here is understood as the transition from a State I to a State II — it is positioned as the category of politics in this intellectuality.[22] However, since this ‘revolution’ is a category of historicist thought, it is a thought in externality, concerned with the political rather than politics. 

Further, if we keep in mind that History has produced the proletariat as its subject-object, has produced a method for this subject-object to grasp itself and along with it, the situation in which it finds itself, from which it recognizes that ‘its time’ has come, the category of ‘totality’ renders the method — taken from Hegel and Marx, Lukács effectively posits a continuity that reaches beyond Marxism itself — exclusive to the proletariat as the class which will emancipate all others. Thus, on one side, one can place ‘bourgeois, idealist, individualist’ sciences, incapable of grasping society as a totality, doomed by History as a total process, and a single (“… there is nothing but a single, unified—dialectical and historical—science of the evolution of society as a totality.”[23]) ‘proletarian, materialist, totalist’ science. This methodological guarantee is key to guaranteeing the class nature of party and state, particularly if one recognizes the consequence of Lenin’s notion of consciousness which does away with any sense of a strict determination of subjectivity by one’s position in the production process. Determination of thought not by mode of being, but procedure of thought made possible by and applicable to such a mode. It becomes a question of how one invests in the social body, what one thinks, desires, rather than an economically determined essence of which subjectivity is merely the expression or epiphenomenon.

This leaves the reified proletariat — the proletariat which has been created by the Historical process but which has not taken the decisive steps towards consciousness — to hope for the emergence of a form capable of organizing it into a conscious class, capable of grasping itself as a totality. This is where Lenin’s innovation — the vanguard party — enters and is inscribed in History as an absolute necessity, due to the very structure of the logic of History that the Method allows us to understand. Lukács writes, 

The form taken by the class consciousness of the proletariat is the Party […] For the mechanical vulgarizers the party was merely a form of organization—and the mass movement, the revolution, was likewise no more than a problem of organization […] the organization is much more likely to be the effect than the cause of the revolutionary process, just as the proletariat can constitute itself as a class only in and through revolution. In this process which it can neither provoke nor escape, the Party is assigned the sublime role of bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the conscience of its historical vocation…

To summarize briefly, 1) the proletariat appears as an effect of the Historical process albeit in a reified form; 2) this process must produce a theory and practice which at a certain stage in development produces the party form as mediator of theory and practice, class and history; 3) the appearance of this form is itself the effect rather than the cause of the revolutionary process. In short, if the proletariat is to rise to power, it must recognize this as a necessity imposed on it, viz. the revolutionary process is that from which the revolutionary necessity derives. The same process that produces the theory produces the party and the revolution. With a sufficient grasp of method, and adequacy in its application, one can understand oneself as acting according to duty and repaying an infinite debt to one’s ancestors (millions of communists have died… how can you throw it all away?). One can also understand one’s particular Club, by virtue of its existence and its intellectuality, as signifying the objective possibility/inevitability of a revolution. All the more since, 4) the ‘totality’ fetish guarantees the class nature of the party, its intellectuality, and provides a line of demarcation according to which other claimants to the totality, the class perspective, are merely deluded, lacking the ‘class independence’ to truly to grasp things; and 5) since the Club is merely the effect of a process which “it can neither provoke nor escape,” its intellectuality considered as an expression of that same process, its existence a proof of that process, a subjective investment in the Club-as-necessary is produced such that its members can sincerely declare: Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me.

Thus, it becomes clear that our partisan’s question cannot really be heard by her comrades — from within their space of thought it is a nonsense question. The immanence of this system, in which everything is as it must be, in order to become what it always was becoming, is such that one cannot question it from within. There are correct interpretations, and incorrect interpretations. The Club has a total perspective which guarantees its correctness, its existence considered as an effect of an underlying revolutionary process guarantees that this process is continuously developing, always existing. Our partisan cannot possibly hope to contest this with her one-sided, subjective, individual standpoint, and she is unsure about ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water.’ If the question cannot be heard, if it cannot be satisfied from within the terrain, the terrain must be shifted, distinctions made in a different register.

Production

It would be absurd to conclude from a brief examination of a system of guarantees from the viewpoint of politics in the rare sense that all Leninisms are necessarily depoliticized, their intellectualities producing Correct Ideas Clubs. To do so would be to deny reality and contradict our point of reference, Lazarus, who posits the existence of a mode of politics in interiority which shared features with the Bolshevik mode — the ‘dialectical mode’ corresponding to the people’s army and people’s war in China.[25] Everything stands and falls with these distinctions of politics versus the political, singularity versus universality, invention versus application. The Club gravitates towards the political, universal, the application, and is said to be depoliticized, i.e., a form of adjustment and investment in the capitalist social formation.[26] Whether the party form can be expected to continue to serve as the form of organization, in both politics and the political, is not at hand for us — we are not in the register of dead-failures and live-failures.[27] What is at hand is a question posed from within the Club, which echoes Spinoza’s question: why do men fight for their enslavement as if it were their salvation? In order to answer our partisan’s question, we must move into the register of desire, and adopt the vocabulary of schizoanalysis developed by Deleuze and Guattari. However, this is only in service of constructing a bridge, using these terms to bend the stick, so that we may slip under the political, and for a moment glimpse what we may, grab what we can, and begin to think outside its immanences. To that end, this section is burdensome, it features the utterances of one incompetent in schizoanalysis, but is essential if our partisan is to be satisfied. As such, this section introduces conceptual terminology before offering a preliminary account of The Correct Ideas Club.

While the claim may seem counter-intuitive, the proper name ‘Deleuze and Guattari’ is that of a Leninist intellectuality, although a Leninism trying to adequately grasp a situation in which depoliticization has become widespread — a familiar theme, often described as the loss of Marxism’s historical referents — in which it seems that politics will have to emerge outside the ‘official’ movement. For Deleuze and Guattari, a subaltern class can only be constituted by a counterinvestment of the social “that creates its own interest in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.”[28] That is, the party represents the class and forms it — it presides over invention, or what we have called politics. The party assigns “aims and means, and effects a revolutionary break in the preconscious domain…”[29] The point here is to briefly demonstrate that Deleuze and Guattari upheld a variant of the Leninist idea which makes the party appear as necessary to the development of revolutionary consciousness. The necessity of the party here is still embedded in the logic of development of a social body, but it is no longer the logic of a total process with an emergent subject-object. Now, it is a matter of the emergence of new possibilities from the body of the old, of the incorporation of the new into the old or of the new’s overtaking the old and connstituting a new social body. Not only is there now economic and political class, with its corresponding consciousness, but there are preconscious and unconscious investments of the social field — a new separation, this time desire from politics. Meaning that where an organization may nominally have correct ideas, have a correct class basis, and otherwise be that which revolutionary ‘science’ has taught one to look for, it may nonetheless represent a benign growth on the surface of the social body which does not threaten to undo it, since it is, in our terms, depoliticized. In the register of science, one may look to the programme or doctrine and critique it according to the highest stage of science thus far achieved — this is not our task here however. The desire/politics separation allows Deleuze and Guattari to ask a very pertinent question: “why do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a reactionary type?”[30]

Here are the beginnings of an answer:  “We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with passion the system that oppresses them and where they always find an interest, since it is here that they search for and measure it. Interest always comes after.”[31] Important here are the terms ‘invest’ and ‘interest’ — a person searches for an interest in the social body in which they live and always finds one. Since “desire is always constitutive of a social field,” and “desire belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology, desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production…”[32], it must be the case that the desire which invests and constitutes the social field, is where interests can be sought. From this it follows that one’s investments and interests are dependent on encounters, one’s history, and not inherently determined by one’s position in social production or awareness of one’s position in a total process of History. This is still a Leninist thought regarding class consciousness — social being determines social consciousness, revolutionary consciousness comes from the outside, build the party, smash the state, enact a transition.

So, already, we have an image of a social body which is invested by desire, thus producing the real, in which interests are found. To introduce more terms: “Antiproduction effuses in the system: antiproduction is loved for itself, as is the way in which desire represses itself in the great capitalist aggregate. Repressing desire, not only for others but in oneself, being the cop for others and for oneself—that is what arouses, and it is not ideology, it is economy.”[33] Which is to say that where there is production, there is antiproduction, which reins in desire, appropriates its surplus, produces repressions — this, not this, but never that — and attempts to maintain the control of social machines over desiring-production. In the capitalist social body, antiproduction is represented by things such as the police, army, and surplus appropriation by capital — the expenditure of labour power by proletarians in exchange for wages in production at the same time produces the lack of access to means of consumption on the part of the proletarian and accumulation on the part of the capitalist. In other words, the form of social production engenders itself as if in a circle, and people participate in it because they have found interest in it, their desire invested in it. In other words, it is all Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.

It is plainly the case that one’s desire can be wrapped up in the social body in which one is oppressed — this is what Lenin was struggling with. Now, where there were economic and political classes, Deleuze and Guattari add preconscious and unconscious libidinal investments. It is worth reproducing some passages at length here:

First is that, “A revolutionary preconscious investment bears upon new aims, new social syntheses, a new power. But it could be that a part at least of the unconscious libido continues to invest the former body, the old form of power, its codes, and its flows.”[34] Which means that the preconscious investment is related to the new, but the unconscious libido remains invested in the old — this is what we call adjustment, or depoliticization. They continue, “… even when the libido embraces the new body—the new force that corresponds to the effectively revolutionary goals and syntheses from the viewpoint of the preconscious—it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment is itself revolutionary…”[35] Which raises the possibility of revolutionary consciousness without a revolutionary unconscious — thought, even if correct, is not enough. There must be something more.

To continue: “In fact, the unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the socius that desiring-production subordinates in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, and overthrown subordination.”[36] Which is to say that the unconscious revolutionary break implies an excess of desiring-production over the regime of social production it threatens. Going further,

The preconscious revolution refers to a new regime of social production that creates, distributes, and satisfies new aims and interests. But the unconscious revolution does not merely refer to the socius that conditions this change as a form of power; it refers within this socius to the regime of desiring-production as an overthrown power on the body without organs. It is not the same state of flows and schizzes: in one case the break is between two forms of socius, the second of which is measured according to its capacity to introduce the flows of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest; in the other case the break is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape, and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks.

Simply meaning that 1) the preconscious revolution is of the order of social production, of new aims and interests, and 2) the unconscious revolution has to do with the relation of the new to the old, the first case representing a new form of socius with its own regime of social production, the second representing a growth within the existing socius. In other words, the former declares that the old socius is not necessary — with its own codes, it produces its own necessities.

And thus they conclude: “It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so—and even remain fascist and police-like—from the standpoint of its libidinal investments. Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire.”[38] With this language of desire and investment one becomes able to discuss problems beyond the register of classism, orthodoxy, anti-revisionism, although at the cost of requiring burdensome vocabulary and immediately facing rejection for attempting to ‘step outside.’ That is, one does not need to meet the Club on its own terrain where their questions cannot be heard. Here, one must follow Althusser in concluding that ideology is not a matter of choice, or of thought — it is lived, it is encountered, it confronts us. So much so that the final caveat (“an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire”) can be read as saying that every partisan has to be born somewhere, in a social formation in which her desire invests, and begins to find her interest. The Club understands this and seeks to minimize the investments with which it must contend, aiming for younger, less experienced people. This will be returned to.

Now, another set of distinctions: a) the subject-group and b) the subjugated group. The following passages should provide a sense of their uses: 

a) “A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom; the effusion of antiproduction and death-carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more immortal; the phenomena of group “superegoization,” narcissism, and hierarchy—the mechanisms for the repression of desire.”

b) “A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group super-ego.”

For the former group, which we will also refer to as ‘in externality,’ we are in the register of the political — the necessity imposed by the productive forces, death-carrying elements, a sense of immortality, hierarchy, repression of desire. For the latter, ‘in interiority,’ desire subordinates social production, it knows itself and its inventions to be mortal, it exceeds thoughts of hierarchy.

And another term, this one more essential to our inquiry: paranoiac investments. Which, “… consists in subordinating molecular desiring-production to the molar aggregate it forms on one surface of the full body without organs, enslaving it by that very fact to a form of socius that exercises the function of a full body under determinate conditions. The paranoiac engineers masses, and is continually forming large aggregates, inventing heavy apparatuses for the regimentation and the repression of the desiring-machines.”[41] This type of investment produces “a disinterested love of the molar machine, a veritable enjoyment, with all the hatred it contains for those who do not submit to the molar machine: the entire libido is at stake.”[42] Which is to say, the immanence of the Club produces enemies out of defense of libidinal investments, out of defense of the machine and the pseudo-world which it creates through subordinating desiring-machines to itself. 

Indeed, the paranoiac aspires to the despot’s body, and the body of capital-money — which is the full body of the socius — “… or a new revolutionary body, the moment it becomes a form of power and gregariousness.”[43] Indeed, “to be possessed by this body as well as possessing it; to engineer subjugated groups for which one becomes so many cogs and parts; to insert oneself into the machine to find there at last the enjoyment of the mechanisms that pulverize desire—such is the paranoiac experience.”[44] The total subordination of the personality spoken about in Leninist literature is exemplified, insofar as “the paranoiac applies his delirium to the family—and to his own family—but it is first of all a delirium of races, ranks, classes, and universal history.”[45]

With the ground prepared, I can offer a preliminary account of the Correct Ideas Club: The Correct Ideas Club is pseudo-revolutionary machine and interest-producing apparatus which exhibits a paranoiac style of libidinal investment. It situates itself — particularly around high schools and universities — to break off flows of money and labour and overcode desires. The Correct Ideas Club engineers masses. It effuses antiproduction and death-carrying elements in its production, its dominant signifier that of History. Because it is depoliticized, it is production for production’s sake under the conditions of capital, complete with sales and recruitment quotas, fierce competition with other start ups (there can only be one!), and for those with the requisite virtue, a promising ascetic life, serving as censor, instructor, supervisor, and whip. As body of production, the Club produces meaning, interests, desires, inscription in History — money too. As body of antiproduction, the Club expends its surplus on flashy internal events, endless reading under supervision, the salaries of ‘full timers,’ offices, posters, publishing, and excessive amounts of booze. Sometimes it runs in elections. In the sphere of the social the Club finds itself isolated by other groups — often formally being asked to not appear at actions — but the paranoiac investment means the Club reads this as vindicating. That is, demonstrating the the necessity of defending its investment, of effusing its production with the production of enemies. The Club is also an abuse machine, its self-defense consisting in closing ranks around offending leaders, hush campaigns among members, smear campaigns against survivors, and occasionally, the quiet departure of offenders  — ‘the entire libido is at stake.’ The Club induces a psychic repression and a duty to produce more members, to produce more money, to produce more Club. It induces a ‘delirium of races, ranks, classes, and universal History’ — outbursts against ’distorters’, ‘deceivers,’ ‘identity politicians’ and ‘queer theorists’ understood as agents of state, wittingly or unwittingly, are to be expected. The Correct Ideas Club is Oedipalizing, it reproduces within itself the culture of silence and permissiveness characteristic of the bourgeois family. The Correct Ideas Club is the ascetic priest in Leninist drag.

Fraternity

Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to recognize, that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty.
— Deleuze and Guattari

… in my relations with my friends as well as with my enemies I have no other consideration than the revolutionary cause. Personal prejudices are absolutely foreign to me.
— Leon Trotsky

A very old opinion holds that what is most proper to the political is the maximum extension of friendship.[48] This is proper to the Club — except the friendship that it wishes to extend is that of the comrades and leaders. The friendship that is authorized, possible, valued within this thought of the political is one that flattens all singularities, endowing them with value only insofar as the Club remains its ends and condition. Should our partisan be excommunicated, she will lose these friendships, this family, this world, since she becomes heterogeneous in her quality, separated from those who remain dedicated to the Club (there is too much pressing internal work to be done, it’s a lot to ask them, and besides, they don’t want to raise suspicions). Friends will be transfigured into enemies. Which is to say that this friendship is subordinated to something other than itself, that the Club produces limits on friendships at the same time as it produces them. As mentioned in earlier sections, the Club prizes homogeneity among its membership which is also proper to the political — homogeneity among members qua members, a definite identification of ruler-ruled between rank-and-file and leadership, and definite friend-enemy distinctions. An aspect of this is the selection of young people without experience in recruiting. Once selected, these tabula rasa are fed into a regime of close supervision of intellectual activity among members. This can feature elaborate curricula, senior members tracking readings and intended interpretations chapter by chapter, and generally discouraging members from pursuing their own intellectual curiosity, either directly or through keeping members too busy with internal obligations. Written output is restricted to leadership-approved repetition of already established positions or what amounts to promotional material for the Club. This is assigned as a kind of honour. Another aspect is the supervision and enforcement of standards for social activity — it is likely the Club will regard the formation of non-official channels such as group chats among friends as ‘factionalism’ — which can include the monitoring of social media activity and systematically ‘checking in’ on former members or contacts. Further, the Club will interpret its intellectuality so as to enforce a bureaucratic ‘faux democracy’ in which all votes must be unanimous in order to demonstrate the strength of unity — read homogeneity — within the Club. Leadership will almost always be elected in the manner of a unanimous ‘yes’ for a pre-selected slate. This section deals with the question of friendship in the Club, universal History, and the political. 

The paranoiac investment of the social which characterizes the Club produces a type of friend which we will refer to as the comrade. It has elements of friendship — a form of equality, a similarity, an end — although this type of friendship is limited due to the site in which it occurs and the type of investment in play. Behind the mask of every friend, behind every comrade, is a possible enemy lying in wait. The condition of the friendship is belonging to the Club, or potentially belonging to the Club. In a sense, we can say that these comrades are friends in equality under History, or, a fraternity under the Club as paternal figure of History. Meaning beyond and for life is here premised on the friendship’s relation to History — the singular persons are incidental. Indeed, this is what is to be understood when Trotsky writes “… in my relations with my friends as well as with my enemies I have no other consideration than the revolutionary cause […] personal prejudices are absolutely foreign to me”[49]. On the one hand, there is the fact that for the political, there is no possible private enemy or friend[50] — friends and enemies are a public matter, identification of the enemy inaugurates the public, the possibility of war being their criteria of meaningful existence[51] — and on the other, it seems that for a partisan, one’s personality must be so subsumed by one’s organization, that one must absolutely reduce or devalue the quality of any relation which may be heterogeneous to it. Here we are in the register of the distinction between the temporal and the eternal, finitude and infinitude. 

Earlier it was asserted that the intellectuality of the Club is such that it derives its necessity from the very structure of History — History assigns tasks, the Club mediates the inscription of its members into the process. It promises a kind of immortality for its comrades and relegation to the dustbin of History for its enemies. One may do the work of the Club all their life and not see the Day, but they will die knowing they did what was necessary, that this fraternity under History lives on, that the Day will come because this is simply how History works. There is a messianic stench to this Club, that is in no way new — at least no newer than the Christianized Rome. 

Saint Augustine’s text The City of God — considered as thought in externality, as concerned with the state, organizing subjectivity around it — bears striking resemblances to the thought of our Correct Ideas Club in terms of its teleological account of History, inscribed in the very laws of reality, which can only be known through a method of reading doctrinal texts, and how it relegates this life to one of obedience, duty, and patience, in order that one may live a better, eternal life in the future. For our purposes, the text is to be read as dealing with the possibility of friendship and happiness outside of an established immanent intellectuality which presents itself as the real.

Since, in dying, what happiness a mortal achieved also ends, the happiness of mortals cannot be the ultimate end of life.[52] Indeed, “… eternal life is the supreme good and eternal death the supreme evil,” and “… to attain the one and avoid the other, we must live rightly.”[53] This is a significant departure from the ethics of earlier philosophers such as Cicero and Aristotle who “… wanted to be happy here and now and, through an astonishing vanity […] wanted to be made happy by their own actions.”[54] Where Cicero[55] praises friendship and honour as goods pleasurable in themselves for promoting the fellowship needed for a political community, and excellent friendships for producing a kind of life in excess of life, Augustine outright denies that such things could produce real happiness — without being ordered towards God, there can be nothing good. The significance of this will be made apparent shortly.

The City of God for Augustine is the name granted to both the holy kingdom which is to appear at the end of History, and the fellowship which serves to carry out what is demanded by the process. In other words, the City of God is both a promised state of affairs and the multitude of bearers and sites of the process which serve as the manifestation of the process. Or, in a more familiar tone: the City of God is the ‘real movement’. Since it's the case that 1) “… anyone who is unable to view the whole is on that account offended by the deformity of the part, since he is ignorant of its fitness or proper relationship to the whole. . .”;[56] that 2) “no human being acts rightly unless assisted by divine help,”[57], and 3) “true reason does not permit more than one [thing] to be true…”[58] it must be that the City of God represents the sole possibility of happiness, or liberation from earthly miseries. The City of God, or its bearer, the Church, then, mediates mortals in their relationship with the divine in accordance with the plan which it can grasp adequately enough to save souls, until the day of Judgment arrives and it rules with and in God for eternity. And so, since earthly happiness, and earthly virtue are neither happiness nor virtue, the City offers hope:

… as we are made well by hope, so we are made happy by hope; and as we do not presently possess well-being, but look forward to it in the future “with patience,” so it is with happiness. This is because we are now among evils, which we must endure patiently, until we arrive at those goods in which we will find only indescribable delight and none of the things which we must now endure. Such well-being, which we will find in the future world, will itself be final happiness. Because they do not see this happiness, the philosophers refuse to believe in it, but struggle to fabricate for themselves in this life an utterly false happiness through a virtue as dishonest as it is proud.

This pride of virtue is that of a usurper, the threat of false values, of rendering proper mediation impossible. Augustine writes, “… pride imitates God in a distorted way. It hates equality with partners under God, but wants to impose its own domination upon its partners in place of God…”[60] Nothing can exist outside of the immanence of the City — it can only stray from its nature, from God. It can only be corrupted or be corrupting. 

Forced to endure a world of evils, to fill one’s life with experience to ultimately be judged, there is the love of God, and hope. The promised end already exists in germ form. Augustine writes, “those who share in this good have a holy fellowship with both him to whom they cling and with one another. Together they form one city of God, which is his living sacrifice and living temple…”[61] and “… even now the church is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven.”[62]

Further entrenching the necessity of the City as the mediator of History, Augustine inscribes it into the order of things:

The peace between a mortal man and God is an ordered obedience, in faith, under the eternal law […] The peace among human beings is ordered concord. The peace of the household is an ordered concord concerning commanding and obeying among those who dwell together. The peace of the city is an ordered concord concerning commanding and obeying among the citizens. The peace of the heavenly city is a fellowship perfectly ordered and harmonious, enjoying God and each other in God. The peace of all things is the tranquility of order.

Every link in this chain is a relationship of commanding and obeying — everything from the relationship of a man to himself (“In serving God, the soul correctly rules the body, and the reason in the soul subordinate to the Lord God correctly rules lust and the rest of the corrupt parts of the soul.”[64]), to the members of a household or a city, to the divine is ordered according to commanding and obeying. Indeed, “… when one who knows how to love himself is commanded to love his neighbor as himself, what else is commanded except, as much as he can, to show his neighbor that it is good to love God? This is worship of God. This is true religion.”[65] The friendship one experiences with oneself, a friendship of commanding and obeying, is the same as friendship with God, which in practice commands the expansion of this particular type of friendship. One may say it’s the reproduction on an extended scale of friendship under God. It is the only worthwhile way to relate to oneself, to relate to one’s neighbors, to relate to one’s kin — it must be ordered to God, to his end.

However, the City of God, since the Fall, must exist intermingled with the Earthly City — the city of non-believers, sinners, mortals. The task of the City is to save as many members of the Earthly City, to induct them into this fraternity of friendship and obedience under God. Indeed, “among [its] enemies hide its future citizens. Living among them, may that [heavenly] city not think it fruitless to bear their hostilities until such time as it obtains their confessions of faith…”[66] The City lives among its enemy-friends until the day comes, and mortal enemies become eternal enemies. It attempts to use alms to extend this friendship where it can (“Through alms, the needs of the just are met and they become friends who might accept them into the eternal tabernacles”[67]). Which is to say that the City is fulfilling the tasks assigned to it by history:

… That is why the church prays for those who are its enemies among the human race now, for now is the time for fruitful repentence. For what does the church most especially pray on their behalf, except that, as the apostle says, “God might grant them repentence and that they might return to their senses from the traps of the devil, by whom they are held captive, according to his will.

Not only friendship under God, but as mentioned,its reproduction on an extended scale, the maximum extension of this fraternity. One is by Nature part of the city; one is apart from it only due to deviation, the evil of the world into which one is born. It is not enough that the friend is known as friend, the friend of God be the friend of God as the instantiation of proper friendship with self, but that the enemy is known as enemy, and treated as such. Thus, “… in order to be innocent, duty demands not only that one not bring evil to anyone, but also that one restrain another from sin or punish his sin, so that either the person who is punished might be set straight by the experience or others frightened by his example.”[69] Virtue in one’s actions is not enough — it must be ordered to God.

Not affirmation of difference or singularity, but rather, indifference through the operation of homogenizing universality. Augustine writes:

So long as this heavenly city journeys on the earth, it calls forth citizens from all peoples and gathers a society of foreigners speaking all languages. It is not troubled at all about differences in customs, laws, and institutions by which the earthly peace is either sought or maintained. So long as they do not impede the religion which teaches the worship of the one, supreme, and true God, the heavenly city abrogates or destroys none of them, but indeed observes and follows them, for whatever the diversities of different nations, they nevertheless strive toward the one and the same end of earthly peace.

Difference is here annulled and subsumed under a teleological end. It is an indifference to difference with the condition that difference must not ‘impede the religion’. In essence, difference is effective only insofar as it is the difference of friend and enemy. All may be friends, unless they be enemies. Given this universalization, this negative indifference to difference, what serves the function of discrimination?

Tentatively, it is a methodology of producing knowledge of History, it is the immanence of the intellectuality. Augustine writes:

… no one denies or doubts that the final judgment will be through Jesus Christ in such a manner as is announced by those holy writings except one who, through some strange sort of incredible animosity or blindness, does not believe those same writings which have already demonstrated their own truth to the whole world. We have learned, then, that these things will come about in or with that judgment […] That all these things will come must be believed. In what ways and in what order they will come, however, the experience of the events themselves will then teach with more completeness than human intelligence can attain now.

While here is not the place to give an account of Augustine’s method, it can be described as a method of reading doctrinal texts, wherein the events of the Old Testament, of Biblical History, are shadows of the future. Indeed, Augustine castigates Cicero for denying the possibility of knowledge of the future, because the possibility of such knowledge is actual knowledge upon which he bases his understanding of History.[72] Some of this should thematically be familiar: an already demonstrated truth, a presupposition of enmity on the part of those who reject or fail to recognize it, the coming event, and the recognition of inadequacy of method or thought which forces a concession to contingency with the presupposition that it will lead to this event inevitably.

Care

We know ourselves to be saturated by history, we feel the extraordinary force of its determinations; we are also steeped in a discourse of its insignificance, and, above all, we know that history will no longer (always already did not) act as our redeemer. 
— Wendy Brown

Be excellent to each other...
And party on.
— Bill and Ted

As with the friendship proper to the City of God, so with the friendship proper to the Club. These friendships share a history, a striking resemblance, which cannot be mere coincidence. With the advent of Leninism began a revolution in the concept of the political — war was no longer to be between states, but between parties — to be further developed by Mao and the national liberation struggle mode of politics. The enemy is now the global class enemy, fought asymmetrically by irregular and state forces. It is absolute enmity, which aims at the total destruction of the enemy, the impossibility of his being. It is war aimed at eternal peace — war on war itself, war in excess of the laws of war.[74] In a few words: socialism or barbarism, heaven or hell. Proper to this is a messianic friendship premised on this coming event (did it already happen? is it happening now?), guaranteed by the thought of History under which these friends know each other as such. These are friendships common and customary, ordered to eternity, to the promised friend and friendship to come, in excess of the merely temporal. The friendship of the comrade is derivative friendship, premised on an equality (a homogeneity and interchangeability), a utility — more legal than ethical — and to some extent pleasure. But ultimately, it is a friendship ordered towards a friendship to come, one that today is impossible, but perhaps one day will be.[75] That is, it is a programmatic friendship which can only be derived from the existence of the enemy (real or promised), a friendship possessing a telos which carries it into the space of the political, foreclosing the possibility of thinking politics in the rare, inventive sense (is the Club’s communist socius a secular City of God? Surely this was settled by the Cold Warriors?). To have a friend is to be put under the law of the other, it is to be able to think the other, if not the condition of all thought — the quality and localized site of one’s friendships truly presents the horizon and limit of one’s mode of life. Above, it has been claimed that the Club is a machine. Here, I will add that in a sense it is a friendship machine, a brother-friend-enemy machine, its production effused with the eschatological so that we may also say that it is a future machine. Through its operation it opens the space of the comrade, it produces her world, where she finds her interest, realizes the meaning of her speech and acts, establishes her friendships, and develops a mode of life. One becomes a comrade when the mode of one’s life has become determined and marked, overcoded, by its articulation with the Club. The consequence of such articulation is the opening of the space in which our partisan raises (or does not) a question which cannot be heard. Here, at the edge of History, our partisan finds another history, and passes judgment on this one: O comrades, there is no comrade.

Comrades, in the space of the Club, there is no comrade. Further, to this address should be added that there is no enemy. The concept of the political — here, it is the international class enemy to be vanquished in the coming revolution — which this comradeship is proper to can only be identified and endowed with effectivity within the space of the Club’s intellectuality. That is, this enemy cannot be actual, it can only appear for those in the Club. For the political to exist, for there to be a meaningful friend-enemy distinction, war must be an immanent threat. The Club must be able to decide on war against the state, as its own state in embryo, or the state must be able to decide on war against the Club. It must be a concrete possibility, which as soon as it becomes possible, is eventual. The Club can easily point to historical examples of persecutions or state repression by states that no longer exist, or of the sacrifices of their ancestor-brothers as proof of the effectivity of the enemy, or maybe someone they knew got arrested one time, or that the state is using claims of abuse within the Club to ‘wreck’ or that every other local organization hates them, but the fact is that these are not even remotely close to the possibility of war, the eventuality of killing or being killed as a brother of History. Which is why the Club must be a brother-friend-enemy machine, and why it is characterized by the paranoiac libidinal investments which give it the sense of operating as a trauma-abuse machine when viewed from the outside. In the absence of an effective enemy, the Club must manufacture one. There is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of History — too abstract to be effective, can be applied to anyone and anything given the correct axioms. There is then the (non-real, pseudo-political) enemy of the Club — the competing Club, the brother-betrayers, the unionists who did not follow their dictates, the activists who scoff at their sales tactics, the dead intellectuals who did not make it onto their reading lists, etc. To be sure, enemies do in fact exist in effectivity (e.g. there are active people’s wars in the Philippines and India) but the Club has nothing to do with these groupings. The Club may even deny that such things are happening, or have historical meaning, since it falls outside of its immanence, that is, fails to lend support to its self-guarantees of correctness. To the same effect, the Club could identify with a side in these wars, express support, campaign, etc., but this is not the same as belonging to a friend-enemy grouping, which is always concrete and without doubt. It is often the case that a Club will try to shore up its legitimacy by pointing to incidents on the other side of the world and take credit, or assign blame. Yet even if the Club were to ascribe to a similar intellectuality as those parties engaged in war, it could be neither friend nor enemy in any meaningful sense. Neither capital nor the state are particularly concerned about the Club — it is a benign growth on the body of capital, another possible site of investment in its necessity, another way to trap desire, prevent its overflowing. This is one meaning of the term depoliticization. 

What this depoliticized Club leaves us with is a derived friendship in the miserable present in service of a promised perfect friendship to come. A hope for the eternal. That is, for the coming judgment or event, where these friends will be weighed, sorted, separated, justice dispensed, one’s meaning determined forever (did you do your duty, or are you a traitor?). This is so-called universal History. This is the History which ineluctably draws thought into the register of the state, the necessity of the conjuncture, and the ascetic priest — it is the History of nihilists. It is the History that is clear. Clear because it obscures politics as the price of a promise, a guarantee.

What about this other history? There are likely as many histories as there are practices, bodies, and terms. Here I will mention just one, not as the History which will give us emancipatory politics, but as a point of departure from that of the Club. This is the history of friendship, which Cicero speaks about in On Friendship. The history of those great friends whose names echo through it. For Cicero, this history is the history of pairs of men who were friends of virtue, who through their friendship became other selves, their other differences nullified and transmuted. This nullification extends into death: when a friend of this type dies, nothing bad has happened to the friends — one’s life is extended beyond life by having lived this friendship, by living on in the living friend, their names signifying the singular process of their relationship inscribed in this history which has no end.[76] One does not need to reject History, but from the vantage point to which we have climbed, one may see that there are other paths available than that of the comrade in the Club.

None of this is to prescribe a return to the ethics of the Romans and Greeks, but it is to point towards that which is unthinkable within the depoliticized intellectuality of the Club and the mode of life it induces one to not only sacrifice the whole of one’s personality for, but to desire making such a sacrifice, continuously. Which is the possibility that doing so may not be necessary, that the practices of the Club have no causal relation to that which is its supposed end, i.e., the virtue of the Club is only apparent. The party form and logic of History from which it is derived may very well be involved in the next sequence of politics — I am not contesting the thought of those parties which are engaged in people’s war — and the ideas of the Club may even be correct. However, if politics is indeed rare, its emergence aleatory and its life sequential, we need to seriously consider our partisan’s question and consider whether in our efforts to free ourselves from all determinations we are really making ourselves unfree. That is, whether our investments of the social Oedipalize us, deform our friendships (and thus ourselves), and orient us towards accusations against life and the world or whether they open us to play, to affirming the new although we may not know how to produce it or if it will be produced or when.

All of which is to say that while politics may be rare, one still lives and thinks in the situation they inhabit. One still inevitably finds their interest. One still sees the symptoms of a hysteria within the social, understands that one is unfree, and thus still, almost obsessively, asks oneself: ‘what is to be done?’ The Club offers an answer to the question and an approach to its realization, but as has been argued here, this is in the register of the pseudo-political. From our viewpoint, however, the question must now be posed in the register of the ethical. That is, in terms of what Michel Foucault in the final years of his life began referring to as the care of the self, and what I here have broadly gestured towards with the term ‘friendship’ and the deployment of the language of desire.[77]

If the friend is another self, when one asks oneself a question one is already dealing with multiple selves. Otherwise, since friendship is the condition of thought, the question could not be posed and could not be answered. That is, the question is not that of an individual seeking an individual practice into which one can retreat from the social. It is necessarily posed in relation to others, in an affirmation of one’s relation to others. It is a question of the modality of such affirmation — does it open or foreclose possibility? When this question is posed within the space of the Club, its answer comes in the form of a duty to subordinate friendships to itself, indirectly through the mode of life its comrades develop as parts of a whole, or directly through pressure to recruit, sell newspapers, promote events and so on. This has already been identified as symptomatic of a historical nihilism. By proposing that the question instead be posed to one’s self, which is always to address one’s friends, we open ourselves to overcoming such nihilism. In a few words, once we leave the register of the depoliticized pseudo-political and affirm the rarity of politics, we can affirm our becomings without the mediation of the Club and in doing so produce our own values in excess of those imposed on us. The meaning of suffering and death is thus transformed from that which is guaranteed to be redeemed in the realization of History and becomes indeterminate, open to experimentation, to innovation. In a sense, it opens a space of freedom.

‘What is to be done?’ is the question we must continually ask ourselves. The appropriate direction in which this asking proceeds is precisely anti-political, and has been indicated by Foucault in his interpretation of Plato’s Apology. In this dialogue, Socrates says

… if I had long ago attempted to be politically active, I would long ago have perished, and I would have benefited neither you nor myself […] if someone who really fights for the just is going to preserve himself even for a short time, it is necessary for him to lead a private rather than a public life.

There is a relationship between death, politics, and public life on the one hand and life, justice, and private life on the other. Socrates’ relationship to truth and his Delphic mission preclude direct participation in the political — they are antithetical to his ability to carry out such a mission and live as he speaks. For Socrates, what is to be done, what he decides to die rather than live without practicing, is to teach men to care for themselves. To be concerned with virtue, with their souls.

Now, one does not need to adopt any of Plato’s positions, nor use terms like ‘virtue’ or believe in a tripartite division of the soul. That is not what’s being advocated here. What I take from this is the term ‘care’ (what is that?) which is essentially indeterminate, its meaning changing with how one is invested in the social, how one relates to their self and therefore others. In the above discussion of Augustine, it was argued that the immanence of his intellectuality demanded a friendship which was ordered towards God, or the eternal. There is a resemblance to what is being put forward here, although for Socrates, as with Cicero, the role of death is reduced to something fundamentally unknowable rather than an ultimate evil to be avoided. The meanings of death and suffering can be produced by friendship, life beyond life produced as a consequence of how one cared for one’s self and taught others to care for theirs. Going further, one takes on a friendship knowing one will die, one mourns as one lives, but one also transfigures the other’s death into life by surviving, by living in such a way that one is carried on through their friends when their time comes. The affirmation of life is only possible through mourning its end. Each self is singular, as is each friendship, not all will be excellent — this cannot be guaranteed — but some might be.

Rather than an Oedipalizing fraternity under History, a community of practitioners of care, or investigators of the social. The Revolution does not need a general staff and the class does not need to be represented and thought for by a Club. In every situation, even beyond the end of History, people think. For people to think, to raise thoughts that are both of the real and in excess of the real, they need friendship. Published in the 1980s, there is a line in John Sullivan’s satirical pamphlet ‘As soon as this pub closes’ that cuts to the core of what I am trying to express here:

In sum political sects provide a refuge which many people need, either permanently or temporarily. They are the heart of a heartless world and will disappear only when that world begins to change.

Our partisan may have revealed herself as a traitor when she posed her question to her comrades, and from their perspective, she may be an enemy or perhaps just astray. But that is one sided, since we are not in a space where the term has effective meaning. Instead, we turn away from the Club, we reorient our friendships towards care, and begin the work of endlessly posing to ourselves Lenin’s famous question: what is to be done?

It may be a disappointment that in this essay there is no attempt at overturning the party form, nor even an appeal to adopt work in the form of affinity groups — neither in themselves produce emancipatory politics and can equally be described as Clubs in their own ways. This essay does not even propose an alternative for political practice. It simply raises a call for our comrades to think, to ask, and to affirm the rarity of politics. Politics is rare, but friendship is not. What is being pointed out is that with the Club there is a danger that one’s desire becomes caught in the pseudo-political, that one lives as a nihilist, without there being any connection to the possibility of politics. Regardless of the form of organization one participates in, this risk remains. Consequently, this lack of relation between the political and politics allows us to pursue our work as practitioners of care and social investigators (remember Mao — “to investigate a problem is to solve it”). ‘Why are we doing this?’ is from here on answered not in the terms of History, but rather in the terms of care, of producing friendship, of demonstrating what it truly means to think within a concrete situation. The ways in which we relate to our selves and affirm our becomings do not need to be valorized as politics or political. It is better for one to choose their work, friendships, and interests for themselves. We can live in this world, in the world we build with our friends, rather than in service of one that is promised to come. In this way, the organizations we build can actually be the consequence of our practice and thought rather than our practice being the consequence of a theoretical need to build our organizations as a prerequisite for politics.

Notes

  1. ‘History’ is capitalized throughout to communicate the sense in which the concept is weighted in the intellectualities under consideration in this essay, as well as to insist on a proximity between such intellectualities and those theologies which feature an eschatology and ‘divine plan.’
  2. “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,” in History and Class Consciousness, by György Lukács, Foundations, #19 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021). Lukács is clear about the necessity of subordinating one’s personality to the party, writing: “The only decisive weapon [the party] possesses is its ability to draw together all the party members and to involve them in activity on behalf of the party with the whole of their personality.” (375) and “Freedom—as the classical German philosophers realized—is something practical, it is an activity. And only by becoming a world of activity for every one of its members can the Communist Party really hope to overcome the passive role assumed by bourgeois man when he is confronted by the inevitable course of events that he cannot understand,” (377).
  3. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1922), 224. “Toward the end of November occurred the “wine-pogrom” « 7 »—looting of the wine-cellars—beginning with the plundering of the Winter Palace vaults. For days there were drunken soldiers on the streets…”
  4. Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, trans. Gila Walker, The French List (Seagull Books, 2015), 29–35.
  5. Sylvain Lazarus, “Can Politics Be Thought in Interiority?,” trans. Tyler Harper, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 12, no. 1 (January 2016): 17.
  6. Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, 42–43.
  7. Sylvain Lazarus, “Lenin and the Party, 1902-November 1917,” in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 20070601), 260.
  8. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, Foundations, #15 (Paris: Foreign languages press, 2021), 83.
  9. Lazarus, “Can Politics Be Thought in Interiority?”; Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought? (Duke University Press, 2018).
  10. When I write ‘the political’ it is in the sense of that which is concerned with the state and its reproduction. Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
  11. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 10.
  12. Ibid, 10.
  13. Ibid, 10.
  14. Ibid, 10-11.
  15. Ibid, 11.
  16. Ibid, 11.
  17. Ibid, 39.
  18. Ibid, 40.
  19. Ibid, 40.
  20. Ibid, 41.
  21. Ibid, 41.
  22. Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, 176–204.
  23. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 40.
  24. Ibid, 54.
  25. Lazarus, “Can Politics Be Thought in Interiority?”
  26. Asad Haider, “On Depoliticization,” Viewpoint Magazine, December 16, 2019, https://viewpointmag.com/2019/12/16/on-depoliticization/.
  27. J. Moufawad-Paul, Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain (John Hunt Publishing, 2016).
  28. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 7th ed. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), 344.
  29. Ibid, 344.
  30. Ibid, 344.
  31. Ibid, 346.
  32. Ibid, 348.
  33. Ibid, 346.
  34. Ibid, 347.
  35. Ibid, 347.
  36. Ibid, 347.
  37. Ibid, 347-48.
  38. Ibid, 348.
  39. Ibid, 348.
  40. Ibid, 348-49.
  41. Ibid, 364.
  42. Ibid, 364.
  43. Ibid, 365.
  44. Ibid, 365.
  45. Ibid, 365.
  46. Ibid, 344.
  47. Leon Trotsky, “Leon Trotsky to Maurice Paz,” July 11, 1929.
  48. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (Verso, 2005).
  49. Trotsky, “Leon Trotsky to Maurice Paz.”
  50. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 28.
  51. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 85–90.
  52. The City of God,” in Augustine: Political Writings, by Augustine of Hippo (Hackett Publishing, 1994), 141.
  53. Ibid, 143.
  54. Ibid, 143.
  55. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Laelius, on Friendship (Laelius de Amicitia) ; &, The Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis), trans. J. G. F. Powell (Aris & Phillips, 1990); Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero: On Duties (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
  56. “City of God,” 116.
  57. Ibid, 165.
  58. Ibid, 142.
  59. Ibid, 146-47.
  60. Ibid, 152.
  61. IIbid, 87.
  62. Ibid, 168.
  63. Ibid, 154.
  64. Ibid, 161.
  65. Ibid, 73.
  66. Ibid, 11-12.
  67. Ibid, 183.
  68. Ibid, 181.
  69. Ibid, 157.
  70. Ibid, 158.
  71. Ibid, 173-74.
  72. Ibid, 36.
  73. “Wounded Attachments,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, by Wendy Brown (Princeton University Press, 2020), 71.
  74. Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen, 2. [Druck] (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 20).
  75. The language in this section is by and large taken from Derrida’s Politics of Friendship.
  76. Cicero, Laelius, on Friendship (Laelius de Amicitia) ; &, The Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis).
  77. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011).
  78. Plato, Plato’s Apology of Socrates: An Interpretation, with a New Translation, trans. Thomas G. West (Cornell University Press, 1979), 31d.
  79. John Sullivan, “As Soon as This Pub Closes,” 40, accessed December 12, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/As-soon-as-this-pub-closes.pdf.