The communist hypothesis and the question of organization

Abstract

In this text, I explore some of the consequences of the notion of the communist hypothesis in relation to the “organization question” and, in particular, the emerging debate regarding the appropriate party-form for radical politics today. Firstly, I will argue that the sometimes obscure organizational implications of the generic claim of communism become clearer when we situate this discussion historically as a transposition and continuation, “in philosophical terms”, of some of the central debates of the alter-globalization movement. Secondly, I intend to explore some significant models of organization that emerged in previous periods, in which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts to rethink the party form: a) the notion of “compositional party”, derived from the experience of Italian operaismo, recently – and perhaps surprisingly – re-proposed in Commonwealth, by Hardt and Negri; b) the conceptualization of the party as a “laboratory” in which a unitary “political subject” could be forged, which was most coherently theorized by the work of the young Lukács; and c) Gramsci's exhortation for the formation of a “modern prince”, as a direction of the conflict inherent to political modernity through a constituent party-form.