In 1904, a debate over questions of organizational form was unfolding between Lenin and Trotsky within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, prompting an intervention from Rosa Luxemburg. The party’s responsibility, Luxemburg argued, was not only to represent class interests of urban, industrial workers but “all who are oppressed by bourgeois domination.” The strongest party was one that served as a “haven of all discontented elements in our society and thus of the entire people, as contrasted to the tiny minority of capitalist masters,” she wrote.

Echoes of this idea can be found across the history of the left. In Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, Sarah Gordon, a former Communist militant from the Bronx, describes how party membership inscribed her life with meaning: “It was rich, warm, energetic, an exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. It nourished us when nothing else nourished us. It not only kept us alive, it made us powerful inside ourselves.” Partway through her eponymous memoir, Assata Shakur reflects on the people that she met in the course of her organizing in the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. “I was caught up in the music of struggle, and i wanted to dance,” she writes. “I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me.”

A haven where the music of struggle plays and all the discontented and oppressed are wrapped in the rich, warm, energetic embrace of their friends and comrades: this is what a political party can be, not just a ballot line or a program. It is a school and a weapon and a refuge. For those of us who imagine and demand a better world, organization is the thing that initiates struggles that bring others into the experience of solidarity—what Jodi Dean describes in Crowds and Party as “an affective infrastructure that enlarges the world.”

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/when-the-partys-over-oconnor