For the better part of the last
decade, the most exciting political force has been the crowd. Worldwide we feel
the opposition of the crowd in demonstrations, riots, occupations, and,
sometimes, in revolutions. This paper considers the political opening of the
crowd event—the excitement crowds incite, particularly in contrast to the
melancholia of leftists who traffic in failure and misery. My claim is that the
crowd signals the paradoxical power of the people as political subject (by
“people” here, I mean the people as the rest of us, the people divided from
elites and rulers, the people as an unavoidably split subject). The crowd is
not the people and the crowd is not a political subject. Rather, the people
appear as the subject of politics when the innovation of the crowd event can be
attributed to them, retroactively, as an effect of and in fidelity to the
egalitarian crowd discharge. To make the argument, I bring Elias Canetti
together with Alain Badiou, connecting Cannetti’s account of the crowd with Badiou’s
discussion of subjectivation and the subjective process in Theory of the Subject. Even though Badiou himself would no longer
agree, I argue that maintaining fidelity to the egalitarian crowd discharge is
the task of a communist party. An international communist party faithful to
global crowds can make them appear as “the people,” giving a politics to the
international force that they already are.