Beneath Class and Consciousness

A Critique of Phil A. Neel’s Theory of the Party

La città che sale by Umberto Boccioni (1911)

“It is in the name of what it builds that a party appears before the tribunal of communist evaluation.
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject¹

I. Introduction

Today we are witnessing a turn of revolutionary thought back towards the question of the party. After a period of explicit rejection of the party-form from various ultra-left currents, debates on organizational considerations (such as horizontalism, autonomism, communization, and tiqqunism/appelism’s “imaginary party,” to name but a few) have been brought to bear against the intensification of the class struggle and the inability of the large-scale uprisings of the 2010s and early 2020s to coalesce into a revolutionary situation on their own terms. Beyond (and at times alongside) the ultra-left, factions within the Democratic Socialists of America have also undertaken more serious considerations into the question of the party. Where the partyists of the democratic socialist current assume the party in its form as a traditional political party, they are incapable of articulating a position in practice distinct from that of the Democratic Party’s ballot line. What the ultra-left and democratic socialist currents share in their rapprochements with the party is the attempt to consider the party on different terms than its degradation in the practices of various so-called Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, or Maoist sects.

Within the ultra-left milieu, Phil A. Neel has recently attempted to salvage the concept of the party in his essay “Theory of the Party,” certain parts of his newest book Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, and his subsequent writings on partisan organization. Across his body of work, Neel has produced valuable geographic research and insight into the global operation of the capitalist mode of production today. In his conjunctural and regionally specific studies of social conditions, Neel’s work is detailed and genuinely useful. It is, however, appended to a theoretical mélange that leaves us with a mistaken guide to political action. The recent turn towards considerations of the party must take up the question of the form of the communist party specifically as a vehicle of revolutionary struggle.

Neel’s effort to think the party gains its particular significance for its recognition of place and moment, and its commitment to the political significance of the rebellions, uprisings, and retributive acts of recent decades to the question of organization. He attempts to lay out the fundamentals of a distinctly revolutionary communist project through the theorization of the subjectivity of the revolutionary communist partisan, the subjectivity’s relationship to the proletarian classes, and the attendant forms of partisan organization that develop in this process of social relation. He aims to problematize many traditional accounts of the question of organization, seeking to show the ways in which it is more often invoked as a salve than any concrete prescription. Rather than developing a programmatic account of the party, Neel bases his theory on the core assumption that processes of subjectivation are set into motion by Events that exceed the boundaries of the social order and thus open up a possibility of communist measures to be implemented in the contingency of the rupture. This passive conception of the party is precisely the critical failing of his theory. There will continue to be uprisings and they will be critical sites of intervention, but the providential impulse to see each instance of such as an immediate path to communist revolution is not a tenable basis for the formation of the party.

We take no issue with the objective of the advance of a communist project through the formation of the party, nor with the necessity of developing a communist party capable of making militant tactical advances and staging the conditions for insurrection. It is absolutely essential that the question of the development of the communist party is undertaken not on the terms of its being a traditional political party that aims to act within the parliamentary structures of the capitalist state, or as one more isolated and cultish sect, but instead on the terms of the intentional construction of the communist party as a vehicle for revolutionary struggle, able to unite different forms of practical activity towards that end. These needs are points of agreement upon which we establish this critical intervention.² Rather, we aim to critique the means that Neel proposes towards the formation of the party, and the ways in which his theory’s political prescriptions and implications practically frustrate the realization of the objective of militant communist struggle.

Neel’s theory of the party is unable to posit a distinctly communist project. A communist project necessitates creating the means to develop a specifically communist politics, and fundamental limitations of Neel’s theoretical position render him incapable of doing this. His theory disavows the active role of any conscious relationship to the process of political development. Instead, he begins from a tactical fetishism that, in its attempt to defend the political potential of the uprisings of recent decades, reduces the practice of determining a communist political content to the deployment of tactics themselves in localized moments of open conflict. The terrain of tactical engagement with the armed forces of the capitalist state, however, is demonstrably not solely that of the proletariat or communist militants, but right-wing and explicitly fascist militants as well. The question of tactics and their relationship to the political content of mass mobilizations must then be critically engaged. Instead, Neel simply assembles an eclectic array of material which serves as a substitute for the development of any conscious method for determining the political potential of uprisings. He relies heavily on allusions to mystical forces rather than articulating the development of consciousness within the proletariat as the revolutionary class and the development of communist partisans from within the class. This lack of attention to the active development of revolutionary consciousness entrenches the separation between partisan and proletariat, the separation which Neel ostensibly seeks to develop the theoretical means of overcoming. In his practical rejection of Marxism, Neel’s approach to methodology then loses its critical posture and begins accommodating even those social elements antagonistic to communist measures in their struggles. What Neel develops is a syncretic methodology that merely relies upon an aesthetic of militancy to support its prescriptive claims. From this, he does not arrive at any clarity of what the communist party today may be or must become; he simply falls into what is ultimately a populist embrace of class-collaborationist politics, where differentiated interests both within and between classes are obscured by the generalization of an immediatist notion of the “species” that unites itself against capital and the state. Such desperate opportunism—which rejects the specificity of the proletariat in the development of a revolutionary communist party—leads Neel further away from communism than he was when he began, and much closer to a renewed third position.

Through this immanent critique, we seek to demonstrate that communist partisans are not bound to the occult mysteries of the unknowable, and are in fact capable of intentionally crafting programmatic interventions for the practical development of the communist party in our own context (as ourselves revolutionary communists located in the so-called U.S.). Through such efforts, the method for building the party must cohere across many uneven and differentiated conditions and relations in the global class struggle, and through the construction of forms of mediation that transform class struggle into communist revolutionary practice. If we are to overcome the challenges of the past, we must understand the party as the vehicle for closing the gap between the partisan and the proletariat, and not as the institutionalization of this separation.

II. Tactical Fetishism

In matters of strategy, the distinction between tactics and politics must be made. While there is a necessary relationship between the tactical and the political within a given situation, serious weaknesses result when these terms are conflated or misconstrued as a simple unity in strategic considerations. It has historically been the work of communist partisans to think about these together dialectically in order to formulate political programs and strategies against the classes antagonistic to the proletariat. This has been essential in order to structure the development of the proletarian class struggle towards the adoption of revolutionary communist measures.

Neel’s theory of the party begins with the conflation of tactics and politics, and furthermore provides no definition of what tactics or politics even are in the first place. In arguing that political positions arise from tactical actions themselves without clarifying the meaning of these terms, Neel makes an error that we call tactical fetishism: the assumption that tactics in themselves possess an intrinsic political content, as things that appear to animate people rather than being the product of human social activity. Tactics and politics are in fact two different things, and an essential task of the communist party is to develop the critical consciousness of the activity of the social relations constituting them in practice. Here we will reconstruct his argument as we follow the development of this error throughout his theory of the party and subsequent efforts to think partisan organization.

The failure of existing forms of organization to meaningfully intervene in the uprisings of our time is the starting point of Neel’s theory. According to Neel, the reason that existing forms of organization fail is because they “usually provide no concrete tactical experience or strategic knowledge and are therefore incapable of pushing the revolt beyond its limits and building substantial forms of proletarian power.”³ This problem is identified as “a symptom of concrete tactical limits evident in the inability of rebellions to enact meaningful social change or generate forms of proletarian power that can survive in their wake.”⁴ We have here a dual-sided failure of tactical acumen: that of the organization that cannot make an offering to the masses in revolt, and the rebellion that cannot cohere its activity into a definite form. However, reducing the problems of these rebellions to tactical limits already begins from a position that ignores the question of the political situation—the historical development of the specific struggle in which an intervention must be planned. By beginning from this orientation to tactical primacy, Neel makes himself unable to recognize the historical specificity of the moments in which uprisings occur, assuming that all uprisings are internally similar and occur on a similar ground. This fundamental assumption forecloses a Marxist analysis of the balance of class forces in contention within a specific historical conjuncture, and the practical political efforts to forge conscious interventions within moments of struggle. What Neel produces instead bears a closer resemblance to bourgeois social scientific thought than it does to dialectical and historical materialist analysis. Without such specific methodological clarity, what he proposes makes the construction of specifically communist interventions impossible.

Neel thus begins with a rejection of a conscious relationship to the conditions of struggle itself and remains at a stage where his diagnosis is unconscious of its own conditions of possibility. The moment of uprising or rebellion is then assumed to be in itself the foundation of a communist politics, without any consideration of the conditions from which such forms of struggle would emerge, or any avowed political character on their own terms. It is from here that the separation between the politicized communist partisan and the proletariat appears as his problem of organization:

in the midst of struggles and rebellions of various intensities, myriad forms of organization (often mischaracterized as “spontaneous” or “informal”) emerge from tactical puzzles posed to the collective intelligence of participants and, only once this practical substrate of popular power is formed, can more “strategic” or theoretical forms of larger-scale coordination and power-building begin to take shape. In other words, those who enter into the rebellion demanding that “we get organized” presume a “we” that does not yet exist.⁵

Neel then articulates the starting point of the theory of the party as a twofold question:

how can a specifically communist form of revolutionary subjectivity emerge out of the distinctly non-communist, everyday struggles of the class? And how might specific f ractions of individual communist partisans produced by these struggles intervene back into these conditions in order to further elaborate this partisan subjectivity in and beyond individual struggles?⁶

In an attempt to answer this question, Neel seeks to construct a bridge between the subjectivity of the class and the partisan with his concept of the “tactical vanguard.” This notion places at the forefront of strategy a fidelity to a specific kind of tactical militancy best understood as actions undertaken in the context of an uprising or rebellion, what Neel would call an Event. Neel provides the following reasoning for the primacy of the tactical vanguard:

the assumption is that people are convinced to adopt certain political ideas through conversation, polemic, or propaganda, and that these ideas then imply the adoption of certain strategic orientations and affiliated tactical practices. But history demonstrates the exact opposite: political positions emerge from tactical action rather than the discursive imposition of moral or ideological arguments.⁷

In this schema, the actual program of a political organization is not the primary affair, for “people do not join organizations, support them, or adopt their political positions, symbology, and general dispositions en masse because they agree with them. They do so because these organizations exhibit competency and strength of spirit.”⁸ Since politics, he argues, flow from tactical action, concerns over the so-called political ideas of militants or uprisings themselves are superfluous. The focus is what individuals or crowds do, and not why they may do it. Where the discursive terrain of politics is subordinated to tactical action, the consciousness of political activity ceases to be a concern.

On the one hand, Neel has a point—political programs do not on their own compel attention and allegiance without being articulations of real action and demonstrated competence. What does it matter what a political formation says if no one knows what it does or if it cannot do what it says it does? But on the other hand, he has over-extended the capabilities of this point in a total rejection of the program itself in establishing how people might recognize the actions of a formation as legible in the first place. One must ask why he opposes politics to action and competence. Competency is reduced here to a simplistic vision of “brave” actions taken by frontliners in moments of street conflict. The demonstration of competency, however, can occur across a wide range of activities in which the party may develop links with the class that enable them to politicize their conditions and self-consciously direct activity toward the objective of class struggle, from legal defense efforts to the provisioning of relief supplies in moments of crisis. The key is that such activity subordinates its tactics to the achievement of the political objective of advancing the adoption of communist measures to address the conditions of struggle that require tactical interventions in the first place. In other words, the demonstration of competency must organize said activity in a manner that directly engages in and further cultivates the capacities of the proletariat in its struggles towards the goal of communist revolution. What is most important then is not simply tactical competency, but the initiative of communists in crafting interventions into the conditions of struggle. It is the clarity of the political objective in practice, not merely the act on its own, that compels the proletariat’s development into a force that recognizes itself as revolutionary.

There is a more immediate context that explains Neel’s attempted intervention here, though it only reveals the parochial character of his thought. Tactical fetishism can be read as an overcorrection for the era of street mobilizations and confrontations, from 1999’s protests of the World Trade Organization to the 2020 George Floyd Uprising. In this period, particularly the 2010s, the antagonistic dynamic between street militants and “peace police” protestors hostile to property destruction and confrontations with police became ascendant as a clear mark of distinction between participants and their respective objectives. Elements hostile to street militancy laundered the ideology of non-violence through privilege discourse to discredit militants in street demonstrations. This counterinsurgency was carried out in various ways largely by nonprofit employees and individuals indoctrinated in an identity reductionist politics diffused through the university and social media. For militants, such elements become the primary opponent in the struggle to overcome immediate internal limits to the advance of an uprising. The problem could be identified as one of opposing tactics, but that would be an oversimplification; militants themselves are haunted by the pessimism of this era of “horizontalist” movements and struggle to preserve the tactical advances of these confrontations and develop mobilizations into definite political projects. The immediate concern tends to become the question of how to convince everyone who is already out in the street to take up the militant position, rather than a more critical study of who is out in the street and why. The dynamic of pro- vs. anti-militancy often appears as simply a debate over the adoption of violent vs. nonviolent tactics, but in actuality it is an opposition undergirded by fundamental political differences, which are significantly determined by differences of the social composition of the respective forces deploying certain tactics.

While tactical acumen is an essential skill that a communist partisan project must develop, such interventions cannot be entirely reduced to the uprising or rebellion as the sole terrain of engagement or political clarity. In Neel’s conception, however, the tactical is made identical to the political in order to demonstrate the insufficiency of ideas or discursive approaches to political engagement. This tactical fetishism amounts to an immediatism that turns the party from a force that intentionally develops mass revolutionary proletarian consciousness into a special operations unit and a meme generator (on this latter point, see section III below). There are always political implications to any action undertaken that precede the moment of implementation, and objective and historical developments that do not always appear immediately to us in the practice or perception of a tactic in its moment. What must be recovered from this prescription then is a notion of the stakes of communist politics—the critical evaluation of capitalist social relations and creation of prescriptions for how to confront them in order to transform them through the organization of practical activity—in which the conscious mediations of party and program are recognized in their historical roles.

Neel rejects this reciprocal relation of party and program, stating that the “‘programmatic’ approach to party building is fundamentally backwards, confusing the result of generation-spanning organizational debates and practical reformations with its starting point.”⁹ According to him,

enforcing a strict and schematic adherence to a maximal program stunts most organizations before they can get off the ground, leaving no space for the participation of new generations of partisans with little practical experience and only a murky grasp of revolutionary theory and history. For this reason, it is also a method used by racketized organizations to ensure that their core members (who have at least a basic grasp on these debates) can exert their authority over the broader organization through manipulation of these programmatic points and forcible exclusion of personal enemies on the basis of even minor disagreements.¹⁰

Yet without such consciousness of party and program as forms of mediation that are developed to deliberate and evaluate the efficacy of political activity among large groups of people, “tactical action” simply becomes a fetish object in Neel’s work, as the mere representation of action takes primacy over the social activity of decision-making. Politics are expected to be transmitted absent any attempt to engage in the development of a directed process of a tactic’s conscious implementation, or a conscious engagement with the conditions in which specific tactical actions become legible to those taking them up. While he is correct that organizations may use a rigid programmatism to control and manipulate their rank-and-file members, the construction of a cult of the deed amongst partisans in an informal social milieu without agreed-upon means of forming collective decisions is no alternative. Such environments are just as oppressive and rife with manipulation as any formal sect, and just as much a racket in which wealthier and more well-resourced elements have a clear social advantage over others that they often abuse. Without the intentional construction of party-building and programmatic development as a reciprocal process based in the mediations of partisan and class activity, Neel’s “tactical vanguard” remains an insular force, if one at all. The notion of an immediate transmission of partisan subjectivity through the tactical interface implies that no uprising or rebellion has limits to their development into a revolutionary situation beyond the willpower of its participants. As such, Neel’s notion of partisan subjectivity carries within it a voluntarism in which communism may be carried out by whomever takes the tactical edge in a moment of conflict. This tactical fetishism further metastasizes in Neel’s concept of the “sigil.”

III. The Occult Power of the Meme

Neel’s tactical fetishism substitutes the conscious consideration of politics with the notion of the “sigil.” The “sigil” is said to operate at its “most rudimentary” at the “aesthetic level,” and in a more elaborate form as “certain tactical practices or organizational dispositions” that are “transmitted through a name and a package of minimal practices.”¹¹ This sigil then “renders tactics into broadly replicable forms and offers a minimal passage through which the uninitiated (i.e. that section of the population deemed ‘apolitical’) are able to enter into the moment of rupture.”¹² It is, for Neel, “a preliminary form of collective subjectivity,” one that “simultaneously summons a partisan force out of the class through its seemingly occult power [!] and, as a practical waypoint orienting concrete tactics, also structures this amorphous subjectivity into minimal forms of organization.”¹³ So, what exactly is a sigil? A glorified meme.¹⁴

Rather than proposing a program for the development of a critical self-consciousness realized in proletarian self-activity, the practice offered instead is a memetic affair of summoning “occult power.” For Neel, this largely follows from moments such as the gilets jaunes movement in France and the yellow helmets of the Hong Kong uprisings (his choice examples), in which the internet and social media played a major role in transmitting practices to people in disparate places. Here, Neel disavows analysis of the real conditions by which these practices or tactics may have been transmitted. The transmission of practice is conceived neither as the result of some kind of conscious act of recognition nor out of determination by specific conditions faced by specific partisans. Instead, Neel appeals to an immediate, mystical connection which does not require rational explanation. Such a concept assumes that political development is both unconscious and uniform. While it is true that practices of street militancy were transmitted via internet memes throughout the 2010s, Neel simply takes it as given that such isolated processes can transmit communist politics, an assumption that becomes increasingly ludicrous as the far right consolidates control of popular digital platforms.

But beyond the practical fact of the right-wing seizure of digital platforms and mass media, there is also the much more general question—left unexamined by Neel—of the inherently reactionary form of mass media and of the politics of the meme in particular. Following the logic of the sigil, we are to assume that partisan subjectivity is to emerge from the position of the uniform spectator, in which the activity of the subject already appears to it as its alienated product. Political development is then a matter of physical mimicry, instilled in the participant through this alienated image of collective activity. What is offered here is not a means of developing a critical and rational consciousness within the class struggle, but a means of inducing a mechanical response according to certain stimuli. This is the logic of advertising and of meme-driven engagement in digital platforms. Are we to take this as the logic of communist politics? Where “political dispositions […] trail behind the sigil, serving as the messy, mostly subconscious articulation of these radical acts after the fact,”¹⁵ the sigil is presented as a shortcut to the development of a revolutionary communist activity, lacking any political criteria beyond the immediate appearance of a certain action in a certain situation, regardless of who is doing so and why. The sigil then doesn’t produce conscious participants in class struggle; instead, it reproduces passive recipients of propaganda. The internet meme, though infinitely reproducible in a decentralized manner that may appear as participation, merely pantomimes conscious participation in the form of self-alienating representations. Neel’s entire theory of a “tactical vanguard” relies on the continual separation between vanguard and class that the sigil’s form of engagement requires in practice. Politics are assumed to be transmitted in a streamlined fashion through the reduction of the individual to a mere recipient, simply reproducing the way that mass media platforms already operate and elevating the meme to the level of strategy. The partisan here does not meet the proletariat in its conditions of struggle, much less directly advance the class beyond its conditions through conscious intervention. In fact, the partisan does not meet them at all. The partisan farms content.

Neel’s theorization of the relations class, partisan, and vanguard is then based upon a set of contradicting assumptions. We can accept that these formations are distinct in practice and currently exist in a state of separation, and it is from this point where the attempt to theorize practice begins. However, in the mechanical logic of the sigil’s operation, these objects are assumed to arise throughout a homogenous social substance, which ironically serves to justify the irreconcilability of their separation in practice. The lack of any particular clarity in Neel’s deployment of these terms simply constructs a naturalized hierarchy of anti-social actors that are supposed to be capable of politics, despite the reciprocal alienation of this form of activity. This notion of the party is primarily an aesthetic one. The potential of partisan political development is reduced to the immediate moment of an Event, a rupture that itself unfolds in isolation from the historical development of the struggle that forged its conditions and relations. In this conception, vanguard elements are merely empowered partisan planners who transmit instructions to an undifferentiated mass that acts as mere recipients.

Where Neel adopts the term of the “historical party” to name the political potential of the mass that is unconsciously constituted by the immediacy of the Event or moment of rupture, it is in fact a party without history; his tactical fetishism has now overcome any need to identify any specifically revolutionary class strata from within this mass and the historical development of the balance of class forces within that struggle. In doing so, Neel forgoes the party’s essential task of transforming the proletariat from a class in-itself, a distinct mode of social existence characterized by specific relations of production, to a class for-itself, a distinct political formation capable of articulating its interests across its differentiated forms of appearance and acting upon them in an intentional and conscious manner. When the task of transforming social relations is entirely subordinated to the immediacy of the Event, it disavows the historical relationships preceding and developed within and beyond the Event. This disavowal evacuates any means of consciously creating the conditions for rupture to be created by the self-activity of the revolutionary proletariat. Such capacities can only be achieved through practices of organization and the development of collective strategy that create the historical consciousness of the relations and conditions of any moment of rupture. In Neel’s conception of the party, the form ceases to have any determinate content, and thus itself ceases to be able to assume any definite form.

In constructing this fetishized representation of tactical action and his resort to the mysticism of the “sigil” in propagating politics, Neel actually abandons the party and instead revives a version of “propaganda of the deed” that ultimately obscures the actual process by which masses in struggles—such as the uprisings of our time—come to recognize what must be done and undertake such necessary actions. While these struggles are often spontaneous to their moment, there is an essential logic in their historical development such that a set of specific tactical actions becomes recognized as necessary to participants. Contrary to a recognition of the historical dynamic of the proletariat becoming active and conscious, Neel reproduces a view of the mass as statically passive and drawn to mere representations of militancy. While such a form of unconscious activity may appear true in the manner by which capitalist social relations are immediately represented, the task of communist political practice is to overcome these social relations to realize a newly emancipatory form of social life. If one were to assume that these dynamics will simply be automatically reproduced in struggle, then one must wonder what the point of “communism” even is?

The “sigil” then produces an intractable contradiction that compounds the above error of tactical fetishism. On the one hand, the “sigil” collapses the conscious reconstruction of a struggle’s historical development into a voluntarism that expects any potential action to be picked up by any mass, similar to that of the role of the “tactical vanguard.” On the other hand, these masses are now conceived of as fundamentally devoid of legible reason themselves, acting subconsciously and susceptible to the spectacular representation of their struggle in the form of “memetic replications.” The voluntarism of his tactical fetishism has now produced an attendant fatalism, where despite any appeal to the “collective intelligence” of the masses that Neel may make, he essentially does not find them to be particularly conscious actors.

IV. Politicizing Needs

While Neel’s tactical fetishism and deployment of the “sigil” foreclose a program of the development of the proletariat as a self-consciously communist partisan force, it would be unfair to say that he makes no attempt to offer further strategic points of intervention. These contributions, however, are derived from the same subjective division which has complicated his bridge between the “tactical vanguard” and the proletariat, between the partisan and the class. The vacillation between voluntarism and fatalism becomes erratic and volatile as he attempts to address this subjective division in practice.¹⁶ This is most apparent when he deploys the notions of “subsistence struggles” as the baseline of intermediary activity between uprisings or “Events.” While Neel intends for these proposals to be clarifying, he neither recognizes the conditions in which distinct needs become catalysts for class struggle, nor is he at all clear on the relation between interventions into these struggles and the development of a communist political project.

In Neel’s terms, subsistence struggles are “concrete issues of survival under capitalism” and are to be classified according to two types: “struggles over the terms of subsistence, and struggles over the imposition of these terms on the population.”¹⁷ This is a distinction made without a difference. What he claims as two types of struggle collapse into each other. They ultimately possess no determinate political objective in the same manner as his tactical fetishism, and his elaboration of them forms a convoluted means of concealing the partisan’s aims. Where the former tend to be largely economic struggles involving questions of price levels and the distribution of wealth and resources, the latter are said to focus “on raw survival and dignity in life and work.”¹⁸ Where the economic struggles can be recuperated to the ruling order according to the concrete interests of classes and class strata against the interests of others, the more confrontational struggles against impositions of the terms of subsistence are said to have the potential to become “struggles against domination as such.”¹⁹ For Neel, “particular confluences of subsistence struggles serve as the grounds from which mass uprisings emerge, which will then exceed these initial bounds and thereby cease to merely express these underlying subsistence struggles.”²⁰ While Neel is correct to point out that subsistence “struggles are more easily recuperated into the policy sphere, and only take on a radical edge in extreme conditions or when partisan organizations exist to push them in this direction,”²¹ he operates on mistaken assumptions that maintain a separation between the vanguard and the masses in ways that contradict the purpose and basis of the communist party. What struggles over our conditions must lead to is the recognition of the interdependency between the vanguard and the proletarian masses, a relation that becomes a conscious one to participants through the mediations of the party and its programs.

Engagement with these struggles on such terms maintains an antinomy between the ends of the proletariat and those of the partisan subject. Where the proletarian engagement in such struggles is reduced to subsistence, Neel does not identify the class as developing any direct political consciousness of the stakes of their struggles. Partisan intervention is where these are made to be seen “as a limit to be overcome.”²² Missing from this analysis is a key part of class organization: observing and learning from the self-activity of the class. There is a social character to the way we get our needs met. If the partisan has a role here, it is to make conscious the social and political character of needs and their satisfaction. It is only through this process that an effective strategy of action in confrontation with bosses, landlords, and institutions can cohere. The partisan and the class are mutually incomplete; each part has something the other does not. Mutual recognition of this incompleteness is key to the development of proletarian forces in the class struggle. Maintaining a separation between the two, each left to their own silo, precludes the possibility of building mass revolutionary politics. If the separation of class and partisan is maintained, movements become stagnant and insular, and easy for the state to pick off in times of intensifying repression. There can be no revolutionary communist party worth its name without the closing of this gap. Developing the capacity to satisfy social needs in a directly political and politicizing manner is an essential means of overcoming this separation of the daily class struggle and the communist revolutionary project.

Following his earlier subjugation of the question of conscious development to the operation of memes, Neel’s engagement in subsistence struggles is here completely subordinate to the end of creating the conditions for the uprising as an Event. He assumes that the key escalations leading to an uprising will come from the brave partisans rather than from the proletarian masses. There is no politicization beyond simply steering the class into conflicts with the state, for which they may or may not be prepared. Fighting the police or the state’s armed forces is both necessary and inevitable in any struggle. It is, however, a potential source for manifold tactical blunders if experienced partisans are either unable to prepare proletarians accordingly for what they may face, or are themselves ignorant of the tactical necessities that proletarians know intimately.

Just as much as timidity in the wrong moment can produce a loss of confidence from the proletarian masses, rash action solely designed to escalate could make itself illegible to them. At every moment, true tactical acumen requires an embeddedness in the proletariat such that the class becomes self-conscious of the fact that only militant struggle may truly satisfy its needs, and that the objective of this struggle is communism. Tactical acumen then is not simply meeting people where they are at, but becoming skilled in the tactful guidance of proletarians towards conscious and strategic escalation, and the work of making ourselves attuned to recognize those moments when proletarians are ready and going to escalate. Engaging in subsistence struggles with ulterior or concealed motives the way that Neel’s strategy implies would only make the communist party a force alien to the interests of the proletariat. In doing so, Neel reproduces the transactional logic of certain organizational projects focused on the provision of services, where proletarians have no agency. Here, the class is conceived of as economistic actors that are reduced to an inert object for partisan intervention. What is needed is a relationship of conscious reciprocity between the proletariat and communist partisans, not a transactional one. The transactional relationship maintains the separation between the tactical vanguard and the recipient masses, mirroring how the sigil operates on the assumption of the same separation.

When this transactional approach to need is taken as given, it obscures how need is socially mediated by capital and subordinated to the necessity of reproducing capitalist social relations. The transactional approach does nothing to transform the recipient into a conscious political actor, nor the predisposition to understand need as something that is beyond their reach within these social relations. The political aspect of need is obscured in the moment when subsistence is naturalized and stripped of its social character, and converted into a so-called basic need.²³ This obfuscation reproduces the separation between the partisan and masses, for it disavows the necessity for communist partisans to engage in the development of proletarians’ class consciousness and of their conditions which are the basis for this consciousness. Where needs are de-politicized, their satisfaction comes to proletarians as transactional relations without history, rather than through developing consciousness that a need’s satisfaction is the result of an entire system of interdependent relationships within a determinate mode of production. The objective of developing class consciousness is to create the potential to transform capitalist relations of interdependency, where need is satisfied through the production and exchange of commodities, into a communist one, where needs and desires are satisfied by the collective association of liberated actors in a classless society. The satisfaction of subsistence needs is then one avenue for imputing class consciousness, though at this moment for many reasons such activity ends up reproducing the service model. This is a problem for communist partisans to solve, not to ignore or cynically take advantage of.

V. Incoherent Methods

Neel’s sole strategic contribution is the objective of directing struggle to the moment of an uprising. What is to happen beyond this is anyone’s guess. Strategy is surrendered to the imperative of action, yet the significance of this conception itself cannot be explained. While he knows that “communism must emerge from a revolutionary break with the old world and cannot be slowly approached through the evolutionary means of gradual reform and development of the productive forces,”²⁴ Neel is unable to articulate what the social substance of a communist project is in terms of concrete political organization. For him “the most important dividing line” is simply

that which separates communists from all those who fear, dismiss, or treat as infantile the riotous behavior of the crowd in the moment of the uprising, preferring either orderly and “peaceful” protest tactics or some mythic form of militant discipline, as if insurrections were surgical military operations rather than messy, mass uprisings.²⁵

The proletarian uprisings of the 21st century are indeed the high watermarks of class struggle and communist revolutionary potential in our time; they are the real movement. These uprisings are the closest we have come to conceiving of what the development of mass proletarian armed struggle may look like in our contexts in a manner that precedes the formal organization required to wield such capacity according to a politically-directed strategy. A dividing line does form in practice between those who recognize the necessity of directing organized proletarian violence against its class enemies and those who disavow this necessity. Neel, however, reconstructs this dividing line in a manner that fetishizes the Event itself as a purely tactical moment at the expense of the specific political motivations and class compositions of such Events. For him, anyone who would join in any uprising, apparently regardless of the character of said uprising, would be considered a member of the “historical party.” For Neel, revolution ceases to be an intentional affair that is maneuvered according to plans made reflexively in the midst of crises and evaluated according to their efficacy (in turn denying the actual history of any of the successful revolutionary communist parties). The outcome of this subordination of all strategy to the aim of creating this singular Event of an indeterminate political character is a methodological incoherence which serves only to retroactively justify Neel’s assumptions about political practice. This ultimately foretells a failure to prepare for protracted class struggle that culminates in communist revolution.

This militant posturing conceals the absence of any ability to articulate the means of developing distinctly communist strategy, leading Neel to contradict himself. He defends this lack of strategy in a characteristically moral fashion, stating that the “one thing that should unify communists, then, is a strict opposition to sectarianism and any pretensions to certainty.”²⁶ This is because “our practice must be ecumenical and experimental from the very beginning, cultivating, collating, and catalyzing differences that are then put into constant conversation with one another.”²⁷ Discursive means have returned after their prior rejection in order to make sure communists do not differentiate themselves too strongly from each other for the purpose of “maintaining a posture of openness toward apolitical or antipolitical currents, as well as to those whose stylistic or tonal expression of politics differs from our own, rather than clunkily transmuting such aesthetic differences into allegedly political critiques.”²⁸

As here “communism coheres through the very diversity of expressions that compose it,” it is at the same time “not a strict or supervening unity that overrides and homogenizes subsidiary elements, but merely a requisite measure of coherence.”²⁹ Neel then recognizes that these “minimal conditions must be enforced in order to ensure” the creation of “an ecumenical environment that allows for the proliferation of truly communist ideas.”³⁰ While this enforcement is necessary, the very means of doing so are opaque on the terms that Neel establishes. If there is to be deliberation, there is no way offered here beyond merely a new way to charge those who disagree with “sectarianism.” Amidst the appeal to ecumenicism and experimentation, and despite Neel’s insistence that “any claim by any party to possess the one true path to revolution is obviously laughable,”³¹ we are led to only assume the authority of Neel’s position, despite his lack of clarity. The appeal to deliberation is already complicated by his notion of the tactical vanguard’s primacy of demonstrating “strength of spirit”³² through “brave acts”³³ in “incendiary conflicts.”³⁴ The privileged voice in any deliberation is then only certain practitioners within that terrain of struggle. What emerges instead, if we are to take such proclamations seriously, is a vision of the party in which political organization is subordinate to the armed wings of struggle. We are left to wonder how much deliberation would indeed be possible in practice.

While Neel warns against “eclecticism,” his work does not demonstrate such caution. Taking him at his word, we can see how his pretensions to “openness” in practice lends itself to a peculiarly syncretic methodology capable only of assembling concepts from various areas and creating links between them in a roughly ad hoc manner. This is how Neel appears to possess a certain erudition and scope in his analysis. In reality, it is that sheer quantity of information has combined with the entertainment of an abundance of (often mixed) metaphors to conceal the lack of a critical synthesis of the concepts that are deployed. A reconstruction of the logic of his theory would reveal a series of influences more than it would any definite consistency of method. This is all deployed to the ends of justifying a pre-conceived notion of what revolutionary communist praxis entails (the reified rupture), largely avoiding any critical (let alone self-critical) import. As Neel’s reasoning is entirely instrumentalized to the uprising, his own method is revealed to be a logical spontaneism that projects its own political indeterminacy upon the objectives of any struggle. Communism then has no reason to be found in the class struggle on its own terms, but itself has become an empty signifier for any possible “rupture.” Rupture is not enough.

To briefly survey some of the theories invoked in Neel’s assemblage: the concept of the “‘competitive control’ over an open field of conflict,”³⁵ developed by military strategists of the capitalist state’s imperial order, is used by Neel to argue that his tactical fetishism has reasonable grounds. From this notion, only when “concrete leadership in action has been established do people become receptive to the more abstract leadership in program and principle.”³⁶ Yet this follows from the assumption that “organization emerges through the practical overcoming of material limits, trailing its intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical commitments behind.”³⁷ The clear separation between practical exigency and the means of any self-consciousness of praxis then posits that partisans of any position—communist, liberal, even fascist—are essentially engaged in the same game on an identical field, competing over the same constituencies. In assuming the open field of conflict and common constituencies for any quality of formation, Neel loses the ability to differentiate situations of and conditions for action.

This is what the above-mentioned notion of the memetic transfer of tactics in the sigil intends to flatten into a general terrain for action. As opposed to organization that intentionally acts within a specific composition and develops a specific form of subjectivity, Neel follows Adrian Wohlleben’s work on memes³⁸ to posit subjectivity as a perpetually singular and contingent matter. In his opposition to the specificity of organized intervention, Neel vacates the question of class composition and reproduces the inability of those cited imperial military strategists to understand proletarians as actual or potential historical actors. Where he renounces the conscious orchestration of insurrection and subordinates all strategy to the assumption of the spontaneous uprising, Neel must draw up on another eclectic combination to relieve himself of the burden of constructing concrete analyses of concrete situations. He (quite selectively) draws upon the works of Alain Badiou and Michael Neocosmos to posit the precedence of an ontology of the Event over the scientific anticipations of Marxism. As everything is subordinated to the immediacy of the moment of rupture and what “practice” is assumed to be “pragmatic” to such moments, all Neel offers is a newly-conjured spontaneism. Nothing can be theoretically ascertained in anticipation of these moments, and there is no practice that informs theory in the interstices of these “incendiary” events.

We are back at the perennial problem, which is that Neel has no practical idea of what constitutes politics beyond the physicality of the spontaneous Event, which is the only term through which his reified understanding of social relations is able to render class struggle intelligible. In Neel’s thought, we would have no means of actively cohering the party except by resorting to tailing any spontaneous activity in these “magical” moments of rupture, at the expense of developing any determinate social, and thus too political and discursive, content in doing so. He instead only alludes to a “protracted process of political experimentation and construction that takes root in whatever fractions of the class move earliest and most forcefully and which then develops only by exceeding these initial bounds.”³⁹ Thus it ceases to matter exactly which elements of the proletariat take action, or even their precise motivations, so long as they are the ones taking action. Forgoing class analysis, we instead get an irrationalist vitalism. In order to more fully grasp the extent to which Neel abandons the political import of Marxism, we must visit him at his most self-conscious with his engagement in method.

VI. The Devaluation of Marxism

Neel’s syncretic approach to method is prominent in Chapter 4 of Hellworld, in which he most clearly sheds the presuppositions of Marxism and class analysis. Read as a theoretical foundation for the arguments made in his “Theory of the Party,” it becomes clear that his tactical fetishism is a recapitulation of the way he fetishizes the relation between labor and value—at times rendering them identical, at times seeing them as completely opposite each other. Despite the appearance of theoretical rigor in his reconstruction of these key categories of Marxism, he in fact never establishes a logical relation between them. What follows from this is an arbitrary naturalization of these social relations in which labor is posited as simply external to capital, rather than being an essential and constitutive category of capitalist social relations.

Where it is the case for Neel that “the labour process constitutes the basic engine of exploitation producing the social surplus that then accrues to the ruling class, as capital,”⁴⁰ he demonstrates an immediate identification of the labor process with the valorization process. These distinct, coterminous moments of the capitalist process of production are already elided. This error leads Neel to further reduce the question of labor-power’s exploitation to one of a physical nature rather than a matter of the organization of social relations. Value is described as substantial “in the sense that it behaves like a quantity” and “exerts a very real physical force on the world around it.”⁴¹ Where value becomes “synonymous with these social relationships” in which it is produced⁴² for Neel, he disregards the fact that value and these social relationships are, in fact, two different things. As such, he cannot articulate any relation or practice of mediation between them. From this, Neel’s fetishistic identification of human labor with its value-producing form retreats into a naturalized, vitalistic conception of labor where the conditions for the capitalist mode of production’s endemic crises are to be “found in class antagonism,” yet these antagonisms are reduced to “the contradictory inclusion of labour within capital.”⁴³ He states that:

As the source of value, labour-power exerts both an intrinsic force in the form of class conflict […] and poses an extrinsic constraint in the sense that, as a transmutation of general human intellectual and bodily capacities, labour-power is a peculiar commodity that cannot be produced directly by capitalist means. Thus, it poses the most intractable contradiction: labour must simultaneously be a commodity and a non-commodity.⁴⁴

For Neel “labour, like nature, is ontologically prior to production” and “therefore constantly confounds its smooth conversion into labour-power with the obstinate friction of the worker’s living body.”⁴⁵ As a result, he concludes that “labour can be transformed into the source of value for the simple reason that value is the form taken by the social relationships of domination that bridge the metabolic gap.”⁴⁶ The value form is here reduced to a process of subsumption in which value is the form taken by social relationships of domination, which are themselves the form of appearance of value. Where labor is now “ontologically prior” to the very activity of production in which labor is intelligible as labor, Neel’s attempt at explaining the nature of value and its relation to labor is that of two parallel tautologies. Labor is taken as something that exists in a natural state, and value an unnatural imposition placed upon it. Labor’s dual existence is then, for Neel, solely that of an appearance as both commodity and non-commodity, rather than that of abstract and concrete labor. He is mistaken.

The social form of labor does not stand apart from capital as an external contradiction, but is in actuality a contradiction internal to capitalist social relations. The concept of labor, developed by bourgeois political economy, necessarily already presupposes the commodified form of labor as labor-power. This is what Marx recognized, and why he developed the distinct concept of labor-power in the first place, to identify more precisely what social relations bourgeois consciousness mystified in the notion of labor.

Neel maintains a naturalism that presupposes a transhistorical notion of labor, as if it did not emerge as a concept that already presupposed its essential alienation of the agent from their own activity. Despite critiquing positions that see capital as a “parasite,”⁴⁷ this is precisely the position that Neel arrives at himself. Labor, for him, remains intrinsic to social activity, a natural property. Value remains an alien configuration imposed externally upon labor’s life-activity by social relationships of domination, which cannot be explained by his account of the relations themselves. Neel has no account of the form of value as an immanent product of the social and historical development of antagonistic social relations of production.

If value is not a contradictory product of labor’s own activity, but rather always imposed again by capital successfully against the “friction” of these physiological limits, then there would not appear to be any means immanent to the laboring subject’s capacities to do anything beyond resisting its “domestication.”⁴⁸ According to Neel’s anti-logic, there are then no possible means to reconstruct why such a form has developed historically from the activity of relations of class struggle, or to discern what is to be done about it beyond prescriptions that remain at the level of an abstract negativity. This is the theoretical basis for his fetishistic attachment to the immediate temporality of the Event, and so too is it a self-induced frustration of any proclaimed communist aims. This puts us in dangerous territory: class struggle is then always fated to fail, and class does not really seem to matter. This problem arises because Neel has foregone the social basis of the contradictions of capitalist social relations for one to be found in a natural, physiological limit. Without the clear recognition of this social basis, we cannot recognize how value’s social relations of domination are produced by the social form of labor itself.

Value then cannot be understood merely in its abstract negativity as an antagonism to be destroyed, but as the positing of distinct social relations through the organization of practical activity. The logic of capital’s form of value continuously produces social antagonisms that undermine the continued operation of that very form. The logic of value’s social relations thus necessarily and simultaneously contains the capacity to transform these very social relations from within that very antagonism. The temporal differentiation characteristic of capitalist society’s reproduction of antagonistic social relations posits that social needs can only be satisfied at the expense of others, through the exploitation of labor-time. The communist imperative is to engage in those forms of activity by which the needs of the proletariat are met at the expense of capitalists and class strata that rely on their exploitation. The recognition of this relation of exploitation first encounters value in the form of social relations of domination. This is, however, specifically the domination of capitalist relations, which is the reproduction of the conditions for the production and realization of value in the form of money. Capital’s form of value is then more precisely stated as the reproduction of social activity as a universally alienable property.

The logic of the valorization process is a field of contestation over the terms of life-time’s subsumption to labor-time. From this emerges the social and historical necessity to practically transform these relations within the course of their reproduction. The necessity of doing so is given by the capitalist mode of production’s fundamental dependency on the expanded reproduction of proletarian dispossession, and the antagonism of the satisfaction of proletarian need and desire to capitalist reproduction. Class struggle against the terms of capital’s valorization then entails the organization of the capacity to make decisions to posit communist social relations in the very practices of social life’s material reproduction.

As such, the contradictory tension in value cannot remain at the simple level of “capital and labor,” since the very logic of capital’s valorization produces manifold differentiations of forms of capital and labor. The potential for the development of communist revolutionary consciousness arises from the confrontation within and against these very differentiations. We then do not posit the “decommodification” of labor, as Neel does,⁴⁹ for the criterion of communist measures. Where he assumes a natural unity in the “universal subjectivity of the species” through the “annihilation” of labor-power, it is an entirely passive concept that hopes for spontaneous uprisings in the wake of capitalist breakdown and crisis.⁵⁰ This contradicts Neel’s own imperative to act. We articulate instead an active relation of the proletariat in the process of the subjective development of communist consciousness. The commodification of labor-power is not solely the formal dispossession of labor from its means of production, but the reproduction of the separation of the capacity of proletarians to act from their own conscious intentions. That is, proletarians cannot decide what is to be done with their own capacities, nor are they permitted the means of directly satisfying their needs or desires in order to do so. Where the valorization of capital sets the terms of social metabolic reproduction, decisions about the conditions for living life-time are set by capital’s needs. It is from within this contradiction and antagonism that the struggle towards the negation of this social metabolic order must take place. Our task is to make proletarians conscious of this alienation from and separation of these moments of self-activity that reproduces the commodity labor-power.

In the engagements of class struggle, the capacities of proletarians are re-combined with those intentions that are antagonistic to capital’s needs. In this re-unification that negates the initial negation of labor from its means of production, something new and more than labor’s decommodification is posited: the creative self-activity of the revolutionary proletariat. The process by which a fusion is made of the revolutionary proletariat’s creative self-activity and its articulation in the party we call communist evaluation. It is the potential of this active and conscious relationship of the proletariat to the class struggle from which communist politics will develop, and it is precisely this that Neel forecloses in his theory’s bourgeois naturalization of labor that obfuscates the task of the proletarian development of communist consciousness that can become capable of recognizing the actual terrain and terms of class struggle.

VII. The End of Class

In the place of the proletariat’s creative self-activity, Neel instead offers an account of the indeterminate coordinates of singular, ruptural Events and the subjectivities produced in their time and place. In doing so, he contradicts himself when he attempts to theorize the determinate differentiations of the proletariat and other class strata as “subjectivities.”⁵¹ These dynamics of class differentiation pertain amongst many labor processes that can be said to now be formally proletarianized, but they are not homogeneous in their conditions. The proletariat for Neel ceases to be a subject that possesses an antagonistic character to other classes and strata as the content of this separation, but is rather part of an already assumed unity of the “species” in which the specific antagonisms of class struggle are suppressed by Neel.

For Neel, the notion that “the proletariat will serve as the necessary gestation chamber for revolutionary subjectivity… has in fact become so obvious as to be banal,” a position that now “will be proven correct by simple tautology… since the vast majority of the global population has now been proletarianised.”⁵² The question is rather that of “where within the social brain will this revolutionary impulse first spark and spread, and how might this occur?”⁵³ He directs his critical ire against the position that “there exists a particular demographic defined by its structural position relative to production (including groups that lie ‘outside’ of it), that acts as the primary subjective force of revolutionary struggle because of this structural position.”⁵⁴

In this deviation from Marxism, the question of the social base for the communist partisan then follows his tactical fetishism as a matter of “organization as a practical question posed in the midst of insurrection.”⁵⁵ Insurrection is then only defined as “the passage through and beyond” the “delimited interests” that arise in the moment of the “excess” through which subjectivity “takes shape,” and takes “the class beyond itself.”⁵⁶ Insurrection is, according to Neel, “an active, practical universality built in the tension between livelihood and emancipation, through the concrete construction of communist power.”⁵⁷

What could any of this amount to in practice without a serious engagement with the necessity of the proletariat, and the specificity of its revolutionary elements in a given situation? As we can see, it is sufficient enough for Neel to assume that insurrection is solely a communist affair, and not a tactical position that could also be assumed by reactionaries. Neel does not trouble himself with such concerns, as for him “it is not a question that can ultimately be answered with any specificity in theory because […] it is not a question of theory at all but instead a pragmatic one, solvable only within the particular confluence of historically-accreted conflicts that poses it as a question in the first place,”⁵⁸ for “revolutionary agency always has a singular and contingent character, composed of functional organs formed in a specific context and only provisionally useful beyond it.”⁵⁹ Where he has been so strident before, Neel is now averse to any totalizing claims, proposing a vitalistic immediacy against the conscious work of politics as a substitute for any articulation of the relation between theory and practice, or class and consciousness. There is apparently no need for communist partisans to develop any political criteria across different conditions if everything is singular and contingent to its time and place.

But this now leads Neel to a qualified defense of what he has just dismissed: such conclusions now mean “that certain groups, due to the excess of oppression they suffer within the social system, may have broader ‘interests’ that more easily gesture toward emancipatory ends, rather than insular ones.”⁶⁰ He is forced to admit that there are specific historical antagonisms that influence the development of revolutionary potential within specific fractions of the proletariat. Where such developments in subjectivity may “take on a universally emancipatory character […] pushing even beyond the bounds of the broadest possible ‘demands’ that arise from structural position alone,”⁶¹ the task of organization in political struggle becomes that of inventing “practical methods to span a heterogenous class rather than expecting some forthcoming homogenisation of interests.”⁶²

The formation of a revolutionary proletariat and communist consciousness is necessarily a historical product of class struggle, conditioned by the ongoing reproduction and development of specific social relations of antagonism. Where Neel has subsumed the specificities of dynamics of proletarianization and its forms of class antagonism to a notion of a species immediately given in unity against an autonomized capital, he vacates the means to reconstruct the reasons for revolutionary development within specific class strata over others. Such criteria would then demand questions of composition, questions he attempts to eschew.

We see that Neel wishes to be freed from history’s constraints, while also selectively appealing to them when he cannot evade confronting our inherited social conditions. This internal contradiction haunts Neel’s theory and its concept of subjectivity. He flattens the proletariat, neglecting differentiations of relations to production within the class and the distinct loyalties to capital and the state that such differentiations engender. Neel develops an essentially populist vision of the party. His tactical fetishism and reliance on the ontology of the Event lead him to turn to the participation of anybody in a moment of uprising. Class collaboration is not engaged as a tactical problem, but itself the strategy.

The heterogeneous class is assumed to undergo an immediate transformation in a singular moment, yet it is also not a matter of any definite class. Neel sees no issue here, because he neglects the class basis of the party and its revolutionary objective entirely. Where he states that it is a “false presumption that partisans are entering into the class from the outside,” because “as proletarians, partisans have no choice but to engage in such struggles,” he simultaneously states that “rather than ‘connection’” of day-to-day struggles with the partisan project, “the principle of active and intentional separation is the foundation of partisan organizing.”⁶³ Anyone who compares the social compositions of various politicized activist milieus of U.S. metropolitan areas with the same areas’ respective proletarian populations will find many cases of stark differentiations and social separation. The practical separation of these categories in Neel’s theory of the party reifies this separation, and so his only means of overcoming it is to state that there is already an immediate unity of class and party which does not exist in reality. As such, Neel’s theory only further justifies this separation and makes it the basis of further party-building strategy, rather than any conscious effort to recognize and act within the actual differentiations between these class strata. It is altogether unclear how further separating the intentions of these politicized elements from the class’s struggles would create any kind of social power beyond a cult of the deed amongst self-styled activist militants who await the transformative potential of an Event with Messianic faith and themselves have no meaningful political contact with the proletarians around them. Where a communist movement is supposed to arise from this is anyone’s guess.

If one were to proceed by this method, one would quickly begin to experience endless frustration as proletarians of different nations, occupations, and conditions do not experience an immediate unity of interests, especially in those much vaunted “incendiary” moments that Neel makes so central as a clarifying force. These moments are indeed clarifying, but they are so precisely for the reaction that they provoke, inciting the class enemies of the revolutionary proletariat to close ranks. Contrary to Neel, we see no need to assume an irreducible singularity that can only be recognized as the Event, but rather recognize the need for the party as the vehicle for establishing a continuity of specific historical developments of the class struggle. It is the fusion of the revolutionary proletariat and the party that articulates this continuity of the class struggle’s moments of rupture as a rationality that can be reconstructed for the purposes of future anticipation, guiding the prospective interventions of communist organization. The party is not to be separated, but to become a living force in the daily life of the proletariat, emboldening its need and desire to engage in militant revolutionary confrontations with its social conditions of existence.

It is in these moments historically that we see the futility of any populist strategy. Contrary to any attempt to seek an immediate unity in the “species,” we instead experience a world already differentiated in extensive points of antagonism. The abstract domination of capital is in fact the work of specific social actors, distinct classes that are themselves members of the same “species” in biological terms, yet socially entirely different from those they exploit in order to constitute this social order and reproduce its essential conditions. This is the entire reason for the specific study of classes, the particular forms that they take in a given context, and their relation to the totality of the capitalist mode of production’s interdependent social relations. Because these are social relations from definite histories of class struggle, individuals may indeed move between ranks, but the continuous cycles of reproduction accumulate a set of marked distinctions between classes such that they do not experience each other as members of the same “species” in practical terms.

Lifetimes and bodies are indeed mutilated by the social relations of capitalist accumulation, yet the dominant classes of the capitalist garrison are not moved by any fellow feeling that is to be found in a natural basis of common being. They are only moved by the force of the revolutionary proletariat’s organization. The power of dominant classes is only displaced by the efforts of the communist party to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. To forego this specific objective of the communist party is to cede the ground to all manners of distortion.

Neel’s omission of the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to embrace populism reveals that the conceptual arsenal that has been deployed thus far has no intrinsic political character, and can apply to the development of a movement of any political quality, as his vitalistic conception of labor has vacated capitalist social relations themselves of any political qualities. Where there is no recognizable social basis for the historical continuity of a communist movement in his theory of the party, there are no definite coordinates within engaging the class struggles of our time in relation to the historical development of a communist movement. The fetishistic emphasis on the tactical interface has further rigidified the separation between class and partisan, for rather than developing the linkage between these categories, he assumes them already developed—existing independently in mutual isolation and to be joined by the spontaneous movement of the Event, yet unable to relate to themselves in any self-conscious way in the interregnum. Neel envisions contending partisans arriving in the field of conflict to spar in acts of bravery, competing for the mantle of popular approval. All elements of the above formulations follow each other without positing any particular direction; in separation, the class tails the party, the party tails the class.

VIII. Return to Blood

Neel is quite aware of the tailism problem, though he is unable to address it beyond mounting a simple, reactive defense. In addressing the primacy of the act within this tactical interface in Hellworld, he polemically addresses “those trapped in the rotting corpse of the left [that] can only see a latent fascism [!] in any politics that prioritises action over program, which is to say any possible politics at all.”⁶⁴ This is, to say the least, a curious way to preempt criticism. Made in reference to the challenge of right-wing localism predominating in the Hong Kong uprisings of 2019, Neel cannot assume any course of action beyond matching these reactionary forces in a struggle that in actuality would appear to only strengthen the very development of reaction. If this is indeed the case, then the only possible politics according to Neel’s own theory of the party are no politics at all at best, and a support of reactionary militancy at worst.⁶⁵

Neel’s reaction thus reveals a bad conscience that he can only justify by degrading the political content of tactics themselves. In his own attempt to critique far-right claims of being “beyond left and right,” Neel claims that “we lie beneath left and right rather than beyond it” and immediately after offers the formulation “or perhaps before left and right: in the antepolitical space that precedes true partisanship.”⁶⁶ In this breathless indecision, he can only finally land upon a renewed third-position, not so different from the right-wing position he attempted to critique, with the formulation that “beneath left and right, we have only the act.”⁶⁷ Where the activity of the tactical vanguard of a situation is now reduced to the status of an ante-political terrain, right wing political forces (here, right-wing localists in Hong Kong)⁶⁸ are apparently engaged in essentially the same political program as any would-be communist partisans. For all his efforts to lay out a specificity of communist “subjectivity,” Neel ultimately believes that communists are in a race with fascists for the hearts and minds of the same masses. In this error, he finds himself making the most egregious concessions to exactly the manner by which fascistic organizations and partisans relate to any mass mobilization or seizures of political power. This is the convenient justification that arises from his own intractable contradiction, where these right wing forces are present, but we are somehow at the same time all “beneath left and right,” forced by powers beyond our simple comprehension to follow whatever class fractions take action. Where Neel has critiqued third positionist fascist politics elsewhere for the fact that “political practice only exists for them insofar as it can be performed by kindred actors” and “politics is the performance of this kinship,” his theory of partisan organization effectively concedes this fascistic “oath of blood” as a universal necessity.⁶⁹ In the end, where Neel describes far right strategy as the “pragmatic focus on questions of power,”⁷⁰ he appears to admit that he recognizes in these struggles a path that he himself would like to see taken.

Neel’s further engagements with partisan organization only continue to dilute the potency of any communist potential. Partisans are not strictly that of communist revolution, but said to be “partisans of a better world,” without stating what such a “better” world may be.⁷¹ There is no doubt that committed fascists believe themselves to be fighting on behalf of a better world against the domination of the present order,⁷² and it is the responsibility of communists to articulate why this is not the case. Yet Neel would have it that communist partisans only make this case through the competency of tactical actions in revolts alongside right wing elements, even if those elements predominate, so long as they are partaking in “brave” frontline militancy in the streets. Where he may state a criticism of the “fantasy of the politically purified ‘militant,’ in which a small subset of those with the True Knowledge can, through some sort of refined and ruthless insurgency […] compel world-historical transformation at the barrel of a gun,”⁷³ this is precisely the fantasy that he himself evokes. For Neel, “building power through action therefore remains the necessary precursor to any question of how that power might best be deployed or which practices are best suited to decommodification,” because “procrastinating about the precise political content of our actions [!] rather than their practical effect (and ability to amplify our own further capacity to act) quickly becomes a form of paralysis.”⁷⁴ It need not matter if the communist partisan’s actions are part of a movement that is antagonistic to the class, so long as they experience no “paralysis” in taking action.

IX. Conclusion: Salvation

Neel experiences no “paralysis” himself, because he has no capacity for the discretion that actual tactical acumen demands of the communist partisan. Neel is unable to see the necessity of organization based in the political act of decision, much less any cultivation of judgment. As such, he has no methodological basis upon which the revolutionary strata of the proletariat can practically construct the means of developing and deploying its decision-making power in the process of enacting communist measures. This is the direct consequence of analysis in which the ground is continually ceded to contingency, spontaneity, and voluntarism. All that is left to him is the blatant opportunism in his notions of the “tactical vanguard” and the “sigil,” where the determinate content of the communist party is beholden to the transmission of memes. Neel cannot see a path to the development of the critical self-consciousness of revolutionary communist subjectivity in the proletariat; he only seeks out a mechanical logic in which people are put into motion in reaction to various stimuli. This cannot be said to be a communist position, but rather is that of an enlightened cynic who believes that principles and norms are important for others, but not necessary for oneself. He must rather be the opportunist who believes in nothing but raw strength in order to enact a will to power in any moment, and the movement is but a means with no other end.

What does this theory of the party then look like in practice? For all of Neel’s current writing on these forms of partisan organization, it is unclear how any such forms are capable of contributing to his supposedly “minimal conditions” for communist unity: “the belief that the goal of such a project is the creation of a planetary society operating according to principles of deliberation, non-domination, and free association, using the vast (scientific, productive, spiritual, cultural, etc.) capacities of the human species to rehabilitate its metabolism with the non-human world.”⁷⁵ What we have instead is a tentative non-program for the construction of social groupings and initiatives that would supposedly create the kind of socialization from which a communist party proper could emerge. This is nothing but an attempt to make the social milieu of political activists, already a fixture in many metropolitan areas of the U.S., the basis for party-building strategy. In practice, such scenes are anything but deliberative or participatory, much less capable of addressing the social chasm that exists between the individuals in them and the surrounding proletariat at large. When Neel invokes the “conclave” as “the atomic form of partisan organization,”⁷⁶ it is clear that deliberation only happens at a level that is not transparent, between the elite who are not accountable to anyone else. As these forms are largely void of any formal organization or broader responsibility, they often become havens of abuses driven by hierarchies of interpersonal relationships based on individual proximities to wealth and resources. While this is a persistent base from which all manners of trauma and disorganization are produced, Neel sees an opportunity. Where he sees partisan organization as primarily to be “oriented around self-cultivation, the construction of community, and the evangelical exposition of communist positions to those already interested or seeking comfort in a harsh world,” he is explicit that “such an organization would effectively function as a church.”⁷⁷ We then have in no uncertain terms no theory of the party, but only a theory of the Church of “Communism,” to be led by Father Neel himself.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. “Theses on Need,” tr. Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald ([1942], New Institute for Social Research, 2017). Accessed online at https://isr.press/Adorno_Theses_on_Need/index.html

Badiou, Alain. Theory of the Subject, tr. Bruno Bosteels (Bloomsbury Press, 2013)

Benoist, Alain de, and Charles Champetier, “Economics: Beyond the Marketplace,” Manifesto for a European Renaissance (Arktos, 1999).

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “What is to be Done? Burning Questions for Our Movement,” [1902] in Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 5:347-530, tr. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (Foreign Language Publishing House, 1967). Accessed online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Lukács, Georg. “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” History & Class Consciousness, tr. Rodney Livingstone ([1923]; Merlin Press, 1967). Accessed online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm

Neel, Phil A. Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, (Brill, 2025)

———. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (Reaktion Books, 2020)

———. “Theory of the Party,” Ill Will, September 6, 2025. Accessed online at https://illwill.com/print/theory-of-the-party

———. “What May Come: Prospects for Partisan Organizing.” Heatwave, No. 3 (June 2026):60–73

Wohlleben, Adrian. “Memes Without End,” Ill Will, May 17, 2021. Accessed online at https://illwill.com/memes-without-end

Notes

1. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, tr. Bruno Bosteels ([1982]; Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 244. ↩

2. See part 2 (forthcoming), “Theses on the Reconstruction of the Party.” ↩

3. Phil A. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” Ill Will, September 6, 2025, 4-5. Accessed online at https://illwill.com/print/theory-of-the-party ↩

4. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 5. ↩

5. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 5. ↩

6. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 5. ↩

7. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 6. ↩

8. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 6. ↩

9. Phil A. Neel, “What May Come: Prospects for Partisan Organizing.” Heatwave, No. 3 (June 2026):60–73; 70. ↩

10. Neel, “What May Come,” 70. ↩

11. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 7. ↩

12. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 7. ↩

13. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 7. ↩

14. “The concept of the ‘sigil’ is an elaboration of the ‘meme with force’ developed by Paul Torino and Adrian Wohlleben.” Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 24n4. ↩

15. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 8. ↩

16. Lukács speaks of these as two sides of the same coin in “What is Orthodox Marxism?”: “Fatalism and voluntarism are only mutually contradictory to an undialectical and unhistorical mind. In the dialectical view of history they prove to be necessarily complementary opposites, intellectual reflexes clearly expressing the antagonisms of capitalist society and the intractability of its problems when conceived in its own terms.” Georg Lukács, “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” History & Class Consciousness, tr. Rodney Livingstone ([1923]; Merlin Press, 1967). Accessed online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm ↩

17. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 9. ↩

18. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 9-10. ↩

19. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 10. ↩

20. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 10. ↩

21. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 9. ↩

22. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 8. ↩

23. Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses on Need,” tr. Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald ([1942], New Institute for Social Research, 2017). Accessed online at https://isr.press/Adorno_Theses_on_Need/index.html ↩

24. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 12. ↩

25. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 12. ↩

26. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 11. ↩

27. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 11. ↩

28. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 11. ↩

29. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 11-12. ↩

30. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 12. ↩

31. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 11. ↩

32. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 6. ↩

33. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 7. ↩

34. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 5. ↩

35. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 6; 24n3. ↩

36. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 6. ↩

37. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 6. ↩

38. Adrian Wohlleben, “Memes Without End,” Ill Will, May 17, 2021. Accessed online at https://illwill.com/memes-without-end ↩

39. Phil A. Neel, Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, (Brill, 2025), 238. ↩

40. Neel, Hellworld, 202. ↩

41. Neel, Hellworld, 206. ↩

42. Neel, Hellworld, 206. ↩

43. Neel, Hellworld, 212-13. ↩

44. Neel, Hellworld, 217. ↩

45. Neel, Hellworld, 213-14. ↩

46. Neel, Hellworld, 214. ↩

47. Neel, Hellworld, 210. ↩

48. Neel, Hellworld, 211. ↩

49. Neel, Hellworld, 236, 238. ↩

50. Neel, Hellworld, 210. ↩

51. Neel, Hellworld, 232-233; Neel is taking the term directly from Neocosmos, cited 233n70 and elsewhere. ↩

52. Neel, Hellworld, 228. ↩

53. Neel, Hellworld, 228. ↩

54. Neel, Hellworld, 229-30. ↩

55. Neel, Hellworld, 230. ↩

56. Neel, Hellworld, 237. ↩

57. Neel, Hellworld, 237. ↩

58. Neel, Hellworld, 230-31. ↩

59. Neel, Hellworld, 231. ↩

60. Neel, Hellworld, 232-33. ↩

61. Neel, Hellworld, 232-33. ↩

62. Neel, Hellworld, 232-33. ↩

63. Neel, “What May Come,” 64. ↩

64. Neel, Hellworld, 409. ↩

65. We would do well to remember Lenin’s warning against such submission to “the possible”: “That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is that which is going on at the given moment. This is precisely the trend of unbounded opportunism, which passively adapts itself to spontaneity.” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “What is to be Done? Burning Questions for Our Movement,” [1902] in Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 5:347-530, tr. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (Foreign Language Publishing House, 1967). Accessed online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm ↩

66. Neel, Hellworld, 408. ↩

67. Neel, Hellworld, 410. ↩

68. Neel, Hellworld, 410. ↩

69. Phil A. Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (Reaktion Books, 2020), 52. ↩

70. Neel, Hinterland, 53. ↩

71. Neel, “What May Come,” 62. ↩

72. Far-right elements are certainly capable of articulating their desire for “decommodification” as well. See a key manifesto of the European New Right: “Given the breadth of transformations it has brought about, the commodification of the world from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth century has been one of the most important phenomena in human history. Decommodification will be one of the main phenomena in the Twenty-first century. Thus, it is necessary to return to the origins of the economy (oikos-nomos), to the general laws of the human habitat in the world, which include those of ecological balance, human passion, respect for the harmony and beauty of nature, and, in a more general way, all the non-quantifiable elements that economic science has arbitrarily excluded from its calculations. All economic life implies the mediation of a large range of cultural institutions and juridical means. Today, the economy must be recontextualised within life, society, politics and ethics. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “Economics: Beyond the Marketplace,” Manifesto for a European Renaissance (Arktos, 1999). ↩

73. Neel, “What May Come,” 69. ↩

74. Neel, Hellworld, 411. ↩

75. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 12. ↩

76. Neel, “Theory of the Party,” 18. ↩

77. Neel, “What May Come,” 69. ↩