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This framing is excellent https://www.viewpointmag.com/2020/09/04/party-as-articulator/
I take class composition to have two meanings, in tension with each other. One is the composition that capital produces, both through deliberate disarticulation and in the "spontaneous" social formations that result from capitalist social relations, such as the atomized household
This is the form of composition that we encounter "as is," it's the terrain we have to deal with, both to survive as individuals and as the set of obstacles to overcome through class struggle.
This is somewhat inaccurate, as it's not prior to struggle, but is the result of struggles up to that point. Then there is composition in the sense of an actively produced configuration, which might be the creation of novel groupings or the reorientation of existing ones.
In labor organizing, there's this term "mapping" which refers to the first step or organizing any shop: figuring out who hangs out with who, who eats lunch together, who comes from the same neighborhood, who speaks the same language, etc. Even though we are formally atomized
under capitalism, we always have a host of nonpolitical ties. These are the disarticulated groupings that result from capitalism itself (ie being neighbors) but also from resistance to atomization (ie coworkers who cover each other when napping on shift).
This is the starting basis of any organizing. One person might turn out to be influential with a whole social group and they will all come on board with that person's intervention. The opposite might be the case.
The eventual unified mass is a composite of these preexisting circumstances, one reconfigured to be able to act. This is the product of a process where composition as given is rearticulated into an oppositional unity, what I tend to call "self-composition"
because it encompasses the transition from the subject as the incidental residue of objectification and fetishization to one where the subject begins to dictate its own formation. People relate to each other on their own terms, not the boss's, and articulate to themselves
as something more than aggregated atoms. Self-composition is then the social process governed by capitalist social relations in tension with itself, as individuals brought together for no other reason than labor-power inputs find other potentials contained in that togetherness
often on the basis of a preexisting "map" of social relationships, whatever is left over that still exceeds frictionless commodity relations. Composition, then, is a struggle over mediation: the mediation of capital, the state and its institutions, a mediation between objects,
against the self-mediation of capable subjects; each are immanent to the other. The party has an ambivalent relationship to this process. It must necessarily take some political form, it must harbor and collectivize resources denominated in commodity terms, it must
make decisions through some bureaucracy, itself a necessary disarticulation of the self-composition described above. It must stand apart from the class, because that is what capitalism forces it to do. For this reason, many communists reject the party tout court,
and many others see it as "realists," as the bridge between capitalism as it exists and any possible socialism. Both are reasonable to an extent. As my example from labor organizing implicitly shows, any given process of self-composition does not have to have to contain communist
content. Union organizing is a matter of engaging in this articulating and composing, to overcome the automatic alienation that prevails everywhere, in order to transition to another highly constrained capitalist mediation, to create a stable compact to lessen exploitation.
Parties and unions exist in a spectrum, all engaging in this potent process of self-composition to reach some preset stable point that in the best cases, consolidate gains or, in the worst cases, recuperate the struggle for the reproduction of the institution.
And as the article points out, some articulated unity, the result of this struggle for self-composition in some particular context, might be completely out of touch with an explosion of struggle elsewhere and incapable of linking up with it, articulating anything with it.
The process itself needs to be our focus. Self-composition as capable and autonomous subjects in and against capitalism and attendant oppressions, able to respond to immediate given conditions, "meeting up" with parallel activity, taking on forms that are able to articulate all
of these moving parts into a flexible movement that is *oriented* towards overcoming capitalism. That is the only way for the struggle to maintain communist content, is the process of rearticulating, relinking and reorienting as repression, alienation and history scatter it.
If a singular organization successfully carries out this process, then so be it. We have a party in the traditional sense. More than likely, it won't be singular, it won't be stable and it won't be static. It will be a composite.
