On the one hand the desire will echo across the machine or web, hooking up other individuals and creating other circumstances. The manifestation of the desires, of the flicker of a glance will then echo into other flickers and be partially articulated by them collective curiosity will have its on physical presence, as will whittering. It will be their embodied in the world, a terrible impersonal, mundane idiotic thing. Desire then stops being only a thing n the human brain, it become articulated in the world, it becomes akin to a physical force. A mind which uses a rigmarole of machine and human to articulate itself. Humans become then a mere cell in a wider collective series of feelings.
These feelings will then as a physical force look to a power. Or better they will be viable ( as a physical force is ) to be plugged into machines and so become powerful. They will therefore really matter as such.
On the other hand, individual humans and there action as people (and there embodiment as government) are likely to slip out of view. They matte hardly at all. They matter not even to the government. All after all the governing classes need is to preach to the desires and cobble together a loose coalition of desire once every four years or so and so be elected. The actual individual humans as humans thereby create for themselves and in their freedom a new way to be powerless.
This might not matter (marx did suggests that communist man is all things at different times,a and perhaps this ism what he meant). And yet the trouble is that in the Marxian system there at least existed a something, a communism, a self-consciousness perhaps or echoing of consciousness that this was what was happening,and an understanding which define the collective mind the sharing of the conscious (as if the whole was an individual) which could capture the process. But there is no real need for this holding function Dickens suggests. If government is merely yet another desire, how will this idea of an idea in all minds form? Where can it hold from? if will merely slip into a desire for itself. It will then becomes a part of the system of shards. That shard (call it identity or bureaucracy or global consciousness) which allows for all the others and yet is a merely a part in the system.
Communism would then falter as its definition would merely be caught in the system. or to put it differently communisms has a change if it is the paradigm within which the shattering of human perception into thought is enacted self consciously and in the name of revolution. But its self consciousness follows on then it will merley be born devoured within the system it means to critique: this is Dickens notes the normal way and has been since the days of Spinoza and Leibniz) which self consciousness if understood.
What made Marx then think it can be so different this time?
The answer of course must be Hegel... that is the idea that history or across history a people or collective mind learns and learns for all of time. The realisation then that the mind is making its own world or the communist that they were the agents for a desire ought be enough to contain a system for all of time. Dickens however doubts this. The point is rather that every generation will need to learn for itself. Self consciousnes said then not carried forward tot he next generation. The problem is them that it becomes (like feminism or perhaps ecology) a player in a system it was once designed to contain. Real politik then needs to live with this fact. That is with the fact that whatever 'communist' systems we devise will ultimately fall into the system that analyse.
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