Crowds and Party · 第 119 页

One recommendation for overcoming this division is imagining oneself as a comrade, not a professor.⁶² Organizers are advised to speak “not as a soap boxer or a seasoned Communist theorist” but just to “be one of the workers, which indeed you are.”⁶³ Other recommendations include better development of cadres, more effort at education. Still others highlight a kind of transferential relation that can arise from “visiting the workers at least two or three times a week, getting to know them by name and their individual problems, and have them call you by name and feel you are one of them.”⁶⁴ Imagining oneself as a comrade, particularly when accompanied by instructions to do what one would normally do, involves a reflexive turn onto the everyday as one looks at what one does from the Party perspective.

The same desire that leads people to join the Party separates them from the crowd. Once they have become communists, they see themselves and the world from the perspective opened up by the Party. They look at the world differently from how they did before. Yet they also have to continue to imagine themselves as the workers they are, bound to the economic struggle. Hence the advice: “Little by little from the conditions in the shops go on to the speed up, wage cuts, unemployment and then to the need for organization. Don’t appear too insistent at first.”⁶⁵ The organizer has to begin from the perspective of the worker and guide the worker to a shift in perspective, to seeing from a different place. The superegoic dimension of the Party is inseparable from its capacity to provide an ideal ego and ego ideal.

The internal criticisms that the Party Organizer raises are unrelenting. For every success in increasing membership, there is an injunction to do more, to do better. One article will take up the ways problems are being addressed. The next will hammer home the problems that persist. The demands they place on themselves never let up—another membership drive, more focus on the trade unions, intensification of reading, more thorough reporting. They acknowledge small victories, but every victory—in true superegoic fashion—inspires yet more self-criticism. One writes, “Our influence among workers has increased ten-fold within the last few years, but the membership of our Party has remained practically stationary. Why do the workers come and leave our ranks? What is wrong with us?”⁶⁶

Throughout 1932, the conversation in the Party Organizer, particularly in the section on mass work, centers on “concentration”—concentration in the shops, concentration in the neighborhoods, concentration in the stockyards of Chicago. “Concentration” is approached from different angles, the emphasis on subjective factors explained in light of objective factors.⁶⁷ By February 1933, critical reflection turns round upon “concentration.” In “Concentration—A Means of Winning the Workers in the Key Industries,” J. P. observes that “concentration” has become a Party term: “we concentrate feverishly.”⁶⁸ But the formality and sectarianism of the approach to concentration has become itself the problem, the actual barrier to growth and increase. The Party has had the wrong conception of “concentration.” What is necessary is more intimate contact with the workers. Six months later a disgusted Party member laments, “we have never taken concentration seriously.”⁶⁹

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