Crowds and Party · 第 139 页

In this setting, class consciousness was developed as a political consciousness. Neither an individual identity, sociological given, or even collective self-awareness, class was used “in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense.”²² It was an outlook on the world, a way of thinking in terms of laws and tendencies and acting in accordance with political allegiance. Samuel rejects the idea that the Communist Party was ever workerist, seeing the “retreat into trade unionism” in the sixties and seventies as a displaced expression of the Party’s “disenchantment with itself,” a symptom of the accretion of failure, disappointment, and tragedy following Khrushchev’s secret speech, the invasion of Hungary, and the Sino-Soviet split.²³ The Party lost the will and capacity to make demands on itself. Those industrial workers who remained in the Party turned their focus to factory issues and factory workers turned less to the Party than to their own immediate struggles.

Underpinning these institutional analogies of church, family, and university were the practices through which the Party organized its members. Communists were caught up in “an endless round of activity that left them very little personal time.”²⁴ Treated as a good in itself, activity not only enveloped members deeply and daily in political work but also incited a sense of urgency: what they were doing had to be done; it was vital, necessary, urgent. Good communists involved themselves in a wide variety of daytoday struggles. The Party held meetings, rallies, and membership drives. It published and distributed a wide array of literature. It organized demonstrations, mobilized strike support, carried out emergency protests. Committed to direct action and immediate struggle, the CPGB planned campaigns, developing systems and processes for making its actions more efficient, for following up and self-assessment. It worked to concentrate its resources and energies so that it would “seem more powerful than it was.” It reviewed tasks, prepared agendas, and drew up committees.

Members were more than members. They had practical positions and responsibilities far beyond those given to them by their place in capitalism. They had specialized roles such that each was always more than him or herself. Each was also someone in the Party: organizer, bureau member, instructor, trainer, branch officer, propagandist, literature seller, delegate, agitator. Related to this, Samuel says, “was a positive mania for reports which served both as an elaborate system of tutelage and as a method of accountability.”²⁵ Reporting installed a practice of looking at activity from the perspective of the Party.

Samuel describes communist organizational passion in detail, treating it as a series of disciplines of the faithful—efficiency in the use of time, solemnity in the conduct of meetings, rhythm and symmetry in street marches, statistical precision in the preparation of reports. What comes through in his account is the affective register of organization. Organization is not just a matter of bureaucracy and control. It’s a generator of enthusiasm, an apparatus of intensification that ruptures the everyday by breaking with spontaneism. Planning is a matter of collective mindfulness. Samuel writes, “To be organized was to be the master rather than the creature of events. In one register it signified regularity, in another strength, in yet another control.”²⁶ Organization produced a shared sense of strength, of a collective with the capacity to carry out its will.

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