Crowds and Party · 第 140 页

The Party meeting, even at the local and branch level, was conducted with great care. Samuel recounts meetings that his mother’s husband, Bill, attended in the early thirties. Ten to fifteen comrades met in the kitchen of a locomotive driver and his wife. The leader was a schoolteacher. The treasurer was a dockworker who hadn’t “a political idea in his head but just loved the Party. He was very passionate about funds.”²⁷ Bill remembered the meeting as “solemn.” Members would discuss world events but the primary purpose of the meeting was “checking up on decisions,” knowing who was going to do what. Later during the war Bill attended meetings of his factory branch in the Three Magpies pub. “It wasn’t exactly formal, but there was a lot of authority there. It wasn’t me. It was in the room.”²⁸ Bill doesn’t mean in the pub. But he doesn’t mean not in the pub, either. He is pointing to the sensibility the group meeting generated. The meeting authorized those who met, transforming a group of people having a pint in the pub into the Communist Party. Their words and actions took on an importance far beyond what they would have been absent the Party. They acquired resonance, transferring the force and important of global struggle into the Three Magpies.

Samuel sets out the specific elements of a meeting. The comrade who opened the meeting made a report. The one who closed it “summed up.” Everyone was expected to contribute to discussion, speaking formally by addressing the chair, “Comrade Chairman.” Samuel writes:

The point of a Party meeting was to get things done, to translate the events of the day into campaigning issues. The “political report” which opened a meeting (even a disciplinary hearing began with one) started with the international situation before “drawing the lessons” and setting out targets and tasks. If the discussion got bogged down in particulars, there would be someone to “raise the level of the discussion” by reminding us of the seriousness of the situation.²⁹

The meeting connected the local, the immediate, with world-historical events (think globally, act locally was communist practice long before it became an activist slogan). Unlike the moves to the personal and political that often disrupt political discussions in an individualist age, comrades drew strength from seeing themselves in a larger setting, from recognizing that rather than being unique they were typical, generic. The particular was a bog, a swampy morass that a group could get stuck in and out of which it would have to be pulled. Lessons could then be learned, conclusions drawn and plans made. Meetings broadened lives by opening them to the political, attaching them to movements and tendencies that took them out of miserable isolation. The world didn’t simply happen to them. They fought to shape the world.

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