Crowds and Party · 第 145 页

Collective Desire

Mid-century British and US American communists experienced the political life structured by the Party as intensely demanding and alive. Its language, meetings, rituals, and reports channeled poverty and hope into practical optimism. The Party perspective made their actions significant, nothing less than the historical struggle of the world’s oppressed. Isolated deprivation became collective power, rupturing capitalism’s own incessant drumbeat of inferiority and failure. No one had to go it alone, to experience politics as either out of reach or inchoate longing. The Party provided an affective structure that didn’t allow people to give in to their shallower desires and, in so doing, brought out the best in them.⁴⁰

This disallowance was a constraint, sometimes experienced as punishing, always felt as a requirement or compulsion, that which must be done. Sarah Gordon describes how she hated selling the Daily Worker during her twenty years in the Party.

But I did it, I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other. It was each other we’d be betraying if we didn’t push down the gagging and go do it. You know, people never understand that. They say to us, “The Communist Party held a whip over you.” They don’t understand. The whip was inside each of us, we held it over ourselves, not each other.⁴¹

“Party” names a common interior force. Gordon couldn’t help but resist it. Its demands went up against her natural inclinations as if shoved down her throat. Her opposition was visceral. Yet the interiorized structure of comradeship would win out. A collective desire for collectivity was stronger than her individual wants. Feeling its strength inside her, she felt the power of the Party. The sense of what she must do was the same as the sense of what the Party could do.

Hudson recounts how recruiting people into the Party requires patience, nuance, and judgment. Recruiting wasn’t just grabbing or pushing. It had to be taught: “We were teaching our comrades all the way down through the units, we’d teach how to approach people, how to recruit.” In the early thirties, the Party was concentrating on industrial workers, which meant “contacting individual people, making it a regular responsibility.”⁴² Steelworkers, railroad porters, schoolteachers, and chauffeurs were all different and had to be approached differently. Hudson evokes the difference by contrasting the feeling of “facing that hot steel” every morning with being someone who “got a party somewhere they going to tonight.” Teachers and insurance writers are workers, “but they line all different altogether, big time, big parties, having big outings somewhere. They ain’t got time to talk about working class oppression.” Industrial workers have time to talk about it because they face it every day. Yet these workers, even though they know all about the mine, all about the plant, when they come out, they “don’t have nothing to say.”⁴³ One group of workers can talk but they don’t have time. The other has the time because they have to have the time. But they don’t express themselves. Hudson makes the Party into an instrument for the workers’ self-expression, a vehicle for getting that feeling in the mine that they all know up out of the mine and connecting it with the world. Without the Party, working-class oppression would remain underground, unexpressed.

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