Crowds and Party · 第 148 页

Samuel reads a CPGB appeal from 1945 as masochistic in its evocation of specific instances of heroic self-sacrifice, the heads on the blocks and nooses around the neck, the starvation, imprisonment, and deprivation endured with steadfast hope. I take “masochistic” to signal not self-punishment or self-inflicted pain but the reflexivity of collective desire as it works backs upon itself. The Party takes the perspective that the situation of the oppressed and exploited is not necessary. It can be changed, redressed, abolished. To the extent that exploitation continues, enough is not being done to stop it. The Party is the collective that makes the force of this realization into its maxim. There is always an answer to Lenin’s question “what is to be done?” And that answer is always too much. Too much is to be done and that excess is the force the Party turns on itself. The enthusiasm and solidarity that infuses the Party’s commitment to ongoing political action works back on the comrades as an intensity that relentlessly pushes them from within themselves.

Peggy Dennis, a journalist and organizer for CPUSA (her husband served as General Secretary and went to prison under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era), expresses the interior pull of the Party. Dennis was the daughter of Russian Jewish revolutionaries who immigrated to California shortly before the 1905 revolution. Her mother was disappointed when Dennis got pregnant and married. She had taught her daughter “that personal love was not a sufficient singular purpose in life; that for women, no less than for men, there must be much more to an enriched life. Conventional marriage was the deadly trap and motherhood was the snaplock to that trap door.”⁴⁹

In 1929, when Dennis’s child was first born, her husband was in jail. He had been arrested during a street meeting in front of the marine workers’ union hall. The unpermitted street meeting, “a tumultuous assembly,” came about because the hall for a planned protest was denied at the last minute. The protest was around the “Red Camp Case.” The Young Communist League’s children’s summer camp had been “raided by a posse of American Legionnaires led by local sheriffs.” The children were moved to juvenile court. The adults were charged with “conspiracy to teach the tenets of communism.”⁵⁰ The raid on the camp and subsequent arrest of communists and militants was part of an ongoing struggle in Los Angeles as employers and government viewed demands for “Jobs or Relief” and “Bread or Wages” as “the harbinger of social revolution.” Dennis writes:

Meanwhile, I was chafing, restlessly. I nursed our infant, scrubbed his diapers and carefully observed the rigid schedules prescribed in those days by government pamphlets on infant training. But no great surge of mother love enveloped me. Mama adored the baby, but carefully left me in sole charge … Gene came home from his meetings or jail absences to stand gazing at his sleeping son. Only I was an unfeeling monster; except in the silence of the 2 am feeding. With the child pulling at my breast and the exciting world outside stilled, the small body in my arms and I did communicate. But with the morning came the beat of struggle that passed me by.⁵¹

Dennis feels the Party as the beat of struggle, the pull of solidarity, a longing for the density and equality that comes through collective action. Self-critically she observes her own chafing against the reduction of her world around an infant’s demands even as she links these demands to a rigid, coercive government. She judges herself as monstrous for longing for the excitement of the external world. The struggle that matters is outside, the fight “to feed, clothe, or house the millions thrown on the scrap heap of capitalism.”

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