Confined by “the deadly trap of motherhood,” Dennis is pulled in different directions by an interior crowd. She writes that she “was under strict orders from everyone” not to get arrested. “Everyone” included her mother, husband, the Young Communist League, and the Party. A crowd was enjoining her to focus on the baby. She was a nursing mother and had to attend to the newborn. Dennis explains, “Not getting arrested meant staying out of street actions or public meetings. I taught classes, wrote leaflets, served on committees that planned actions for others who would get arrested. I felt guilty.”<sup>52</sup> As if feeling the avoidance of arrest as a manifestation of what Canetti calls “the traitor within,” she judges herself for betraying her comrades, for a failure of courage and solidarity. Dennis subjectivizes an impossibility, turning the barrier to action into an internal barrier, a personal failing. The perspective from which she judges is the perspective of the Party, even when her comrades have told her to stay home and she is still tirelessly doing the work of the Party. The excess that is the Party perspective, the point from which she sees, is the too-much-ness that both gives Party life its intensity and that works back upon the comrades as a superegoic injunction they cannot but give themselves. The gap between possible and enjoined is the gap of communist desire. The Party sustains that gap.
Diana Johnson, a twenty-year member of CPUSA, observes,
None of us considered the work we did on the “outside” important. Because, after all, we knew it didn’t matter what you did out there. You were living in a bourgeois capitalist world where everything was shit, everything fed a single purpose, so what did it matter what you did. Your real life was with the Party, with your comrades, with things you did in meetings and demonstrations.<sup>53</sup>
All the multiple multitudinous activities of living that seem so necessary from the perspective of capitalism fall to the wayside from the perspective of the Party. They don’t matter. The Party ruptures the bourgeois world of profit and loss so that another one can appear. No wonder Dennis felt guilty—she had ceded the desire for communism that made life worth living.
The Actuality of the Communist Party
Describing the Communist Party as an awesome structure for concentrating and harnessing inchoate political emotion, Vivian Gornick employs a metaphor Canetti associates with the crowd: a tidal wave. The tidal wave evokes a sweeping force that cannot be contained or channeled. It exceeds all barriers, engulfing everything it encounters. Like the crowd, the tidal wave is natural and unpredictable, indivisible and unchosen, more a dynamic than a structure or thing. The communist party derives its energy from the crowd as it strives to find ways to let the crowd endure, to enable its intensity to be felt even after the crowd has dispersed. It provides a transferential object that can stand in for the crowd, not representing it but pushing the urges it activates in the direction of equality and justice. With meetings and actions, the party produces assemblies of intensity that press comrades into action, involving them in practices and activities through which they are accountable to one another.
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