Wright says that the charges against Ross aren’t brought until well into the evening. Those that bring them are not Central Committee members or high-level operatives. They’re Ross’s own friends. When it comes time for Ross to defend himself, he wilts, trembling and unable to talk. He calls no one to speak in his behalf.
The hall was as still as death. Guilt was written in every poor of his black skin … His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated. Yet he could not have been so humbled unless he had shared and accepted the vision that had crushed him, the common vision that bound us all together.<sup>55</sup>
Ross is guilty because his desire is so great, so magnified and intense, that it cannot not be betrayed. The superegoic force of the Party concentrates collective desire into an impossible, unshakeable desire for collectivity.
Ross confesses. He accepts his guilt, recounts his errors, outlines plans to reform. Wright makes it clear that
Ross had not been duped; he had been awakened. It was not a fear of the Communist Party that had made him confess, but a fear of the punishment that he would exact of himself that made him tell of his wrong-doings. The Communists had talked to him until they had given him new eyes with which to see his own crime … He was one with all the members there, regardless of race or color; his heart was theirs and their hearts were his; and when a man reaches that state of kinship with others, that degree of oneness, or when a trial has made him kin after he has been sundered from them by wrongdoing, then he must rise and say, out of a sense of the deepest morality in the world: “I’m guilty. Forgive me.”<sup>56</sup>
A ritual assembly for sundering becomes an intense experience of belonging. Even as it concentrates the enormity of global struggle and oppression, the Party provides a structure for relief from that pressure. It gives meaning to suffering. It supplies a vehicle for its redress. Something can be done, but it can only be done together. To insist on one’s own way is to do nothing at all because against all of capitalism individual efforts are worthless. In fact, it’s even worse: to insist on one’s own way is to support capitalism, racism, imperialism, and fascism, to join them in their war against the people. Alone, Ross would be left isolated in his confrontation with the impossible demands of the people. With his comrades, he could experience the power of these demands in forcing change.
As Wright depicts it, Ross’s trial has echoes of Socrates’ trial before the Athenians. Charges are brought by friends. The accused does not call on anyone to speak in his behalf. The real trial is before history: Who is actually guilty here? The Athenians? The Party? The difference is that unlike Plato, Wright expresses the ambivalence of collective power. The Chicago comrades were wrong, living blind and limited lives “truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of communism.” But a truth appears even through their “corrupted consciousness.” The experience of equality across raced division, the discharge Canetti associates with the crowd, cuts through the spectacle of misguided banishment. Seeing with the Party, viewing himself from the same perspective as his accusers, Ross is no Socrates. Where Plato isolates the moral perspective in the figure of Socrates and judges the Athenians from that vantage point, Wright maintains fidelity to the perspective opened by the Party even as it errs, even as it fails to apply this perspective to itself.
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