{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":118,"pdf_page":117,"physical_index":117,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"679ab488c362f6e1405ffda9399f45a81c93ff4938ebab45af48f94d41dbf384"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Once it utterly collapsed, we lost the other through whom we could believe.\n\nThe Party Organizer\n\nWritings from the 1930s in the Party Organizer, a publication of the Communist Party of the United States for the internal use of unit and district organizers, display the array of dynamic and structural effects knotted together in the party.\n\nA first example illustrates the intertwining of ideal ego and ego ideal in the Party. The writer vividly narrates how his CP-organized block committee fought to get food relief for a needy woman and her children. As he tells it, the workers “stood up like a solid wall, demanding food.” The cowardly relief supervisor, “a capitalist tool,” called the police, who rushed in and grabbed the CP organizer. “But the roar from the workers and my determination to fight back put fear into the hearts of the police.” The police called for reinforcements and brought “the big fat Judge Mendriski” with them. With a heroic image of himself, workers, and Party standing up to the capitalist relief supervisor, police, and judge and fighting to keep a woman and her children from starving, the organizer recounts, “I looked right at him and said: ‘What the hell are you here for, to help this serpent deny this mother with her three children? You don’t care … you with your belly packed with steak.’” The judge orders the police to lock up the organizer. But the police, “seeing the determination of the workers,” are forced to let him go.<sup>59</sup> The workers appear as a crowd, a roaring steadfast wall. Their appearing compels the police to take the perspective of the CP and recognize that the united workers are stronger than any judge and his order.\n\nA second example brings out the superegoic dimension of the Party. In the early 1930s, the Party Organizer filled itself with articles on how to recruit and retain new members. Month after month, the writers—many anonymous, many district-level organizers—express excitement about gains in new members and dismay over the party’s failure to retain them. They worry that their meetings are too long, that they don’t start and finish on time, that they aren’t “snappy enough.”<sup>60</sup> They advise one another on the best design for a party meeting: no more than two hours, not to exceed two and half hours, three hours at the absolute limit. District organizers are advised to pick up members at their houses and bring them to meetings. Members are reminded to talk to new recruits. The CP organizers writing in the magazine sense the “enthusiasm and earnest desire of the workers,” but blame themselves for the fact that the workers drop out:\n\nThe recruit comes into the average unit of the Party and finds there a group of strangers speaking a jargon which he does not understand. No one pays much attention to him and he is therefore left very much to himself … enthusiasm cools, he becomes discouraged, loses his enthusiasm and finally drops out of the Party.<sup>61</sup>\n\n“Jargon” is a symptom of the problem. “Jargon” means that the people and the Party are not speaking the same language. It marks a division between workers and Party members, even when Party members are workers. The language that members share, the ideas that enable them to see the world in terms other to capitalism’s, enhance and hinder belonging at the same time. The very activities they pursue as communists— reading, discussing, meeting, leafleting, organizing, training—separate them from the workers. What makes them communists, what separates them from capitalism’s constraints as it provides them with political capacity and conviction, inscribes a gap in the givenness of economic belonging. They are not just economic producers. They are political producers creating not commodities but collective power.\n\n118","previous_page":117,"next_page":119}