{"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":133,"pdf_page":132,"physical_index":132,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"47c3915eb17ff020008ee4a2acd7197ef4fdbd415cc840b311a25bcede3f2515"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Lanzetti tells a story of expansion, of becoming many. He describes how he imparted to Lilly the sense that she wasn’t alone. There was a crowd standing with her. She was backed by the Party. She could gather confidence from the fact that countless others—the whole damned Communist Party—would be right there with her when she confronted her father. And, according to Lanzetti, Lilly felt this, she saw them. Her sense of having the solidarity of the specific people she knew expands into a sense of the whole of the Party standing there with her, supporting her. As she sees the Party right there with her, she becomes stronger, more courageous. A cramped apartment layered in fear transforms into a site of triumph, collective power saturating the everyday in the courage of the cheeky retort, “who’ll cook your eggs?”\n\nLanzetti sees Lilly as a class-conscious communist, someone who works hard, who is at the edge of survival but nonetheless attends meeting after meeting after working both to earn a wage and care for her father. He observes the repetitions of her daily life, how she prepares meal after meal for the silent father she fears. As Lanzetti narrates the story, he stumbles. He mistakenly presumes that, for Lilly, he is a supposed to know a kind of truth about sex: the conditions of its permissibility. Lanzetti slips into imagining himself as one who might validate a young working-class Jewish woman’s sexual independence. She wasn’t the smartest person in the world, after all. But Lilly doesn’t position him as knowing something about sex. She doesn’t need this validation. Of course she was sleeping with the man she loved. The problem wasn’t sex. It was her father as he held the place of family, religion, and race. Lilly was terrified by the prospect of a confrontation with her father, by the challenge of open rejection of his law. Lanzetti recognizes his error. He didn’t know. He guessed wrong about what she wanted and in the moment of his guess he confined Lilly to a traditionally gendered expectation beyond which she had already moved. After all, she was a class-conscious communist. Correcting himself, Lanzetti turns to the Party for its solidarity, no longer imagining himself as the one who might authorize Lilly but looking at both of them from the perspective of the Party. He gets into the swing of things, feeling the power that accrues as one becomes more and then many—himself, delegation, the whole damned Party.\n\nLanzetti’s story is about more than Lilly. It’s about himself as an organizer and how he transmitted the sense of the Party to Lilly so that she was emboldened openly to reject her father (and not just covertly to transgress the law he embodied). Class consciousness, which Lilly already has, isn’t the same as the political confidence or practical optimism that the Party inspires. The life of a neighborhood, as well as the workplace experience, may generate a shared sensibility or even identity. That sensibility nourishes political potential. But it is not sufficient for a politics. It is not yet explicit as a division or a will. To be a communist is to go to meeting after meeting, to work hard, maybe even to remain poor, but it is also to have access to a force strong enough to go up against the law and win, a force neither fully internal nor external, neither reducible to particular organizational features nor separate from them, but rather an affective infrastructure capable of enlarging the world.\n\nThe Enduring Crowd\n\n133","previous_page":132,"next_page":134}