{"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":137,"pdf_page":136,"physical_index":136,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6fafdbfd42473fd1be42e5eb4a3002004c824727643d8bf7760ad3e29c0780e4"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Lauren Berlant presents affect theory as “another phase in the history of ideology theory.”<sup>9</sup> Common and atmospheric, affect intertwines knowing and doing, infusing each with a feeling-mood-sensibility irreducible to individual emotional dispositions. Attention to affect can open up a register beyond texts and practices, providing access to a domain of attachments and expectations productive of a mode of life. Berlant observes that the Marxist tradition “has offered multiple ways to engage the affective aspects of class antagonism, labor practices, a communally generated feeling that emerges from inhabiting a zone of lived structure.”<sup>10</sup> Whether as histories of the working class, analyses of the structure of feeling specific to an historical formation, or readings of a world in terms of its aesthetics, Marxist cultural theory has usefully documented and explored the conditions of class belonging. It generally neglects party belonging. Where class appears in the rich fabric of work and life, in the culture and customs ostensibly inspiring that collective identity mobilized in the party, the party appears as mechanistic and cold. Against the abundance of everyday diversity, the party seems abstract, calculating, instrumental. I want to change this perception of the party.\n\nBerlant herself looks to affect to discern the specificity of the mediation of desire in late neoliberalism. She is concerned with “the attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, the good life.”<sup>11</sup> In contrast to Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” I attend to the practical optimism generated through the Party.<sup>12</sup> I consider the building up of hope through the transmission of a communist sensibility in settings characterized by its absence. Rather than tracing diminution and loss, I track intensification and gain, the production of new conviction, as we see with Lilly and Lanzetti. The Communist Party provided an affective infrastructure through which everyday experiences took on meanings separate from those channeled through capitalism. The Party held open a gap in the given through which people could see themselves in collective struggle changing the world.\n\nThe American Communists speaking in Gornick’s book recount their lives in the Party in sensorially vivid terms. The intensity of the felt experience that they invoke cuts through everyday deprivation and frustration, making real the possibility of another world: they can already feel it. Working to build it, to bring it about, they remake their individual experiences of capitalist injustice into moments of collective communist equality. Ben Saltzman, a New York garment worker says, “I had the Party and I had my comrades, and they made me strong, strong on my feet.”<sup>13</sup> Joe Preisen, a Brooklyn trade unionist, similarly observes, “History was all around you. You could touch it, smell it, see it. And when a labor organizer who was also a Communist got up to talk you could taste it in your mouth.”<sup>14</sup> Belle Rothman, a union organizer, insists,\n\n137","previous_page":136,"next_page":138}