{"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":138,"pdf_page":137,"physical_index":137,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6d65aa269b599eed5acd7a06936645e4b24f96357aeb7ea53628545117be87c2"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"You don’t understand. We had no choice. It’s not like today, where the kids think they have the choice to be political or not be political, or be any other damn thing they want to be. We had no choice. We did not choose, we were chosen. Life came in on us, and we were bashed over the head, and we struggled to our knees and to our feet, and when we were standing there was the Communist Party.<sup>15</sup>\n\nSarah Gordon, who grew up communist in the Bronx, explains how political attachment to the Communist Party “literally negated our deprivation. It was rich, warm, energetic, an exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. It nourished us when nothing else nourished us. It not only kept us alive, it made us powerful inside ourselves.”<sup>16</sup> By attending to the affective attachments of Communists to their party, I draw out the practical optimism that enabled the egalitarian intensity and desire of the crowd to endure after the crowds dispersed.\n\nInfrastructure of Feeling\n\nWriting in the 1980s, as Marxism Today was reconfiguring British communism for new times, replacing capitalism with Thatcherism as its enemy and communism with progressive modernization as its goal, Raphael Samuel evoked The Lost World of British Communism.<sup>17</sup> The proximate occasion for Samuel’s evocation was the defeat of the miners’ strike and the split in the CPGB, variously rendered as an opposition between a “hard” and a “soft left,” “Stalinists” and “Eurocommunists,” “Fundamentalists” and “Realists,” or Morning Star and Marxism Today. The more fundamental occasion was the change with which the Left had found itself grappling since 1968: the erosion of collectivity amidst ever-increasing political, economic, and societal emphasis on “personal identity and individual self-assertion.”<sup>18</sup> “Collectivity, instead of being the means of realizing the common good,” Samuel writes, was coming to be seen “as an instrument of coercion, promoting uniformity rather than diversity, intimidating the individual, and subordinating the minority to the unthinking mass.”<sup>19</sup> In the seventies and eighties, all social institutions—particularly those associated with the welfare state—came under attack from left and right. Yet as Samuel explains, those associated with working-class collectivism were particularly vulnerable: “Once the decision to strike becomes a matter of personal decision rather than of obedience to collective discipline, or of upholding collective honour, it is subject to all those discriminations and cross-currents which make it so difficult to cope with everyday.”<sup>20</sup> Samuel writes to refresh and retain the memory of collective power.\n\nIn some ways, Samuel gives us a communism resolutely in step with the one its critics describe: a secular religion woven out of ministry, self-sacrifice, faith, and unity. Here communism is “the way, the truth, and the light.” Providing an international fellowship, “promise of redemption,” and the Soviet Union as the “promised land,” the communism of Samuel’s childhood exudes rightness and certitude. At the same time, his communism also appears as familial and pedagogic, less a matter of metaphysical conviction than of everyday life. Samuel’s mother and most of her relatives were communists, their communism “a bridge by which the children of the ghetto entered the national culture” as well as an educational “surrogate for university.”<sup>21</sup> To be recruited into the Party was to enter into a system of education with readings, classes, lectures, and study.\n\n138","previous_page":137,"next_page":139}