{"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":141,"pdf_page":140,"physical_index":140,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8ee64998c815051a4464b315cdfef0cf11365d0c29191c8f731a32b9fc83250d"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Samuel observes that much Party activity was “less instrumental than expressive.”<sup>30</sup> Organization had a fantastic dimension, buttressing illusions of control, expressing dreams of power and efficacy as capable of being fulfilled. If weakness was a matter of failures of organization, then strength would accrue as these were corrected. To the extent that organization enabled members of the CPGB to imagine their Party as shaping the world, they could believe in what they were doing whether or not their rallies and Daily Worker headlines corresponded to any actually significant political influence. But even with this observation, Samuel rightly refuses to allow the cynical, dismissive, and defeatist attitude of a contemporary Left that looks at the world from the perspective of capitalism to fill in the gap of possibility British communists were able to maintain. He continues to see from the perspective of the Party. The Party, shortcomings and all, continues to provide an ego ideal or symbolic point from which to view actions as momentous. The Party sustains the perspective it provides such that agitating against imperialism in a colonial society, campaigning against fascism, keeping alive the housing question, and supporting twenty years of Hunger Marches manifest the heroic work of energetic comrades, communism in the actuality of political movement. Multiple activities were not a differentiated pluralism of possibilities but a singular communist politics, envisioned as and from the perspective of the enduring struggle of the masses.\n\nSamuel’s account of Party activity isn’t unique to CPGB. It resonates with the experiences of American communists. Gornick writes,\n\nFor thousands of Communists, being a Communist meant years of selling the Daily Worker, running off mimeographed leaflets, speaking on street corners, canvassing doorto-door for local and national votes, organizing neighborhood groups for tenants’ rights or welfare rights or unemployment benefits, raising money for the Party or for legal defenses or bail bonds or union struggles. Only that and nothing more.<sup>31</sup>\n\nWhat Gornick calls the “grinding ordinariness” of the life of Party members in the US, like that in the UK, involved ceaseless activity. Gornick presents the dream of revolution as external to this activity. I disagree. It wasn’t the vision that sustained the activity. The activity was the practical optimism that sustained the vision. Consistent activity—particularly the planning, meetings, and reports—generated the perspective of the Party that enabled it. Consistency made it possible for the everyday to feel momentous, for neighborhood matters to become more than their immediacy, to become vehicles transmitting the sense of the world. Organization concentrated collective sentiment into a form other than the deprivations of capital and state, enabling people to see themselves and the world from the perspective of a gap in the given, a gap of hope and possibility.\n\nHosea Hudson’s experiences as a black communist in the US South support my reversal of the relation between activity and vision. Hudson describes unit meetings, section meetings, and branch meetings; printing and distributing leaflets; reports, checkups, and criticism; recruiting people one by one. Born in 1898 into a family of Alabama sharecroppers, Hudson worked as a molder at the Stockham foundry in Birmingham in the 1920s. Even before the Depression hit in full force, workers in the gray iron department faced wage cuts, the result of the “stagger system”—they would work two days one week, three the next, and some weeks not at all—that accompanied the introduction of a conveyor and a points system for determining pay. Hudson became aware of the Party in 1930 because of their leafleting: “The people were always putting them around the community, but I didn’t know who they was. They’d drop by at night and you’d pick them up in the morning—there’d be a leaflet on your porch.”<sup>32</sup> Hudson couldn’t read, so he’d get his wife to read the leaflets for him. Early in 1931, his interest in the Party increased because of the Scottsboro case. Nine young African American men (one was twelve years old) were accused of raping two white women on a freight train. The Party led the campaign in their defense.\n\n141","previous_page":140,"next_page":142}