{"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":147,"pdf_page":146,"physical_index":146,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7b1b433540e4fc8cd9c857c8e441051609d26ca25a3b735cf40610d2c15d4bae"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The Party made Hudson feel like somebody. As a Party organizer he sought to let others feel like somebody—which meant seeing themselves from the perspective of the party. The feeling of mattering is a political consciousness, the practical optimism that accompanies an understanding of how things work, the patterns that connect new machinery in the plant with lynching and imperialism. Knowing how things get done flows into a sense of what it takes to get things done—planning, organization, and solidarity—which feeds back in on and is reinforced in the affective space of the Party. The affective intensity of the Party works on its members, making them stronger together than they were apart as it pushes them to act in collective rather than individual interest. Each feels the inner force of their collective strength as a command or duty. This duty is the collective desire impressing itself in the individual comrade. To the extent that the individual is a comrade, is a communist, doing his or her duty isn’t a ceding of desire; it’s fidelity to it. Betraying the Party is giving way on desire, and the only thing, Lacan would say, ofwhich one can be guilty.\n\nHudson’s wife, Sophie, didn’t support his Party work. “By she not being politically developed, not being developed along with me, it just pulled us apart.”<sup>46</sup> Hudson learns in the seventies that while he was busy organizing back in the thirties, going to meetings and traveling, Sophie was having sex with another man.\n\nThat’s some of the results of the things I had to pay for and sacrifice for, trying to carry out this one thing that was my duty as a Party person. The Party was a political party, and only the most developed, the most developed and class-conscious, the people who’s willing to sacrifice, to take the sacrifice, to make the sacrifice and would be willing to 47 accept the discipline of the Party could be members of the Party.\n\nHudson did not have to be a member of the Communist Party. In fact, he couldn’t even just choose to be a member. He had to be chosen. Not just anyone was invited to join. Being chosen meant that he was somebody and the sacrifices he made for the Party confirmed that the Party was right in its choice. He was, in fact, somebody. He was somebody because of his identification with the ego ideal of the Party. From the perspective of the Party he could see himself as doing things that were important.\n\nSamuel, in his account of British communism in the forties and fifties, is not wrong to imply that the CP embodied a secular Calvinism whereby comrades sought to justify their election. “The willingness to make sacrifices, whether in terms of time, comfort, or money, also seems to have been a litmus test of dedication lower down the Party scale: as in some of the Party’s successor organizations of more recent times, there was a relentless pressure on members to be ‘active.’”<sup>48</sup> The pressure was the interior force of their own collectivity. They exerted it on themselves. Every sacrifice strengthened it, generating a sense of the more that needed to be done and that could be done if more sacrifices were made. To be “politically developed,” as Hudson would say, was to feel a gap open up in the world between the actual and the possible and to see the world from the perspective of that gap.\n\n147","previous_page":146,"next_page":148}