{"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":150,"pdf_page":149,"physical_index":149,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6b08d4d4b8269c20226678974d5ec886a10d193510fafed8d49ceb88a13f0462"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Another assembly of intensity, one the twentieth-century Communist Party shares with other political forms such as the liberal-legal and the religious state, is the trial.\n\nRichard Wright provides a compelling account of the Chicago Party trial of Ross, one of his comrades in the mid-1930s. On a cold Sunday afternoon, a small group of Chicago Communists concentrates the oppression and suffering of the masses of the world into a South Side meeting hall. As they speak, they flood the hall with the needs and struggles of millions upon millions, a sea of workers, a field of peasants, mountains of the unemployed. They transfer a complex array of anger, failure, and longing one to another, building and reinforcing an awareness of what can be done out of what must be done.\n\nAt its start, the trial is informal, like a conversation among neighbors over a common problem. Anyone can speak. Underneath the informality, a deeper structure unfolds. Speakers describe the world situation, presenting facts about the rise of fascism and the Soviet Union’s struggle to survive as the world’s lone workers’ state. The logic of this structure is to provide the correct perspective from which to consider Ross’s actions. The perspective is like a law, the law enabling communist desire, setting it apart from the capitalist world by holding up and uniting the experiences of the oppressed. It’s a law communists give themselves in order to hold themselves together when everything conspires to pull them apart—police repression, fear and paranoia, individual desire and need. In instances where solidarity is at risk of fraying, a standard of common judgment on matters of common concern is necessary. That standard can only come from the struggles of the exploited masses themselves.\n\nOver the course of several hours, party speakers produce “a vivid picture of mankind under oppression.” Once world conditions are clear, different speakers talk about the poverty and suffering on Chicago’s South Side, specifically, “its Negro population” and the tasks of the Communist Party. They thereby fuse the “world, the national and the local” into “one overwhelming drama of moral struggle.” Everyone in the hall participates in it. No one escapes. All are implicated. In the intensity of the trial, the comrades’ voices enthrone “a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present, a sense of man on earth. With the exception of the church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.<sup>54</sup>” For those in the hall, the world is not what it was. Reality itself has been ruptured, impressed upon by the weight of the many.\n\nWright had not wanted to attend the trial and in attending he had vowed not to participate. Yet the passional dynamics the trial sets free sweep over everyone, Wright included. The impossible demands of the many, for which the Party serves as a transferential object, cannot not be betrayed. Confrontation with this guilt unleashes immense, unbearable anxiety. The force of the uncounted many envelopes the hall, becoming more and more, “a gigantic tension” relentless in its commanding need. Turned in on a single person, it is crushing, not in the sense of the density and equality accompanying the discharge but as a more fundamental exclusion that cuts a person off from political subjectivity altogether.\n\n150","previous_page":149,"next_page":151}