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# Crowds and Party
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The Passional Dynamics of the Communist Party
It sometimes seems as if people on the Left love revolution, but hate the party. We enthusiastically support transformation, especially personal transformation. Yet in the same breath we scoff at institutionalized practices strategically oriented toward the pursuit of radical political change. Many of us thus reject the organizational form that marks the difference between the chaos of revolution and the building of a new political and social order. With this rejection, we shield ourselves from a confrontation with the real of division, luxuriating instead in the fantasy of the beautiful moment.
The party is a political form that compels this confrontation. It claims, occupies, and mobilizes it. This chapter continues the investigation of the psychodynamics of the party introduced in chapter four. Using examples from British and US American communism, I highlight the symbolic space of the party. What enabled the Communist Party to provide a location from which communists in the UK and US could see their actions as valuable and worthwhile? My claim is that the affective infrastructure of the party provided the material support for its symbolic location. Ceaseless practice generated the intensities that members directed onto themselves, letting them push themselves such that they could see themselves as changing the world. They became bigger, able to do more than they could have imagined, and the world became present in the everyday. So instead of considering the communist party in terms of ideology, program, leadership, or organizational structure, I approach it in terms of the dynamics of feeling it generates and mobilizes. More than an instrument for political power, the communist party provides an affective infrastructure that enlarges the world.
The communist party’s capacity to enlarge the world comes at a cost. The knot of unconscious processes that holds open the space for communist political subjectivity exerts constant, even unrealizable, demands. Bluntly put: seeing yourself as changing the world requires you to look at yourself from a position that makes relentless demands on you, a position that compels and judges and accepts no excuses. If that’s what communists want, and we should, then we have to confront these costs head on. The stronger the political organization we build, the greater will be its—and our— expectations. Organizing us, the party compels us, or, differently put, it is the apparatus through which we compel ourselves to do what we must, to do what has to be done because we cannot, will not, acquiesce to inequality, exploitation, and oppression.
5
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I begin with a story from Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism. It’s about an organizer named Eric Lanzetti and a young party member named Lilly. I like this story because it illustrates the themes of enlargement and courage that the Party perspective provides.
Lanzetti grew up in a West Virginia mining town after fascism pushed his father out of Italy. He attended Brown and Oxford on scholarship. In 1938, having been radicalized by the war in Spain, Lanzetti joined the Communist Party. Within a short time, he was made a section organizer on the Lower East Side of New York City. In one of the interviews with American Communists at the basis of Gornick’s book, Lanzetti tries to convey the reach of the Party on New York’s Lower East Side in the thirties, its moral place in the life of the neighborhood. He gives the example of Lilly:
She wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but she was a hardworking, conscientious Communist, with a powerful sense of class. She lived alone with her father on Rivington Street. The old man was an Orthodox Jew who paid absolutely no attention to her or to her politics or anything. She made his breakfast in the morning, went to work, came home, made his dinner, went to a meeting, came home, made him hot milk, and that was it. The old man sat reading the Talmud all day long. Lilly ran the house entirely. If it wasn’t for her working, they would have both starved. But he was her father and she was scared shitless of him.1
One evening after a meeting, Lanzetti recalls, Lilly wanted to talk to him about something. Hesitantly, she started to tell him about a man with whom she was in love. Lanzetti assumed Lilly wanted to know whether she should sleep with him, so he started to talk about how sex outside of marriage is not a problem. “‘Oh no, no, no,’ she interrupts me, ‘it’s nothing like that. Of course, we’ve been sleeping together. It’s that he’s Chinese. I’m terrified to tell my father we want to get married.’” Lanzetti recounts that he stared at her, momentarily dumbfounded. Then he replied, “‘Look, if you’re afraid to tell him alone I’ll go with you.’ ‘You’ll go with me?’ she says. ‘Not only me,’ I say, ‘we’ll take a delegation if that’ll make you feel any better.’ ‘A delegation?’ she says. ‘Sure,’ I say, getting into the swing of it, ‘we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party.’”
A month later, Lilly approached Lanzetti again. He asked her what had happened. She says that it took a while for her to get up the nerve, but then she finally told her father she was getting married. Her father asked, “Is he Jewish?” No, she answered. He’s Chinese. Lilly’s father was silent for a long time. “I’ll kill you,” he finally said. Lilly relates that her knees started to buckle:
Then all of a sudden it was like you were in there in the room with me. I saw you and my branch organizer and all the people I work with and I felt like the whole Communist Party was right there in the room with me. I looked at my father and I said to him: “If you kill me, who’ll cook your eggs?”
Sometimes You Have to Cook a Few Eggs
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Lanzetti tells a story of expansion, of becoming many. He describes how he imparted to Lilly the sense that she wasn’t alone. There was a crowd standing with her. She was backed by the Party. She could gather confidence from the fact that countless others—the whole damned Communist Party—would be right there with her when she confronted her father. And, according to Lanzetti, Lilly felt this, she saw them. Her sense of having the solidarity of the specific people she knew expands into a sense of the whole of the Party standing there with her, supporting her. As she sees the Party right there with her, she becomes stronger, more courageous. A cramped apartment layered in fear transforms into a site of triumph, collective power saturating the everyday in the courage of the cheeky retort, “who’ll cook your eggs?”
Lanzetti sees Lilly as a class-conscious communist, someone who works hard, who is at the edge of survival but nonetheless attends meeting after meeting after working both to earn a wage and care for her father. He observes the repetitions of her daily life, how she prepares meal after meal for the silent father she fears. As Lanzetti narrates the story, he stumbles. He mistakenly presumes that, for Lilly, he is a supposed to know a kind of truth about sex: the conditions of its permissibility. Lanzetti slips into imagining himself as one who might validate a young working-class Jewish woman’s sexual independence. She wasn’t the smartest person in the world, after all. But Lilly doesn’t position him as knowing something about sex. She doesn’t need this validation. Of course she was sleeping with the man she loved. The problem wasn’t sex. It was her father as he held the place of family, religion, and race. Lilly was terrified by the prospect of a confrontation with her father, by the challenge of open rejection of his law. Lanzetti recognizes his error. He didn’t know. He guessed wrong about what she wanted and in the moment of his guess he confined Lilly to a traditionally gendered expectation beyond which she had already moved. After all, she was a class-conscious communist. Correcting himself, Lanzetti turns to the Party for its solidarity, no longer imagining himself as the one who might authorize Lilly but looking at both of them from the perspective of the Party. He gets into the swing of things, feeling the power that accrues as one becomes more and then many—himself, delegation, the whole damned Party.
Lanzetti’s story is about more than Lilly. It’s about himself as an organizer and how he transmitted the sense of the Party to Lilly so that she was emboldened openly to reject her father (and not just covertly to transgress the law he embodied). Class consciousness, which Lilly already has, isn’t the same as the political confidence or practical optimism that the Party inspires. The life of a neighborhood, as well as the workplace experience, may generate a shared sensibility or even identity. That sensibility nourishes political potential. But it is not sufficient for a politics. It is not yet explicit as a division or a will. To be a communist is to go to meeting after meeting, to work hard, maybe even to remain poor, but it is also to have access to a force strong enough to go up against the law and win, a force neither fully internal nor external, neither reducible to particular organizational features nor separate from them, but rather an affective infrastructure capable of enlarging the world.
The Enduring Crowd
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Elias Canetti’s study of the crowd is a theory of collective desire. The crowd assembles libidinal and affective intensities into the force of a longing irreducible to the crowd’s emotion, to the specific excitement or event that calls it together. Canetti classifies crowds with respect to their prevailing emotion—the baiting crowd out for the kill, the flight crowd in which everyone flees, the prohibition crowd that refuses, the reversal crowd turning against those who command or oppress it, and the feast crowd that enjoys in common. What we might think of as the unconscious structure and processes of the crowd, the crowd’s economy of enjoyment, persists through or underneath these different types of crowds. As I discussed in chapter three, this crowd unconscious has four attributes: a desire to grow, a state of absolute equality (which Canetti defines as the “discharge”), a love of density, and a need of direction.
These crowd attributes dynamically generate collective jouissance. The desire to increase, expand, accumulate, and extend infuses even the crowd enclosed in an institution. The urge to grow is ineliminable, a primary impulse of the crowd. Crowds can be open or closed, but even spatial limitations can be breached by the crowd’s desire to grow. Consider, for example, the odd obviousness of majority rule. The weight of number forces itself as the push of the crowd. It exerts as pressure, no matter whether right or wrong, reasonable or not. Even those who object and resist encounter this pressure. Going against the crowd is hard. The crowd wants to pull everything into itself, to take on more and increase itself. Canetti writes, “the crowd never feels itself saturated.”2
With the discharge, Canetti offers a view of equality fundamentally different from the psychoanalytic association of equality with envy. Equality in the crowd is dedifferentiation, de-individuation, the momentary release from hierarchy, closure, and separation. “It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and that they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it,” Canetti writes. “All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.”3 The press for equality comes not from ressentiment. It’s not born of weakness or deprivation. It comes from the strength of many as it amplifies itself, reinforces itself, and pushes itself back upon itself. With shouts, exclamations, and noise—the spontaneous “utterance in common”—the crowd expresses the equality that is its substance.
The crowd’s density is its indivisibility or degree of solidarity. Understood physiologically, density manifests itself in commonality of feeling, for example, the excitement that passes through the crowd, amplifying and feeding into itself. Close proximity helps here. Canetti pairs equality and density, telling us that in the dancing crowd they coincide. The “skillful enactment of density and equality” engenders the crowd feeling.
The crowd’s direction is its goal. When common, the goal “strengthens the feeling of equality.” The stronger the common goal is, the weaker the individual goals that threaten the crowd’s density. Whereas Le Bon and Freud attribute the crowd’s need for direction to its need for a leader, Canetti makes direction into a process internal to the crowd: direction, common cause, subordinates individual preferences. Everyone belonging to a crowd “carries within him a small traitor who wants to eat, drink, make love and be left alone.”4 When the crowd has a direction, when it is moving toward a goal, it can remain dense. Without its goal, the crowd disintegrates into individuals pursuing their own private ends. The goal is outside the crowd, that toward which it is oriented. The goal is not the discharge, although the discharge is the aim.
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Canetti’s crowd processes resemble psychoanalytic dynamics of desire and drive. Growth and direction point outwards. Equality and density turn back in. Together they form the knot of intensities I am referring to as the crowd unconscious. The crowd isn’t structured like a language. It isn’t a discursive formation. Rather, it’s the dynamic press of many, the force exerted by collectivity. It doesn’t have a politics any more than does an anthill, forest, or heap of stones. Canetti’s crowds include dancing warriors and swarms of insects, spermatozoa and the dead, production and inflation. The real press of many takes and disrupts multiple forms: material, institutional, imaginary, symbolic. It also occurs in varying temporalities: quick or slow, momentary or enduring. The multiplicity of forms and tempos overlap and intersect, flowing together into a crowd of crowds. What the crowd wants most of all—what it lacks—is endurance.
Canetti writes: “The tendency of all human crowds to become more and more—the blind, reckless, dynamic movement which sacrifices everything to itself and which is always present in a gathering crowd—this tendency is transferable.”5 He doesn’t explicate the concept. Instead he gives multiple examples: hunters transfer the growth tendency to their prey, farmers transfer it to their crops, modern Europeans transfer it to money, using the word “million” as the basic unit for counting population and money “the abstract number has become filled with a crowd-meaning contained by no other number today.”6 The mechanisms of transference matter little to Canetti. He blurs together rituals, symbols, and processes. All enable the transmission or displacement of the crowd’s desire to increase from the crowd onto something else. Wheat, mountains, and sea can become crowd symbols because they can carry the desire for increase.
Practical Optimism
Although Canetti doesn’t make this point, the party, too, can carry the desire for increase as well as other attributes of the crowd unconscious. As it gathers and generates power, the party, especially the communist party, operates as a transferential object—a symbol and combination of rituals and processes—for the collective action of the many.
The crowd wants to endure. The party provides an apparatus for this endurance. Marxist discussions of the party typically focus on the organizational and ideological aspects of the party apparatus: vanguard versus mass, covert versus legal, revolutionary versus reformist. Left out is the affective infrastructure of the party, its reconfiguration of the crowd unconsciousness into a political form. Gavin Walker shifts discussion toward this reconfiguration. He describes the party as a “material substratum” that “allows the reverberations or ‘overtone’ of the event to remain at the core of a consistency.”7 As the body that turns the subjectivizing crowd event into a moment in a subjective process of politicizing the people, the party is tasked with transmitting the event’s overtone. It can’t simply declare an event to be an action of the heroic working class or revolutionary people. The party has to defend this declaration in a hostile setting. Even more, it has to ensure its truth, conducing the affective intensity of the crowd discharge in the wake of its dissipation.
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Under contemporary conditions of communicative capitalism, nonstop ubiquitous media offer a never-ending supply of disasters, invasions, shootings, and protests. Scandals and epidemics displace one another as the most important issue of the day, their measure in tweets testimony to their inability to produce a gap in the dominant order. Anyone can issue an interpretation of an event, calling it this or that and attempting to push discussions in one direction rather than another. Moreover, a certain reflexivity, a self-consciousness about media, is a constitutive feature of communicative capitalism. Hashtags, slogans, memes, images, and phrases or manners of speech that briefly achieve a kind of recognizable currency before becoming outmoded or forgotten all point to the multiple, distributed ways in which communicative acts are less about meaning than circulation, less about use value than exchange value.8 This setting poses particular problems for left politics: How can acts remain intelligible as acts of a collective subject? How do the people prevent their acts from being absorbed back into communicative capitalism?
The party provides an affective infrastructure that can help address these problems. Rather than ceding the transmission of the overtone to intellectuals, particularly those individualized within academic or journalistic career paths, and instead of requiring fragmented activists working along multiple separate trajectories to produce their alliance event by event, issue by issue, the party is a form for concentration and endurance. In a capitalist setting, the party provides communism with a body—one that is heterogeneous, porous, and polymorphous.
By the end of the twentieth century, this body was present primarily as memory, fear, bureaucracy, or sect, as former necessity and current impossibility. The perspective it provides became so many scattered inclinations to political correctness, no less righteous and insistent for all their fragmentation into weakness. Indeed, the superegoic effects of righteous injunction seem all the more intense precisely because there is no party that can anchor them, no program to which one might appeal for justification and relief. Circulating as insults and directives in social media, these effects rage as an incessant urge to police and punish, whipping the Left into the frenzy of its own failure. The Left can see differences, but no longer pull them together into a politics.
Concentration and endurance are not the same as agreement. Communist parties— like the Left more broadly—are always sites of debate, argument, factions, and splintering. Put in Lacanese: to think of the party in terms of either agreement or schism is to remain at the level of the imaginary where the party is nothing but a figure of egoism and competition. But the symbolic dimension of the party, its form as a place from which communists assess themselves and their actions, is what matters. Concentration and endurance adhere to the party form at the level of the symbolic.
The everyday experiences of rank-and-file members of CPUSA and CPGB testify to the symbolic effect of the Communist Party. I use examples from these parties because of their weakness. The US and UK were neither party-states nor parliamentary systems where Communists have ever had much electoral success. Even in the 1930s and ’40s when the Communist Party was at its strongest in the US and UK, actual political power was out of reach. In the twentieth century, neither country appeared on the brink of proletarian revolution. Instead each encountered a mix of deradicalizing middle-class prosperity, working-class defeat, and capitalist aggression, not to mention the intense anti-communism of the Cold War. How, then, under conditions even Moscow agreed were far from revolutionarily ripe, did a communist sensibility endure? What enabled the Communist Party to provide a location from which members in the US and UK could see their actions as necessary and important and that even non-members could and would adopt? My claim, as I mention at the outset of this chapter, is that the affective infrastructure of the Party provided the material support for its symbolic location.
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Lauren Berlant presents affect theory as “another phase in the history of ideology theory.”9 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.”10 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.
Berlant 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.”11 In contrast to Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” I attend to the practical optimism generated through the Party.12 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.
The 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.”13 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.”14 Belle Rothman, a union organizer, insists,
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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.15
Sarah 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.”16 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.
Infrastructure of Feeling
Writing 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.17 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.”18 “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.”19 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.”20 Samuel writes to refresh and retain the memory of collective power.
In 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.”21 To be recruited into the Party was to enter into a system of education with readings, classes, lectures, and study.
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In this setting, class consciousness was developed as a political consciousness. Neither an individual identity, sociological given, or even collective self-awareness, class was used “in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense.”22 It was an outlook on the world, a way of thinking in terms of laws and tendencies and acting in accordance with political allegiance. Samuel rejects the idea that the Communist Party was ever workerist, seeing the “retreat into trade unionism” in the sixties and seventies as a displaced expression of the Party’s “disenchantment with itself,” a symptom of the accretion of failure, disappointment, and tragedy following Khrushchev’s secret speech, the invasion of Hungary, and the Sino-Soviet split.23 The Party lost the will and capacity to make demands on itself. Those industrial workers who remained in the Party turned their focus to factory issues and factory workers turned less to the Party than to their own immediate struggles.
Underpinning these institutional analogies of church, family, and university were the practices through which the Party organized its members. Communists were caught up in “an endless round of activity that left them very little personal time.”24 Treated as a good in itself, activity not only enveloped members deeply and daily in political work but also incited a sense of urgency: what they were doing had to be done; it was vital, necessary, urgent. Good communists involved themselves in a wide variety of daytoday struggles. The Party held meetings, rallies, and membership drives. It published and distributed a wide array of literature. It organized demonstrations, mobilized strike support, carried out emergency protests. Committed to direct action and immediate struggle, the CPGB planned campaigns, developing systems and processes for making its actions more efficient, for following up and self-assessment. It worked to concentrate its resources and energies so that it would “seem more powerful than it was.” It reviewed tasks, prepared agendas, and drew up committees.
Members were more than members. They had practical positions and responsibilities far beyond those given to them by their place in capitalism. They had specialized roles such that each was always more than him or herself. Each was also someone in the Party: organizer, bureau member, instructor, trainer, branch officer, propagandist, literature seller, delegate, agitator. Related to this, Samuel says, “was a positive mania for reports which served both as an elaborate system of tutelage and as a method of accountability.”25 Reporting installed a practice of looking at activity from the perspective of the Party.
Samuel describes communist organizational passion in detail, treating it as a series of disciplines of the faithful—efficiency in the use of time, solemnity in the conduct of meetings, rhythm and symmetry in street marches, statistical precision in the preparation of reports. What comes through in his account is the affective register of organization. Organization is not just a matter of bureaucracy and control. It’s a generator of enthusiasm, an apparatus of intensification that ruptures the everyday by breaking with spontaneism. Planning is a matter of collective mindfulness. Samuel writes, “To be organized was to be the master rather than the creature of events. In one register it signified regularity, in another strength, in yet another control.”26 Organization produced a shared sense of strength, of a collective with the capacity to carry out its will.
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The Party meeting, even at the local and branch level, was conducted with great care. Samuel recounts meetings that his mother’s husband, Bill, attended in the early thirties. Ten to fifteen comrades met in the kitchen of a locomotive driver and his wife. The leader was a schoolteacher. The treasurer was a dockworker who hadn’t “a political idea in his head but just loved the Party. He was very passionate about funds.”27 Bill remembered the meeting as “solemn.” Members would discuss world events but the primary purpose of the meeting was “checking up on decisions,” knowing who was going to do what. Later during the war Bill attended meetings of his factory branch in the Three Magpies pub. “It wasn’t exactly formal, but there was a lot of authority there. It wasn’t me. It was in the room.”28 Bill doesn’t mean in the pub. But he doesn’t mean not in the pub, either. He is pointing to the sensibility the group meeting generated. The meeting authorized those who met, transforming a group of people having a pint in the pub into the Communist Party. Their words and actions took on an importance far beyond what they would have been absent the Party. They acquired resonance, transferring the force and important of global struggle into the Three Magpies.
Samuel sets out the specific elements of a meeting. The comrade who opened the meeting made a report. The one who closed it “summed up.” Everyone was expected to contribute to discussion, speaking formally by addressing the chair, “Comrade Chairman.” Samuel writes:
The point of a Party meeting was to get things done, to translate the events of the day into campaigning issues. The “political report” which opened a meeting (even a disciplinary hearing began with one) started with the international situation before “drawing the lessons” and setting out targets and tasks. If the discussion got bogged down in particulars, there would be someone to “raise the level of the discussion” by reminding us of the seriousness of the situation.29
The meeting connected the local, the immediate, with world-historical events (think globally, act locally was communist practice long before it became an activist slogan). Unlike the moves to the personal and political that often disrupt political discussions in an individualist age, comrades drew strength from seeing themselves in a larger setting, from recognizing that rather than being unique they were typical, generic. The particular was a bog, a swampy morass that a group could get stuck in and out of which it would have to be pulled. Lessons could then be learned, conclusions drawn and plans made. Meetings broadened lives by opening them to the political, attaching them to movements and tendencies that took them out of miserable isolation. The world didn’t simply happen to them. They fought to shape the world.
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