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# Crowds and Party
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Samuel observes that much Party activity was “less instrumental than expressive.”30 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.
Samuel’s account of Party activity isn’t unique to CPGB. It resonates with the experiences of American communists. Gornick writes,
For 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.31
What 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.
Hosea 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.”32 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.
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When invited to his first meeting, Hudson was living in a company house, “stoolpigeon row,” that is, a block where all the houses were occupied by company people. Hudson was anxious when Al Murphy, a Party member recently fired from the foundry, approached his house in broad daylight with an armful of papers, including the Liberator, which argued for Negro self-determination in the Black Belt of the US South. “And here come this guy Murphy they done fired out the shop. He know he been spotted, they know who he is … He brought me papers, come strutting up the street, everybody know him, ain’t nowhere to hide, and he come there, leave me a paper.”33 Hudson had known Murphy briefly when Murphy worked in the foundry’s coal room. He knew Murphy was involved with an organization defending the Scottsboro boys and that he had been in New York. Hudson had asked Murphy about meetings in Birmingham, but Murphy, suspicious, kept mum. And then he comes by Hudson’s house, openly, “strutting up the street.” Anyone can see him, and people know who he is. Murphy’s not afraid. Hudson says that he himself was “never scared of the Reds,” although other people were because of the risk of losing their jobs. Hudson wasn’t afraid of that either, having been fired multiple times. When he says that Murphy “come busting up to my house and yard with an armful of papers in broad daylight,” he isn’t contrasting Murphy’s confidence with his own fear. He associates it instead with the damage that people who are inexperienced in the Party can do to someone with a job and living in a company house. Hudson judges Murphy from the Party perspective to which Murphy himself introduced him. It’s as if Murphy embodies a set of different breaks and possibilities, breaks between employed and unemployed, housed and homeless, open and hidden, literate and illiterate, confident and cautious, developed and inexperienced.
That first meeting Hudson attended was in the small house of another worker from the shop. As Hudson tells it, “I didn’t say anything, but I’m a little let down, cause I’m looking for a big something, important people. And here’s the guys working in the shop with me, regular guys.” In this disappointing, unimportant setting, a small house with regular guys, Murphy outlines the role and program of the Party:
the Scottsboro case and the unemployed and the Depression and the imperialist war. You had all that he was talking about that night. In the biggest part, I didn’t know what he was saying. All I know is about the Scottsboro case. He was explaining about how the Scottsboro case is a part of the whole frame-up of the Negro people in the South—jim crow, frame-up, lynching, all that was part of the system. So I could understand that all right, and how speed-up, the unemployment, and how the unemployed people wouldn’t be able to buy back what they make, that they was consumers and that it would put more people in the street … He took the conveyer, up there where we mold, took that and made a pattern, said, “How many men been kicked out in the street after they put that conveyer machine in there?” I could see that.34
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Hudson understands some of what he hears, but not everything, not even the “biggest part.” Murphy’s words evoke something bigger that Hudson hears but doesn’t understand even as he gets that this bigger something connects with his life, his concerns. Hudson goes to the meeting expecting “a big something” which he doesn’t quite find for the biggest part remains what he doesn’t know. Important people don’t occupy that place. Instead, regular guys, like him, are, like him, there in the small house listening to Murphy and all signing up that night for the Party.
Hudson doesn’t describe a rousing, inspiring speech. He doesn’t say anything about revolution or the mission of the proletariat. Instead, he sees a pattern, a pattern that connects the conveyor in the foundry, unemployment, Jim Crow, and lynching to something bigger. Hudson doesn’t say that the Party knows what this something is, but he experiences it as the place of this something, this gap of more to and in the world than what he has already known. He mentions looking on Murphy and another comrade, Ted Horton, as “kind of special.” Unlike people who could only talk about what was happening around Birmingham, Horton and Murphy met different people, people coming through from New York and Chattanooga. “They could always talk about a certain meeting over yonder.”
The same night Hudson joins the Party he’s elected organizer of the Stockham unit. Murphy tells him that it will be his responsibility to meet on Friday nights with other unit organizers from around Birmingham. Hudson’s first unit organizers’ meeting was much like his first Party meeting. “I was somewhat surprised, to see such a small group of people,” he explains. “I was looking for a large group of people.”35 He feels that the Party is something big; he expects it to be bigger. The seven people at that first organizers’ meeting—all black, Hudson doesn’t meet a white comrade until the next year are thrilled finally to have an actual industrial worker in their group. They were all from community units and the Party was trying to concentrate on industry, as Hudson would later learn. After he was fired five months later, members of his shop unit were afraid to meet, so he set up neighborhood units, organizing people around unemployment relief.
Leafleting was the primary activity of Hudson’s unit. The group would leave pamphlets setting out the Party program and updating readers on the Scottsboro boys’ case on porches, gates, and church steps. The units also held classes where they would read and discuss articles from the Liberator.
We would read this paper and this would give us great courage. We’d compare, we’d talk about the right of self-determination. We discussed the question of if we established a government, what role we comrades would play, then about the relationship of the white, of the poor white, of the farmers, etc. in this area.36
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In Depression-era Alabama, the space of the Party enabled Hudson and his comrades to see themselves as possessing constituent power, to imagine themselves as establishing a government, setting out the principles and processes for a new, liberated, majority-black society. Hudson couldn’t read, but he had a practical optimism sufficient for imagining himself making a new world as he engaged in the struggles of the day—“the right to vote, against lynching, police brutality, the right for poor rural Negroes to sell they products, that was immediate.”37 Hudson had this practical optimism because of his work in the party.
In one of these meetings on a hot July night Hudson first learned about democratic rights. Someone asked a white comrade from New York whether Negroes would ever enjoy democratic rights under the current system. Hudson stops him, saying “I don’t know what you mean by ‘democratic rights.’ I hear you all talking about ‘democratic,’ what is ‘democratic rights’?” The white comrade, Hudson says, “Didn’t get mad, say ‘You ought to know,’ or stuff like that. He stopped and explained it in detail.”
In the Party, Hudson learned to read and write well enough to publish a book. He attended the Party’s National Training School. The Party reinforced his confidence, strengthening his courage:
What the Party was doing was taking this lower class like myself and making people out of them, took the time and they didn’t laugh at you if you made a mistake. In other words, it made this lower class feel at home when they sit down in a meeting. If he got up and tried to talk and he couldn’t express hisself, nobody liable to laugh at him. They tried to help him and tell them, “you’ll learn.” There was always something to bring you forward, to give you courage … The Party made me know that I was somebody.38
Before he joined the Party, Hudson sang with a quartet and attended church. So he had already a kind of confidence, but not the kind that would let him speak easily with the “better class” blacks or with whites.
In part Hudson’s insecurity was a matter of his illiteracy. The little primary education he had as a child was traumatizing. To get to school, he had to walk several miles alone through woods and pastures and he was afraid of encountering a snake or mad dog. Once he got to school he chewed his sleeves with nervousness. His grandmother instructed the teacher to whip him till he stopped. As soon as he was big enough, he was pulled from school for spring plowing even as his younger brother was allowed to continue to study. The favored younger brother became a preacher. Until he joined the Party, Hudson was held down in inferiorities that tied him to a world of poverty and violence. The Party brought him up out of it, not just by helping him acquire skills but by imbuing him with collective strength. He came to know he was somebody by experiencing the way the Party made people out of the lower class. Even meetings, perhaps especially meetings, helped instill this sensibility as they made them feel at home. As comrades in the Communist Party, they could see and feel the power their collectivity gave them, the strength that comes from solidarity. Comrades wouldn’t laugh at someone having trouble expressing himself. They would support him as one of their own and in that support give him the sense of a world where equality was possible, even when it wasn’t easy.39
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Collective Desire
Mid-century British and US American communists experienced the political life structured by the Party as intensely demanding and alive. Its language, meetings, rituals, and reports channeled poverty and hope into practical optimism. The Party perspective made their actions significant, nothing less than the historical struggle of the world’s oppressed. Isolated deprivation became collective power, rupturing capitalism’s own incessant drumbeat of inferiority and failure. No one had to go it alone, to experience politics as either out of reach or inchoate longing. The Party provided an affective structure that didn’t allow people to give in to their shallower desires and, in so doing, brought out the best in them.40
This disallowance was a constraint, sometimes experienced as punishing, always felt as a requirement or compulsion, that which must be done. Sarah Gordon describes how she hated selling the Daily Worker during her twenty years in the Party.
But I did it, I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other. It was each other we’d be betraying if we didn’t push down the gagging and go do it. You know, people never understand that. They say to us, “The Communist Party held a whip over you.” They don’t understand. The whip was inside each of us, we held it over ourselves, not each other.41
“Party” names a common interior force. Gordon couldn’t help but resist it. Its demands went up against her natural inclinations as if shoved down her throat. Her opposition was visceral. Yet the interiorized structure of comradeship would win out. A collective desire for collectivity was stronger than her individual wants. Feeling its strength inside her, she felt the power of the Party. The sense of what she must do was the same as the sense of what the Party could do.
Hudson recounts how recruiting people into the Party requires patience, nuance, and judgment. Recruiting wasn’t just grabbing or pushing. It had to be taught: “We were teaching our comrades all the way down through the units, we’d teach how to approach people, how to recruit.” In the early thirties, the Party was concentrating on industrial workers, which meant “contacting individual people, making it a regular responsibility.”42 Steelworkers, railroad porters, schoolteachers, and chauffeurs were all different and had to be approached differently. Hudson evokes the difference by contrasting the feeling of “facing that hot steel” every morning with being someone who “got a party somewhere they going to tonight.” Teachers and insurance writers are workers, “but they line all different altogether, big time, big parties, having big outings somewhere. They ain’t got time to talk about working class oppression.” Industrial workers have time to talk about it because they face it every day. Yet these workers, even though they know all about the mine, all about the plant, when they come out, they “don’t have nothing to say.”43 One group of workers can talk but they don’t have time. The other has the time because they have to have the time. But they don’t express themselves. Hudson makes the Party into an instrument for the workers’ self-expression, a vehicle for getting that feeling in the mine that they all know up out of the mine and connecting it with the world. Without the Party, working-class oppression would remain underground, unexpressed.
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Hudson presents the Party’s work as like that of a nursing mother; industrial workers are the main baby. “You got to nurse that baby, but you ain’t going to let the baby over here go hungry because you are trying to nurse this one.” He presents the Party’s work as like that of a farmer: “You sow the seed.” And he presents it as a moral imperative, compelling because of the way it comes in to take the feeling that workers face every morning in the mine and turn it into something else, a source of strength that the workers feel collectively in themselves. Hudson describes writing leaflets with the industrial workers (his steel plant section published a monthly bulletin, the Hot Blast): “You tell what’s going on, tell how it’s happening, but let the workers help to write it. Don’t you write it. Involve them all the way through. Make them believe that they somebody. In other words, make them feel that they doing it, and not you doing it for them.”44
Practices of reporting and checking amplify the sense of being somebody as they make each accountable to the group—one was somebody because one mattered to the collective. These practices were key to the leafleting system. Hudson’s network could cover all of Birmingham in half an hour. He describes a checkup meeting in 1933. Some in the section had talked to people in the community where a John Gordon was supposed to have distributed leaflets. The people hadn’t seen any. At the checkup meeting, members made reports about their leafleting. John Gordon talked all about where he put his leaflets, what people had said about them, how they were reading them and then giving them to neighbors. Hudson says to Gordon, “I went through there, and I found ain’t nobody know anything about those leaflets. I asked three or four people, nobody ain’t seen the leaflets.” At this point, Gordon gives in. As Hudson tells it, “You see guys go to sweating then, cause the questions getting too sharp.” Gordon “began to scratch and wiggle in his chair.” Other comrades pressure him with questions—where did he actually put the leaflets? It turns out, he put them down a sewer manhole in the street. “And then we all showed him just how he was helping the bosses against the interest of the oppressed Negro and poor white workers who could not get sufficient food to eat and clothing to keep themselves and their children warm from the cold winter weather.”45 John Gordon mattered. No one was going to do his work for him, just like no one but the communists was seeing after the oppressed Negro and poor white workers. Those ten leaflets down the sewer were ten leaflets that poor Negroes did not get to read, ten missed opportunities for understanding why their children were hungry and how they could do something about it. The opportunities were now lost and exerted the force of their unrealization on the comrades. To be somebody was to be accountable and to be accountable was to feel the moral pressure of the collective. The Party expected members to do what they said they were going to do. It turns out John Gordon had been talking a lot with the Birmingham police. He was kicked out of the Party.
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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.
Hudson’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.”46 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.
That’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.
Hudson 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.
Samuel, 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.’”48 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.
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Samuel reads a CPGB appeal from 1945 as masochistic in its evocation of specific instances of heroic self-sacrifice, the heads on the blocks and nooses around the neck, the starvation, imprisonment, and deprivation endured with steadfast hope. I take “masochistic” to signal not self-punishment or self-inflicted pain but the reflexivity of collective desire as it works backs upon itself. The Party takes the perspective that the situation of the oppressed and exploited is not necessary. It can be changed, redressed, abolished. To the extent that exploitation continues, enough is not being done to stop it. The Party is the collective that makes the force of this realization into its maxim. There is always an answer to Lenin’s question “what is to be done?” And that answer is always too much. Too much is to be done and that excess is the force the Party turns on itself. The enthusiasm and solidarity that infuses the Party’s commitment to ongoing political action works back on the comrades as an intensity that relentlessly pushes them from within themselves.
Peggy Dennis, a journalist and organizer for CPUSA (her husband served as General Secretary and went to prison under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era), expresses the interior pull of the Party. Dennis was the daughter of Russian Jewish revolutionaries who immigrated to California shortly before the 1905 revolution. Her mother was disappointed when Dennis got pregnant and married. She had taught her daughter “that personal love was not a sufficient singular purpose in life; that for women, no less than for men, there must be much more to an enriched life. Conventional marriage was the deadly trap and motherhood was the snaplock to that trap door.”49
In 1929, when Dennis’s child was first born, her husband was in jail. He had been arrested during a street meeting in front of the marine workers’ union hall. The unpermitted street meeting, “a tumultuous assembly,” came about because the hall for a planned protest was denied at the last minute. The protest was around the “Red Camp Case.” The Young Communist League’s children’s summer camp had been “raided by a posse of American Legionnaires led by local sheriffs.” The children were moved to juvenile court. The adults were charged with “conspiracy to teach the tenets of communism.”50 The raid on the camp and subsequent arrest of communists and militants was part of an ongoing struggle in Los Angeles as employers and government viewed demands for “Jobs or Relief” and “Bread or Wages” as “the harbinger of social revolution.” Dennis writes:
Meanwhile, I was chafing, restlessly. I nursed our infant, scrubbed his diapers and carefully observed the rigid schedules prescribed in those days by government pamphlets on infant training. But no great surge of mother love enveloped me. Mama adored the baby, but carefully left me in sole charge … Gene came home from his meetings or jail absences to stand gazing at his sleeping son. Only I was an unfeeling monster; except in the silence of the 2 am feeding. With the child pulling at my breast and the exciting world outside stilled, the small body in my arms and I did communicate. But with the morning came the beat of struggle that passed me by.51
Dennis feels the Party as the beat of struggle, the pull of solidarity, a longing for the density and equality that comes through collective action. Self-critically she observes her own chafing against the reduction of her world around an infant’s demands even as she links these demands to a rigid, coercive government. She judges herself as monstrous for longing for the excitement of the external world. The struggle that matters is outside, the fight “to feed, clothe, or house the millions thrown on the scrap heap of capitalism.”
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Confined by “the deadly trap of motherhood,” Dennis is pulled in different directions by an interior crowd. She writes that she “was under strict orders from everyone” not to get arrested. “Everyone” included her mother, husband, the Young Communist League, and the Party. A crowd was enjoining her to focus on the baby. She was a nursing mother and had to attend to the newborn. Dennis explains, “Not getting arrested meant staying out of street actions or public meetings. I taught classes, wrote leaflets, served on committees that planned actions for others who would get arrested. I felt guilty.”52 As if feeling the avoidance of arrest as a manifestation of what Canetti calls “the traitor within,” she judges herself for betraying her comrades, for a failure of courage and solidarity. Dennis subjectivizes an impossibility, turning the barrier to action into an internal barrier, a personal failing. The perspective from which she judges is the perspective of the Party, even when her comrades have told her to stay home and she is still tirelessly doing the work of the Party. The excess that is the Party perspective, the point from which she sees, is the too-much-ness that both gives Party life its intensity and that works back upon the comrades as a superegoic injunction they cannot but give themselves. The gap between possible and enjoined is the gap of communist desire. The Party sustains that gap.
Diana Johnson, a twenty-year member of CPUSA, observes,
None of us considered the work we did on the “outside” important. Because, after all, we knew it didn’t matter what you did out there. You were living in a bourgeois capitalist world where everything was shit, everything fed a single purpose, so what did it matter what you did. Your real life was with the Party, with your comrades, with things you did in meetings and demonstrations.53
All the multiple multitudinous activities of living that seem so necessary from the perspective of capitalism fall to the wayside from the perspective of the Party. They don’t matter. The Party ruptures the bourgeois world of profit and loss so that another one can appear. No wonder Dennis felt guilty—she had ceded the desire for communism that made life worth living.
The Actuality of the Communist Party
Describing the Communist Party as an awesome structure for concentrating and harnessing inchoate political emotion, Vivian Gornick employs a metaphor Canetti associates with the crowd: a tidal wave. The tidal wave evokes a sweeping force that cannot be contained or channeled. It exceeds all barriers, engulfing everything it encounters. Like the crowd, the tidal wave is natural and unpredictable, indivisible and unchosen, more a dynamic than a structure or thing. The communist party derives its energy from the crowd as it strives to find ways to let the crowd endure, to enable its intensity to be felt even after the crowd has dispersed. It provides a transferential object that can stand in for the crowd, not representing it but pushing the urges it activates in the direction of equality and justice. With meetings and actions, the party produces assemblies of intensity that press comrades into action, involving them in practices and activities through which they are accountable to one another.
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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.
Richard 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.
At 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.
Over 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.54” 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.
Wright 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.
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