Inner Dialogue

Sarah Gordon, a young communist in New York in the 1930s, hated selling the Daily Worker on the street – the task that the party assigned to her. ‘But I did it, I did it’, she recalled. Her friends outside the party, uncomprehending, would ask her why. ‘They say to us, “The Communist Party held a whip over you”. But they did not understand. 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’, explained Gordon. ‘The whip was inside each of us, we held it over ourselves, not each other.’1 What historical process can cause someone to feel a social context inside herself as a ‘whip’? It was historically specific – a collective intensity that emerged within the individual only when enough people joined in the practices of the organization, as happened in the 1930s and 1940s: ‘We were accountable to each other’. Communism was a voice in Gordon’s head, its daily organizational operations functioning as an interior drive. Within her, guiding her actions, was dialogue, not monologue. But the party’s voice was not an external imposition: by her activity, she generated it. Communism spoke to her in a voice that she recognized as her own.

Communism · Context (archaeology) · Face (sociological concept) · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Whip (tree) · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Race, History, and American Society