"In fact, it is just to the degree that individual psychological traits
remain that the Communist falls short of being a bolshevik" (12)."The
question remains: if the cadre has no official existence, how can
it be identified and what is the source of its being? Members of the
cadre
are members of the cadre when they are recognized as such by their
equals
and superiors in the cadre. They become members of the cadre and achieve
their status within the cadre by the decision of their superiors in the
cadre; and the status of the superiors depends upon *their* superiors"
(15).
"All Party experience and all Party training, theoretical and
practical,
lead towards absolute and uncompromising acceptance of the
decisions of the organization--not only in the face if prison, torture,
and death, but in the face of what were yesterday one's firmest
convictions. What is demanded is more than acceptance, more than
the carrying out of decisions. One must make those decisions one's
own--even though one still knows that they are wrong" (21).
"The inner contradictions of a self-reconstruction, which requires
the
suppression or destruction of most of the best instincts and attitudes
of the human being and demands complete subordination of individuality,
threaten at every moment to shatter the acquired personality structure
into a thousand bits" (25).
"Once let that will falter for a single moment and the human being
emerges,
in revolt against the elablorate structure of untruth and evil which has
dominated him. There are but two possible outcomes of the conflict
between
the individual and the moulding process: either failure of the will to
enforce dehumanization, followed by revolt and break from the Party; or
the
truiumph of the will, fortified by cynicism and residual faith-- the
successful moulding of a Communist" (26).
"But the same implicit psychological theory lies behind the whole
process of the training of the Communist cadre. Timidity, the
critical spirit, inidividualist resentment against authority--every
personal trait which blocks the fusion of the personality in the
mould of the Communist type--is slowly and steadily destroyed,
but without crisis tactics or dramatic confrontation. To the
degree that the developing Communist accepts Marxism-Leninism
as a true view of reality, his acceptance becomes an anvil upon
which his personality can be hammered into shape by the
Party's constant blows against those attitudes which, by the
technique of reductionism, are shown to be incompatible with
the accepted Marxist-Leninist outlook" (85).
"The energy expended upon any single effort to recruit varies,
of course, depending upon the Party's judgment of the probable
usefulness of the individual. That judgment is influenced by two
considerations. First, does the prospective recruit already hold
some strategric position of influence or show signs of abilities
which will enable him to achieve such a position? Secondly,
has he qualities which indicate cadre-potentiality? While these
two possibilities may be combined in the same individual, it is
the cadre-potentiality which is decisive" (100-101).
"A man joins the Communist Party because he wants
to be a Communist, and thedecisive step of joining
the Party is taken with a deep awareness of passing a
decisive climacteric" (102).
"And so, despite the fact that once a recruit is drawn into
the Communist machine, terrific pressure is brought to bear
to mould him into the desired ideal Communist by destroying
his individuality, the process of recruiting itself concentrates
upon him as an individual" (103).
"The primary aim is the creation of a steeled cadre,
flexible enough to take any tactically desired stand on
current questions, accreting strenth as it moves through
opposite and contradictory campaigns and feeds upon
generation after generation of the rank and file of the
formal Parties" (105).
"Apart from the direct result achieved in these classes
through absorption of the material taught--the raising of the Party from
a
mundane institution to a mystical entity--two other results are
attained. In
the first place, the Communist method of teaching through a guided
discussion directed toward a predetermined end confirms the belief of
the
new member that the conclusions to which he comes have been arrived at
freely and by his own thinking, although they always turn out to be the
conclusions of the Party.... The student emerges conditioned both to
accept
the decision of the leadership and to that, to the degree of his
understanding, he has arrived at those decision himself and will
understand
them more and more fully the more thoroughly he masters the science of
the
movement" (113).
"But the main task of any Communist Party in the
pre-revolutionary period is *to build and strengthen the
Communist cadre* for the day when it will be needed
for its only proper task. Any attitude which attaches
value to activities for their own sake is, from the Marxist-
Leninist point of view, reformist--that is, non-revolutionary,
non-Communist, a 'betrayal of the working class' " (123).
"Through theory, through atmosphere, through
interpreted experience in demonstation or picket line,
the sense of community with the nation is shattered.
Very concretely, the idea of a commonwealth within
the established commonwealth, and in bitter battle
with it, is instilled" (128).
"The whole of Communist training, however, drives towards the
acceptance of the revolution as the end to which all things and all
persons must be strictly subordinated as means.... The good or
evil in any situation is determined by whether it helps the
revolution or impedes it" (130).
"The ideational content of such crises is essentially the
clash of ethos I have discussed. Communists recognize this
when they speak of 'the necessity of choosing between two
worlds.' In fact, in many cases the Party deliberately raises
an apparently trivial problem to a height which will create
such a crisis. While a clash of ethos is the ideational
content of these crises, their emotional power is
undoubtedly generated by the pressure to surrender the
individuality of the personality, replacing it with the new
Communist inner imperative. But since it is precisely the
innate and unique value of the individual person which
lies at the heart of the Western ethos, the ideational and
emotional components of this crisis, in Western
Communists at least, are interconnected in their essence.
The crisis on all levels is a crisis of individual personality"
(133).
"Whatever the occasion of the crisis, however, the content
inevitably involves a clash between personal judgment and
Party judgment, carried to a point where the will is faced
with the choice of which judgment is to be followed. And
what makes the situation radically critical is the realization
that this time, for some reason or other (presumably
relevant to the characteristics and the accidents of
development of the particular personality), the surrender
of individuality is decisive. Final barriers are being crashed;
the decision is not for this instance only, but for a whole
life" (136).
"Called before a commission of the Bureau after a number
of brushes with lower authorities, and faced with a set of
demands--deliberately provocative--which no ordinary
self-respecting man would put up with, he was goaded
into statements which could be used as the basis for a
decision expelling him from the Party.... The rights and
wrongs of the case went by the board. The issue became
one of willingness to suspend personal judgment, to
subordinate it to the judgment of the Party leadership" (139).
"It did, however, give the District exactly what was wanted,
an occasion for intense pressure upon the important abstainers,
in order either to create cadre consciousness or to drive them
out of the Party" (140).
"It is the faith, whole and entire, Communism, the Party,
which inspires the Communist's universe and is the object
of the his devotion. That is why the known realities of the
Soviet Union--oppression, slave-labor camps, purge after
purge, murder in the millions, brutal and unprovoked
aggression, even Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin and the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956--slide off the cadre
Communist's conscience like water off a duck's back.
They make no live impact upon him. Intellectually he
explains them as necessary casualties of the historic
process, unfortuante but unavoidable. Emotionally they
simple are not real, even when he has actually seen
horrors with his own eyes. Facts taht do not fit the
theoretical outlook of Marxism-Leninism have only a
shadowy existence. Reality rests only in the doctrines
of Communism and the institution of the Party" (155).
"If ever a trained and developed cadre Communist allows
himself fully and deeply to acknoweledge any reality
independent of the Communist cosmos--a fact, an idea,
an aspect of an order of being--the whole tense, complex
structure is in imminent danger of shattering into bits. Only
the most stupendous and immediate effort of the will can
close the breach. The man to whom this is happening
sometimes pretends to himself that he does not recognize
its significance; but in such cases, almost always the Party
smells it. Then, if he admits it, to the Party and to himself,
everything possible is done to help him make that effort
of will. But if he denies it, he is boxed off, trapped into
compromising or blackmailable situations, demoted,
expelled, vilified. For, even if *he* does not know that
he has taken the first step on the road out of the Party,
which for a cadre Communist means the road to
hostility towards the Party (the Party speaks of 'the iron
law of renegacy'), the Party does, and it will stop at
nothing to neutralize the threat" (155-156).
"Two prior conditions, I believe, must be fulfilled before the
moment of acceptance of a reality counter to the Communist
outlook is possible. First, there must have been over a considerable
period of time a continuing series of doubts and questions, quickly
repressed, but not fully dealt with and intellectually overcome, so
that they have, if only to a small degree, sapped and weakened the
foundations of Marxist-Leninist belief. Such a substratum, however,
is not by itself a sufficient pre-condition. Secondly, there must occur
some separation of the person from the Party, geographically or
emotionally, for a time" (157).
"So strong is the impress of the Communist mould, that to
follow the path upon which they then find themselves
compelled to proceed is not an easy, quick or automatic
process. It is, in fact, a 'dark night of the soul,' mentally
and spiritually agonizing to a degree which makes the
extreme personal and social difficulties which the
Party creates for them minor. Perhaps a premonition of
this--a horror of the void through which one must pass
before finding a new understanding on the other side--is
an additional buttress oto the Commuist will in resisting
the temptations of reality and truth. For it is the will
which decides the issue. Exerted steadfastly day by day--
because doubt after doubt creeps in and must be dealt
with--it is called to its supreme effort when some
eventuality creates the conditions in which the threat
to long-accepted certainties arises" (157-158).
"The Communists say, when a defection occurs at a high level,
that the person concerned 'never fully understood and
accepted Marxism-Leninism.' They find indications in all his
writings, his speeches, his actions, to prove their contention.
It may well be that in the deepest sense they are right. The cadre
Communist who breaks has retained somewhere within his
personality values, elements of understanding, which are alien
to the world-view of Marxism-Leninism" (158).
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