Mass parties once functioned as total social worlds encompassing family and neighborhood

Evidence

French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa was born in 1950 to a family of committed Communists; his mother was a typist, his father a cycling reporter for a Party newspaper. In an interview, Michéa recalled that one of the most disconcerting moments of his childhood was the day he discovered there were neighbors in the village who were not card-carrying French Communist Party (PCF) members. “That seemed unimaginable,” he said, as if those people “lived outside the bounds of society itself.” Not coincidentally, the Parisian students of May 1968 regularly compared the Communist Party to the Catholic Church. Christians yearned for God, workers for revolution. Instead, as Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau put it, “the Christians got the Church, and the working class got the Party.” For Michéa, the Party served as an extension of family, of friendship circles, of the neighborhood. Its boundaries were the boundaries of his world. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 90

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the deep-institutional world Jäger’s framework depends on: mass parties as converters of feeling into force. Compares usefully against the reader’s own framework knowledge.
• SHARE: The Jambet/Lardreau line about ‘the Christians got the Church, and the working class got the Party’ would land with anyone interested in religion-secular parallels.