Witness: Cold War Classics

Chapter 4, “The Communist Party,” explores Chambers’s experiences with his local Communist Party chapter. He expects to find there a small cadre of disciplined revolutionaries. Instead, he encounters a large and cacophonous discussion group. Chambers soon learns that there are fierce ideological divisions among the various factions. Even so, he soon becomes an official member. He is so committed that he makes the surprising move of registering under his actual name.

His friends at Columbia dismiss his adoption of Communism. In response, Chambers concludes that, for them, thinking was an exercise, not an impetus to action.

Chambers begins writing for the principal Communist publication in the United States, The Daily Worker, as well as a study group attempting to define the laws of social revolution.

While researching the 1919 Hungarian Revolution, Chambers meets a man who embodies his moral ideal: a kind but highly disciplined servant of the Communist cause. This buoys Chambers’s spirits as he struggles with Richard’s decline.

Chambers briefly pauses all Party activity upon his brother’s death. Eventually one of his comrades tells him that grief is an irrational distraction from the effort to change the social structures that led to his brother’s decline in the first place.