Truly a fascinating chapter.

I'm going to jot down some random thoughts, not a whole lot of coherency, just some notes.

Reading about what membership to the party entailed was very interesting for me: at one point the author uses the word "honor" to qualify membership (in the paragraph about the social worker declining the vote of her peers to become a Communist) which shows how it was perceived then, but it's also very interesting to see how taxing this membership must have been.

It'd be easy to draw parallels to "career" politicians of today, but I don't think that's too valuable; instead, I want to draw a parallel with left-wing, if not straight up socialist/communist activism of today. I've been reading a lot recently about movements that were active in the 1970s in my country of origin that attempted to build a revolutionary party, a workers' party: I don't know if doing it the way Lenin did would have been the right way (probably not, different contexts), but they definitely did have Lenin in mind when they attempted to do it. There were many attempts to "translate" Lenin (his thought, and theory, and praxis) to make him make sense in the society they were living in (and at the same time to clean Lenin from the layers of...idolatry, I guess? that decades of stale "communist" politics contributed to defanging and smoothing him out). They were not successful in their revolutionary aims, but they did manage to contribute a lot of original marxist theory. What I see in this chapter, especially in the first paragraphs, is the description of a (violently?) active entity that is tasked with seizing the power and building the new order. I think that most realities that I know of today lack this conviction, and again I don't believe lifting that formula 1-to-1 and applying it to a country of the imperial block in 2026 would be in any way successful, but I somewhat think that a conviction of the same magnitude must be there.