Analysis Of Comrade Laski

California is one of the most common places that the American Dream is fulfilled. The Golden state is one of the wealthiest states in America, and only a few people with money or fame were known. In Joan Didion’s essay, “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A (M.-L.)”, we are shown an example of trying to make the dream come true. In the essay, Michael Laski and the members of the Communist Party try to start a revolution, but were stopped due to the reality of money and support. Michael Laski was just an ordinary dreamer, and as Didion described Laski as a “relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California” (61). He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and later in his

(M.-L.), she was only interested knowing about Laski and not the plans of their revolution (62). She even begins to become aware of what kind of person Laski and even “becomes comfortable with the Michael Laski of this world, with those who live outside rather than in” (62-63). As they converse, she thinks of Laski as someone with dread, but doesn’t bother to bring up dread, but instead depression. Sounding confident in himself Laski says that, “depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them” (63). So anyone who did not have beliefs in anything, including communism, were to fall into depression. Even while believing in the system, someone may get nothing out of it, and even Laski goes on to explain that, “the party offers nothing, it offers thirty or forty years of putting the Party above everything. It offers beatings, Jail. On the high levels, assassination” (64). To get an understanding of what Laski was like, Didion says, “you must have a feeling for that kind of compulsion” (62). So whatever his original plan from when he moved to California to become a student at UCLA was all altered, and had changed into a dream of a revolution that never occurred. So in a way, Laski was only doing the activities out of dread, and could have only

It does not exclusively say how many members are in the party, since Laski does not want to share that information with Didion (63), but if it were to be estimated, it would be nowhere near as many members as another political party. For a revolution to start, they need power, and that comes from money or from the people, or in Laski’s case, the workers. The group needed funds to promote themselves, but could barely make anything. People are out living their own lives, not thinking about starting a revolution. The workers are trying to survive in the current bourgeois society. The party tried raising funds to support their revolution, and when one of the days Didion was at the Workers’ International Bookstore, one of the members were selling papers that were from the People’s Voice. Throughout four hours of trying to sell the People’s Voice, the member of the party was only able sell 75 papers to raise a total of “Nine dollars and ninety-one cents” (64). The party also had a small collection of guns in the back of the bookstore, but it was only for the security of the group. If the party were to continue making funds from selling papers, they would get nowhere and a revolution would never begin. To make more money for the communist party, Laski gathered all of the funds that the group has raised and took it all to Las Vegas. He tried gambling to earn more, but he lost all of it in