Brooklyn Communist Party (Fourth International)

The Brooklyn Communist Party (Fourth International) is depicted as a nearly vanished political organization whose remaining life rests with Antonio Ulises Jones, its last member in Brooklyn by 1987. Its history is measured not by institutional power or public victories but by the dwindling number of people who sustain it: Jones remains after fellow members die or disappear, holding fast to the cell as an obligation that outlasts the movement’s visible strength.

Identity and Political Setting

Jones tells Oscar Fate that he belongs to the Brooklyn Communist Party and has continued to keep its cell operative even when, by the time Fate meets him, there is no other Communist left in Brooklyn. The organization appears through this solitary custodian rather than through meetings, campaigns, or a functioning network. Its persistence is therefore both concrete and precarious: Jones still represents the Party, but the collective structure implied by a political cell has contracted to one person.

The organization’s name also records Jones’s ideological path. He says that he belonged to the Third International until fifteen years earlier, when Dr. Minski, a retired UCLA professor with whom he occasionally corresponded, convinced him to join the Fourth. The novel supplies no account of the Party’s formal structure or program beyond this affiliation and Jones’s commitment to maintaining its cell; its history is instead rendered through his recollection of the people who once made up the Brooklyn movement.

Membership and Decline

Jones gives Fate a compressed chronology of the Communists in Brooklyn. During World War II, there were more than a thousand; after the war, the number rose to thirteen hundred. At the start of McCarthyism, membership had fallen to around seven hundred, and by the end of that period scarcely two hundred remained. In the sixties, there were half as many; in the seventies, no more than thirty, scattered among five hardy cells.

The contraction continues as a sequence of losses rather than a single decisive dissolution. At the end of the seventies, ten members were left. By the beginning of the eighties, only four remained. Two of those four died of cancer during the decade, and another disappeared without telling anyone. Jones speculates that the missing member may have gone on a trip and died on the way, or perhaps moved to Florida to live with his daughter. The uncertainty is part of the organization’s decline: a member can vanish from the group’s record without any clear account of what happened.

By 1987, Jones says, he was the only one left. The figures trace a collective history into a personal remainder. The Party’s survival in Brooklyn no longer means an active community of comrades; it means that a man continues to name himself as a member after the social world that gave the cell its form has largely disappeared.

Jones as the Remaining Cell

Fate encounters Jones by chance and visits him in a two-room apartment in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods. The living room contains a table and more than fifteen chairs, incongruous signs of a place arranged for company. Yet the organization Jones represents has dwindled to one member. The contrast between the many chairs and the emptying cell makes the apartment feel like a remnant of collective life, although the narrative does not describe it as a Party headquarters or explain the chairs’ purpose.

When Fate asks why he has stayed, Jones hesitates, considers his answer, and looks him in the eye: “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.” The sentence gives the organization its clearest definition in the novel. Keeping it alive is not presented as a route to imminent growth or victory; it is the task Jones continues because no one else remains to do it. His persistence makes the cell at once an institution and a personal responsibility.

Jones’s recollections also show that his politics are not simple reverence for every Communist leader. Asked about Stalin and Lenin, he calls each a son of a bitch; when Fate asks about Marx, Jones says Fate should have started there and speaks of Marx in glowing terms, while faulting his temper and attributing it to poverty. He claims he predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the real-world Socialist regimes ten years before it happened. These opinions come through a conversation with one elderly adherent, not as an official platform for the Brooklyn organization, but they give its last representative an independent and sometimes sharply critical voice.

Political Memory and Public Reception

Jones links the Party’s history to the memory of the Scottsboro trials. Neighborhood children call him Scottsboro Boy, among other nicknames, because he often speaks about the Black men who were nearly lynched in Scottsboro and about trials no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood remembers. During one conversation with Fate, he opens a window and sings the first lines of “The Internationale,” then asks whether it sounds like an anthem made especially for Black people. The gesture joins an international workers’ song to a specifically Black historical memory; Fate admits he has never thought of it that way.

The scene is followed by a stark measure of organizational erosion: a song meant to summon the oppressed is sung by the man left after Brooklyn’s Communist cells have nearly disappeared. Jones’s account gives the Party a past larger than his own apartment, while the singing makes that past briefly present in a face-to-face exchange. The narrative does not turn this moment into proof that the organization can recover its former numbers. Instead, it preserves the gap between the collective promise voiced in the anthem and the isolation of the person still singing it.

Fate’s published story about Jones brings another kind of reduction. Colleagues treat it as little more than an excursion into African-American picturesque, grouping Jones with a loony preacher and a loony former jazz musician as a sociological curiosity. They like the piece, and Fate soon becomes a staff writer, but he never sees Jones again. The episode distinguishes the Party’s meaning to its remaining member from the cultural category into which his interviewer’s colleagues place him: Jones speaks of historical violence, political defeat, and duty, while the story is received as a portrait of eccentricity. The Brooklyn Communist Party survives in the novel through that unresolved tension—between the scale of a political history and the small, vulnerable figure who refuses to let its last cell simply go dark.