Fourth International

The Fourth International enters the novel through Antonio Ulises Jones’s account of a political life reduced to a single remaining member. In a conversation with Oscar Fate, Jones says he moved from the Third International to the Fourth and presents his continued presence as a duty: someone must keep the cell operative. The organization is thus represented not through active structures or collective campaigns, but through the dwindling history and stubborn commitment of its last Brooklyn adherent.

Identity and History

Jones tells Fate that he belonged to the Third International until fifteen years earlier, when a retired UCLA professor, Dr. Minski, persuaded him to join the Fourth International. The passage offers no fuller account of the organization’s program or its institutional links; its history reaches the reader through Jones’s personal recollection and the small remnant of political life around him.

That remnant has been steadily diminished. Jones recounts that ten members remained in the 1970s and only four by the beginning of the 1980s. During that decade, two of the four died of cancer and another vanished without explanation. Jones speculates that the missing man may have died while traveling or gone to live with his daughter in Florida, but neither possibility is confirmed. By 1987, Jones says, only one member was left: himself.

The Brooklyn Cell

Jones’s description makes the cell’s survival a question of maintenance rather than growth. When Fate asks why he remains, Jones answers, “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.” The statement gives the organization a minimal but concrete form: even without a visible membership beyond Jones, the cell must, in his view, be kept functioning. His answer makes persistence itself the remnant’s political work.

The practical circumstances sharpen the isolation. Jones says he has no contact with other Communists in the United States or abroad, apart from occasional correspondence with Dr. Minski. The narrative presents no wider network through which the Brooklyn cell could be sustained. Its continuity rests on Jones’s own presence and his conviction that the work cannot simply be abandoned.

Books and Political Transmission

Jones gives Fate a book that he says will be useful to him. Fate expects a copy of The Communist Manifesto, having noticed several copies of it in Jones’s living room, but the volume Jones hands over is The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas, an Englishman who had been a professor at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. Jones says it cost him “only cunning, not money,” leaving Fate to infer that he had stolen it, though the possibility that someone at the bookstore had helped him remains speculation.

Fate initially refuses the book because it appears expensive and may be Jones’s only copy. Later, after discovering that the author is white and had taught at a military academy, Fate puts it aside and does not read it. Before leaving Detroit, however, he buys his own copy of The Slave Trade at the city’s only decent bookstore. The episode does not establish a formal connection between the book and the Fourth International’s doctrine; instead, it places Jones’s attempt to pass on reading beside Fate’s hesitation and later, independent purchase.

Narrative Presentation and Significance

The Fourth International is mediated through Fate’s interview and the shrinking chronology Jones supplies. Jones is at once the source of the membership figures and a participant whose presence gives those figures their last point of reference. His account combines specific losses—deaths from cancer and a member’s unexplained disappearance—with uncertainty about what happened to the missing man. The organization’s contraction is therefore recorded as personal history, not as a complete institutional chronicle.

Fate notes that most of his colleagues treated the interview as little more than an excursion into African-American curiosities, grouping Jones with a preacher and an ex-jazz musician as sociological oddities. Yet the story was well received, and Fate soon became a staff writer. Afterward, he never saw Jones again, just as he likely would never see Barry Seaman again. The cell’s continued operation and Jones’s disappearance from Fate’s life remain in tension: the political commitment is vividly stated, but the narrative offers no confirmation of what became of the organization after their meeting.