McCarthyism

McCarthyism is presented in 2666 as a period of political pressure that sharply reduced the already small Communist community in Brooklyn. In Antonio Ulises Jones’s account to Oscar Fate, it marks a decisive decline in membership, but the novel places that history within a wider reflection on political violence and on which people society recognizes as worthy of attention.

The Brooklyn Communist Cell

During one of three conversations with Fate, Jones recalls the changing numbers of Brooklyn Communists across the mid-twentieth century. There had been more than a thousand during World War II; after the war, he says, the number rose to thirteen hundred. At the start of McCarthyism, it had fallen to about seven hundred, and by the time the period ended, scarcely two hundred remained. The figures give Jones’s account a concrete scale: a political climate becomes visible not as an abstraction but through the contraction of a local organization.

The decline continues beyond McCarthyism. Jones says that the community was about half as large in the 1960s, with no more than thirty members dispersed among five cells by the 1970s. Ten remained at the end of that decade, and four at the beginning of the 1980s. Of those four, two died of cancer and one disappeared; by 1987, Jones says, he was the sole remaining member. McCarthyism is therefore one turning point in a long attrition, not the whole explanation for the cell’s eventual near-disappearance.

Jones’s Political Memory

Jones’s recollection is part of a conversation in which Fate asks him about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of socialist governments. Jones claims that he had predicted those events ten years earlier. He then opens a window and sings the first lines of the Internationale, before asking whether the anthem seems to him to have been made especially for Black people. The sequence places the fading Communist cell alongside Jones’s enduring identification with its political language, while showing that his account of political history is also shaped by race and personal conviction.

When Fate asks why he remains after the other members have died or vanished, Jones pauses before answering, “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.” His response gives the numerical history a human endpoint: organizational survival has narrowed to the commitment of one person. The cell’s continued existence is no longer evidence of strength; it is a duty Jones assumes amid the losses he has just described.

Political History and Social Legibility

Elsewhere, a speaker reflecting on the history of crime and public attention compares the treatment of deaths across different social groups. The account says that at least twenty percent of the people transported for sale on each slave ship in the seventeenth century died, without provoking the public alarm that followed killings within recognized society. It also contrasts the mass deaths of the Paris Commune with the extensive attention given to a knife sharpener who killed his wife and elderly mother. The speaker’s distinction is between lives that could be treated as part of society, and therefore made legible in public accounts, and lives excluded from that recognition.

This argument gives McCarthyism a place in a larger historical arrangement of power, though the novel does not equate the period with the other forms of violence it discusses. Across these passages, political and social structures shape whose experiences enter public memory and whose disappear from it. Jones’s dwindling cell supplies one intimate, counted history of political pressure; the reflections on crime and exclusion widen the frame to ask how language can record violence while also filtering, minimizing, or avoiding it.