Unsettled questions of communist organization
Posted by Mike E on January 25, 2012
by Mike Ely
Chegitz writes:
“…no form of organization is immune from degenerating into something awful.”
And he gives the example of the collapse of the Socialist Party (which he has been part of) — which was constructed along different (more loose and anarchic) lines than the mini-parties we have otherwise been discussing.
I think Chegitz’s point is true, and its implications are worth exploring.
And this includes forms like the commune or soviet forms of governance by representative mass democracy — which solve some problems, but exist in the context of dynamics that inevitably create new and ongoing problems. And it is true for the vanguard party, both in the forms we are familiar with, but also in future forms of core organization that we might imagine or build.
Pointing out the organizational problems with previous mini-parties (and their peculiar versions of democratic centralism) also does not mean there is are necessarily organizational solutions to those problems.
If you have evidence of a form of organization producing troubling dynamics — the solution may involve some other form of organization, but let’s not assume that changes of form provide some simple, definitive corrective.
There may be better forms (political procedures, habits, structures) — better for our purposes, better for our particular moment or our current stage of development — but the solution (to becoming exhausted, uncreative, marginalized, ossified, cultish, even corrupt) isn’t necessarily (or simply) to imagine some pre-figured and presumably immune alternative form(s).
There are no forms of organization (none!) immune to problems or counterrevolutionary pulls — though (again) some forms may be better than others (given specific conditions and purposes), and some creative organizational processes (of “party-building” and its reconception) may be more promising than others.
It is the point also made by Mao Zedong during debates over form at the height of the Cultural Revolution:
“If the Paris Commune had not failed but had been successful, then in my opinion, it would have become by now a bourgeois commune… In regard to the form of soviet political power, as soon as it materialized, Lenin was elated, deeming it a remarkable creation by workers, peasants and soldiers, as well as a new form proletarian dictatorship. Nonetheless, Lenin had not anticipated then that although the workers, peasants and soldiers could use this form of political power, it could also be used by the bourgeoisie, and by Khrushchev. Thus, the present soviet has been transformed from Lenin’s soviet to Khrushchev’s soviet.”
And Mao’s verdict remains highly controversial precisely because some people believe that a return to the commune form would (in China) have started to solve the problems of the “party/state” form — or (more precisely) that the decision not to return to the commune form (in the January uprising of 1967) represented the decisive victory of counterrevolution in China’s revolution.
Formalism and orthodoxy
Certainly I’m arguing against particular orthodox assumptions about party-building — that seek to solve current problems by recapturing an allegedly universal form in a pure and original (i.e. non-revised) state.
And we are also engaging with the illusions of “formalism” generally — including the idea that adopting forms of mass democracy at every level is key to solving all the difficult problems of politics (including betrayal, exhaustion, and alienation).
The fantasy of orthodoxy (both in the common religious fundamentalist forms or, here, in the dogmatic habits among some communists) is that most problems have already been “settled” in some imagined “good old days” or in a series of previous prophetic verdicts. So (in that fantasy world) our job is to identify the previously-established “correct” form and then “apply it.”
It makes every problem excitingly simple… except that it doesn’t work.
This method is (by its nature) illusory and non-organic. The experience of previous party-building efforts after 1970 is that you can’t “solve the problems of the revolutionary 1960s by adopting wholesale the codified verdicts from the 1930s.”
The focus on “settled verdicts” is the advocacy of “closed system.” It crops up again because orthodoxy makes false and seductive promises: If you dress up in our past language and forms, you will have our success in your time and place. It offers to simplify the inherently complex, it claims to routinize the inherently non-routine. And that is tempting, especially to those who don’t know the particularities of history.
Orthodox methods can seem excitingly coherent and plausible — especially when they come wrapped, as Comintern pronouncements do, in a carefully invented aura of inevitability and infallibility. This is a “road once taken” that we should not repeat.
Anti-Leninism: That baby/bathwater problem
At the same time, I feel like we need to make a second argument:
That those problems that revealed themselves in the practice of particular past party-formations (both the mini-parties that dried up in the U.S., and the macro-parties that successfully contested for power) may not be solved by (simply) dumping whole framework of Leninist organizational discussion.
There is a lot to learn from the communist experiences of Lenin’s time (in its theories, controversies, and changing practices). And clinging to orthodoxy is (by the way) not one of Lenin’s legacies — since his approach, including on party building, was a masterpiece of creative rupture with Marxist orthodoxies and particular adaptations to contemporary (and Russian) conditions.
The problems arise from real world contradictions (tensions within the very process of politics and revolution) that aren’t “solved” by finding some magic organizational form (these tensions manifest themselves whatever form you adopt — and then play out according to the dynamics of the moment and the structure we have created).
Staying on a revolutionary road is a complex struggle — which cannot be pre-won by organizational statutes, it has to be creatively reinforced at every point (as the terrain changes, as the terms of struggle change, as the people come and go).
Example, we could write in some hypothetical statutes:
“Everyone will be equal, all decisions will be discussed at lower levels before being implemented by higher levels, the institutions of leadership will not become identified with particular individuals, leadership will be rotated through the organization with everyone receiving training and experience as facilitators and organizers of the project, the development of the least privileged requires the sharp constraint on the influence and prominence of those with specialized training and skills… etc.”
But what will then happen? Will that solve the problems of hierarchy, alienation and creative path-finding?
Such organizations either lockup and wither (because nothing can actually operate that way). Or they start to pay lipservice to those statutes while really (in a secret and non-transparent way) having defacto leadership processes (that are not legitimized or accountable). Or (most commonly) they do both.
Those outcomes have been seen over and over, and they demonstrate the problems with another form of organization: the one that enforces simple mass democracy as a universal principle and enshrines a determined rejection of any center of respected, trained, legitimized and talented leaders.
Successors and some problems of leadership
Chegitz’s other point is also (i believe) important:
“I’ve noticed where one or a few individuals are really the center of an organization, and without their input, the organization simply will not function. It’s especially noticeable in the SPUSA, where when a key individual leaves, a local or state organization will simply collapse, despite a number of people remaining. I don’t, personally know, how to counteract this.”
In fact, in human organization, the role of specific individuals matter. You can’t avoid that by statutory means (though people think you can). This is a larger problem Obviously the death of a Marx or a Lenin (or a Mao, or a Ho Chi Minh) had an effect on the movement that followed them. They weren’t that easy to replace — or (put another way) what replaced them was often not the same.
“Counteract this”? It is the problem of more people taking responsibility (and that in tern has elements of encouraging consciousness, creative thinking and training). Communists call this the “problem of successors.” And mainly it has emerged as a problem (not as an array of promising solutions).
Some people think that the answer is to forgo leaders from the beginning (to emphasize organization and process that prevents anyone playing a stable ongoing leading role), and encourage a kind of flattened mass democracy (rotating chairs, timing of who speaks and for how long, etc.) But the problem is that the resultant organization deprives itself of the major advantages that come with empowering some people to lead (if you have someone who can lead in a way that corresponds with the ethos and politics of the project). In some ways, we are lucky when we have decent leaders who have ideas, creativity, and who have earned a modicum of trust and legitimacy (in order to act as leaders).
In osme ways, the problem is closer to how Chegitz puts it: The problem is not having leaders (with is inevitable and positive in human organization). The problem is a) holding them accountable, and b) preparing more people to take up such roles (in various spheres) to make the overall structure less fragile and to solve the problem of successors.
anewworldispossible said
Very well stated – i have a lot to learn and have some questions. I’ve often heard the logic: “line is key”, therefore “the line put forward by our leader is the only line that will liberate humanity.” and if the script of party building isn’t followed exactly then people are accused of being revisionist or counter revolutionary, but I see the lines brought out here on calling out imperialist aggression and giving breathing space to create something new and liberating – while pointing out wrong turns. Would the 1960/70s national liberation movement of the Vietmanese be supported by the RCP even tho there were clear line differences? I appreciate the hard work Kasama is really doing to get to the truth for liberation with a careful analysis of past projects.
chegitz guevara said
Collapse is probably not the best word to use regarding what’s happening with the SPUSA, but that’s a quibble.
Of the two issues I’ve raised, I think they both stem from the same problem, which is a rank and file that doesn’t step up, doesn’t take itself seriously. Whether this is because of exhaustion, demoralization, lack of confidence, ignorance or laziness, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a majority of people let an organization whither and degenerate. And it allows those with energy and opportunity and charisma, whether opportunist or dogmatist, to concentrate authority and power.
In this awful society, we are simultaneously told we can’t initiate anything on our own, that we are powerless to do things ourselves (even collectively), that we need someone to approve it and enable it.
And yet, we all know people who shouldn’t be able to accomplish something, and they make it happen through sheer drive, like starting with a paper clip and trading until you end up with a house. The sheer audacity to think something like that could work, and yet it did. And if those audacious people are unscrupulous, most of the rest of us can be swept along in their wake.
Of course, it’s very true we need excellent leaders. And we need successors who can carry on their work when our leaders get taken away from us (by a job, moving, or worse). But a comrade said to me a long time ago, we can’t wait for the next Lenin. We need to make ourselves the next Lenin. We need to step up and take initiative. We need to take responsibility for our organizations.
And if we don’t do that, if we can’t do that, what makes us think we’re capable of taking power from the capitalists?
SKS said
I agree with all of this.
jlowrieJ. Lowrie said
Sorry, but there you go again, Mike. There is no such form as representative democracy and the adjective mass is superfluous. Democracy is necessarily mass, since it means rule by the poor, who are necessarily in most states the vast majority or the mass if you will. To ensure such rule democracies are participatory or they are not democracies. “Representative Democracy” is another invention of bourgeois ideologues, who were quite clear what they were about. I think Hamilton in”The Federalist Papers” but I don’t have the reference handy. Amazing how Mao thought the Paris Commune would have become a bourgeois one with time. There is class instinct for you! Of course it would have, but why? Mao did not know; he was really just surmising, rightly in my opinion. The answer is that the principle of election is an aristocratic one: the best people get elected time and time again, since they are the best! but with time they degenerate into oligarchs, while the vast majority are excluded from rule, so that when the time comes they are unable to ”step up”, having surrendered power to their ”representatives”, who of course do not fail to look tothemselves. Deng said ‘some must get rich first’. Were the Deng family among the first or the last? Surely by this time historical evidence demonstrates that ‘vanguards’ sooner or later degenerate. So I suggest the role of the communist party is not to take power but to introduce a democracy. Where the communist party takes power it all too soon becomes the anti-communist party!
Binh said
It’s not true that “line is key.” Lines can change. Control from below and the ability to adapt are key:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/a-response-to-paul-leblancs-marxism-and-organization/
Unfortunately there is no vaccine against political/organization degeneration.
What’s this about the SP USA’s collapse?
SKS said
Binh,
I am glad you have the recipe for perfection. Have you tried running any organization? Not just political, but say a club, a student union, a small business?
Because saying that “control from below” is a panacea is very much not in line with the organizational experience of anything. It is, in fact, as much as a dogma as the leadership worship.
As Mike mentioned, “control from below” is often code word for “unaccountable leadership”. That is the real problem – accountability, or the lack of accountability. Not mythical control from below – which is indeed a question of line, even if you do not see as such.
SKS said
JlowrieJ. Lowrie,
Democracy doesn’t mean “rule by the poor”. It has never meant that in usual parlance.
Democracy comes from the Greek “demokrati” which means rule of the commoner. A commoner is not necessarily the poor, but the non-aristocrat. It was born as temr in English, in the late middle ages, as a term to mean the rule of the bourgeois, as opposed to the rule of the aristocrat. No mention of the poor.
As the term has developed and come to mean different things, democracy has come to mean many things. Mike’s specification is generally an accepted one when speaking in context in which the multiple interpretations of what democracy is come into play.
In particular, there are two major issues regarding democracy, one is the definition of what “demo” means – for you it means the poor, for the USA it means the citizen-person of adult age – another is what “krati”, that is, what constitutes ruling. In the case of Representative Democracy, ruling is indirect – via representatives. This could be counterpoised, for example, to Direct Democracy, in which the ruling is done directly by the demo.
Interestingly enough, the first documented example of democracy, from which the word derives, was a slave society in which the Demo was formed by male citizens who owned property above a certain limit, and specifically slaves.
As for the term for “rule by the poor”, well, that is “socialism”. But that is a whole other set of problematic definitions…
jlowrieJ. Lowrie said
SKS will really need to read Aristotle’s Politics. He is quite wrong to argue that a property qualification was a condition for citizenship in ancient democracies. I use the word poor not in the sense of those living in penury but of those lacking objective real wealth, following Marx in The Grundrisse, where he talks of the increasing immiseration of the population under capitalism. In no way did he mean by this their increasing poverty.
As for ‘usual parlance’ I take this to be a euphemism for bourgeois ideology. I do not know of anything less representative that so-called representative democracy, a veritable contradiction in terms. SKS should ask himself what the opposite of democracy is. It is oligarchy and this is what the U.S. is. It can be tested quite empirically by examining the wealth of its ‘representatives’!
Daniel said
Chegitz has highlighted a very important point and one that is quite poignant when one looks at the current state of Occupy.
I myself am in such a trap: Having unintentionally become a force of pushing my local Occupy forward, I’ve become almost the singular leader of the group and if I take even a little time away from it, the group immediately stagnates. It’s a terrible situation for me because a GA can’t even function without me being there to moderate it from collapsing into chaos.
There was recently an article from the New York Review concerning the degenerating state of OWS. It was observed that the movement had failed to attract an actual working class presence precisely because it had failed to create a form of organization that could flexibly allow participation without having to abandon one’s working life.
Of course one wants as many full-time revolutionaries as possible in a movement, yet at least in the current situation, hopes of building a vanguard in America, specifically a vanguard emerging from Occupy, seems a little bit problematic due to this. How can one build a vanguard when so few working people have the time and ability to participate and help build it?
It also seems part of a dialectic that the mass party and its functioning forms of organization should already be established prior to a revolutionary period (such as the soviets and worker’s councils that were gradually built prior to 1917); yet at the same time, the energy needed to be put into building a mass revolutionary organization really seems to only emerge during desperate and potentially revolutionary situations. Thus socialist parties here in America stagnate because they have no energy filling their potential revolutionary functions up with life; yet at the same time, lively and energetic movements like Occupy twist and turn chaotically because they have no pre-established forms of organization. Occupy cannot be blamed for this considering the dire state of the American left for the past 30 years.
From my (admittedly limited) personal experience in Occupy, the sincere and youthful energy is certainly there (something we have not seen for a very long time in America), yet it’s without direction. I attribute this directly to the utopian anti-political attitudes within Occupy itself, it is part of an ideology I would like to see wither away soon.
I do think that many of the problems Occupy faces can be treated effectively by what Lenin and others have taught us, yet ironically, it is the unquestioning adherence to these lessons which has isolated the revolutionary left from the working class. I think Lenin (or at least his lessons) needs to be discovered by Occupy, while his own heterodoxy needs to be rediscovered by the socialist far-left.
The reason why I use Occupy as a primary example of this contemporary problem is not only because of Occupy’s relevance, but because it simultaneously reflects and contrasts with the current state of the socialist left. It’s not just a matter of creating accountable leadership, but of creating accountable organizational structures.
Daniel said
JlowrieJ. Lowrie is correct on Aristotle’s commentary on democracy. He considered the electing of representatives to be undemocratic because they always resulted in an oligarchy of politicians who were not apart of demos (the poor majority):
“What really differentiates oligarchy and democracy is wealth or the lack of it. It inevitably follows that where men rule because of the possession of wealth, whether their number be large or small, that is oligarchy and when the poor rule, that is democracy” (Politics)
More specifically, Aristotle said that representative democracy led to an “aristoi” of the “best talents”, rather than democratic rule of the people. This is very clear when we look at elections today.
In Athenian democracy there were no property qualifications to my knowledge other than that you had to be a free male citizen. Decisions would be directly voted on in the town’s square or they would be done through a system of random selection of the population that we would today call demarchy. Through this latter method, the problems of creating an aristocracy of politicians would not occur because any random person would get a chance to participate in processes that could not practically be done through direct voting.
Binh said
SKS — I’ve founded and led two anti-war groups, a social justice group in my high school, and was part of a socialist organization for many years. “Control from below” is a lifeless abstraction only if you’ve never organized at the grassroots level.
SKS said
Binh,
Read what I said. I didn’t say “lifeless abstraction”, I said “as much as a dogma as the leadership worship”.
For example, where are the two (!!!) anti-war groups you “founded and led”? Where is the social justice group in your former high school? Why did you leave that socialist organization? Where the problems in the related to control for below or other reasons?
And the largest organization in the USA that claims to represent the politics of “control from below” is the ISO. There is something hilarious in this sense to those of us familiar with their particular internal organization. If any group proves that in seeking solutions “Control from below and the ability to adapt are key” as opposed to line is incorrect as a proposition it is the ISO. The problems of the ISO are mainly of line, not of control from below. The immense majority of its long time members (aka cadre) have no significant differences of line.
So the problem is not that it is a “lifeless abstraction”, but a shibboleth that gets much more bandied around than actually practiced, and when actually practiced, usually leads to impermanence and dissolution of the body under control, or worse, to the emergence of invisible, unaccountable, politically capricious but unremovable and unquestionable leadership. So you true statement “Unfortunately there is no vaccine against political/organization degeneration.” is contradicted by your formulaic application of “Control from below and the ability to adapt are key”. No, line is key. If it is arrived by divine inspiration or ultra-democratic affinity is immaterial to line being correct or not.
So the problem is the opposite, it is that it is a lively reality that leads us to the same dead-ends as the leadership worship and cult mongering.
So disagree, strongly even, but do not dare to misrepresent what is being said, specially when you can read it a few lines above.
Harsh Thakor said
The Communist Movement is plagued by a series of problems on how democracy was and actually can be built up in the Socialist Societies.We have the positive and negative experiences of Russia and China.On one hand we witnessed monstrous achievements never witnessed in the history of mankind in literacy,agricultural and industrial production,democratic rights of the masses,on the other hand thee were killings of innocent people,attacks on intellectuals ,artists etc,strong personality cult and not the democracy that Marx envisaged.
We have to however summarize that these were the experiments of Socialist Revolution for the first time.Only after very thoroughly grasping the writings of Comrades like Marx,Lenin and Mao can we make any innovative changes that too only after very deep level of practice.It is the genius of such revolutionaries and the Marxist Leninist method that built victories of the Russian and Chinese Revolution,victory of U.S.S.R in World War2,etc..We must imagine ourselves being in the place of Lenin,Stalin or Mao or what we would have done.
Infact right from Lenin’s Bolshevik party period there were problems of imposition of party on the Soviets etc which carried the thread to the Maoist party in the G.P.C.R.The Vanguard party often dictated itself on the mass organizations etc,with strong tendencies of personality cult ,but then we cannot project any alternative and it reflected the problem sin the building of a Socialist Society.By attacking the Leninist concept of organisation we veer towards a Trotskyite line or that of the New Left.
I appreciate this debate but again I point out that lot of the debates veer from the fundamental question of the mass line.
Jacob Richter said
I don’t think this video and underlying book can be over-stressed:
http://radicalebooks.blogspot.com/2009/07/revolutionary-strategy-by-mike-mcnair.html (see the Mirrors there, since they’re free)