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.

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?

I agree with all of this.

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!

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?

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.

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...

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'!

<blockquote>“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.”</blockquote>



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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

In a response to Binh:

The Socialist Party USA (SPUSA) once had a degree of promise. I joined a year ago, when it seemed like the organization was going somewhere. In my mind, I shrugged off its membership of just over 1000 members. There were many people within the party who were active in discussions online, in various forums. However, many things have occurred which caused the split of Revolutionary Unity, originally a tendency within the Socialist Party, to split off. A few of our members are working on a document to explain why we left the party. Needless to say, a major issue in it was a lack of democracy. The new National Committee elected at the last convention was afraid to have people have their own independent forum for discussion, where they had no control.

The forums that they do control have far to many rules to even have a discussion. Their list-serv only allows for you two send two messages a day. And from what I have been told, there was a time not too long before my joining that this list was in digest-only mode as well. Digest mode is fine for lists that have many messages in one day, but the SPUSA list is lucky to get 1 message a day. Public discussion is curtailed, and private discussion is restricted. The list has plenty of other rules, which deal with insults and using private conversations. Many who left were often subjected to bans from the list, further reducing meaningful discussion.

Another major issue with our party deals with raising funds. Our member's dues are used for three things primarily: to pay the national secretary, to publish our bimonthly magazine "The Socialist", and to set up yearly organizing conferences. Frequently the money needed falls short, and we are appealed to donate more. We have made suggestions, such as allowing new members to check a box indicating whether they would like a pdf version of the magazine rather than a printed one, but these suggestions have been met with no changes.

Many who come to Kasama seem to be refugees from sectarian organizations or cults. So my experience might differ from others here. Although it does stem from an issue seen in many socialist organizations: a lack of democracy. There are plenty of other reasons, though the other former members could go into better detail on this.