This essay is a part of Negation's Organizational Culture Dossier. The rest of the collection can be found here.

In Asad Haider’s article, “Dismissal”, he notes the absurdity of how left sects bicker and splinter in the same way as our twentieth century forebearers, yet without nearly the same stakes. Citing how many of his political experiences morphed into petty factionalism, Haider says: 

My sense of novelty each time this happened, which paradoxically appears to be a historical invariant, was tempered somewhat by my awareness that purges and factionalism are classic problems of the left. Yet historically, they occurred in the context of global and civil wars, frequently following invasions and large-scale massacres. Why then did microscopic, parodical versions of these phenomena now take place even in the absence of such stakes?

I’m in my twenties, and I have already experienced the collapse of two organizations. One was a student organization I co-founded in my undergraduate years, and the other was a DSA caucus. The student organization fell apart over petty interpersonal squabbling, and there were zero political stakes. The collapse of the caucus was much different from my little student group, as the major cause was a sexual assault scandal, even if there were also political differences leading to the split. 

However, these political differences were not really political—there’s no reason why identification with specific Marxist or communist political identities should hinder organizing. In his article “On Depoliticization,” Haider observes this hyperfixation on political labels and explains it as resulting from the collapse of twentieth century communism. Haider’s article is often cited to describe the absurdity of the contemporary left, and specifically when individuals or organizations over-inflate their own importance, ruthlessly persist in minute theoretical debates with people who more or less agree with them, or dogmatically adhere to old texts when discussing strategy and tactics (or as Mao would say, book worship). Yet depoliticization is only a meaningful concept vis-a-vis the thesis that politics is sequential.[2] Depoliticization is the result of the end of a political sequence, which in our case is the termination of the communist sequence of the twentieth century defined by the party-form, state socialism, and industrial unionism. Many still cling to this past and wish to turn back the clock, and end up acting like they themselves are present at Congresses of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. While there is still political struggle, there has been an absence of a distinctly communist politics for decades, and in this absence, many yearn for a return to the past.[3] While revolutionaries always draw on the past for inspiration, it must be done with the purpose of infusing the present movement with a vision, rather than in an attempt to dig up the past and reanimate it, like Victor Frankenstein raiding graveyards to bring a corpse back from the dead. In our conjuncture, groups and individuals too often rely on copy and pasting old strategies and tactics—as if politics were about following Grandma’s old recipes that get passed down through the generations.[4] 

In Negation Magazine’s first dossier, Specter of the Party, we wrote about the party-form, which many of us approached in relation to contemporary organization. The party-form is absent from contemporary communist organization and it is no longer an active organizational form, even if many orgs nominally consider themselves “pre-party” formations. The communist parties of Western Europe and the United States in the twentieth century carried hundreds of thousands to millions of members—likewise, communist unions like the CGT in France also had millions of members. Those were mass organizations, and no communist organization today comes close to this size. The only left organization with more than tens of thousands of members in the United States is the DSA, for better or worse. Regardless, none of us in Negation are organizing within communist parties, and we find ourselves in different spaces of our organizational ecology. Most communist organizations today are really just cadre organizations, including those which call themselves parties, and my experience has largely been within this kind of organization. Cadre organizations focus on training and developing communist organizers who can then intervene in mass movements, unions, etc., and this will be the focus of the article. 

The Trauma of Organization

In his groundbreaking work, Nether Vertical nor Horizontal, which was oft-cited in Specter of the Party [5], Rodrigo Nunes draws from Jacques Derrida to identify organization as a pharmakon—a poison and a remedy. This dual character of organization is what makes it a site of trauma. Nunes says: 

No wonder, then, that it [organization] should be a site of trauma. Of everyday trauma, in the sense that people everywhere constantly experience its ‘poison’ aspect. But, equally, of historical trauma, above all the one associated with twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and the tarnished legacy of actually existing socialism. The shadow of the latter has hung over anti-systemic movements long enough to instill a mistrust of structure, discipline and collectivity which, combined with the growing atomisation of social life and the ideological naturalization thereof, has become permanently woven into the ambient mood of our time.

Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism brilliantly demonstrates the trauma of organization as CPUSA members of the mid-twentieth century detail their experiences in the party, many of which are shocking and horrific. Much of the trauma detailed in the book occurred in the aftermath of Nikita Khruschev’s Secret Speech in 1956, which fully exposed the horrors of Stalinist political culture and daily life within the USSR.[7] Gornick emphasizes throughout the book that American party members believed communist revolution was imminent. They believed that the Russians had flicked the first domino which would soon topple the entire capitalist world system. The Secret Speech symbolized a betrayal, a back-stabbing of epic proportions. Individuals were shocked to learn that their revolutionary model was a lie, and many of them quit the party in the aftermath. 

Rossana Rossanda, an Italian organizer and theorist in the mid-century Italian Communist Party (PCI) experienced this as well. In her memoir The Comrade From Milan, she details the way in which the Secret Speech shattered collective morale within the PCI. While it was less damaging than in the CPUSA, since the PCI was more autonomous from the USSR (both financially and theoretically), it still had major effects. Rossanda says: “The effect of these events was devastating, turning our voyage from hopeful exploration to a discovery of the unspeakable. The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, held in February of that year, took even the PCI leadership by surprise; l’Unità [a Party paper] didn’t even lead with the news that day. Nobody was expecting it, not even people who knew that the Soviet Politburo was in turmoil after the death of Stalin.”[8] However, the initial reports of the Twentieth Congress only focused on Khrsuchev’s public remarks, many of which weren’t too damaging to the collective perception of the PCI. His “secret speech” didn’t filter out until months later because party leadership decided to keep it to themselves. She says: “It must have been early in June—the weekly journal Il Punto published the whole text of the secret speech. What Khrushchev had said in his public address now sounded like a massive understatement.”[9] The Secret Speech created a split in the PCI between those who condemned Stalin’s crimes and those who defended them. It was only a few months later that the USSR invaded Hungary to shut down an uprising, which further deepened the crisis of the USSR. Rossanda says: 

Things were never the same in the party after that. Trust in the USSR was broken or wasn’t the same… Comrades felt tricked; they’d been treated all along as if they were as blind and helpless as newborn kittens, and now they swung between one denial and another… Many did leave [the party], and the remaining members were split between those who were disillusioned with the USSR and those who clung to it as if it were the last life raft…

I am haunted by a photograph which for me sums up the Hungarian crisis: an official is dangling from a lamppost in front of the Csepel factory, with a broken neck and the distorted face of the hanged, while below him two workers from the factory in revolt are laughing. This was the first time I said to myself, ‘They hate us. Not their bosses; our own people hate us’… The poor and the oppressed are not always right. But communists who make the people hate them are always wrong. And that hatred was massive, deeply embedded: people don’t do these terrible things unless they have suffered a wrong for a long time.

Rossanda was ultimately expelled from the PCI in 1969 for her role in co-founding Il Manifesto, a journal which was critical of the party. 

Returning to Gornick and the CPUSA, other experiences of trauma weren’t political at all—they were deeply personal. Many party members would marry each other, and the strain of personal relationships damaged individuals’ relationships to the party. Paula Sachman’s experience was particularly sinister. She had married Maurey Sachman, another party member, when they were twenty. Both of them attended New York’s City College, and were active in the party’s student group at the school. Paula began to clash with the other students as she felt they were too “hard-line” about their political beliefs, whereas she was more open to less orthodox ideas. Gornick says: “One day, while having lunch at the group's table in the City College cafeteria, Paula said to the leader of the group: ‘What do you mean, that’s the objective reality? There is no objective reality in this case. Look at it this way …’ And the two fell into a somewhat acrimonious argument about the situation under discussion.”[11] Paula was then requested at the party headquarters the next week. Gornick continues:

“I went up to the room I had been told to go to,” Paula says, her face tight, her long slim fingers wrapped around her coffee cup as we sit at the kitchen table in Kansas twenty-six years after the fact. “Maurey remained outside in the hall. I went in and there were all our friends from school plus a man I’d never seen before. I noticed immediately that the chairs were arranged oddly: all in a circle with one chair in the middle of the circle. The strange man directed me to sit on the chair in the middle of the circle. I started to tremble. I took my seat and it began.

I was being brought up on charges of insubordination and divisiveness, the man told me. What did that mean? I asked. Who was bringing these charges? The man nodded to the leader of our group. I turned to him and said, ‘Jerry, you’re charging me?’ Jerry—I’d known him for years—didn’t answer me. His eyes were cold and his lips pressed together, I hardly recognized him. He nodded his head. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never said or done anything.’

Then one of the girls in our group took out a notebook and began to read from it. It was simply unbelievable. I thought I was going to lose my mind then and there. She read out whole conversations that had taken place in the cafeteria at school. Conversations I could barely remember, things I supposedly said I couldn’t remember saying, it all seemed so long ago and far away. She had been taking notes on my conversations for two years. Two whole years. I looked at her as though I’d never seen her before in my life. She had been my friend. We used to go back to the Bronx together on the subway. We’d talked about clothes and homework and our mothers, and all that time she’d been taking notes on me. It was like being in the middle of a nightmare I was never going to wake up from.”
 

Paula’s story is shocking and almost inconceivable, and hers is just one of the many outlandish anecdotes Gornick recounts in the book. Yet the worst part is that stories like hers still happen on the Left today, and more often than not, these traumas do not even result from actual political struggle. They’re the products of interpersonal cruelty which should have no place in left cultural life. The most sinister aspect of interpersonal cruelty in Gornick’s account is that the individuals dishing it out had little recollection of their actions, and hid behind organizational practices and policy to justify their behavior.[13] 

Both Rossanda and Gornick articulate the traumas of organizing within the communist parties of the twentieth centuries, and these seem tame in comparison to the experiences of state socialism. The USSR obviously had the Great Purges of the 1930s, while China had the Cultural Revolution which saw violent conflict throughout every section of society. The Purges and GPCR were qualitatively different in their political content, as the former sought to consolidate Stalin’s rule while the latter began as a push for mass mobilization to disrupt China’s descent towards capitalist degeneration before escalating into total chaos. Regardless, it’s imperative to study the history of communist organization in our attempts to organize today, and individuals should not avoid organization just because it can be traumatic. As Nunes argues, organization is not inherently good or bad, or healthy or dysfunctional—it just is. Nunes says that,“if everything that happens is in some way organized, there is no opting out of organization, and it literally makes no sense to be ‘against it’ as such.”[14] 

Yet organizing is incredibly difficult, and cultivating and maintaining unity is rare. In her article “Spadework”, Alyssa Battistoni details her experience organizing in the Yale graduate student union in 2016. The union won the election to form a union, yet Yale refused to negotiate with them, and the union fell apart before the NLRB could intervene and certify the union. Battistoni says: 

We had asked a lot from people for a long time, pushed each other hard to hit our goals for rally turnouts and petition signatures. In the drive to force Yale to the table, our group of ultracommitted organizers had gotten out ahead of the rest of the membership and kept going; most of us had stretched our relationships in our departments as far as they would go, on the expectation that once we won, everyone else would come along. We had accepted these difficulties as the price of winning. But winning always seemed to be around just one more corner. Why would this time be any different? As our prospects faded, so did trust in the union leadership, which was predicated at least in part on the idea that we knew what we were doing. All the frustrations, criticisms, and resentments suppressed in the name of victory resurged: the union was undemocratic, delusional, instrumentalizing, manipulative.

Battistoni’s experience demonstrates the fragility of organization—in one moment you’re victorious, united, and unstoppable, and in the next you’re frustrated, disillusioned, and defeated. We can fall just as quickly as we rise. 

Division is the Rule, Unity is the Exception

In Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, Alessandro Russo explores the concept of probable defeat. He argues that in the buildup to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao embraced probable defeat, believing that China would likely follow the same path as the USSR towards bourgeois degeneration. Russo cites Mao directly, who said: “most probably revisionism will win out, and we will be defeated. Through the probable defeat, we will arouse everyone’s attention.”[16] Conceived in this way, the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to counter the degeneration of China, and Mao hoped that it could reinvigorate a mass movement that would struggle against the State. Thinking in terms of probable defeat also has psychological benefits—if we see victory as the likely outcome, our vision will be clouded by complacency, and thinking in terms of defeat provides a sense of urgency and a respect for the enemy. Althusser advocated for a similar approach to strategic problems and cited Machiavelli, who he says started his political thinking through the prism of the worst case scenario.[17] 

Mao’s position was partially informed by the crisis in the USSR following 1956, and he thought that Khruschev’s Secret Speech didn’t go far enough in denouncing Stalinism. A full scale re-examination of the entire communist project was necessary, and specifically the meaning of victory and defeat. For Russo, probable victory is a cornerstone of historical materialism—after all, how many communists have historically assumed that revolution was inevitable?[18] Russo says that, “For Stalin’s immediate successors, despite various adjustments and large doses of rhetoric, the main rationale of the socialist states was still measurable in the last analysis by the standard of the historical guarantee of victory… the then official ideology of the communist parties took for granted that socialism was in any case the historical antecedent of communism.”[19] The logic of transition was a central assumption of state socialism, where the revolution was the first step towards socialism, which itself was a mid-point between capitalism and communism. Any issues encountered during socialist construction could be waved away or downplayed by invoking the category of transition. Thus, while Mao’s conception of bourgeois restoration seems compatible with historical materialism, it was interpreted as insane extremism within the political culture of the time.[20] 

Mao’s approach was premised on viewing socialism as a historical exception to capitalism, rather than its inevitable supersession. Russo says:

Revisionism for Mao indicated twin phenomena: socialism’s likely defeat without root-and-branch political reappraisal of its merit and the hurdles to overcome in order to achieve that reckoning. It also acquired a double face during the revolutionary decade. It appeared as a synonym for the ‘capitalist road’... The question that preoccupied Mao, as well as the source of his anxiety, boiled down to whether new forms of political organization could be found beyond the horizon to combat capitalism’s probable defeat of the exception that was socialism. 

Thus for Mao, capitalism is the rule, and socialism is the exception. Without this recognition and the political urgency that maintaining the exception requires, socialism will revert back into capitalism. I think it’s safe to say that he was right. 

The principle of ‘capitalism is the rule, socialism is the exception’ can be further generalized into ‘domination or oppression is the rule, emancipation is the exception.’ The history of human society is defined by domination and hierarchy—it’s what led Marx to declare that life before communism is the pre-history of humanity.[22] The classical Marxist schema of historical development (communalism → feudalism → capitalism) articulates how domination morphs over time in accordance with developing technology and changing forms of governance. Emancipation is an exception to domination, and using the terminology of Lazarus, it is rare and infrequent. Historically, wherever there has been domination, there have been attempts at emancipation. The masses have always rebelled against tyranny, whether in the mass revolts and strikes of modernity, the streets of Paris in the French Revolution, slaves rebelling against their colonial overlords in Haiti and the Americas, or the German peasants wreaking havoc in the Peasant War. Yet for the most part, these attempts at emancipation fail. After all, we’re still living in the chains of an exploitative and oppressive mode of organizing social life. Thus, domination is the rule, and emancipation is the exception. 

I would like to extrapolate this analogy into organization by saying that division is the rule, and unity is the exception. This is because in societies with oppressive or exploitative social relations, individuals in the dominated classes are often divided from each other. In order to become a viable political force, these individuals must unite together in order to fight those in power. Yet building this unity is incredibly difficult. After all, the history of communism is defined by division in the form of splits, conflicts, and political defeats resulting in frequent periods of disorganization. Even organizations that lasted for decades, like the Communist parties of Western Europe and the United States, were marked by splits, expulsions, and frequent realignment. Unity is fragile and sensitive, and maintaining it is a colossal challenge. 

Obstacles to Unity

Outside of the basic threat of state repression, which is arguably the main historical obstacle to building political unity amongst communists, I believe we face three major obstacles to unity today: social atomization, burnout, and individualist ideologies. Capitalism is defined by ruthless individualism, so it’s no surprise that division is inscribed into the social formation itself. 

Capitalism is constructed around the concept of the individual. At its most basic level, the mode of production is reduced to individuals selling their labor power in exchange for a wage. The psychological result of capitalism is alienation, where individuals feel separated from the products of their labor, from other people, and even from themselves. Individual atomization and general disorganization leads to complete powerlessness as individuals submit to capitalism.[23] When organizing, I’ve found that many people don’t even conceive of being able to positively change their situation through organization. If someone is unhappy at their job or in their living situation, they believe they only have two options: accept a bad situation or leave to try and find something better. Capitalist atomization, combined with the destruction of the left organization of the twentieth century, has left many individuals scared to even organize. Without organization, individual displeasure is simply internalized, rather than being combined with the grievances of others into a larger, collective force that is capable of combating bosses and landlords.

Even if one embraces organization, many will run into the obstacles imposed by the demands of work and the need to earn money for self-sustenance. Communists have to work too, after all. Communists I organize with, besides undergraduate students, have full time jobs. Some of them are exhausting—I’ve been in organizations with nurses, lawyers, and teachers that already work draining jobs, only to then have to sit in meetings where guys drone on about the intricacies of Marxist texts. Of course, the gratification one feels when submerged in an organizing project can be enough to sustain someone through this exhaustion. Organizing a workplace or a building, protesting on the street, and connecting with comrades provides an infusion of hope and energy, and it’s like riding a high of adrenaline. But relying on this high is not sustainable, because everything comes to an end at some point. Sometimes an organizing project ends in demoralizing defeat. Sometimes you’re successful—such as unionizing a workplace and ratifying a contract, or preventing a rent increase with a tenants union—but even success does not necessarily sustain the energy, as new challenges and obstacles instantly appear (as any union organizer finds immediately after a contract fight). Burnout is a major obstacle to communist organization.

Any organizer has likely heard the word “capacity” a million times, and for good reason. As Nunes writes, organization “concerns the problem of assembling, expanding, coordinating and deploying the collective capacity to act.”[24] Organizations are defined by their capacity, and organizational capacity is often the aggregate of individual capacity. Or in other words, the more members with time and energy to effectively contribute that an organization has, the more the organization can do. Of course, an organization also has to be able to effectively deploy and involve each individual, but that will be explored in greater detail later in the essay. Organization needs individual capacity, and this capacity is obstructed by burnout (which is itself a product of life under capitalism). Many organizations fail or are unable to fully utilize the capacity of its members because they are unable to manage burnout. To use a basketball analogy, if you play your starters the full forty-eight minutes every single game, they’ll be exhausted which will result in poor performance and injuries down the line. Draining every ounce of individual energy is not sustainable, and individuals need to be aware of their own capacity, while any organization has to find ways to relieve burnout through rotating roles and by providing a culture that takes burnout seriously. 

The last obstacle to unity is ego, which is partly a product of an ideology of individualism which is cultivated and encouraged by capitalist ideology, and it is particularly pernicious in the United States. Individuals are taught from a young age to glorify celebrities and the rich, and their success is attributed to their individualism. We are also taught that our value as individuals is tied to our accomplishments, which is why adults often point out McDonalds workers or janitors to children as negative examples of individual development. Working an unglorified job is perceived as a stain on an individual’s reputation. Obviously one would not be a communist without deconstructing this relationship between individual value and what capitalism defines as “success,” but individualism still seeps its way into communist organization. 

Mao’s “Combat Liberalism” is one of the most direct pieces of Marxist literature that addresses ego amongst communists. It’s an amusing text, and reads almost like a communist Buzzfeed article. Mao says: 

To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.

The rest of his identifications of liberalism amongst communists boil down into the following:

  1. Talking shit and gossiping about people behind their backs, while saying nothing to their face.
  2. Refusing to obey orders and rejecting discipline from the organization.
  3. Engaging in personal attacks instead of principled struggle against ‘incorrect’ views.
  4. Refusing to correct ‘incorrect’ views.
  5. Failing to agitate and amongst the masses, and failure to engage or care for the masses at all. 
  6. Working for the sake of working without a definite plan or direction. 
  7. Overinflating one’s importance to an organization, while being “slipshod in work and slack in study.”
  8. Being aware of your own flaws and mistakes, yet making no attempt to fix them. 

Mao identifies eleven types of liberalism in total, but some of them repeat the same principles. While many of them are specific to the party-form and shouldn’t necessarily be emphasized today, like the line on obeying orders and the notion of “incorrect” views, the thesis that liberalism seeps into our individual behaviors and that we must all check ourselves is absolutely correct. 

To give one particular example in my own organizing experience, I was in a small cadre group that was determining which project we would pursue. One project was to construct a tenants union, and the other was an abolitionist project. Two different groups worked on the proposals for each, and presented them to the collective. We ultimately decided to pursue the tenants union, and some individuals in the group which worked on the abolitionist proposal ultimately withdrew from the collective in the weeks and months after the decision. To be fair, individuals should not be forced by a collective to do work they don’t have the capacity and interest in doing, and as Nunes’ notion of an ecology implies, there is a lot of work to be done and it doesn’t all need to be done by one organization. But I’ve seen many instances of individuals withdrawing from organizations in general over disagreement with a decision, and this is not sustainable. Sometimes you need to buckle down and abide by collectively determined decisions, and give them a chance to bear fruit. 

Every organization is dependent on collective “buy in,” where every individual is pulling in the same direction. If individuals are apathetic, or at worst, actively resisting the progress of a project or strategy, the organization will be constrained. Organization must cultivate professionalism, not in the “capitalist productivity” understanding of the term, but in the general: that every individual is devoted to their craft and to becoming the best person they can be. That every individual is here “to do a job,” which in our case is organizing for communist revolution. This entails that organizers try to become the best organizers they can be, whether that’s through consistent study, skill development, frequent self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses, and active mentorship of new members. 

It’s inevitable that individuals born and raised in capitalist society will bear its marks. Those organizing under the banner of communism are not and will never be pure and perfect people or organizers. We are all flawed, we all carry the traumas of life under capitalism in the forms of work, egoism, and even forms of chauvinism (whether that’s underlying racism, misogyny, or queerphobia). Egalitarian organization is also incredibly foreign in our society. Places with organization are always hierarchical, whether in the workplace, organized team sports, etc, where there is usually a leader telling people what to do. In contrast, the communist organizations I’ve been in, whether DSA caucuses or small, independent collectives, had no formalized leadership that called the shots, and any organized leadership was always administrative rather than authoritative. Organization should thus never start from the premise that organizers will be ready-made—organizers have to be cultivated and developed, and the onus of development falls more on the organization than the individual. The leadership of most organizations are usually more experienced individuals: those who have been engaged in communist theory and practice for years and decades. The onus is on them to develop new communists, and too often I’ve seen a reliance on new communists to develop themselves. 

Cultivating Unity

In Unity and Struggle, Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary from Guinea-Bissau, makes an analogy between communist organization and a football (soccer) team. He says: 

Let us consider, for example, a football team, which is made up of various individuals, eleven persons. Each person has his specific work to do when the football team is playing. The persons differ from each other: different temperaments; often different education, some cannot read or write, others are doctors or engineers; different religion, one might be Muslim, another Catholic, etc. They may even act differently on the political plane, one might be of one Party, another of another. One might be for the status quo, in Portugal for example, another might be for the opposition. That is, persons different from each other, each one feeling different from the other, but in the same football team. And if this football team, when it comes to playing, does not succeed in achieving a unity of all its elements, it will not be a football team. Each one can preserve his personality, his ideas, his religion, his personal problems, even a little of his style of play, but they must all obey one thing: they must act together to score goals against any opponent with whom they are playing, that is act around this specific aim of scoring the maximum number of goals against the opponent. They have to form a unity. If they do not do this, there is no football team, there is nothing. That is to show you a clear example of unity [italics mine].

I grew up playing sports, and I have often found that it is very similar to political organization for the reasons Cabral outlines. You unite together with individuals from diverse backgrounds in order to achieve a common goal. For this reason, many principles and ideas that are common in organized team sports, whether in relation to strategy, tactics, or in our case, culture, can be readily translated into political organization. 

To start with, any effective organization must be greater than the sum of its parts. Or in other words, an organization must be able to combine the skills and talents of its individual members to produce something greater. Organizations fail if they are unable to harness and combine the talent at their disposal. In order for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, a clearly defined strategy and organizational structure is critical. One of the biggest problems I’ve seen in many organizations is the failure to effectively integrate new members, and the onus is placed on the members to integrate themselves rather than the other way around. A member who is new or inexperienced will not feel confident participating in organizing work unless there is someone there to guide them. Individuals aren’t inclined to step up unless they are confident in doing so, and confidence is an effect of sound structure and leadership. If there aren’t clearly defined roles to step into, it’s hard to involve yourself. I’ve seen many left organizations embody Jo Freeman’s “tyranny of structurelessness,” where in the absence of formalized roles, leadership, and structure, cliques and informal leadership reign. Freeman’s thesis is a natural extension of Lenin’s thesis on ideology, that in the absence of a distinct communist ideology, bourgeois ideology will fill the void. Likewise, in the absence of formalized leadership, informal leadership will dominate and these leaders will emerge based on social status and group popularity. 

A clear strategy is also necessary for individuals to buy into the work. If there isn’t a clearly defined vision or strategy, then the work will feel aimless and uninspired. The bulk of organizing work is mundane, tedious, and thus not intrinsically motivating. Who wants to spend their time after work in meetings, following up with contacts, updating spreadsheets, and sending emails? Don’t we get enough of that at our jobs already? This day to day minutiae constitutes the bulk of organizing work, and unless it is clearly tied to a larger vision which shows progress over time, individuals will gradually become unmotivated. A lack of vision does not inspire people and this ends up draining capacity, leaving organizations in a vicious cycle of not having enough people to do things which then reinforces organizational aimlessness. Clear strategy and organizational structure are critical in effectively utilizing the individual capacity of every member, which is already a finite obstacle. 

While the relationship between strategy and tactics is too complex to adequately deal with here in the abstract, organizations must be tactically flexible. I generally understand strategy as the macro, tactics as the micro. To use an example, a base-building organization’s strategy is to recompose the atomized working class through the formation of tenants unions and rank-and-file struggle in existing unions. But this is very abstract, and realizing the strategy may require different tactics in different situations. Base-building in a city like New York or Boston should look very different from base building in Florida, and will likely require different types of projects. To use a sports analogy, a team’s strategy in soccer may be to have a lot of possession with the ball and to high press the opponent without the ball (this strategy has become hegemonic in soccer over the last decade). Yet how does a team keep possession and create openings in the opposition? The specific tactics depend on the players available and the tactics of the opposition. The key to maintaining possession is usually overloading the midfield with numbers (usually by playing three or sometimes four players in the midfield), yet if the opposition has less numbers in midfield, it isn’t as necessary. If the opposition presses the two central defenders with two players, then the defensive midfielder should drop back in possession to recreate a numerical advantage. The point is that a good team is not tactically rigid—they are constantly adjusting to the players they have, the team they’re playing, and the overall situation. Communist organizations should be the same. If a certain project isn’t working, then tweak it! If there aren’t enough members to effectively carry a project, then modify its scope in a way that fits the active membership! Adjust, adjust, adjust! This doesn’t mean abandoning the strategy, rather, there is no clear path to achieving it and organizers must constantly assess the situation in order to chart the right path. As Taylor B wrote in his article on DSA following the George Floyd protests, politics (and thus strategy) is like climbing a mountain, and the terrain is always changing. We can’t just follow the instructions of old climbers like Lenin, or have a fixed roadmap.[27] We need to constantly assess the conditions and be ready to change course if needed. 

The key to culture and organization is cultivating “buy-in,” which I keep emphasizing. If everyone isn’t fully committed to the organization and pulling in the same direction, the organization will be less than the sum of its parts. In order for individuals to buy-in, they have to have faith in the long-term strategy (that their hard work will actually lead to success) and a clearly defined role. If individuals are insecure in their role, or if many people are fighting over the same tasks, then this will constrain the collective and damage buy-in. If a basketball team does not have a clear understanding of who takes the final shot at the end of a game, if multiple players all think they are “that guy,” the team will fail. At the same time, every individual should be willing to sacrifice their ego in service of the greater good, but this is contingent on believing sacrifice will lead to results. Organization entails balancing these different forces. 

Cultivating a collective mentality is another critical part of communist culture. In The Romance of American Communism, Gornick observes how American communists had an emotional or even religious relationship to organization where becoming a communist was almost like a conversion where an individual attains enlightenment. Individuals would ride this initial wave of energy in their total commitment to the organization, before inevitably growing disillusioned, whether through events like the Secret Speech or personal conflict, as detailed earlier. Gornick contrasts this to the culture of the mid-century European communist parties who, according to her, were playing the long game.[28] While there are certain dangers with this approach, as evidenced by the stagnation and eventual collapse of the European CPs, contemporary communists ought to embrace this approach more.[29] I’ve seen many of my contemporaries fall into the emotional approach described by Gornick, where one becomes fully embraced in a struggle, and then, when it inevitably fails or peters out, they become disillusioned and disengage from politics. Building a communist world, if it is possible at all, will not take years or decades, and there will never be linear progress. If we can say that the communist movement definitively started in 1870 with the Paris Commune, then communists have been going at this for about one hundred and fifty years. It seemed like we were on the path to victory with the Bolshevik Revolution, and then everything flipped and by the end of the twentieth century, things seemed more hopeless than ever. An analogy can be made with the development of capitalism which, if you believe Giovanni Arrighi, began all the way back in the Italian city-states of the seventeenth century. There were fleeting moments of bourgeois society, like the Dutch Republic, the initial French Revolution, etc., which all ended in defeat before capitalism finally became hegemonic towards the end of the nineteenth century. There is obviously no guarantee that communists will achieve the same fate, but in our efforts to rebuild the communist movement, we must both play the long game while acting with the sense of urgency that our situation requires with accelerating climate crises and genocidal violence being unleashed on Palestinians as I write. 

Conclusion

The main priority of organization is how to effectively harness and combine the skills and capacity of every member so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction. However, there are other aspects of culture that are obviously important to address, although I am unable to deal with these in full length in this essay.  

1. Organizing is grueling and much of the day-to-day is mundane, so ensuring that individuals at least enjoy the work and have fun is important for communist culture. Organizations should have regular social events where individuals can hang out together. 

2. However, organizations need to find a balance between personal relations and professionalism. It is inevitable that people with shared interests who are spending a lot of time together will develop personal relationships, whether platonic or romantic, but this shouldn’t be an expectation or something that is necessarily encouraged. To be specific, communists can’t create a culture where individuals can join an organization with the intention of finding romantic partners, which unfortunately is a frequent trend on the left and creates an uncomfortable culture for women.

3. As the first point implies, there must be an integration of communist organization into everyday life. Organizing should not be strictly another obligation that exists outside of the daily lives of organizers, it should be an extension of it. The communist organizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries achieved this integration through community centers, hobbies, clubs, etc. If the project of communism is to build a new world, then that process can begin even under capitalism. 

4. Creating healthy forms of conflict resolution is critical to communist culture. Conflict must not be allowed to fester, which eats away at organization and results in tension, bad faith, splits, and at worst, organizational disintegration. Conflict is inevitable, and as I’ve already written, everyone doesn’t have to like each other, but conflicts that affect the work of an organization must be addressed head-on. Conflict should also be public, and knowledge of conflicts shouldn’t be restricted to a small minority of leadership. I’ve been in many organizations where this is the case, and members are left ignorant of critical information. Most organizational conflicts relate to decision making and strategy, and keeping them secret only hurts organization because if newer members are aware of old conflicts and their resolution (or lack thereof), it could be beneficial to future work so that old problems do not repeat themselves. 

5. Avoiding specialization in organizing work to ensure that organizers become well rounded problem solvers capable of intervention at any level of the organization. There are many ways to involve oneself in an organization, and take a tenants union for example. One could primarily do administrative work through organizing meetings, taking notes, sending emails, maintaining spreadsheets, etc. One could primarily onboard new members and facilitate their integration into the organization. One could become a leader of a project or organizing committee and oversee its development. One could also focus on the core work of the organization, which is organizing tenants through canvassing, door-knocking, and building individual relationships with tenants. These roles can become static where individuals specialize in only one area of the organization. Of course, people have different capacities and skills and may be better suited for certain kinds of work, but organizations should be developing well rounded organizers capable of filling in wherever. If capacity and its lack is a central obstacle of communist organization, then developing well rounded organizers is crucial so that there isn’t a reliance on specific individuals.  

6. Lastly, developing theoretical formation and ensuring that organizers are all capable of strategizing and analysis so that thought doesn’t become concentrated amongst a small group. In many organizations, thought becomes concentrated amongst leadership who develop strategy and tactics for the rest of the organization. Communist culture must develop critical thinkers who are capable of strategizing, while resisting dogmatic thinking. 

If the path to communism is like climbing a ladder, then lets say that our twentieth century forebearers were able to climb halfway up before being knocked back down to the bottom by the end of the century. We started the twenty-first century back in the rubble, and the path back up is daunting. The only tools we have are the benefits of hindsight, where we can study the strategies and tactics from a wide range of movements and organizations. Yet, in the general absence of formal communist organization, we are free to start from scratch. Let’s not make the same mistakes. 

Notes

  1. Asad Haider, “Dismissal: The Relevance of the Cultural Revolution”, The Point Magazine (Issue 23), October 21, 2020. 
  2. Haider draws from Sylvain Lazarus on the thesis of politics being sequential, and Lazarus advances this concept through his method of saturation. Lazarus touches on this in “Can Politics Be Thought in Interiority?”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Volume 12, no.1 (2016) and “Lenin and the Party,” in Lenin Reloaded, (Durham: Duke University, 2007). 
  3. One may defend these returns to the past by citing Marx’s comments in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he notes how political actors more or less always LARP revolutionaries from previous generations. Yet Marx emphasizes that when the French Revolution reigned triumphant, the Roman imagery and iconography was dropped in the construction of bourgeois society. Likewise, Cromwell and the English borrowed the iconography of the Old Testament in their bourgeois revolution. Marx says: “When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. The awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.” Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in The Political Writings (London: Verso, 2019), 32. 
  4. The real problem is believing that correct analysis precedes politics in general. Basing politics on sociological analysis and category of class is also succumbing to depoliticization, albeit in a more subtle way. Some organizations might focus less on importing an old mode of politics and more on applying the same theoretical and political principles that drove those old modes. This is merely attaching a new name to an old face. As Asad Haider says in our Negation Magazine interview: “Forms of organization have to be constructed, they have to be actively constructed, and they can’t be just schematically and dogmatically imposed. This means a complicated process of understanding how people are acting politically already, how they are trying to, within their own situations, contest the reality that exists and point to something else that's possible, but then also understanding that there has to be some kind of break from that situation. That will require this balance between developing and cultivating people's practices as they already exist, and generating something that is new, so that it can go beyond what already exists.”
  5. Especially Andrew McWhinney’s “Totality and the Vanguard Function”.
  6. Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, (London: Verso, 2021), 37.
  7. Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, (London: Verso, 2020), 10-11. 
  8. Rossana Rossanda, The Comrade from Milan, (London: Verso, 2010), 266 (e-book).
  9. Rossanda, The Comrade from Milan, 269-270.
  10. Rossanda, 276-277.
  11. Gornick, Romance of American Communism, 151.
  12. Gornick, 151-152.
  13. Marian Moran, a state chair of the CPUSA for over twenty years, is one example. Gornick says, “Marian Moran also led me to believe that she had been at a distance from trials and expulsions; again, six weeks later I was told of at least one trial she had presided over—a particularly ugly and unjust one at that—and I knew in that moment there were countless others she must have been involved in,” 169.
  14. Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, 39.
  15. Alyssa Battistoni, “Spadework”, n+1 (Issue 34), Spring 2019.
  16. Alessandro Russo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 93. 
  17. “Machiavelli reasons by examining the possible limit-cases, by supposing that they are real and studying them. Thus we have the limit-case that has it that, in order to govern them, ‘one must suppose all men to be wicked’, an affirmation of which Machiavelli offers not a single concrete example (this is never the case for him elsewhere); yet it is by thinking in terms of this limit-hypothesis that one makes sure to think the worst possible case, and if one solves that limit-problem, then all the other problems will be lesser problems, and easy to solve.” Louis Althusser, What is to be Done?, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 68-69. 
  18. In “Politics at the End of History”, Negation Magazine, Chloe Cannon observes how the doctrine of probable victory persists in contemporary communist culture. She says, “Today, it seems that more and more people are tapping into this [Marxist] tradition by attending rallies, engaging in mutual aid, and struggling to build revolutionary organizations suited to the tasks that lay ahead of them. There exists a wide range of intellectualities one could adopt, and events to swear fidelity to. In the end they all take this received truth of history as their real—we are condemned to win. They re-enact the debates of the Second International and know exactly what they would have done if they were in ‘so and so’s’ shoes during ‘such and such’ point in history. They immerse and submerge themselves in the modes of politics of long exhausted sequences, and raise categories to the status of concepts. They know what not to do, and are preparing themselves, because they know that they are condemned to win. Science is on their side, and it is only a matter of time and the correct application of hard won theories. The revolution is coming, its inevitability is encoded in the very fabric of everyday life—we just don’t know when. Such is the promise that history offers the dialectical materialist.”
  19. Russo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, 94-95.
  20. Josh Messite questions this logic in “Who Needs a Party?”, Negation Magazine, writing: “Won’t the political leaders, comfortable bureaucrats, and high-ranking military officials of the Party-State always decide that it’s too soon for their power to wither away, and that all arguments to the contrary are ‘ultra-democracy’ or ‘anarchism’? In what situation would a post-revolutionary Communist Party conclude that its best course of action is self-abolition, gracefully handing its power over to the autonomous mass organizations which strive to replace it?”.
  21. Russo, 99-102. 
  22. In his “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx says, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence—but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory [italics mine] of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.”
  23. Since I have invoked Nunes terminology throughout this article, I will note that invoking disorganization seems counter-intuitive since Nunes’ argument is that individuals are always-already organized, whether formally or informally. By invoking disorganization, I mean a lack of mass, enduring organization. Organization today is fragmentary and ephemeral, resulting in a lack of shared history and understanding within individual groups. This is partly why contemporary leftists are constantly trying to reinvent the wheel as there is no shared reference point and organizational history. In his dossier essay, “Postmodernity Against Postmodernism”, Andrew McWhinney identifies this as one of the difficulties of organizing in the conditions of postmodernity, and one of its defining attributes, according to Fredric Jameson, is an ahistoricism where individuals are unable to place themselves in relation to a shared history. 
  24. Nunes, 11.
  25. Mao Zedong, Combat Liberalism, September 7, 1937, accessed from marxists.org
  26. Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 29. 
  27. “We must study Lenin to understand his process of map-making, not to substitute the map of his mountain for ours.” Taylor B, “Beginnings of Politics, Cosmonaut Magazine, November 12, 2020. 
  28. Gornick, 253.
  29. One might argue that it is not possible to replicate this approach without rebuilding the classical Marxist party, where party structures facilitated the ability to play the long game through centralized logistical planning. While I don’t have the space in the essay to directly address this objection, I don’t think a party per se is necessary for this. I believe the long game approach is dependent on enduring organization with a consistent membership that maintains a shared history for new members, and this can occur through cadre organizations, tenants unions, and other forms of organization.