Becoming a member of a socialist organization is the best way to get the political education, the organizing skills, and the institutional support and solidarity you need to not just think like a socialist but act like one.
The canonical Marxist texts contain all kinds of contradictory wisdom. You could become well-versed in the history of class struggle and the classic texts of the socialist tradition all on your own. But even if you spent years reading everything you could lay your hands on, you would still be missing a crucial component of political education: a profound familiarity with — and gut feeling about — your own political context, including all its historical specificities and its unique limitations and possibilities.
It must be honed through experience. This intuition is the difference between an educated guess and warmed-over dogma — and in the actual heat of battle, when we need to make tough calls with real stakes, that difference means the world. After the McCarthyist offensive of the fifties, the overt police repression of the sixties, and the covert sabotage of the seventies, there was very little left in the way of US socialist institutions.
The ascent of neoliberalism and the winding down of the Cold War seemed to close the book on socialism. What few organized socialists remained were barred from participating in mass working-class activity, which itself was grinding to a halt throughout the eighties, nineties, and aughts.
Some socialist groups during those dark decades made a good-faith effort to embed themselves in the lives and struggles of the broader working class, but their small numbers yielded a limited capacity to act. Other socialist groups stopped making attempts to integrate with the working class and became essentially monastic orders, where monkish socialists memorized and reproduced the holy texts, cut off from the outside world. Sometimes their political ideology became not merely ossified but deformed.
Today socialists have a responsibility to take advantage of significantly more favorable political conditions and be perpetually active, always on the lookout for ways to support and advance class struggle on as big a stage as possible. This is not at all to argue against reading socialist texts. This means staying busy year-round with electoral campaigns, workplace organizing, and campaigns around national or neighborhood issues that affect the working class. Socialists have a responsibility to try to convince other people to think and act in certain ways.
Convincing people is not easy. The best place to develop the techniques, comportment, and emotional constitution that we need to convince ordinary people to unionize or strike or vote for socialists is in a democratic organization.
Our society boasts few democratic organizations. Actual elections are abstract affairs, consisting for most people of merely casting a ballot, if they even vote at all. Other elections. News from the SI. Urgent call to support the people of Myanmar 1 November Nicaragua a contemporary victim of absolute power 25 October In Memoriam.
Mikalai Statkevich. Activities and events. COP26 - The challenge of saving our planet. Presidium The members of the SI Presidum from all continents convened for an online meeting 24 October Activities Statement of the Socialist International to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations 21 September Activities Colosio Foundation Forum in Mexico: Strengthening of political parties, facing new global challenges 3 March This work often goes on informally; we have a political discussion over supper, we help a friend write a leaflet.
However, as individuals none of us possesses all such knowledge and skills. One person is an expert on the history of the labor movement, another is a first-class orator, and a third is a cracker-jack organizer. The talents seldom come together in one renaissance man or woman. Such skills and information can only be systematically taught to others through an organization.
The organizing techniques of the Teamster bureaucracy and the former Daley machine in Chicago, to take two extreme examples, are not methods we would use. However effective tho may be, strong-arm intimidation and voting-the-dead are not techniques we want to see taught. It is only those who believe in democracy and mass movements from below who can teach skills in conjunction with politics, and that is the outlook of socialists. In order to systematically pass on our political outlook and our skills, we need an organization.
How will we pass them on without an organization? Capitalism works in insidious ways to eliminate its opponents. Poverty is one way. This is a time of economic hardship, of layoffs, of high prices. These problems affect socialists just as they do others. It removes the labor activists from the arena of his or her political activity. Prosperity is another.
Some socialists have good-paying jobs, they are able to enjoy some comforts. Capitalism, making people comfortable, often co-opts them. A few are fortunate enough to have organizational and political talents which the capitalist society wants to exploit. So a radical intellectual becomes a corporate attorney, a labor journalist becomes a big-time reporter, a community organizer becomes a consultant, a rank and file militant becomes part of the labor bureaucracy, a feminist activist is offered a political position with the government.
In order to remain committed to socialism and not to be crushed or co-opted by capitalism, all of us need peer pressure, sympathy and support of our fellow socialists.
Without a socialist organization, where will we find that support? No socialist organization can be a utopian model of future socialist relationships. However, we think that a socialist organization has to give some expression to the ideas we want to see in a future society. First and foremost, is a commitment to democracy. Democracy in a socialist organization means that the majority rules. Decisions are made by voting.
Leaders are elected and responsible to those who elected them. Power flows up from the bottom of the organization to the top.
Leaders do have a responsibility to lead, but on the basis of the democratic decisions passed by the organization or its delegates at regular conventions.
Part and parcel of democracy is the representation of minorities. That means both political minorities and fractions of the organization with particular problems or interests. Political minorities have to be represented in leadership bodies, have access to the internal and external publications of the organization, be able to recruit people not only to the larger organization but also to their own unique viewpoint. In order to get people to accept the legitimacy of a policy even if they lose a vote, they must have an opportunity to win the vote.
That is why they must be able to organize for their political tendency or faction within the organization, and the leadership of the organization has no right to dictate whether or not that organization is temporary or permanent. Politics has in this respect something in common with love relationships — those are most loyal who are most independent and who most freely choose their commitment. Women and racial minorities must have the right to organize within any larger organization to deal with the particular kind of oppression which they suffer — discrimination which is sometimes repeated even within socialist organizations.
Gays and lesbians need those same rights to protect them from discrimination. The organization also has to have a commitment to the development and promotion of women, radical minorities and gay and lesbian members.
Carrying out that commitment may entail some sort of proportional representation on leadership bodies. There are a number of other goals of a future society which one would like to see in any extant socialist organization which are much more difficult to achieve. Victor Serge once observed that the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, first expressed itself in rudeness. Posturing and bluster are usually symptoms not only of egomania, but also a lack of political substance. The acrimonious and vitriolic debate and the acerbic and sometimes vicious personalities of some of the socialist sects and their members only make one wonder what sort of society they might create if only they had the power.
All socialist will not be nice, but they might at least be courteous. Many independent socialist activists feel that the various movement organizations, coalitions and networks, are sufficient, and that a socialist organization is unnecessary. They bring together those concerned about a particular issue in order to carry out their organizing.
They also define a certain level of politics. For example, Labor Notes, a monthly labor publication sometimes organizes meetings, or even conferences which bring together labor activists working in rank and file movements and concerned about union reform. It develops politics appropriate to those issues. None of these organizations, however, raises the issue of socialism. None of those organizations sees its task as propagandizing for the idea that the means of production ought to be owned and controlled by the working class or that the working class must destroy the capitalist state and create its own kind of state already beginning to die even as it is born.
Only revolutionary socialists believe in those things. But as socialists, we believe that the working class must consciously fight for socialism. There must be a conscious effort to put forward the notions of the democratic control of the working class over the state and over production. How that should be done is a matter of great controversy no doubt, but that it has to be done no socialist can deny. And if there is no socialist organization, then who will do it?
A socialist organization built in the United States in the next several years will not be able to call itself a party. A revolutionary party of the working class in the U. It will be multi-racial in character and national in extent. It will conduct national political electoral campaigns to further its propaganda and organization even though it has no hope of changing the society through elections.
It will be part of a real international socialist movement and perhaps part of a new international socialist organization. No group in the U. Any group which does is only fooling itself. We have no belief and unfortunately no hope that such a party can be organized in the near future.
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