2nd Instalment of 4 on the SACP's "Organisational Renewal" discussion document
'Towards an Organisational Review and Renewal Process': Commentary in number order: Clauses 1 to 10, of 35 D. Tweedie, 18 May 2015 1. The first paragraph of the "substantive" part of the Organisational Renewal document takes for granted that there will be an organisational renewal that is not a completion of the local structure of the party as described in the constitution, but is in fact a dismantling and re-creation of the very constitution on a new basis, that is only speculated upon, but not described. It declares that the national democratic revolution (NDR) is "a direct route to socialism" but it does not say why. The reason why the NDR is a road to socialism, to the extent that it is, is that it trains the masses through democracy to behave as a collective revolutionary free-willing Subject. Yet in this document, the agency of the Party and the agency of the people are confused and not distinguished. Nowhere in this document of more than eleven thousand words does the slogan "Power to the People" occur. This is the fundamental problem with the document. It fails to orient the party towards the revolutionary goal of mass popular revolutionary action. Hence the phrase "direct route to socialism" has become here an empty mantra, obscuring rather than describing the necessary line of march of the masses. 2. Hence in the second paragraph, the document suggests a programme for 20 years with "irreversible" milestones marked on it. Unfortunately, not only are there no irreversibles, as we have discovered in relation to the Soviet Union, but also the idea of "milestones", which is to say the idea of gradualism, has been discredited for an even longer period - notably since the demolition by Rosa Luxemburg of Eduard Bernstein's book, Evolutionary Socialism, at the beginning of the last century. This paragraph is a stranger to the historic strategy and tactics of the SACP, without reasons being given for the estrangement. 3. "We need to build the Party in a much popular and simple way," says the third paragraph, so as to "make it attractive to the workers, the youth, women and other sectors of our society that are not easily enticed to the programmes of the Party let alone seek to understand the Party organisation." This is the worst form of wishy-washy mass-party revisionism. This third paragraph already proves that in the pursuit of military centralism the Party would lose its revolutionary nature (just as if it openly opted for reformism, or "Eurocommunism", it would be obliged to adopt a military style of command-and-control). Reformism and military-style centralism are two sides of the same political coin. 4. "Clearly articulated principles, policies and general guidelines as the basis to unite our Party, cohere members and its unity of purpose," sound appealing, but this actually means dogma and a rejection of study. There is no "clarity" of this kind that can assist the communists. Revolution invariably waits beyond the boundary of trite, present-day "clarity". This clause is an infantile appeal for a political security-blanket. But only in the difficult scientific and philosophical study that grapples with contradictions, and with things that are not yet clear, can the way forward be discovered. 5. This clause expands on the previous security-blanket-seeking clause by proposing that the (new) SACP constitution "be the central [ideological] point of orientation of Party members". It says that this must be done "succinctly". This is misleading. The present constitution is succinct. It does not claim to overtop the great literature of communism, but it refers members to that literature. This is all it can do. There cannot be a communist party constitution that abolishes the "Communist Manifesto" and "Capital", "What Is To Be Done?" and "The State and Revolution", to name but a few. It cannot. This clause is an appeal for a Catechism of communism, or a set of "Frequently Asked Questions" and standard model answers about communism. There is no way that this can be done. If it could be done, the authors of this organisational renewal document would have done it already, and not wasted time just talking about it. 6. This clause praises "democratic centralism" but it is really about what it calls "control of members". There is nothing in democratic centralism that amounts to "control of members"; the latter is a military and not a political concept. 7. This paragraph recommends a learning-by-rote, programmatic type of organisation that is nothing like a communist party. 8. "The main pillars of Party building." This is a set of six moralistic mottoes that could as well be in a Boy Scouts' manual as in a document of the Communist Party. 9. "The four critical subordinates of Party building." This is an attempted re-statement of the principle of democratic centralism that is not as clear as the one in the existing SACP constitution; therefore it is redundant. It is even dangerous, because consideration of democratic centralism in an abstract way, separate from the description of the formal structure of the party that is in the constitution, renders it meaningless, and menacing. 10. "Outline of Party Building Tasks by grass roots organs" "To selflessly serve the community" is not, as this clause claims, the "first task and priority" of communists; nor is "recruitment of new members to the Party and community work". The communists are not community volunteers, friars or nuns; they are the creators of the vanguard party. They are not carers, they are pathfinders. To be a communist is a professional scientific speciality, and not a vow of charitable simplicity. The clause goes on to say that "a minimum of two years is necessary to train a comrade to meet acceptable requirement to service members." Those who do the work of induction, and the separate work of political education, know that there is no such "two years". It is a lifetime's study. There is no graduation. At the same time as being a lifetime and not two years, it is equally a requirement that comrades begin at once, and not two years later, to shoulder the burden of being party members. There is no half-commitment, or half-responsibility. There is no waiting for two years. The people who composed this item 10 are working from an experience of the party that is detached from the experience of ordinary party members, and from the experience of ordinary political education commissars. It does not describe communist reality. It describes a military mentality that is foreign to communist party reality. Next instalment: "Towards an Organisational Review and Renewal Process," commentary in number order: Clauses 11 to 20 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
