First Issued: March 17, 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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From the beginnings of SOC, well before we entered the movement generated by the Committee of Five, we committed ourselves to helping build a new communist party. As our document Notes From Orange says, we put this commitment into practice with efforts to begin rooting cadres within the working class and building a base for socialism within the working class. We saw this as a small part of a protracted process of fusion necessary to create a genuine vanguard party in the U.S. It is our party-building line – to the extent that any small grouping can have a developed line –that fusion is central to developing a new party. We have not changed our views on this.
We were attracted to the Committee of Five in late 1977 largely because we felt they shared this perspective on fusion, and we joined the OCIC largely because we felt most of the organizations within it also shared this perspective, whether or not it was an explicit foundation stone of the OCIC. (We are not sure whether it was at the time, and we doubt if we are the only people who are confused after two years of “clarifications” that leave the issue muddier and muddier.)
Our experience during the crisis and organizational split in Southern California leads us to believe that the leadership of the OCIC does not share our perspective on fusion, either in its understanding of the party-building process or in its actual practice in building the OCIC. We are preparing a document that will develop our views in greater detail, but we wish to share a tentative statement of where we feel our differences lie.
1. To move toward the construction of a new party, we feel it is self-evident that a party-building line is essential. We also feel that the correct party–building line is one based on fusion.
It appears that the leadership of the OCIC do not share this view and do not feel it is necessary at this time to have a party-building line at all to move forward. From the beginning, fear of losing the participation of the Guardian, and later Network forces, pushed the importance of fusion more into the background and finally out of the picture. Undoubtedly the leadership wished to make the OCIC as broad as possible, a center for the entire Tendency, including people with diametrically opposed “rectification” views. This may have been a noble effort but it failed from the first. Putting organizational unity ahead of political principle – instead of contending openly to lead the Tendency based on political line – simply submerged the central “fusion” vs. “rectification” debate. Very few “rectification” groups were willing to enter a formation that they knew was top-heavy with the “fusion” perspective. The call for unity-without-political unity did little to overcome fragmentation and polarization, and may even have heightened suspicions that the OCIC leaders were simply trying to sneak their perspective in the back door.
This organization first approach also introduced within the CCIC the disastrous pattern of trying to use organizational methods to resolve political questions.
2. We feel that the essence of the fusion concept, and the essence of party building is bringing theory and practice together so they can develop in a dialectical unity. To a Marxist-Leninist neither has any meaning in isolation.
It appears to us that the OCIC leadership – following its bent for the purely organizational – is building a formation that in its very design drives theory and practice apart. On one side we have local and other ideological centers for “theory” and on the other we have local organizations and national fractions for “practice.” It is our experience that the local center here not only failed to contribute to a fusion of theory and practice, but destroyed a great deal of what we had already achieved in this direction.
All resistance to the fetish of the local center has been labeled “federationism” and even “racism” (we bitterly resent this empty labeling and unprincipled name-calling), yet the leadership has offered no serious political analysis of the experience of trying to created local centers, has not replied to our political criticism of this organizational form, and continues to call the Southern California split and disaster an instance of “advanced experience.”
3. Following from our first two statements, we believe that political line must determine organizational structure.
It appears to us that the OCIC leadership proceeds from the premise that organizational structure determines political line. An excellent example of this is the NSC paper “Forging a Party Spirit,” the thrust of which suggests that party spirit will grow out of a series of legalistic organizational rules governing individual cadres. We believe that the individual communist’s commitment to an organization grows out of the organizations program and its ability to lead the working class and other oppressed people in living struggle toward greater consciousness and organization. The devotion of each member flows from a conviction that the organization can and does provide correct leadership to the working class in its struggle for state power. Any other conception of party spirit is a return to the religious mysticism of Obedience based on Blind Faith.
It appears to us that the state of the anti-dogmatist, or anti-“ultra-left” tendency today is remarkably parallel to the state of the whole anti-revisionist movement in 1970-1973. Two contending centers have emerged (then it was RU and OL; today OCIC and NNMLC) and each is attempting to lead the whole tendency, with several other currents uncommitted but too weak to contend for leadership on their own. It is all on a much smaller scale today, the groupings are weaker, the whole Movement has declined considerably, but the same growing polarization exists, and the same level of bitter sectarianism is fast approaching, with the NNMLC turning its back on the OCIC, and now the leadership of the OCIC publicly denouncing leaders of the NNMLC as “careerist,” “dishonest,” and worse.
Nothing in the OCIC plan of action appears capable of reversing this polarization. Ideological struggle will still take place, but it will be in between and outside the centers, in various journals and publications. The attempt to create a single center has manifestly failed.
The OCIC is now the focus of debate for members of the OCIC alone, a far cry from what was intended. And even among fusion forces there is a fragmentation and falling away. The very important El Comite group left before the OCIC was formed, and the NSC acknowledges that its contacts with El Comite today leave much to be desired. There are also tensions between various present OCIC organizations that appear to be heading toward confrontation on political questions.
To add to the confusion, the recent PWOC statement on pre-party organization (February Organizer) throws the whole existence of the OCIC into doubt – if not for its members, certainly for those it would like to recruit. The article doesn’t seem to go beyond saying a pre–party organization is a Good Thing (is it really that hard to say straight out, “Yes, we want to launch one soon,” or “No, we won’t launch one until certain conditions are met”?) but it would be naive to suppose trial balloons like this are lofted for no reason. If in fact PWOC is planning to set up a pre-party organization soon, where does this leave the OCIC as a “broad center for the whole tendency?” With a disciplined pre-party organization standing behind and within the OCIC, it would be a very naive independent who didn’t see the local centers as mere transmission belts for recruits, no matter what we say they are.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to admit that the form of the OCIC was a mistake, that it could not and did not do what it was supposed to do, and simply drop it in favor of a pre-party organization? The two forms may be able to co-exist on paper, but not in the real world.
We feel that this whole muddle is the inevitable result of two years of putting organizational questions ahead of fundamental political ones, of attempts to draw people together based on shallow premises rather than contending politically for the leadership of the tendency based frankly and openly on the party-building line of fusion. At this time the state of our tendency demands open discussion on which is the correct party building line, fusion or rectification. The OCIC’s focus on empty organization forms, instead of leading to unity of tendency forces, will only hold back real ideological debate and possible unity.
We have been asked to address ourselves to the question of participating in the L.A. local center – the embodiment of the “organizational over the political” line, the prime example of the separation of theory and practice that now seems to be the foundation of the OCIC.
Let us be specific:
1. The creation of this center did immense damage to SOC. Our attention has to be focused now on salvaging what remains and rebuilding our organization. Our priorities flow not from a small circle spirit, or localism, but from a strong belief that the party-building process must integrate theory and practice.
2. The activity of this center, in principle and design, is divorced from any directed practice in the working class and mass movement. Our participation would involve us in what could only be fruitless and idealist attempts to develop theory and program in the abstract.
3. We have studied the one-year plan of the local center and find that it falls totally outside our conception of the needs of the movement at this time. We believe that its total lack of concern with practice in the working class (or even the summary of such practice) and its emphasis on an over ambitious formal structure promises more non-productive debate rather than advancing party building efforts.
4. The internal life and the political atmosphere of the local center, as described in our “Anatomy of a Disaster,” in no way correspond to a constructive arena for discussion of political lines. There is no evidence that there has been any change within that body since we wrote our paper.
Under the circumstances, it would serve no useful purpose for us to work in the local center here.