You are a gardener. As gardeners, we must be patient. We must plant the seeds of the proletarian party in the soil of empire. We must nurture those seeds carefully, water them, and watch them grow. There is no proletarian party in the U.S.-Canadian empire. It is up to us to nurture it, to bring it into being. What are the seeds of the new party, the party that is the vanguard of the masses? Those seeds are local organizations, cells, study groups, and circles.
First there comes the circle. These are founded organically and spontaneously by advanced workers and petit-bourgeois intellectuals to study the obvious problems that arise from the grinding wheels of capital. A circle is not an organization; it is a group of like-minded individuals who spend time together. They may pursue collective goals, but there is no permanent organizational form to guide the circle in its action. It is merely unspoken consensus which rules.
The circle can mature into a study group, a form that we at the Clarion have promoted for some time. Study groups harden and temper their membership into trained Communists with a basis in theory. There is currently an anarchistic urge in the West to push immediately to action and abandon theory entirely, or relegate it to a secondary role. We must strongly caution against this. In the period before the formation of the party, in the contradiction between theory and praxis, theory is the dominant aspect. “Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” Lenin cautioned. Should circles attempt to leap over theoretical development directly to organized action, they will be unable to chart a steady course, fall victim to major deviations, and eventually collapse from the lack of competent, cadre-level membership.
Study groups become cells, active organizations. Once a study group reaches a certain level of political development, membership, and spare labor-power, the study group can become active and begin practicing Red Aid, strike assistance, and organizing among the masses. A study group that does this has become a cell. Cells band together or expand in membership, sophistication, and capacity to become local organizations of many cells, which focus their activity on a narrow locality. These in turn eventually become regional organizations. The collection of regional and local organizations grows into the proletarian party. We find ourselves in a time when the Communist movement in the West is so disorganized and incoherent as to be nonexistent at any scale larger than individual local organizations. Because we are in this time of chaos, where the movement is not cohering, we cannot rely on central authority to build the party; we must instead, rely on local growth. We must grow from the seeds upward, not from the crown down, otherwise we will not put down stable roots — we will not have connection with the masses, and our local organizations will succumb to wooden dogmatism, opportunism, and blundering. As we wrote in our Unity Prospectus:
Local, primary organizations must be encouraged to grow and band together into leagues. They cannot be subjected to centralization at this stage; they must be free to experiment, raise the level of consciousness, etc. Marxist-Leninists, no matter how dedicated, cannot go into the field and create other Marxist-Leninists out of thin air. The synthesis of Marxism-Leninism must be achieved not by importing organizational practices, but by organically rediscovering them.
No central organization can seed primary organizations if it is determined to retain control over them at this stage. Central organs — of FRSO, for instance — are simply too weak and do not hold the undivided faith of the masses. It is only once the vanguard party is constituted that the primary aspect of this contradiction will shift to centralization.
You must thus become one of these Red Gardeners. It is not enough for a single, or a score of Red Gardeners across the U.S. capitalist empire (and its adjunct Canada) to begin their work. There must be hundreds of Red Gardeners, and ultimately thousands, seeding organizations and tending them. We must nurture dedicated, “high-quality” Communist recruits who will care little for their own personal gains and losses, who will subordinate their own egos to the movement, and be prepared to give everything for the advance of the banner.
Where will we find these seedlings? There are four sources of recruits: personal contacts, group meetings, ideological trainings, and raising class consciousness among the workers. As a local organization grows from a circle to a real organization, its capacity to recruit will expand from the first source, through the second and third, and finally reach the last. When it is a circle, you will draw from personal contacts. When it is a study group, you will draw from group meetings and then ideological trainings. When it is a cell, you will draw from the advanced workers directly, having raised their class consciousness through agitation, propaganda, and practice.
There are those who say that we should simply leap to organizing the masses now! They are mistaken. In the contradiction between the masses and the cadre, it is the cadre which is currently the primary aspect. We do not have a party, so we do not have a corps of dedicated cadre to help direct the movement; we act now as Red Gardeners so that we may create an army of gardeners. We must raise up legions of shepherds and caretakers.
We urge all of our readers: go forth! Tend your garden. Discover your love in the revolution.
