Ask this question to ten different people and you will get ten different answers. The terms “organizing” and “organizers” are common in left-leaning spaces. However, it is difficult to pin down what it means by how it is used in these spaces. The term “organizer” is a moniker seemingly applied to anyone who engages in any kind of action outside the bounds of their home and in company with others.
A person who shows up to protests is called an organizer. A person who is a member of a leftist group is called an organizer. A person who administers aid to the people is called an organizer. Even someone who works for a non-profit may take up the title of organizer without much challenge from others.
The confusion arises because the definition of organizing is obfuscated; diluted by liberal commandeering. After all, an organizer is someone who organizes, so, in order to properly apply the title of organizer, we need to figure out what actually constitutes organizing.
Is organizing building and supporting unions? Is organizing providing aid to the masses? Is organizing holding protests and marches, trying to get as many people as possible to join your group, holding book clubs, or debating theoretical differences with others? Yes, in some ways, it encompasses all of these things. But these definitions lack an essential aspect which ties all of these parts together.
Organizing is the process by which an organization is developed. It allows for the repetition and replication of an organization’s processes. It is the sorting of chaos along a defined structure. A socialist organization involves the development of unity between groups of people, a process which aims to transform our chaotic, uncoordinated efforts at change into a coherent force; a unified voice.
What do we mean by an organization? An organization is not simply a group of people who adopt a name and a logo and go to protests together. An organization is a structure with a clearly defined purpose, function, and rules. It is a vehicle through which the efforts of many can be unified and channeled towards a specific end. When we organize, we attempt to take hold of the chaos of the various levels of consciousness at work among the masses. We attempt to harness the progressive trends that naturally arise within oppressed classes, mold it, sharpen it, and thrust it like a spear into the heart of oppression. What do you need to forge a weapon from raw material? Machinery, tools, and clarity of purpose.
When we organize, we strive to craft the machinery that will forge the weapon. We strive to create the structures, the practices, the strategies and the tactics that will be utilized to free us all when the time comes. Some of this work has been done for us already, for there is a wealth of knowledge left behind from our predecessors during their own attempts at change. But there is much work to be done.
A Tempered Weapon is Strong
There are those who desire to use the weapon before it is ready. Some try to strike with a dull blade, some with the ingots, and others hurl the unrefined ore at the great walls of capital, to burst upon impact and become nothing more than dust. They may be impatient, anxious, and unwilling to put in the work to build the proper machinery.
There are also those who fail to strike at the iron while it’s hot. Wait too long and the metal cools, becomes brittle, and shatters upon impact. They are too obsessed with the machinery for the sake of the machinery itself. They lose sight of the purpose of the machinery and the purpose of the weapon.
The socialist left is rife with these trends, each of which must be exposed, criticized, and corrected if our weapon is to be built and used effectively. Struggle is the method through which we temper our blade, sharpen its edges, and ensure that it strikes true. Disagreement is an essential part of development, and struggle is the method of utilizing disagreement in order to discern truth. No single individual has all the answers. No one person or group is correct about everything at all times. However, somewhere within the minds of all people are the seeds of truth. It is only through struggle within and between groups that as many viewpoints as possible can be accounted for and the truth be revealed.
Building the Machinery
We are all part of the machinery, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not. We all have our roles to play. The machinery represents collective effort, it represents the victory or the defeat of us all. The battle looms and our weapon must be ready. Will you choose to be a well oiled part of the machinery, or will you choose to leave yourself rusted and chipped, dulling the same edge that you aim to sharpen?
We must work together. That doesn’t simply mean showing up to each other’s events; it doesn’t mean exchanging contact info, being cordial, and liking each other’s posts on Instagram. It means collaborating and coordinating, consciously, to build the machinery that will forge our weapon; to build the organization that represents our collective efforts and collective interests. It means creating a political formation capable of withstanding repression, capable of defending itself, and capable of lifting us all up.
This is the main function of our organization, Cincinnati Community Aid and Praxis. While we are an aid organization, we are not a charity. We do not do aid for the sake of aid itself. We seek to eliminate the conditions that create aid necessary in the first place, which can only be done with the spear. Our aid programs serve a few purposes. Firstly, we aim to serve the most downtrodden of our communities and help them to survive until tomorrow. Secondly, it allows us to grow closer to the communities we serve, ensuring that our ties to the masses are never severed. And finally, our aid programs give us the opportunity to hone our theory through our practice, our practice through our theory, and to exercise the structure of our organization to expose its shortcomings and to build its strength.
This last reason is the most important. When we engage in on-the-ground work, we put stress on our organizational structure. Coordinating an aid program requires relying on management of resources, logistics, and coordination. Every time we run one of our regular programs, we take time to examine our performance, analyze our effectiveness, and assess the current conditions and the need for other efforts. Through this process, we develop. We constantly adjust our practices, our structure, and our understanding in response to our mistakes, our shortcomings, and any other information we gather from our work.
Though our aid programs are our most public-facing aspect, it is only one fifth of our actual operations. There are four other committees within our organization, each with varying purposes, but all oriented towards one goal: building the machinery. We are what we consider a primary organization; a pre-party formation. The most valuable thing we can do as a primary organization is contribute to the struggle. That means developing a robust understanding of the material conditions of our locale, formulating theories regarding the character and structure of our formation, putting them to the test with practical work, and, most importantly, sharing what we have learned with others.
Envision yourself within your organization, and your organization within your community, not as an individual body, but as individual cells within a single body, a body that is learning how to walk.
Engage with us in good faith. Unite with us over our commonalities. Struggle with us over our differences. Allow yourself to be driven forward by others as they are driven forward by you. This is a call for action, but it is also a cry for help. We cannot do this alone, nor can you. We need each other, and victory can only arise through our coordinated and collective effort.
A Proposal
CCAP is a pre-party formation and an organization. When we organize, we are in the process of developing the members of CCAP and the locale in which we operate, as well as the organization itself. It is something all leftist organizations should have in common.
But there are higher levels of organization that we aim to achieve. Every advance in the complexity and capability of our collective organization is a step that will allow us to take on bigger and better challenges and provide us the foundations to advance the next steps. It is a process of development. There is no way to be at the top except to start at the bottom.
An individual who grasps class consciousness is at a higher stage of development than one who does not. An individual who gives themselves to the study of revolutionary theory and the study of the machinations of the world is more advanced than the conscious individual. An organization is more advanced than the educated individual. An organization of organizations is more advanced than a single organization itself…and so on and so on until the collective level of the organization of the oppressed classes is at the stage that it can wage effective struggle against the forces that be.
In Cincinnati and across the country, there are many individual, isolated organizations all doing similar or adjacent work. We have our differences, yes, but on the whole we are more alike than not. It is upon the things that we hold in common—our convictions, our goals, our beliefs—that we can unite. Once we have united, we will utilize our differences to engage in discussion and debate and advance ourselves as a collective.
Just as it is erroneous for an individual to believe that they know everything, it is equally as erroneous for us to believe that we have nothing to offer each other as organizations.
What is needed is an organization of organizations, something qualitatively different from the various coalitions, networks, and alliances that currently dot the landscape. This umbrella organization is not just a show of symbolic unity, it is a material unification of groups into a cohesive whole. Should we unify with another group in our city, our two groups would become one organization, of which CCAP is just a single part. This unifying of organizations advances the collective organizational complexity of the movement as a whole and allows us to take on bigger challenges than we can as isolated groups.
This is the meaning of organizing: engaging in the efforts to build not just a movement, but a complex structure with a defined purpose and the capability to engage in operations that advance towards our common goal. As organizers, this is the activity in which we consciously take part.
Does this involve building unions, running book clubs, and going to protests? Yes, it does, at different times and to different degrees. But it is essential for you, if you believe yourself to be an organizer, to expand your understanding of what an organizer actually does. An organizer is not just an activist, they are an architect, a builder, and a blacksmith forging the weapon.
At the current moment, we are struggling without sight in the dark, pulling this way and that with no form or direction. We have a history to learn from, yes, but the conditions of our struggle are novel. We are individual cells of a single body, and we are only just learning to walk.
If you consider yourself an organizer, understand what it means to organize. Understand that while conducting aid programs and holding town halls and staging protests is important, these are surface level actions and don’t constitute a movement. It is not enough to simply espouse radical politics and hope that will change the world. The new world must be built and you as an organizer are a builder.
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