So What’s Going On Exactly?
The Kansas Socialist Book Club (KS-SBC) Organizers thought they knew what they were doing, but after some deep reflection and self-criticism, as well as listening to the criticisms of others, they have come to the conclusion that the old model isn’t working and something must change. In a nutshell, it all boils down to professionalism and amateurish attitudes.
Every revolutionary movement that has ever succeeded got its chops started as a scattering of Marxist study circles. There is a reason for this! Although practice is essential, it’s also true that as Lenin said “Without a revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement.”
Where the KS-SBC leadership, until now, made an error was in thinking the club’s activities equated it with an organization of the same caliber as the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik), the Korean Down-with-Imperialism Union that grew into the Workers’ Party of Korea, or the study groups that emerged in the wake of the Chinese May Fourth Movement which evolved into the Communist Party of China. The Organizers arrogantly but sincerely believed a revolution would spontaneously emerge from merely getting a bunch of people together into an online-only space and having them read a bunch of scattered texts, with absolutely no rhyme or reason to the curriculum other than “people said that’s what they want to read.” This is flat-out wrong!
This isn’t to downplay the significance or the accomplishments of the KS-SBC thus far. In the heart of GOP-Red Kansas, a strong pro-Palestinian Liberation movement has emerged in multiple cities such as Lawrence and Manhattan. Although there are myriad reasons for this, one cannot discount the ideological lessons in radical thought which have been absorbed by multiple protest leaders who organize this budding and still-evolving international solidarity movement. Particularly our study of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s book Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine was one of the most fruitful works that we studied collectively as a group.
An entirely new chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has emerged as well, led by a steering committee composed entirely of members who’ve attended various lessons of the KS-SBC. Say what you will about DSA, but if a book club is leading people into real-life organizing (however flawed that organizing or organization might be) then it cannot be discounted entirely as a failure. It sure as hell isn’t a success, but it’s definitely not a loss because it is being critically reflected upon, recorded, and shared with the broader public. In that sense what would ordinarily be a failure is dialectically inverted into a success.
People also found our lessons engaging. Clearly the KS-SBC was doing something right because many new people would show up every week, eager to engage with and digest political ideas that normally students pay thousands of dollars to take a semester-long course on. The KS-SBC offered this all for free to the community! If it didn’t have value to it, nobody would have ever shown up.
Yet despite these accomplishments, the situation in Kansas is no better off than it was in 2022 when things got started. And behind the scenes of the book club, a lot of things were going on. Comrade Persephone, the primary instructor, was extremely burnt out and fell off the radar. She was not alone in this. Other organizers came and went who taught lessons, and they all felt the same way: burnt out, exhausted, and not seeing a lot of the fruits of their labor.
Furthermore, the rotting ideological creep of opportunism, eclecticism and tailism still dominate the landscape of the political left in Kansas. This alone, much less the existence of a bourgeois state and the lack of a genuine mass revolutionary movement, are all the proof one needs to see that the Kansas Socialist Book Club in its present form is inadequate to the task at hand. If it is to succeed, a change must certainly be made.
In order to correct these errors and proceed down a revolutionary path, the Organizers of the KS-SBC have identified what we believe are the root causes that led to our stagnation and our atrophy. Thankfully, these errors aren’t lethal and can easily be reversed.
Self-Criticism by the KS-SBC Organizers
- Lack of Ideological Rigor: The KS-SBC falsely bought into the absurd notion of the so-called “Big Tent.” This is a deceptively destructive idea. On its surface, it makes a lot of sense: diversity is a virtue, and the correct way to persuade someone is winning them over in the battlespace of ideas. This isn’t exactly wrong, to be fair. Diversity of thought is indeed a strength, and we should absolutely seek to persuade those comrades who hold sincere but incorrect views to our side. However, that’s not what the Big Tent approach actually does. Instead of thinking about it in terms of diversity, think about it in terms of chaos. If I’m trying to navigate a large group of people, we all need to have our compass bearings aligned. When we agree to march to the north, we want to first make sure that everyone’s compass is pointing towards the same north. What the Big Tent does is throw everyone’s compass into a frenzy and give everybody their own unique interpretation of what north means. This is unacceptable and wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it’s an active danger to the movement.
- No Reproduction of Organizers: Burnout has been a HUGE issue for the KS-SBC up to this point. Every single individual who took on a leadership role eventually suffered from severe burnout and mental health consequences because they were overworked. The reason for this was because the Organizers were not taking conscious steps to reproduce themselves. The Book Club was successful at drawing many interested comrades into the fold. At the peak of its activity, it wasn’t uncommon to see as many as fifteen people in a weekly session. But that kind of work, on top of parenting, dealing with disabilities, having a full-time job, and making room for self-care and personal hobbies, is a hell of a lot of work to juggle. It’s even worse when there doesn’t seem to be much of a political result. Sure, people would show up. But what happened after? Nobody was being mobilized, nobody was organizing, and it felt like leading a Sunday school more than a revolutionary movement.
- No Offline Analog: Revolutionary movements cannot occur purely online. The internet, for better or worse, is a part of organizing life for so long as the KS-SBC continues to be a book club. At the end of the day, folks have to meet up in person, face to face, and organize offline. The book club was purely online. This was an error plain and simple.
- No Structure: The final nail in the coffin would be a lack of order and structure. For a bunch of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, the Organizers didn’t have any of the democratic centralism, iron discipline, or organizational chops that Marxist-Leninists love to talk about. They were, for lack of a better way to put it, a couple of dudes and one woman who liked to read and talk about books. This amalgamation went a step further and decided to invite a bunch of random people into an online chat room to talk about the books. This in itself is better than nothing. However, a revolutionary organization of disciplined cadre, it is not.
How has the KS-SBC remedied the issue?
To say all of these issues are all solved and remedied would be just as much of an error — albeit a different sort of error — as the ones we were committing. What is happening is that we are attempting to remedy our errors. How are the Organizers correcting their mistakes? The answer is simple, comrades: we drafted bylaws!
The bylaws address every problem laid out above. They impose order and structure on chaos. They lay out an explicit and democratically agreed upon pathway to reproduce cadre. They also impose ideological coherence by requiring all KS-SBC Organizers while still allowing for diversity of thought, robust theoretical disagreement, and comradely debate. Finally, the Organizers are shifting emphasis onto in-person study throughout cities with our Branch system. This is being done while simultaneously preserving our capacity and ability to broadcast lessons online, so that those who cannot meet up in person still have the opportunity to get political education.
Addressing Objections
When bylaws were proposed way back in March 2024, a number of objections were raised by the members. The Organizers would like to take this opportunity to address such concerns.
Many people felt that the Organizers’ attitudes were undemocratic in spirit. To this, skeptical comrades are encouraged to take a gander at the Flint Hills Marxist Study Group page and see how the fine line between ideological rigor and democratic input is balanced. Nobody wants to be assigned homework, but at the same time every member of the server is here to learn. Part of learning means you take direction from people who know the material better than you do: that is to say, the instructors. Anyone who is uncomfortable with that idea is free to leave or simply not attend a lesson. Nobody is forced into affiliation with the Kansas Socialist Book Club, and everyone can vote with their feet if they so choose.
Furthermore, the Organizers recognize that despite the explicit reorientation in a Marxist direction, that they have cultivated a broad “leftist” space in Kansas. The Organizers don’t want to alienate comrades from the KS-SBC, even if they disagree with us by identifying as anarchists or Trotskyists or what not. So to clarify any doubts or misconceptions: nobody is being purged, and nobody is being kicked out. Rather, what’s happening is that the individuals who were already organizing lessons and putting in behind-the-scenes work are asserting boundaries as to what we will and will not teach. Those who put in the work of education ultimately get a say in how they organize and utilize their labor-power. This is one of the foundational beliefs of socialism.
To be explicitly clear: anyone of any left-wing ideology is welcome to utilize our Discord server as a space to conduct their own political education. There’s never been a rule saying comrades can’t use the server to host their own lessons. Anyone is welcome to use the KS-SBC server to discuss broader socialist ideas, even if those ideas aren’t Marxist in nature. Furthermore, comrades are not only welcome but also encouraged to coordinate with one another and meet up face to face to study in person. As long as the content of the lessons is not about preaching national socialism, then anyone is welcome to use the discord space for broadly “leftist” educational purposes.
The long story short is this: We’re not an anarchist book club. We’re explicitly Marxist and we are explicitly Revolutionary.
We welcome anarchist comrades to use our space to teach anarchism if that’s what you want, but don’t expect us to teach it to you. If you feel so strongly about reading Peter Kropotkin, or studying the legacy of the Krontstadt Sailors, then go voluntarily organize your own spontaneous affinity group and Do The Work, comrade! Though the Organizers of the Book Club might not agree with that ideology, they will still support you in this effort by offering the server as a space.
