We are not Catholic friars who seek to peer into the hearts of our siblings and determine whether or not they had evil thoughts. We are not bourgeois ministers of the court looking to determine who should be punished for their crimes. Despite this, the liberal-individual obsession with penitence and justice has infected the Communist movement in the West and, with its deep roots, continues to poison our ability to engage in constructive political struggle.
Although our Press has put out an updated version of Gracie Lyons’ Constructive Criticism, entitled Constructive Struggle, this work did not touch on the liberal-individualist trend directly. A little over a year later, we believe it is time to update some of Constructive Struggle, or rather to make this addendum to it: that we must purge our organizations of the twin liberal-individualist desires for absolution and for justice. Enough of absolution, then, and enough of justice!
We are Communist revolutionaries. Our task is to nurture the revolutionary energy of the masses, to construct the party-militant that can channel revolutionary fervor, and to lead in the assault on the rotten, tottering bastions of the old society so we can begin to build the new. One of the tools that we have inherited from social-revolutionary movements of the past century, one of the tools that can help us build the party and prevent the structural decay that has afflicted all other party-building efforts in the imperial West, is that of self-and-community criticism. However, self-and-community criticism may easily be distorted. We are prone to distortions of true proletarian tools and to their misuse, because we lack a highly educated and developed backbone of political cadre that form the institutional basis of correct action and the model to which political rectification should conform.
Let us begin, then, with what self-and-community criticism is. Then we may lay out the ways that Western deviations corrupt and distort it, so that all our comrades may be equally on guard against these distortions.
What is Self-and-Community Criticism?
Self-and-community criticism is a tool deployed by the Marxist-Leninist parties of the past. It serves several purposes at one and the same time. It mediates political disputes within a Marxist-Leninist organization and provides a method whereby those who stray out of the correct theoretical space can be brought back into the fold, but conversely it also provides a form of redress for the individual to air their political grievances with their organization.
Self-and-community criticism is a type of constructive struggle. It is the thorough discussion of an error or errors in the political-organizational realm. It generally takes the form of a discussion or meeting in which the errors to be criticized are brought up and put into the open, either amongst comrades or between Communist and the masses. In this meeting, the criticized person or people has a chance to defend themselves, dispute the criticisms, and make counter-criticisms. In this way, the organization rectifies itself, individual members rectify their political understandings, and the organization becomes rectified to the community. It is of the greatest importance that strict rules be observed during such a meeting to prevent it from becoming an exchange of personal attacks.
We can reduce this description to a list of elements or factors that make up a self-and-community criticism session. Self-and-community criticism is:
- Community-based, and undertaken with the membership of an organization or a meaningful sub-unit of that organization;
- Political and neither moral nor personal in scope;
- Designed to correct, not to destroy;
- Open to defenses and counter-criticisms.
What does it mean to be a political process? Self-and-community criticism is not designed nor should it be used for the redressing of personal grievances. Dislike over the way someone carries themselves, behaves, etc., is not appropriate. Criticism of these aspects should only come by way of the manner in which they affect the work. Disagreement with personal habits is not appropriate. Only the political should be addressed. All direct insults should be avoided if possible.
This is one of the hardest things to internalize or analyze. As subjects in a bourgeois political system, we have a naturalized tendency of thinking in terms of morals or property. If a serious harm is done that requires redress, the venue for that redress is not self-and-community criticism. This cannot repair damaged relationships and is not designed to. Should, for instance, a member of a Communist organization steal something from a comrade or strike a comrade, it is not the harm done to the comrade struck or stolen from that is being corrected by a self-and-community criticism. Many harms, however, have a political level or valence to them. In the above examples, stealing from a comrade evinces a lack of respect for the organization and a breach of organizational rules; striking a comrade may exhibit a level of chauvinism, depending on the relationship.
If there are serious breaches of behavior, serious threats to the security and well-being of other members of the organization, then there must be some other, much sharper process than self-and-community criticism. For instance, no organization can countenance serious inter-member violence or sexual abuse, and it should not require a criticism meeting to criticise that behavior; nor should any organization suffer moles or informants, and that is not behavior that needs to be criticised before the organization acts to protect itself.
What does it mean to correct instead of destroy? The purpose of the process is to correct the organization and the person or people criticized. On rare occasions this isn’t possible. However, this is not a punitive process. It is not meant to bring closure for personal grievances or wrongs done. It is designed to bring one or more people to an understanding of an error or errors and, in fact, it may be the initially criticizing party who is wrong and must undergo rectification.
What does it mean to be open to defenses and counter-criticisms? Someone who simply passively accepts criticism is not engaging in the struggle. They must grapple with the criticisms; should they feel they are incorrect or unjust, they must articulate their reasoning. Should they have criticisms of their own which are relevant to the criticized matter, they must air them.
Some censures that might be issued as the result of a criticism meeting include, in increasing order of severity: warnings, serious warnings, removal from positions in the organization, probationary periods, and expulsion. Even in the case of expulsion, it is incumbent on the organization to produce a potential road to recovery and re-admission. The submission of searching, thorough, well-reasoned, and pertinent self-criticisms in response to a criticism may help to mitigate the degree of the sanction issued by the organization.
The Left Deviation: Kill the Patient
One of the most prevalent deviations when it comes to self-criticism is an overemphasis on penitence and purging. This is an ultra-left position whereby the politically suspect are identified and then “burned out” of the organization, leaving only scorched earth behind where a former member once stood.
This is not the purpose of criticism. Self-and-community criticism is not a weapon, nor is it inquisitorial. It is not designed to hunt out and root out the non-believers or those who believe incorrectly. It is a tool of community-building, and an aspect of scientific socialist organization. When transformed into a weapon, it loses all its effectiveness in political rectification and becomes deadly dangerous, allowing whoever controls the criticism process to secure their position in command of the organization. The “kill the patient” model is most commonly manifest as the proverbial witch hunt, in which membership is scoured for the ideological deviants, who are roundly criticized and expelled, leaving the organization ideologically “pure.”
This is, of course, an illusion that only those in command of the witch hunt can possibly believe. Self-and-community criticism is not an investigative technique, and it can become the channel of serious abuse if it is distorted in this fashion.
Self-and-community criticism is also not line struggle, and should not be used to replace line struggle. We must be attentive that ultra-left tendencies are not permitted to use the tool of self-and-community criticism to adjust the line of the organization or otherwise set new, more restrictive, points of unity. It is also important for organizations to maintain a method of line struggle. If this avenue is blocked, it may burst forth in the self-and-community criticism process, wreaking untold havoc.
The Right Deviations: Cult-Building, Individualism, Moralism
The first right deviation is similar to the left deviation, but put to a different end. Cult-building, as we covered in our article, The Cult-Building Tendency, often makes use of criticism as a means of control. When deployed in this fashion, “criticism” becomes the subjection of a member of an organization to a round-robin attack in front of their peers. Their very defenses are often thrown back in their faces as further proof of their guilt. Should they dare to show any interaction with the abusive form of criticism aside from meek acceptance and humble pleas of apology, they are subjected to further angry tirades and sermons about their deviation from the organizational norms. This is a form of emotional abuse, and is not to be tolerated.
The other two major deviations are individualism and moralism. These are intertwined, and arise from the view that criticism is about something other than the political rectification of the criticized person, people, or organ. The example which comes to mind for many seasoned Communists of a moralistic attack on another member of an organization is that of Nikolai Bauman, a member of the RSDLP. In 1899, Bauman had an affair with the wife of a fellow revolutionary, who became pregnant with Bauman’s child. He openly mocked her, and she later hanged herself. In 1902, several of the Iskra editors wanted Bauman expelled from the paper. In 1903, the Iskra board adjudicated the matter, but none other than Vladimir Lenin blocked the investigation, arguing that the party’s task “was to make revolution against the Romanov monarchy and to vet the morality of comrades only when and in so far as their actions affected the implementation of the task.”
Of course, we can now realize that there was a political aspect to this “crime,” which should have been criticized! But the manner in which the criticism was leveled, the attempt to expel Bauman for a moral crime rather than for his political deviation — that is, chauvinism and degrading the fighting-force of the revolutionary organization — was what drew the response.
Criticism is not a bourgeois trial, and is not used to establish the “guilt” of a person in harming a “victim.” Although there may be victims of the criticized as a result of their errors, criticism is a tool for determining if the criticized committed a political error and correcting the errors of the criticized if one has been committed.
Concluding Remarks
I hope that this has been a useful meditation on the processes that are currently used (or not) in our Communist organizations. The Press urges anyone with experience in criticism and self-criticism to submit their own critiques of this piece, submit stories, or update it.
While criticism is certainly important, it must be practiced correctly.
Its use will allow us to purify the ideological atmosphere of our organizations, to bring proletarian consciousness among all strata of our activists, and to rectify the unavoidable deviations of our revolutionists.
Onward, then, together toward revolution!
