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:

1. Community-based, and undertaken with the membership of an organization or a meaningful sub-unit of that organization;
2. Political and neither moral nor personal in scope;
3. Designed to correct, not to destroy;
4. 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!

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.

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.