Organizational Democracy As Socialist Strategy

Marxists have long recognized the essential role of the revolutionary party in the struggle for socialism. It is the party that can unify the various desperate struggles of the working class and mobilize the full power of the class to strike at a single point, it is the party that can articulate the full socialist program going beyond the more limited demands that labor unions and tenant organizations are generally confined to, and the party that unites the vanguard of the working class in the pre-revolutionary period. The revolutionary party is the instrument of the proletariat in the taking of power, it’s a school for the study of socialist theory and strategy, and the embodiment of the historical memory of the working class in its centuries long struggle for liberation. Yet far too often socialists treat the internal organization of the party as a matter of indifference or as a purely secondary question. This is a disastrous mistake. In the words of James P Cannon, “A political organisation capable of handling such colossal tasks cannot arise spontaneously or haphazardly; it has to be continuously, consistently and consciously built. It is not only foolish but fatal to take a lackadaisical attitude toward party-building or its problems. The bitter experiences of so many revolutionary opportunities aborted, mismanaged, and ruined over the past half century by inadequate or treacherous leaderships has incontestably demonstrated that nonchalance in this vital area is a sure formula for disorientation and defeat.” The organization of the revolutionary party must not be left to chance, but must be deliberately constructed according to the principles of democratic centralism.

Democratic centralism describes a set of principles articulated by Lenin with regard to the organization of the Bolshevik party and the communist parties affiliated with the 3rd International. While the structures of the Bolshevik party and Lenin’s relationship to them shifted over time- compare What Is To Be Done? with The Reorganization Of The Party, for instance- overarching principles of majoritarian democratic decision-making, a strong elected party leadership and regular party congresses as the highest deciding bodies, strict outward facing discipline, control of party electeds by organizational leaders, and an obligation on all members to carry out party policy remained largely consistent (insofar as they could reasonably be upheld). Indeed, the shifts in the structure of the Bolshevik party can be meaningfully described as adjustments to the relationship between a strong central leadership and a commitment to throughgoing member democracy to meet the needs imposed by changing historic circumstances. After the Bolshevik revolution and the taking of power the principles of democratic centralism were generalized by communist parties around the world. This generalization was, however, distorted in crucial ways by the Stalinist counter-revolution in the USSR which promoted an undemocratic model of bureaucratic control in the parties under its influence. Fortunately the Trotskyist political tradition and Marxist scholars like Paul Le Blanc, James P Cannon, Ernest Mandel, and Alan Woods have preserved and developed the genuine Leninist principles of democratic centralism. It is vital for revolutionaries today to assimilate these lessons and build our organizations into democratic vehicles for the working class to take power.

Majoritarian Democracy Builds Proletarian Power

Capitalist society is fundamentally anti-democratic. The alienation and subjugation workers experience at the point of production is mirrored by the extreme limits placed on political democracy in even the most liberal capitalist regime. Consequently people joining socialist organizations often do not have experience with genuine participatory democracy and need to be educated in it. The democratic functioning of socialist organizations serves as a type of political education in and of itself and prepares workers for the exercise of power in other areas of our lives. Working to build majorities in democratic organization trains workers in skills we need to organize our workplaces and apartment buildings, successfully influencing party politics builds confidence in the ability of workers to change the world, and remaining disciplined when being outvoted serves as preparation for the discipline of the picket line.

Furthermore it is often the case that the operation of democratic working class organizations is the only place that workers have the opportunity to take leadership roles and have genuine ownership over the structures we participate in. It is that sense of ownership that leads to the incredible loyalty workers show towards our organizations and to the willingness to make personal sacrifices in order to achieve socialist aims. It is the responsibility of socialist cadre to cultivate a sense of ownership among new members of socialist organizations and to make the democratic functioning of the organization as accessible and transparent as practical. Party discipline and loyalty are not automatic and cannot be imposed mechanically rather they develop insofar as workers recognize the value of our organizations in the struggle for socialism and experience their democracy in action. The party must be a component part of the class as a whole and its weapon in the struggle for power, not something separate from it.

Socialist leader Eugene Debs said that “while there is a lower class I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” This idea is not sentimental, it is strategic. If the working class is led undemocratically or by people from other classes who have not fully broken with their class, we will not be able to take power into our own hands. The revolution will not be led by bureaucrats or by petty tyrants cutting off democracy in the organizations they head, but by the workers ourselves organizing our power along democratic lines. Workers need no supreme saviors, no Caesars setting themselves up above our class, rather the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.

Democracy isn’t just about worker ownership of our organizations, however. It also serves to refine our strategic ideas and prevent unnecessary splits. Revolutionary strategies cannot be developed in isolation, but most come out of the common experience and knowledge of the collective of comrades. Getting constant feedback from one’s comrades, clarifying ideas in an environment where everyone is free to bring critiques and have debates, and engaging with alternative perspectives serves to refine ideas and increase the knowledge of everyone seriously participating. Engaging in good faith debate with your comrades will lead to you developing better ideas and learning more about the world, even if you aren’t persuaded by their arguments and they aren’t persuaded by yours. In undemocratic organizations political mistakes are commonplace and cannot be meaningfully corrected as the line is imposed from above without room for critique or refinement, democracy allows the organization to draw on the knowledge and skills of all its members. Comrades are constantly learning from each other, correcting each others’ shortcomings and mistakes, and building on each others’ insights. The democratic collective will still make mistakes but those can be identified and corrected in good time, and its leadership will be drawn from those comrades who can most convincingly defend their ideas and offer perspectives for building working class power.

Democratic organizational structures also allow for the resolution of strategic disagreements when comrades are not persuaded. In an undemocratic organization, sustained dissent from the leadership perspective is unlikely to be tolerated and critics will be removed or driven to split away. Likewise a consensus based model necessarily leads to splits or to withholding disagreements because it requires unanimity to function. Democratic organizing, however, allows for sustained dissent. The dissenting minority does not have to split or to renounce its views rather it merely has to commit to upholding the decisions of the majority when it is outvoted. Importantly, since the minority can continue to function in the organization while retaining its view it can seek to convince others and eventually become the majority even as the decided-upon strategy is being carried out. This model of “freedom in discussion, unity in action” is the crux of democratic centralism as an organizational principle.

Discipline Is Essential For Democracy

This conception of democracy as allowing for disagreements to be resolved without splits or expulsions and maintaining space for dissent is contingent on organizational discipline being enforced. Having won a democratic vote, the majority must be assured the possibility of carrying out its proposals in life and must have the support of the minority in doing so. Democracy exists in action, in carrying out the decided upon program unless and until the majority changes and it is overturned. This means that the minority- and in a truly democratic organization everyone will occasionally be the minority- must be prepared to carry out policies they voted against.

This discipline is not unreasonable or even unique to the socialist movement. In a strike vote any member of the union has the right to conclude that the proposed action is unwise and vote against it, yet anyone who refused to go on strike and kept going into work once the vote passed would be rightly branded as a scab and a traitor to the working class. Democratic discipline in socialist organizations stems from the recognition that the revolutionary party is necessary for the achievement of socialism, agreement with the fundamentals of its program, and trust in one’s fellow members as comrades in struggle. It is not about dropping one’s own ideas but subordinating one’s actions to the collective struggle for liberation and understanding oneself not as an isolated individual but as part of a movement to change the world. In the words of Liu Shaoqi, “When a Party member’s personal interests are subordinated to those of the Party, they are subordinated to the interests of the emancipation of the class and the nation, and those of communism and social progress.” Organizational discipline is about loyalty to the socialist cause, trust in and respect for one’s comrades as co-fighters for the cause, and recognition that no-one can change the world alone but by acting collectively the working class can bring the capitalist system crashing down.

Discipline is not only about acting on already deciding ideas, however, but also about the development of new ideas. A disciplined revolutionary will seek to express their ideas first in conversations with their comrades and proposals for their organization to consider before voicing them in public, and will avoid offering public dissent from the democratically established program of the organization. New projects and positions will be developed and decided upon democratically in organizational meetings rather than proclaimed by single individuals or announced over social media. Respecting comrades means treating them as equals who can offer valuable input on developing ideas and acknowledge that democracy is a positive system, i.e. that the assent of the democratic body is required to endorse new positions. It follows from this that discipline must be firmest when it comes to those members of the organization elected to leadership or that have significant public platforms.

The importance of disciplining the organization’s most visible and leading members stems from their ability to utilize their platforms to push the organization in specific directions and obligation to represent its positions to the broader public. An elected official, central committee member, or social media manager who breaks discipline commits a substantially greater offense against party democracy than the average member would commit through that same action, and discipline must be correspondingly firmer. In his excellent book The Ballot, The Streets- Or Both, August Nimtz discusses Lenin’s concept of “triple control” of the party over elected officials. Party members elected to office would be under the discipline of the party as a whole, directly supervised by the national party leadership, and disciplined by their local party unit. This method ensured that party members in office would continue to be representatives of the broader membership and the program after being elected, and can serve as a model for socialists today.

It is crucially important, however, that discipline not be allowed to become a barrier to the ability of comrades to offer critiques or raise points for discussion. Nor should disciplinary measures be invoked over secondary issues when the organization is in the midst of a serious political discussion. Writing about a time comparable to ours in that the majority of socialists were young workers new to the movement, Cannon said “In the present political climate and with the present changing composition of the party, democratic centralism must be applied flexibly. At least ninety percent of the emphasis should be placed on the democratic side and not on any crackpot schemes to “streamline” the party to the point where questions are unwelcome and criticism and discussion stifled. That is a prescription to kill the party before it gets a chance to show how it can handle and assimilate an expanding membership of new young people, who don’t know it all to start with, but have to learn and grow in the course of explication and discussion in a free, democratic atmosphere.” We need comrades, and new socialists must be given the chance to learn, grow, and develop into experienced cadres. This means that the majority of discipline must be internal, must arise from the voluntary commitment of comrades to the organization and the political recognition of the need for a revolutionary combat party. 

It is the task of the elected leadership of socialist organizations to set the standard for what disciplined behavior looks like, to instill respect for and political commitment to revolutionary organization in newer members, and to determine when a situation calls for formal discipline and cannot be resolved by informal discussion and comradely critique. Comrades elected to leadership positions must model how to be a good communist. The importance of principled revolutionary leadership cannot be underestimated, particularly in an era when major wars and climate catastrophes loom on the horizon. As Trotsky wrote, “All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”

The Role Of The Leadership

The leadership of socialist organizations sets the standard for the norms of behavior that will prevail in the organization and is responsible for maintaining its day to day functioning. That alone is a giantatic enough task and requires that the leadership include at minimum a chair, treasurer, and secretary, as well as the potential for at-large members to take responsibility for specific areas of work. Beyond administrative responsibility, however, the primary task of the elected leadership of socialist organizations is to offer a political vision for how the working class can take power and organize members in support of that vision. The vision of a potential leadership should be presented, preferably in written form, in the lead up to leadership elections. Members must have an opportunity to ask questions, offer critiques, and have a comprehensive debate around the program and vision of comrades seeking election to leadership.

Ideally elections should be competitive and votes should be understood as offering support for one approach to the tasks of fighting for socialism as opposed to another. In such a scenario, comrades running for leadership positions should discuss extensively among themselves, offer endorsements of one another, and organize themselves as competing slates-  presenting written statements of their shared vision for members to debate. The objective is to ensure that leadership elections are highly politicized debates about the strategy and direction of the organization. Only in this way will the comrades elected to leadership positions be assured of the political support of the majority of active members and have the necessary authority to offer credible political leadership. Internal leadership elections are a way for the party to refine its analysis and strategy, to prepare for the coming period and debate the tasks ahead. They must not be squandered. 

 It will not always be the case, however, that full slates run against each other. Indeed, in small organizations it is more often the exception than the rule. This can stem from the fact that many members of socialist organizations in the present period are new to the movement and wish to gain more experience before seeking leadership, widespread agreement on the direction of the organization and on which comrades are best positioned to lead it, or a disportionate number of leadership position to active members of the organization (inevitable at some stages since even small organizations need to accomplish basic administrative and organizing tasks). Uncontested elections resulting from these reasons are not necessarily bad things, and the main problem resulting from them is the need to insure comrades make an active effort to develop future leaders and to demand that those who seek leadership make a clear presentation of their ideas even if they are certain to be elected in any case. Uncompetitive elections can, of course, signal more serious problems such as feeling that the leadership is purely administrative and lack of concern about who holds it or a lack of perceived democracy in the organization and should be closely examined for that reason. Under no circumstances, however, should comrades run for leadership merely to run without offering a serious program. Comrades should seek leadership positions because they have political insights or organizational skills to offer, because they have critiques of the existing leadership that they want to see addressed, or because they are being pushed to the forefront as a result of their contributions to the movement.

It is the political responsibility of existing leaders to develop leading cadres to run in the next election or, in the event that the organization is in the midst of political debate, the responsibility of leading comrades in the majority and minority to put together slates. In selecting comrades to run as part of a slate, attention must first be given to their political cohesiveness. Elected leaders need not be unanimous in all their views rather each should bring their own nuanced interpretation of the program to the table, but they should merge seamlessly into a collective leadership team. The collective leadership should include a majority of experienced cadres along with one or two new leaders (preferably in at large positions), representatives of major constituencies in the organization (ex a worker or tenant from a structure the party is focused on organizing or a leader from a recent priority campaign), and comrades with skillsets matched to officer level positions. Everyone on the slate should have a clear role to play, but a collective leadership should not stand on ceremony about who fills what role. 

A serious collective leadership must be constantly discussing among itself, fluidly shifting its members around to meet changing needs, and developing its politics together. A leadership composed of isolated individuals, each lording it over their own little bit of turf, is doomed to fall apart and to seriously damage the organization when it does. A leadership of cadres discussing and acting collectively once the majority position has crystallized can lead the revolution to victory. Further, each individual leader can only see part of the greater picture of capitalist oppression and exploitation. A collective leadership, representative of a far greater section of the working class and drawing on the experiences and knowledge of each of its members can act as a totalizing force. Only a collective leadership drawn from the vanguard of the working class, and representative of it, can recognize the full horror of capitalism and generalize the methods of resistance to it in order to “produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation” and “clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” (What Is To Be Done?)

The Priority Campaign

A truly collective leadership team, elected by the membership on the basis of its political vision, is necessarily positioned in such a way as to view the organization’s work as a unified socialist project. Final decision-making power within the party needs to be centralized in its hands or in the hands of the membership directly both because that’s simply what it means to be a democratic organization and because that’s what creates the optimal conditions for a transformative socialist politics to flourish. Yet too often socialist organizations are divided up into single-issue autonomous subsections. This is a clear way to kill an organization, to pit its committees against each other in a struggle for resources, to neutralize its campaigns by starving them of member input, and to drive the organization into coalitions with liberals against itself. As Clara Fraser argued, single-issue activism transforms “radicals into organizers of liberals” and a single-issue movement “moves to the right, not to the left, and it moves radicals right along with it.”

Autonomous standing committees pursuing single-issue activism will inherently be drawn to liberal politics over a period of time regardless of the intentions of the comrades at their head as they become separated from the idea of socialism as a totalistic revolutionary project and enter into coalitions with liberal organizations centered around the issue they are attempting to make progress on. As liberal tendencies grow the organization tends to fragment into a number of personal fiefdoms and its structures turn into a bureaucratic maze, impossible for the average member to navigate. The autonomous issue committee model must be rejected and another model put in its place, a model that can bring all the organization’s power together at a single point and is open to the mass engagement of members.

This model is the model of a priority campaign. The priority campaign should not be its own structure within the organization but should be a campaign common to all of the organization’s structures. In addition to the elected leadership, socialists organizations should build structures focused on specific methods of work, administrative tasks, and organizing areas. Dedicated labor and tenant organizing teams, appointed by the elected leadership, should be developed to assist members  organizing where we are. Mutual aid, electoral politics, and protest mobilization teams should be developed and have leaders appointed, and removable, by the elected leadership as necessary to carry out the tasks the organization is engaged in. Administrative committees, such as communications, political education, and finance, should be developed as needed and chaired by members of the elected leadership. In each case these structures should be based on the needs of the organization in carrying out the work decided upon, clearly subordinate to the collective leadership of the organization, and tasked with carrying out work assigned to them rather than initiating new campaigns. It may also be necessary to develop structures focused on representing specific oppressed and marginalized groups, but these structures should be carefully handled to avoid the risks of segregated organizing, open to as many members of the organization as possible, clear about the limitations inherent in that model of representation, and connected and answerable to the organization as a whole. Members located in the same geographic location, apartment complex, or workplace should be further organized into neighborhood and workplace cells responsible for recruitment, agitation within that specific locality, and developing labor and tenant organizing initiatives. The priority campaign fits into this organizational model as something all structures of the organization are tasked with working on and that gets first access to member time, money, and other organizational resources. All of the organization’s members should be asked to engage in work and in decision making with regard to an ongoing campaign and participation in that work should be a major criteria in deciding which comrades to elect to leadership. A priority campaign should not be rubber stamped or adopted in a single meeting. Deciding on a priority campaign should be a democratic political process involving as many members of the organization as possible and should involve serious strategic debate. It is the responsibility of elected leadership, and of every political caucus in the organization that want to be taken seriously, to develop concrete plans for priority campaigns the organization can undertake and to explain how those campaigns will facilitate building the organization and the struggle for socialism.

What specific campaigns offer the greatest chance for success vary according to the specific material conditions they exist in, but some general criteria can be suggested for evaluating the strengths of a particular campaign: Socialism must be in the forefront. If we want socialism to succeed then we cannot act like we are ashamed of being socialists, but should rather observe that Marxist principle that “Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” (The Communist Manifesto) Priority campaigns must build a working class base for socialist power. They must center outreach aimed directly at a working class population and ensure that it is not just a handful of activists engaging with the campaign, but the mass of workers. Successful campaigns will include political education and training. In order to effectively perform outreach, members need to be knowledgeable about the relevant issues of the campaign, need to be trained to table and canvass around it, and must understand its role in the broader struggle for socialism. Finally, winning campaigns must have a credible path to victory with hard deadlines and definite metrics for success or failure that can be evaluated in an objective way. Every priority campaign must fit into a long term plan to build working class power in the fight for socialism. The money necessary to fund them must be raised by member dues, not donors that the organization will then have to answer to. Non-members involved in them must be recruited, members must be educated and trained, and mobilizing must give way to organizing.

Mobilizing And Organizing

The difference between mobilization and organization was most elegantly summarized by Kwame Ture. Mobilization can be summarized as turning masses of people out for a single large event, such as a protest or march. It can be carried out by a small group of committed cadres putting in large amounts of time and effort. Organization can be summarized as building up collectives of people into lasting groups and power bases. Organizing is a mass tactic designed to bring working class people into permanent structures. Whether an socialist organization is engaged primarily in mobilizing or organizing is both influenced and influences its internal structure.

An organization engaged in mobilizing alone will trend away from democracy. This is because mobilizing tactics can be accomplished by a small number of dedicated ‘experts’ and the average member can largely be ignored or expected to merely show up when called upon. Enginging primarily in organizing, however, will tend to build and strengthen the internal democracy of organizations. Organizing relies on long term mass engagement and trains comrades to respond to disagreements by clearly formulating their ideas and seeking to build majority support. Likewise caucusing for their ideas in an internally democratic organization trains members to think like organizers and plan for what it would take to get a majority of our neighbors or co-workers involved in the fight for socialism.

Organizing is about building bases of working class power the socialist party can operate from and generalizing its influence on the working class. Some on the left contrast mass organizing with building a disciplined democratic centralist party. This contrast is incorrect and unhelpful. The revolutionary cadres are the disciplined backbone of the mass movement, recruiting working class people into democratic organizations that allow us to shape our own destiny. The party is the military headquarters of the working class in the class war. It is the place where all the different sections of the class, across lines of geography, identity, and site of exploitation, are brought together in struggle. Labor and tenant unions, while crucial building blocks of working class power, are alone insufficient to achieve socialism. They are constrained by the need to gain majority support in the particular structures they operate in. The party is not bound by such constraints. It begins as a purely self-selected organization on the basis of political agreement with its program and policy. It must be constantly striving to overcome this self-selecting character by engaging in base building activities and becoming the commonsense vehicle of the working class, but its development in this direction is constrained by its own internal democracy and the revolutionary nature of its program. The moment the party gains majority support from the working class is the moment of the revolution and the destruction of the capitalist system. Indeed the revolution will likely arise from spontaneous uprisings brought about by the crises of capitalism well  before the party has gained majority status, but the better organized it is, the more of the working class it encompasses, the more efficient its structures, the less it is reliant on spontaneous development and the more it is able to respond in a principled way to each crisis. The revolutionary party is the vehicle of the working class in taking power, and for that reason its development and structure must be approached seriously and handled with great care.

Every Cook Can Govern

The practice of priority campaigns and the building of bases of working class power can be undermined in two fundamental ways, by opportunist adaptation to the existing order of things and by ultra-left refusals to engage in the day to day practice of the class struggle. Of the two, opportunism is by far the greater danger. While the ultra-leftists merely make themselves irrelevant by refusing to fight for popular reforms or to work in mass working class organizations, opportunist reformism can deliver the illusion of success while undermining the principles and power of the working class movement. While downplaying revolutionary principles in an opportunist search for popularity can appear tempting on the surface, it is necessary to remember that, as Rosa Luxemburg notes, “Opportunism, incidentally, is a political game which can be lost in two ways: not only basic principles but also practical success may be forfeited. The assumption that one can achieve the greatest number of successes by making concessions rests on a complete error…. ….Precisely because we do not yield one inch from our position, we force the government and the bourgeois parties to concede to us the few immediate successes that can be gained. But if we begin to chase after what is ‘possible’ according to the principles of opportunism, unconcerned with our own principles, and by means of statesmanlike barter, then we will soon find ourselves in the same situation as the hunter who has not only failed to stay the deer but has also lost his gun in the process.”

Both ultra-leftism and opportunism are premised on a basic lack of confidence in the working class and in the ability of revolutionaries to organize workers. The ultra-leftists say “the workers will not accept our ideas, therefore we will have nothing to do with them.” They refuse to to engage with the working class as it is and so achieve nothing. The opportunists say “the workers will not accept our ideas, therefore we will change our ideas.” They adapt themselves to the existing class society and so change nothing. Revolutionary politics is about engaging with the existing society and saying “we do not accept this”. It’s about meeting workers where they are and moving them to socialism. It’s about organizing people against capitalism through the struggles we experience in everyday life.

Central to any successful revolutionary movement is a basic commitment to the idea that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself. While reformists despair of the workers ever obtaining power, demeaning us as too coarse and ignorant to take ownership of the great task of reshaping society, and would be autocrats dream of making a revolution over our heads, Marxist revolutionaries commit to democratic organizing and trust in our class to solve the problems that confront it. We are convinced that, as Lenin said, every cook can govern and our organizations reflect that confidence in ordinary working class people. We end with the words of Fred Hampton, “Everything would be alright if everything was put back in the hands of the people, and we’re gonna’ have to put it back in the hands of the people…. …Socialism is the people! You afraid of yourself? If you’re afraid of socialism, you are afraid of yourself.”