Socialists have long debated the type of organization most appropriate to building a mass movement to overturn capitalism.

While it is usually agreed that we need to be organized if we hope to challenge capitalist power, the dominant forms of organization in this society are bureaucratic and top-heavy. How, then, do socialists organize in ways that are democratic, accountable and effective? How do we ensure that we are building the capacities of oppressed people for self-emancipation? These are important questions. At the same time, they can only be answered by addressing the concrete circumstances in which actual radical movements find themselves at a particular moment in history. With these considerations in mind, New Socialist has invited a series of contributors to take up the problem of socialist organization in Canada today. None of them claims to have offered the last word. But their reflections on these issues are helpful as socialists again struggle with how to build an organized movement to change the world.

Taking a Hard Look at Ourselves
By Sheila Wilmot

What forms of socialist organization facilitate the building of revolutionary capacities and self-organization in the direction of a socialist transformation of society?

To answer such a question, it might be tempting to come up with a list of forms of organizing that could be said to inherently facilitate this. But all things do not work in all times and places, for many different reasons. And it is unhelpful for us to work on such a list or be distracted by such a debate.

In our time and place, 21st Century Canada, it seems quite difficult to get the far left to collectively grapple with our political reality, with or without any serious attempt to see a continuity between past and present changes and difficulties. And we face monumental challenges: firstly, there are the overall conditions of society, based on how the economy functions and how the ruling class politically controls and manages this ("objective conditions"); then, we have the increasingly individualized and privatized survival struggles of working people in response to an increasingly exploitative and oppressive day to day reality ("subjective conditions"); and, finally we cannot forget (although we do tend to) the generally successful, complex forms of social control that are woven through these levels of activity. The way this historical functioning of capitalism is coming together in our time and place is indeed overwhelming, the need for change is undeniably urgent and the situation is not in our favour at all. The real conditions of our lives at this time leave little room for actual movement building, let alone revolutionary potential.

Yet, we cannot forget that our lives are inherently worth much. That is a fundamental belief of true socialists: the power and value of human activity and relationships. But we revolutionary reds need to be humbled by our difficult little place in the onerous history of humanity. Believing in the inevitability of developing an effective collectivity by our hard work paying off one day is not a good plan. Rather than allow ourselves to be comforted by our sheer determination, we need most right now to allow ourselves to feel justifiably dismayed and perplexed.

A start at figuring out a way forward is to have a hard historical look at ourselves: at how we function; how we get into formulaic organizing; how we get lost in tactics or simply in the urgency of the need for justice; and how we see ourselves somehow as outside of the society we are trying to change. For example, let's look at consciousness.

A Marxist perspective on consciousness says that we make our consciousness as we make ourselves and as we (try to) change the world, within the limits of the specific historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. At this time neither the level of consciousness of many far leftists ("people make these structures and conditions so all we have to do is work our butts off to change them") or the working class as a whole ("the rich screw us but society is messed up; it's just the way the world works") evaluate the nature of the heavy weight of social relations on us at any given time and place.

And the various ways in which we work our butts off (on one end working only with the "radicals"; on the other, hand counting heads at demos and events, classifying any activity and attendance as meaningful and good) do not shed any light on an analytical mechanism for criticizing and so for theorizing what we are doing, where we are going and how to make this better.

These times need us to do more in-depth education; both as reds and as part of the working class as a whole when we see/seize opportunities to make those small connections and build those relationships. Our limited resources could be put in the framework of a socialist network, rather than the ideal of a socialist organization. Such a network might take on a national publication that takes seriously a grounded anti-racist feminist socialist theorizing. Maybe it is a different version of New Socialist or maybe it's something else. But it is the most useful focus we can have as socialists in these times.

In Favour Of Socialist Organizations
By Harold Lavender

Global capitalism is obscene. It brings war, occupation, repression and death, vast wealth for a minority and poverty for the majority, sexism, racism, national oppression and rapid ecological destruction. What is the alternative and how do we engage in action with millions of others to create another world?

We need a socialist alternative. By socialism, I don't mean a system of bureaucratic dictatorship. What is needed is the abolition of the capitalist system - a new society organized on the basis of human need, not private profit. While it is crucial to defend and expand gains and democratic rights that have been won through collective struggle, ultimately we cannot achieve our goals within the framework of the existing capitalist state. There needs to be a revolutionary rupture in order to create a self-managed, self-organized and fully democratic and participatory society - what we call socialism. And ultimately, it can only be successful on a global scale. This won't happen in one big bang. It will take place through conscious, mass-based activity over time in different places.

What has this got to do with the non-revolutionary situation in the Canadian state today? In the most immediate sense very little. Currently we are being hammered and defeated by the global capitalist offensive and paying an ever increasing human toll. We need to stop this bleeding by transforming the world, starting from the realities and experiences of today where we live. Capitalism by its very nature generates class struggle and resistance against all forms of oppression. Socialists need to be part of this struggle in the most non-reductionist sense of the term - opposing the rule of capital and all forms of oppression. We need to be involved in the process of creating mass-based socialist, feminist and anti-racist politics. As revolutionary organizations or parties, we have a role to play in working within these movements to create conditions to win victories and build toward a revolutionary rupture of capitalism. The question is how.

The debate at hand is whether or not it's too premature to aspire toward a socialist organization or party. Are socialist parties irrelevant in today's context? Or is there some value in very small groups of people engaging in modest ways in the task of building socialist organizations today and laying the seeds for building something far more substantive and rooted in the future?

I believe the concept of a socialist party has value, even today in these non-revolutionary times. In my view, 1001 struggles in 1001 separate boxes aren't going to defeat capitalism. We will need a fundamentally cross-sectoral political project and to do that, we need to greatly increase the forms of cross-sectoral organization happening today. Our very limited partial and particular experiences and understanding of the world can be enormously enhanced and broadened via leaning more deeply about movements and other people's struggles. Socialist political organizations can be a place for this dialogue. But there are pitfalls to avoid. Socialist organizations need to learn from the experiences of recent decades and respect autonomous movements. Sectarianism - the trashing of everyone else's politics but "our own" and the refusal to participate in movements we don't lead - is a dead end street. Neither very small socialist organizations nor handfuls of anti-capitalist radicals are vanguards - they can't substitute for the lived experiences and collective actions of millions of people.

But I believe that organizations such as the New Socialist Group (NSG) can play a useful role. For example, we publish this magazine as a pluralist publication and forum for ideas, perspectives, lived activity and suggestions for struggle which I believe contributes to the movement. And if you look to the last decades, quite small groups of people - including the NSG, OCAP and No One is Illegal in Toronto, and the Prepare the General Strike Committee in British Columbia, have contributed, supported and sometimes led many different kinds of struggle from below.

It is true that the overwhelming majority of people in North America don't believe in socialism. Even the majority of the left lacks confidence in socialist organizations. But this shouldn't deter us in the here and now from trying to create a small positive example.

Building Self-Organization and revolutionary Capacities
By Sudbury Branch of the NSG

Central to the revolutionary project for us is the development of workers and oppressed people's capacities for self-organization and the establishment of their own forms of power in response to the power of capitalists, bureaucratic hierarchies and professional "experts". The development of party projects has historically taken two major forms on the left. The first is the party of the moderate and social democratic left seen clearly in the NDP that reproduces hierarchy and bureaucracy in its own forms of organization (as in the trade union bureaucracies) and also comes to stand over and against the struggles of workers and oppressed people. This works against self-organization and the development of socialist transformation.

The second is the revolutionary party of the Leninist kind that presumes that it is the repository of revolutionary consciousness and that workers and oppressed people cannot develop revolutionary consciousness without the wisdom of this party. This party form of organization designed, in the end to "seize power" on behalf of workers and the oppressed, reproduces forms of hierarchy and command within its mode of organization which also works against self- organization and transformation from below. Even in tiny party or pre-party formations forms of social privilege can emerge for the "leadership" of the organization that stifle self-organization and critical debate.

Some claim that only a revolutionary party can develop a synthesis of all forms of oppression and exploitation in an overall revolutionary strategy, but time after time it has been precisely these party and party-type formations that have stood in the way of learning from feminist, queer, anti-racist, disability, and other revolts and movements. These revolts against oppression require their own autonomous forms of organizing as movements and also within the radical left where feminist, anti-racist, and queer revolts among others must be kept alive. At the same time a perspective that can see both the need for autonomy as well as how all the forms of exploitation and oppression are constructed in and through each other in a capitalist, white supremacist and patriarchal society needs to be developed.

Since the Zapatista revolt, and especially in the global justice movement, some of the historical differences between anti-statist marxism and social/communist currents within anarchism have been overcome in practice. This has led to the cooperation and collaboration of anarchists and marxists in the radical wing of the global justice movement and in radical anti-poverty organizing. One of the obstacles to this collaboration and learning from each other developing further is the hold that the belief in a revolutionary party or parties still has among many marxists.

In our view revolutionary organizations that do not reproduce forms of hierarchy, bureaucracy and power over others and that can bring to struggles and movements a sense of the history and memories of socialist/anarchist organizing are the best vehicles for facilitating and developing forms of self-organization and the building of people's revolutionary capacities. A radical socialist or anarchist transformation of society can only be made by working class and oppressed people themselves. It cannot be made by any party or "leadership" from above. People themselves need to learn and develop their own revolutionary consciousness and capacities through their own experiences and struggles and from learning from and interacting with others including activists in revolutionary organizations. The focus of revolutionary organizations must therefore be on facilitating self-organization and building revolutionary capacities. Some of the acquisitions of parts of the global justice movement with consensus decision making, affinity groups, and spokes-councils can be very useful to this process.

Key to this will also be a politics of direct action (that includes mass action as a central feature) that builds social and self transformation into organizing and is designed to build people's power against the power of capital, state and bureaucracy. A key aspect of organizing has to be the developing and holding of experiences of a possible future in our organizing in the present. This prefigurative dimension of struggle not only provides us with more commitment in our struggles today but also allows us to begin to build toward this future today. The strongest sense a number of us have had of this was on the front-lines in Quebec City in 2001 where in the midst of being doused by tear gas we also witnessed solidarity and people caring for each other combined with the moment of celebration and carnival which is what revolutionary transformation from below needs to be all about. We need forms of revolutionary organizing that can circulate these kinds of experiences and struggles.

In making these comments we are drawing upon our own experiences, Sheila Rowbotham's socialist feminist critique of Leninism, the critique of the revolutionary party developed by CLR James, anarchist-communism, and autonomist Marxism.

Socialist Organizing Today
By Sebastian Lamb

The ways socialists organize ourselves today to work toward socialist transformation should be guided by how we understand three things: the struggle for socialism, what the priorities of socialists in today's political conditions should be, and what ways of organizing are most effective in helping us to work on these priorities.

Supporters of socialism from below seek the establishment of socialist democracy - the control of society by exploited and oppressed people through their own democratic popular organizations. This is the prerequisite for beginning to move beyond capitalism.

Socialist democracy can only be established through social revolutions powered by the self-organized working class. Such revolutions involve profound and sweeping self-organization among exploited and oppressed people. Within this kind of extraordinary action by ordinary people, the political leadership of organizations of people consciously fighting for socialist democracy has a vital role (see my "The Possibility of Revolution and the Question of Political Organization" at http://www.marxsite.com/possibility_of_revolution_and_th.htm).

Because only eruptions of popular power make the establishment of socialist democracy a possibility, its germs lie in the self-organization of workers and oppressed people, not in even the most democratic structures of existing states (such as the participatory budget processes in some Brazilian cities that some on the Left celebrate). The possibility of socialism lies in the mass struggles of the future. That's why the mobilization and self-organization of workers and oppressed people must be at the centre of socialist strategy.

The way socialists organize should always reflect this. Forms of socialist organizing that hinder people from democratically organizing themselves, keep people dependent on union officials, politicians or radical activists, or make it harder for people to develop deeper understandings of society through their own experiences are not building capacities for truly radical change.

WHAT PRIORITIES?

We live in an advanced capitalist society where there is very little self-organization among exploited and oppressed people. The mass workers' organizations that do exist, the unions, are bureaucratic and constrained by state regulation. Radicalism was pushed to the margins by the Cold War. Revivals of the radical left since then have failed to create a single lasting political organization with significant influence. The "official left" centred on the NDP is utterly committed to capitalism and can't imagine another world. The rule of the dominant class is very stable and secure. (See my "Class Struggle in the Canadian State" in New Socialist 45, Jan-Feb 2004).

What should the priorities of socialists be in this situation? Two stand out. One is keeping socialism from below alive and building a living socialist current. The best way to do this isn't by defending ideas and formulas inherited from the past, but by trying to rethink and renew socialist analysis about the society we're trying to change and about how to change it. The idea of a socialist alternative to capitalism is not meaningful or attractive even to many anti-capitalists, so developing compelling socialist answers to the questions people are asking about changing the world is very important. The other equally important priority is participating as socialist activists in today's resistance, even when it's at a very low level. This means patiently working with other activists to mobilize people by connecting with them where they're at, in ways that promote solidarity, democracy and militancy.

EFFECTIVE ORGANIZING

In this society, non-sectarian supporters of socialism from below are very few in number, and we don't have many resources.

On a local level, we need ways of working together as activists, through groups of socialists active in different sectors and/or specific areas of activism. Communication and information-sharing between such groups is easier than ever, thanks to the internet.