Recently, some old friends started coming back in contact with us. The rekindling of old friendships and comradely bonds is always a positive thing, even when they are accompanied by disagreement over this or that issue. In our case, it is over the role of organization.

For a long time, our friends labored to build and grow an organization, only to have many of the same problems that besiege other groups happen to them. In the end, it has left our friends questioning the entire point of having a traditional kind of political organization — whether it would be better to have something less like a political organization or party, like the League or Workers Party, and more like a network or alliance of like-minded revolutionaries.

It’s certainly understandable that our friends would grow tired of doing things that don’t seem to work. And it is certainly the case that certain forms of organization have become counterproductive and work against real, positive political and organizational development of the working class. At the same time, organization in and of itself is not the problem, and there are forms that do work, that are conducive to the growing of the revolutionary movement.

The answer to what kind of value an organization has begins with the question: What kind of organization do you want to build? That is, what do you want the organization to do, to be and to include? It’s not always an easy question, but it is one that has to be answered thoroughly and honestly if you want to have an organization that works.

For our friends, the intellectual answer and the instinctive answer came into conflict. Intellectually, they wanted a “vanguard party” of the “Marxist-Leninist” type, a combat organization capable of leading all of the organs and bodies of a revolutionary struggle to their successful conclusion. Based on how they had seen other self-described “Marxist-Leninists” do this, they believed it demanded a strong top-down structure, with members’ thoughts and activities regimented and controlled, and “organized distrust” as the core principle in the relationship between members and leaders.

Instinctively, however, this clashed with their own experiences, not simply as an organization, but as workers. They rightly came to realize that kind of organization is conducive to petty-bourgeois elements, whose organic form of organization is hierarchical and bureaucratic, and whose closed, “management team” method is actually counterproductive and harmful to the revolutionary workers’ movement. The problem is that the baby went out with the bath water, and they questioned the value of organization itself.

It is sort of an understandable reaction. Like many of us, these comrades came up in the petty-bourgeois socialist left. In that environment, there is a culture of secrecy and confessional faith, where the thoughts and views of members who disagree with the “majority line” are forcibly suppressed under threat of administrative action. Dissent is expected to go only through “official” channels; direct member-to-member communication is discouraged or even penalized; opinions that differ from the “majority” are kept out of the public press and public discussion. There is to be only one leader, one accepted political “line,” one monolithic mass.

That kind of organization is anathema to the working class. We know that our class can fight like cats and dogs over an issue, even in public, and then come together when the situation demands it. We know we can deal with public disputes like a family, discussing them sharply and strongly, but still remaining together and doing what we have to do. We also know that we can accomplish more working together as a group than any of us can accomplish alone.

That, more than anything else, is the value and role of organization: accomplishing together what we cannot accomplish individually. Being organized with other workers allows for a greater exchange and depth of ideas and experience, an ability to distribute ideas and concrete proposals farther and wider than as an individual, an ability to have different people each handling necessary tasks instead of just one person doing it all, and a better ability to gather and generate financing for current and future activities.

For communists, the axis of this work is winning a majority of working people to a program of overthrowing capitalist rule and establishing a working people’s republic.

Of course, the other self-described socialist and communist groups will claim to be doing just that. The problem is that, because of the methods and structures they use, all of which are a reflection of their class character and how they view politics, their educational work among workers becomes almost indistinguishable from that of religious missionaries operating in partibus infidelium (in the land of infidels).

But not only is the method different, so is the purpose.

For communists, the liberation of the working class is the task of workers themselves. That is, while communists advocate for the formation of revolutionary unions, workplace committees and workers’ councils, and for the overthrow of capitalist rule by them, it is up to workers themselves to carry out that work. This is the difference between providing political leadership and acting as a “practical leadership” — i.e., substituting the organization for the class.

These two issues, the way an organization is structured and its role in the class struggle, are directly linked. If an organization sees itself as being a substitute for the working class in the struggle for power, then it is understandable that it would also see itself as separate from the working class itself, that it would need to always present a singular face to workers, that it would have to suppress internal dissent and differences of opinion on all manner of questions. In turn, such a relationship between the organization and the class would naturally be repeated in the relationship between the leadership and the membership, with varying layers of discipline being applied to each level of hierarchical leadership.

On the other hand, a communist organization that accepts that its task is that of providing political leadership sees no need for such a brittle and monolithic structure and method. We can organize on the basis of basic political principles, allowing open differences of opinion on tactics and even strategy, including in our press and meetings. Our members are free to talk with each other and discuss political issues when and how they wish. We, like the rest of our class, can fight like cats and dogs, and then come together to carry out our tasks, because we are, in the end, like a family.

Because of this, we can accomplish more together than we can individually, and grow and develop together.