We strive for the Party: the vehicle by which the struggles of the oppressed are articulated into a united struggle, the organization by which the forward sections of the workers movement coalesce, the process by which the socialist and workers movements flow into each other and are made whole.
In this we are not alone: from Social Democrats to Maoists to the Base Builders, all socialists strive towards this organizational form, hoping to arrive on the promised day of the Party.
But the party is not a place we inevitably reach by plodding along, it is not the rapture, and it will not be called into being through the appendage of P to some acronym or the election of enough socialists to office. The movement which leads to a revolutionary party does not exist in the future independent of us, it exists now, in a fragmentary form, and building the organization we want requires a process of conscious construction and connection. Connecting our fragmentary organizations and groups into one whole is not an impossible task, but it takes analysis, takes experience, takes leadership, on the part of socialists. To build this vehicle, we need more than practical work. We need theory.
Theory is often incorrectly thought of as this inaccessible thing that only exists in colleges. Theory is how we make sense of our own conditions, our own work, or the conditions and work of others. It is not something separate from our work or the life of any worker. And yet for our movement’s years of work we have only publicly theorized about it in a haphazard way. We talk about campaigns offhandedly on social media or in depth only with trusted comrades. Due to the isolated methods of our theorization we have come to the belief that each of us lives in an utterly unique circumstance, that we live in isolated municipalities where we can not learn from each other. This unscientific belief is the product of our unscientific theorization.
In reality, everything we do, every new rally or campaign, is an experiment. Every time two flyers go out and one is more well received than another, a hypothesis has been made and tested through practice. Summation and reflection are the way we transform our individual experiences into collective knowledge, but it is often treated as besides the point. Comrades may feel uncomfortable or disregard the need for summation as a distraction or something to do aspirationally, to be put off to a ‘later’ which never comes.
But if we feel uncomfortable about sharing this information, if we treat these experiments as our personal property or something below thought, all we learn is that the experience of organizing is the personal property of a class of organizers. The skills of leadership, administration, or organizing might be valued, but they are treated as inherent in some people. This creates an organization which rotely replicates the distinctions present in our class society, which can only take in those already trained by white collar workplaces in administrative work. If we want a revolution here we need to accept that people can be transformed.
Despite these flaws and our errors, our movement has grown. The campaigns and projects we organize do have an effect. Our work may bolster or demoralize the people we come into contact with. We may bring up leaders or burn them out. We may connect or alienate communities. But without a process of summation we do not know. Without a process of theorizing summations the prospect of connecting our immediate moment to the future we desire becomes more and more faint. “Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
This journal is for the hundreds of thousands in the United States today, and many more abroad, who are every day building, thinking, and dreaming towards a better world. We believe that the work we do is important, so important that it deserves to be thought about systemically. That it is serious work, and that nothing is more affirming to have your work studied and analyzed by your peers. We believe that by working together, by consciously connecting people across cities and towns, that we can build the theory that gets us to that better world.
To that end, we have three initiatives we intend to start:
– Assisting collectives in developing and implementing trainings on Constructive Criticism.
– Bringing together circles of local leaders from similar regions to conduct group analyses of their areas and of the work they have done within them, with the goal that they become research groups.
– Publishing the findings of these research groups, as well as our own articles, starting with summations on the experience of Marxist Center and a republication of Pacific Collective’s From Circles to the Party.
We believe that by combining these efforts we can begin to scientifically understand our situation, that the process of creating a revolutionary theory is not just a theoretical effort but an organizing one. We believe that our comrades make a great error when they see our interpersonal conflict, our conditions, our work, as isolated instances solely within their domain. We intend to resolve this by working to generalize our experiences. From there we hope to bring the whole movement along with us, evolving past haphazard ‘takes’ to real summations, real theory, which will connect and allow for understanding across the country and the world.
This connection, and only this connection, is what forms the basis for the Party we all desire.
Accept no substitute.
Circles Magazine 