I haven’t posted about this yet, but I quit Communist Party USA in mid-November 2023. Since quitting, I’ve been focused on getting several major health issues treated, building the Flint chapter of the Michigan Mutual Aid Coalition (MIMAC), and in addition to our mutual aid work, trying to build the basis of an educational program...Read More “Why I Left The CPUSA” »
But we do want political power. If that becomes an end unto itself you have a problem, but if political power is instead used as a means to better people’s lives, you’re still on the right track.
Mutual aid that doesn’t lead to political power is just charity. Charity is good, but not all good things are socialist. There are 100 good things an org can do, the challenge is finding which of those things grow the socialist movement, too.
This sounds like a nice excuse in a hypothetical vacuum void of evidence, but we’re talking about an org that is also, from what I’m reading, pushing a line of voting for Biden / democratic party in general. How exactly is backing a genocidal monster in a capitalist controlled political party supposed to be gaining political power? For an org called communist of all things?
I’m aware harm reduction is not intrinsically revolutionary organizing, but if an org is refusing harm reduction as not tactical and backing a major status quo genocidal capitalist party, what exactly are people supposed to see in that as revolutionary?
The CPUSA has a bunch of problems, no argument there. But that doesn’t mean it gets everything wrong, and the results of their efforts can still be useful to leftists who think the party is generally misguided.
Here, a local CPUSA chapter tested how effective mutual aid is as a movement-building tactic. They concluded it wasn’t that effective. We can get into how they conducted the test, how they measured the results, etc. (the linked essay is light on details), but testing different tactics then adjusting your efforts based on the results is the right approach. We shouldn’t dismiss those results because we theorize the test should have gone differently.
Again, this is the right line in theory, but the practice of how this is actually being done matters a lot. I have not seen this “test” and its recorded results and if it was linked to here, I missed it, so I cannot at this time comment on the specifics of whether it makes any sense. What I can say is that in science, a single experiment does not constitute sufficient evidence to generalize about an entire practice under varying conditions.
Furthermore, it is important in this kind of political practice to ask why something was or wasn’t effective, not just if it was. My nonexistent capability to hit a home run in baseball does not constitute evidence as to how capable all human beings are at doing so. Babe Ruth’s capability to hit a home run while blindfolded in a hurricane does not constitute generalized evidence as to how many home runs Babe Ruth can hit under average baseball conditions. The context and conditions matter. That’s why we say we can’t just take the model of one AES state and plop it onto another country with different conditions and expect it to work exactly the same way. Maybe I’m preaching to the choir on that point, I don’t know, but I emphasize it because generalizing about a whole practice based on one test is not only not scientific in the more general sense of science, it’s not in fitting with communist dialectical theory and practice. Yet from what I’ve read, as alleged, CPUSA extrapolated from one test that mutual aid is not effective and is pushing that as a line for the entire party. For all I know, the people conducting the “test” just suck at relationship building and teaching, and so they gained nothing other than performing charity from their “test”. Without a clue as to why it wasn’t effective in whatever metrics they used to measure its effectiveness, what is there to learn from it?
To adjust, you need to know why something didn’t work, not just the plain fact that it didn’t. If I attempt to walk forward and the handle of a bag I’m holding gets snagged on something, I would rightly be thought a fool to conclude that one should never carry a bag if they want to be able to walk. On the other hand, if I recognize that holding in such a way the handle can trail behind me and get caught on things out of view is causing problems, they I can adjust the way in which I hold it.
The essay talks about a local chapter’s stance on mutual aid. I didn’t get the impression it reflects a broader party line. Frankly, the author is too light on details for us to really know what happened. Look at how oddly vague this is:
What does “poo-pooed” mean? Does the chapter want to reduce time spent on mutual aid but still do some, or do they want to do none at all? What do they mean by “apparently” and “from all appearances”? Do they know about the chapter’s experiment(s) with mutual aid or not?
If nothing else, there’s a lesson here about being specific when levying criticisms.
I broadly agree with all your points about how ideas should be tested – you need at least a few tests to draw conclusions, and how you execute those tests can change a lot. Unfortunately, we’re stuck talking about this in the abstract because the details here just aren’t clear.
It wasn’t political power that the CPUSA leadership was worried about, it was specifically “dues paying members”.
“Political power” is a fuzzy concept; “dues paying members” is a measurable proxy. Alternate proxies (crowd size at events, number of people on contact lists, interest in or curiosity about leftism) seem much harder to measure and much less reliably connected to political power.
I can see room for improvement, but the bottom line of “does this tactic help our organization grow?” seems reasonable.
Pretty sure you can use “dues paying members” as a valid metric without using it as an excuse to scuttle community outreach programs.
If your org is too weak to do two things at once, your org isn’t strong enough to worry about reaching for political power.
The solution here is to grow the org, so we’re back to the question of whether mutual aid can be an effective way to do that.
One way or the other, you’re going to be doing mutual aid projects with your comrades to help other comrades.
My point wasn’t that attempting to gain political power was not a necessary part of swaying the political landscape, it was that it should not be the goal. More over, why the all out rejection of mutual aid on the parties part? As you stated mutual aid is good as a means of charity, but they rejected the ideal wholely on the lack of conversion. Yet again, to me that is evidence the goal is not betterment, it is political power. Does the party think that the only people who diserve betterment are party members? That is, as stated before, a sign of being no better than the Democrat or Republican parties in my eye. I reject In and out crowd poltics no matter who the peddler is.
The goal of socialism is to improve lives via systemic political change. If you get caught up spending all your efforts bettering lives on an individual scale, to the point where it interferes with your ability to change the system, that’s good, but that’s not socialism. It’s charity. Charities are good, but they’re not going to end capitalism.