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Inner Party personal politicsand the clique
Maybe this should be in chit-chat. I was turned off to joining a Left Party for many years outside of joining the Peace and Freedom party. I attended CPUSA meetings, met with Spartacus people, Trotskyist from whatever party was around at the time and so on without joining any. Ideology played a part in some decisions. Levels of activism also was a major factor. But the one overriding concern that always made me shy away from participating with some groups and paying dues is the cliquishness of some of the leadership and their friends. By this I am not talking about ideological issues but more along the lines of petty high school "we are the cool people" office politics and the St.Louis branch-is-way-more-down-than-the-Chicago branch-so-dont-call-us-when-your-in-town type of bullshit. And the worst part is the undercurrent of ageism. I have seen it drive to many good people away.It manifests itself into the very vision, actions and attitude of the local branch. It fosters disharmony, factionalism and organizational indifference and uses party unity as an escape clause. So how is it that cliques of "coolness" all to often are left alone to destroy any momentum for good party work. In fact it often inhibits work when this work is not the favored march of the clique or will pull support if their friends aren't gonna support it. These acts are to often based on personalities and not ideological differences. I have seen and been put off by it in several organizations and am beginning to see the start of it in my own. Thoughts?
Last edited by Prometeo liberado; 30th January 2012 at 23:36.
well there's your problem
i dont think anywhere in any left organization will you find an absence of local level cliques of friends. that being said, party discipline must come first before personal friendships when operating as party members doing party work.
FKA Vacant
"snook up behind him and took his koran, he said sumthin about burnin the koran. i was like DUDE YOU HAVE NO KORAN and ran off." - Jacob Isom, Amarillo Resident.
This isn't unique to parties, it's a trait common to all human organizations. There are various "factions" if you want to call them that in every organization. In my experience, though, they often do boil down to political/ideological differences, but might appear as personal cliquishness at first site, simply because the people in a particular faction tend to have similar ideology, or at least agree on a particular issue of importance that another faction doesn't agree with, which is a basis for close cooperation and from that friendship, which leads to easier and closer future cooperation among the same friends on other issues.
I guess my own feeling on it is if you have a correct theory and analysis you can come to a correct decision on some issue, so the faction you would be in would be in the right. Experience would then bear out whether you were in fact correct or not.
Those who, in the name of the quest for the "new," reject the use of the tested insights, understandings, and accomplishments of the last century or more, will merely repeat "old" mistakes.
I think there are cliques around political agreement and so on, but there are also cliques that are just based on familiarity or doing the same areas of work. If a party has some people involved in the same union, they may be 100% in political agreement with people outside that union-work, but they may also become clique-ish because they are working together, they have to discuss and assess their work together anyway and so they start to talk about other political issues or just personal issues etc.
I think it's the smallishness of the revolutionary Left that amplifies this effect too. Local activists all start to know eachother if there aren't big dynamic movements involving lots of people. Even parties that might be toy-Leninist groups that talk about party discipline will develop some local inertia and informal practices. I think it's worse in "leaderless" situations too because there's no transparency for how things function - this is a big problem in the occupy movement where if you know the informal channels in which things happen and you know the right people in the movement you can get a lot of organizing done whereas new people coming from the outside are totally mystified about who to go to for this or that issue they want to raise.
I think on a certain level that clicishness is organic and happens in any group of people - you can't talk to everyone all the time, so people develop their informal networks. As our movements grow, it will be increasingly important to try and counteract this by having established and accountable methods for disseminating information within revolutionary groups, how to handle debates, how to raise issues and concerns. In small movements and groups it's less of an issue because it's just harder to keep secrets anyway. Failing to create ways to avoid cliques in much larger movements would mean creating passivity in the membership and possibly divisiveness.
As far as the political/ideological differences go I can understand that. But cliques based on ageism or what part of the city you live in does nothing but foster disunity, more so when its part of the decision making process. And if it is a clique of the political/ideological nature then I would think that within a party setting comrades would engage rather dismiss other comrades. Shutting off the lines of communication is destructive and runs contrary to party discipline. Again I see the indifference of the leadership as a main culprit in this. If one group within an organization feels that they dont need the support from another group of comrades or won't communicate with them then the the branch leadership has a duty to stamp this out. Its counterproductive and does not look inviting to new members.
Last edited by Prometeo liberado; 30th January 2012 at 15:13.
My experiences from the late '60s on have been universally "personalities over politics." The absence of any effective politics has exacerbated this woeful situation, of course.
Look to the RevLeft purge fiasco and much of the conversation on these left forums: personalities over politics. In this, capitalist system-manufactured personalities and character structures are barring the way to the development of socialist politics. We are acting as the isolated, atomized individual egos capitalism creates.
It isn't just the capitalist system that is the problem, though. Human consciousness creates a picture of separate individuals and living things, whereas all living systems exist in dynamically interdependent, "communist" relations.
We are natural beings who must learn to live naturally as communists. To get there, we will have to combat both capitalist systemic mindfuck and our immediate consciousness. We must learn to see, honor, and practice the unseen organizational relations of life. Are we not life?
I would want to make a clear distinction between factions and cliques. A clique is a group of people that cohere on a personal basis, be it friendship, common perceived grievances or proximity. A faction, on the other hand, forms (or should form) over political disagreements within a party. That is one of the many reasons that programmatic clarity is so important. Keep on course with program, and you don't get caught up in cliques. I guess the example that comes to mind is the Abern group in the SWP. Apparently Marty Abern was a really warm sweet guy, who genuinely believe that he was not a cliquist. He was warm where the leadership under James Cannon was cold. And he was one of the founders of the LO in the US. Unfortunately, this sent him on a course to make common cause with Shachtman and Burnham when they split the SWP over the issue of defense of the USSR. Someone noted that Abern was so effective as a cliquist because he never realized that he was one.
I definitely agree with the first two paragraphs! But I'm a little hesitant with the final two. The natural world has hardly left upon me the impression of communism.
Hierarchies exist throughout; countless species compete with one another, and even amongst themselves; some species have gone so far as to establish boundaries to separate themselves, and quarrel amongst themselves for the preservation or expansion of those boundaries. It is clearly a capitalist construct in my book. Although, if left uninfringed by the extremes of nature or by the introduction of other external variables, they effectively create harmonies within, where all the species, if evolved suitably, prosper to some extent.
I don't interpret the political or economic associations of the natural world as determinate of the fate of human beings.
I am left with the impression that as the sole species upon this planet who possess the means of abstract and critical thought, we are no longer bound by the inherent repressions and toils imposed by the natural world.
If anything, I have come to understand that the foremost reason that we have evolved this unique trait is to overcome the oppression of nature upon
our being. To transcend the pseudo-capitalist world and evolve into communism.
No longer should we accept our enslavement by the scarcity so rampant in the natural world, as we have come to wield the awesome power of our intellect. We are the masters of this world, so long as the world continues to yield, and continues to remain habitable--One should not interpret this phrase as an attempt to justify our oppression, exploitation or slaughter of the other species upon this planet, it is merely a observation that we are identifiably superior to the other species.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
Anybody who votes no on this one is deeply deluded or dishonest.
I don't know what the LO in the US is, and Abern according to Wiki didn't "make common cause" with Schachtman or deny the unconditional defense of the USSR.
The US state doesn't have any rights except for being abolished and replaced by a socialist state. - azula
Middle class left people are going to think and act like middle class people generally.
Rinse and repeat. Regardless of their ostensible ideologies. Until they are essentially forced (coerced by desparate conditions of proletarianization under capitalism)to wholly side with and serve and self-identify with the working class (and no other class but ours which has "nothing to lose but its chains"), you can trust middle class people on the left---no matter how radical they might pose---to think and act like middle class people generally do. It's in the nature of the beast in exploitative class society for have-somes to fuck over have-nots. Until they truly share our objective class interests because they are inescapably one of us, they are not one of us and are in fact ultimately hostile to our interests out of the logic of seeking for their own middle class interests (and their own individual standing within the middle class).
So middle class leftists use ageism, sexism, racism, posession of higher education cred, and a million other divisive elitist tools to prop themselves up while shutting out or putting down have-nots. They're fundamentally no different from the middle class people you see in society and the economy generally. Their behaviors, outlooks, methods are perfectly at home in modern capitalism...it is their "best of all possible worlds", their frontier to go forth and conquer, sucking surplus value from us and spilling our blood, so long as they don't step on the toes of the ruling class. They are the millions of mini-monsters of "competitive free enterprise". Look at the middle class left, and recognize it is these same sort of middle class creatures we working people deal with and suffer under daily in all of exploitative society's social and economic institutions! What's so different between them and your managers at work? What so different between the top leaders of middle class left groups and the owners of small businesses? It's the same class at
bottom. It's just a different business niche in a political business marketplace.
It's "Left Inc.", whether they offer Brand X, Brand Y or Brand Z.
For now, let me just encourage you to try and imagine an entirely exclusively proletarian Left.
How would it be distinct from the historally existing middle class dominated and heavily middle class composed Left we've been familiar with for ages? I'm not saying that working people are all communist angels, of course. But, at the least, we share the same objective class interests in burying class society and building a better classless world for all.
Last edited by workersadvocate; 30th January 2012 at 20:03.
1. I would want to make a clear distinction between factions and cliques. A clique is a group of people that cohere on a personal basis, be it friendship, common perceived grievances or proximity.
I agree and is why I chose to use the word clique as opposed to faction. Furhter though is that these cliques are based solely on some kind of high schoolish popularity baramoeters and on theoretical criteria. As all to often becomes the case,these cliques hold influence of thoought over weaker minded or theoreticaly infant cadres.
2.That is one of the many reasons that programmatic clarity is so important. Keep on course with program, and you don't get caught up in cliques.
I see it as a sort of catch 22. Does elite leadership cultivate a culture of cliques a lack accountability as to the program? Or does the presence of cliques make the program not as important in the lfe of the organization?
All to often the term Democratic Centralism is used to mask the laziness of the organization to confront what is becoming a party building hinderence. And I am a firm believer in dem. centralism.
Again I have to stress that I am just seeing it in it's infancy in my organization but have seen it kill others at this stage leaving just a corpse where the party was. By no means was this what Lenin would remotely put up with as far as personalities creating a wedge between cadres and the working class and cadres isolating from each other. When I hear people ask why one organization didn't or aren't going to a certain event and the answer is "well the comrades in that city didn't invite us" it's embarressing. The whole left looks like fools!
Last edited by Prometeo liberado; 30th January 2012 at 23:39.
LO = Left Opposition (aka Trotskyist) beginning in 1928. And Abern's group was part of the 1941 split in the SWP that abandoned military defense of the USSR over the invasion of Finland. He along with Shachtman and Burnham led the opposition that became the Workers Party. See Trotsky's "In Defense of Marxism" for details. Now he may have personally remained defensist -- Shachtman's Party never was defensist regarding the USSR.
I have read it and remembered he was in opposition to Cannon & Trotsky, but I thought that opposition itself was fractured and didn't all end up in the same place. Like, Burnham became an anti-communist, Schachtman became a state-department "socialist," and Abern.... well, didn't know about him but I thought he remained more of a socialist up to his death in '49?
The US state doesn't have any rights except for being abolished and replaced by a socialist state. - azula
I think it's important to look at the reasons why cliques form:
1) Organization size -- Any organization that is not a mass phenomenon has the tendency toward cliquism built in. This is especially the case when these organizations, whether on a local, regional or national scale, have had more or less the same membership for an extended period of time. Being a small organization alone is not a guarantee that cliques will form, but it does increase the risk.
2) Class-based divisions of labor -- When you have an organization where elements from one class always do one type of work and those from another class do another type (e.g., the petty-bourgeois elements are the theoreticians and leaders, while the working-class elements are the "activists", paper sellers or mules), the development of a clique is almost inevitable. Again, not a 100-percent guarantee that cliques will develop, but a much greater likelihood than just organization size alone.
3) Internalism -- This, more than anything else, can cause cliques and cliquism to take hold in an organization. In this case, the cliques develop out of informal "gossip circles". The members will socialize and hang out, with the conversation drifting from one topic to another until it focuses on perceived negative attributes about a member or group of members. Eventually, the gossip becomes the reason for these members to come together, and may or may not draw in other like-minded people. Unlike the first two reasons mentioned above, internalism is a virtual guarantee that cliquism will develop.
It's also important to keep in mind that there are political and apolitical cliques. A political clique is close to a tendency or faction in its reason for existence; they have a common political difference with the organization, but choose to not go public, preferring instead to build support for their views through socializing and deepening friendships. It is relatively easy to deal with the problem of a political clique; the organization has a right to bring the differences into the open, whether the clique likes it or not.
An apolitical clique, on the other hand, is little more than a cancer in the organization. Because it has no political basis, it is solely a focal point for personal animosities and pettiness. Of course, that also means dealing with it organizationally is a challenge. Even though it is not a political formation, an organization cannot simply impose an administrative solution (e.g., suspensions), since the members have not violated any of the organization's rules (unless, of course, your organization has a rule against apolitical cliquism). The best method for fighting an apolitical clique is to isolate its reach and work to turn the organization in their area toward public activity that undermines the basis for their clique.
In the end, the best ways to demolish cliquism are a conscious turning outward (i.e., not mindless "activism", but a planned-out organizing campaign), drawing new workers into the organization, and developing working-class members as theoretical and organizational leaders (thus breaking down the class-based divisions of labor).
I hope you find all this helpful.
Thank you for that. I have seen all of these in one form or another but point three is more along the lines of what I was going for. I have had to walk away from many conversations because of this kind of petty nonsense. One of the biggest obstacles I have found to drawing in new members is the elitism they see when confronted by this unchecked clique. I have even heard it from some in the Occupy Movement. People spouting crap like "you weren't there as long as I was so your not as down". What?!
Abern remained in Shachtman's Worker's Party until his death in '49. Burnham, who was newer to the Trotskyist movement in the US, very quickly became an anticommunist of the worst order. I actually do not know much about Abern's functioning in the Worker's Party -- if he was in opposition to old Max, I have never heard it, but it could be true. The key to the split though was the sudden sharp shift in the US of intellectual/rad lib circles against the USSR because they made a pact with Hitler and invaded Finland. Trotsky and Cannon were clear that these things in no way changed the class nature of the USSR and argued that it was vital to continue a program of unconditional military defense of it.
Of course, Shachtman and Abern had warred with Cannon earlier (31 to 33 I think) Trotsky basically told them to stop it, they were beating each others brains out, with no major political differences. in '39, the political differences began to become much clearer. Trotsky urged the US leadership of the SWP to take a very gentle approach to the minority faction (it was a BIG minority, about 40%) -- they would be allowed full factional rights, proportional representation on all governing bodies, etc. The only condition was that they abide by majority decisions of the party. The minority refused quite fiercely and was expelled.
Comrade, cliques can develop quite easily within mass organizations, particularly those without much of an accountability process.
Political clique, or apolitical?
How does this address the problem of internalism?
Interestingly enough, Marx called this kind of group a "faction," predating today's negative spin on factions and factionalism even in more mainstream political circles.
Rules against apolitical cliquism? Ironically, the "CPSU" had precisely this in its peculiar interpretation of Lenin's ban on factions:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=_JdM...dinner&f=false
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Middle class leftists excel at painting a political and intellectual appearance to their elitist personality cults and cliques.
They hate us working people and think they're better than us. I hate them back and think they represent even in their persons everything communism will abolish and replace. In competition between the factions and cliques of the middle class left, I hope for mutual assured destruction.
