I was very struck by this comment by
Brownfemipower, quoted by
B|Lab:
ALL of the major movements I know about that are currently working toward a social justice vision have stepped back from the heat of the movement and taken inventory on their movement. And then, of course, adjust accordingly. For heaven’s sake, the zapatistas reevaluate themselves *constantly* and have put out major analysis of their shortcomings as a movement and where they plan on making changes. Incite! is another one that just spent the last year evaluating where they were, where they want to go, what hasn’t been working, what has, and what they need to do to actually get to where they want to go.
It seems to me that what BfP is describing works pretty well as a description of what a political party fundamentally is.
This is something that's been very much on my mind lately. I'm used to arguing for the desperate need for a revolutionary socialist party -- and when I do, I find the stumbling block is that people often misunderstand what I mean by a party, before I get to the revolutionary socialist bit.
I first starting thinking seriously about politics when in high school, I read about the history of the Socialist Party of America and
Eugene Debs, who ran for President not to actually get elected, but to spread the idea of socialism and to organize Socialist Party locals. So, I always had the idea of a political party being an organization of activists striving for a political goal by a variety of means, not just an electoral apparatus whose nominal members are passive. Ever since, I've found it a bit odd to even think of the Democratic and Republican Parties as political parties in any but the narrowest sense. Of course, their nominal constituencies aren't their real constituencies.
Lately, I've been thinking that there may be a distinction to be made between the communist party of Marx, and the Communist Party of Lenin. That is, the latter is a concrete instance of the former, but I wonder if the former is a broader concept. There's always the problem of just how much to generalize from the experience of the Bolsheviks.
Anyway, getting back to the comment by Brownfemipower, the groups she describes as social justice movements, I would describe as parties, actors within movements for social justice. The Zapatistas have a background in Marxist thought -- surely they're working from a model of constructing a party, however they've adapted it. That is, building a party means recruiting new members, training them, forming political plans and enacting them, and assessing how you've accomplished them. The means chosen may be passing out leaflets, or organizing strikes and demonstrations, or canvassing for votes, or conducting an armed struggle, or any combination of these things. But the basic question is having a political organization of some kind.
Often, it seems to me that political movements are described as if they were parties, or as if parties were not neccessary. But they are. The spontaneous actions of the people of Oaxaca were activated by organized groups -- the teachers of SNTE Section 22 and
APPO (the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca). In late October, I had the opportunity to hear from Fernando Mendoza Perez, a teacher from Oaxaca and an elected representative of APPO, who explained that he'd been active in their movement for twenty years. There's the framework upon which spontaneous action is mounted.
And one other thing about BfP's comment, was that it was in the context of a discussion of radical feminism and its discontents. There's the question, how can a social movement learn from its own failures and successes? How can a movement be held accountable? A movement cannot. A party (or an organization that I would call a party) can. It's the organic memory of a movement.
