This comment and response appears as an ongoing discussion on "No Chart Paper Can Hide the Sky: Some Thoughts on Organizing Upgrade and Beyond the Choir."
 

A reader wrote:

"I think your piece represents some valid frustrations on the Left... the lack of a coordinated organized Left in the first place, the subtle anti-communism trends within the Left, and thus too loose of a connection between the reform/social movement left and the revolutionary/party left. I share many of these frustrations.

HOWEVER, frustration does not equal strategy."

Also:

And we definitely know what we've done wrong. We can point to examples of both opportunism from the Right in many of our Left organizations as well as vanguardism/isolationism. From the original Organizing Upgrade, I see organizers struggling with this question in a deeper way. But outside of your perspectives on culture, I don't see any hints on how to strengthen our approach in doing this in your response. That said, I whole-heartedly disagree with the statement "There is a difference between winning for a campaign and setting the stage for taking power." I think the struggle is more nuanced than this...with some campaigns setting us up, and some overly compromising us. For example, the continued "reform" fight to extend unemployment benefits coupled with the trillions of dollars big corporations and Wall Street are "sitting on" exposes a deeper problem and raises the potential to radicalize people for a larger struggle against monopoly capital. That would be a good reform campaign that would set us up for more advanced struggles, no?

I want to dig into a little bit more and say that frustration is not the same as creative tension and how that relates to reform struggles.

Creative tension according to the Society of Organizational Learners is "starts with the principle of creative tension. Creative tension comes from seeing clearly where we want to be, our "vision," and telling the truth about where we are, our "current reality." The gap between the two generates a natural tension"
This is different from stress or frustration, which often times caused by external factors not in our control.

Dr. Martin Luther King was a skilled user of creative tension within his organizing practice. Andrew Young once remarked that King would often have organizers battle out ideas for hours before reaching a decision. Externally, creative tension was the hallmark of his work on non-violent civil disobedience. King wrote in the famed essay "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.

I feel in a lot of ways that radical left movement leaders have avoided creative tension. Rather than seeking to produce synthesis of different ideas(which requires a lot of patient practice and reflection) we often seek consensus.

This is connected to the question of reform work. As I stated in the original article, there is no question reform work is needed. But often we masked the difficulties of a revolutionary and evolutionary process within the context of "meeting people where they at." It is not so much meeting them where they are at, but where are we taking them?

For example. If you brought your child to the 1st grade and after a year of learning that child doesn't know how to read or count, you will say that the school failed your child. You would not accept the notion that the teacher was simply "meeting the child where he/she is at."

In the same way, we can't expect to have a movement for collective liberation without the creative tension of taking people beyond their day to day needs. Many well meaning organizers fore go creative tension (shared vision of collective liberation) for stress (day-to day needs)

This has resulted in organizers not being political advanced and at the end of the day, burned out. Sharing/learning/fighting=agitate/educate/organizer, meaning developing a shared vision of collective liberation that faces the reality of our current moment. That means going beyond the day to day struggles (stress) and developing an overall vision of freedom (creative tension.)

Erica Smiley’s Response to “No Chart Paper is  Big Enough to Hide the Sky”
Kazembe! How are you? I think this is my first time commenting on your facebook, and I'm sure the Organizing Upgrade folks are excited by the dialogue. Though I'm sure many may write this off as a brainwashed CPUSA member sounding off, y...our article was provoking enough for me to risk it and weigh in anyway :)

I think your piece represents some valid frustrations on the Left... the lack of a coordinated organized Left in the first place, the subtle anti-communism trends within the Left, and thus too loose of a connection between the reform/social movement left and the revolutionary/party left. I share many of these frustrations.

HOWEVER, frustration does not equal strategy.

And that is what I was missing from your article. As a Party member, I agree with the necessity of bringing the margin to the center (radical ideas; real politics-- http://www.cpusa.org/). I can't say that many of us on the party left, including my own, have really done this well. In order to build left/center unity and to mainstream more advanced demands, there has to be a strong, vibrant, public left (dare I say socialist) movement.

Nuff said.

And we definitely know what we've done wrong. We can point to examples of both opportunism from the Right in many of our Left organizations as well as vanguardism/isolationism. From the original Organizing Upgrade, I see organizers struggling with this question in a deeper way. But outside of your perspectives on culture, I don't see any hints on how to strengthen our approach in doing this in your response. That said, I whole-heartedly disagree with the statement "There is a difference between winning for a campaign and setting the stage for taking power." I think the struggle is more nuanced than this...with some campaigns setting us up, and some overly compromising us. For example, the continued "reform" fight to extend unemployment benefits coupled with the trillions of dollars big corporations and Wall Street are "sitting on" exposes a deeper problem and raises the potential to radicalize people for a larger struggle against monopoly capital. That would be a good reform campaign that would set us up for more advanced struggles, no?

Additionally, in order to main stream more radical ideas, you have to engage with non-revolutionaries...and typically you do this by engaging people where they are at--in reform struggles. People get radicalized through their experiences. They are exposed to the contradictions of capitalism through their experiences trying to "reform" it. Then, if you've done your job well as an organizer, they pick up the book and get active in more advanced fights.

Under the current political conditions of the US, doing this as an open socialist is not easy, and in some instances doing so can do more harm than good...often closing doors (and the ability to raise someone's consciousness) before you even open your mouth. That's just where we're at. However, I agree that if we had visible, more engaged, more coordinated Left these conditions could be altered, making it easier for organizers in reform struggles to be more public about their politics and revolutionary aims.

Left activists like yourself who have less limitations in publicly expressing our common vision for socialism have a huge role to play in creating the conditions that more deeply connect reform struggles to socialist revolution. Likewise, those of us who engage in reform struggles in our public work have to do better at exposing the daily contradictions in capitalism, and shepherding the "enlightened" into more explicitly Left organizations.

I think we can all agree that what will absolutely not help us is to feed divisions between the social movement Left and the party Left (or whatever we're calling this). In fact, to take it a step further we should probably stop living by (and I really mean living by) the long-standing divisions that have split the Left over the past century--long before many of us were born. It seems like the NYSG has started some of this. I'd certainly be interested in getting some of our folks engaged in these conversations around the country and potentially do some real work together.

Thanks for lighting some fire under our ass.

The radical left has to get its shit together, you don’t have to tell me twice.Folks are angry, fed up and most of all confused. In the place of coherent strategies and bold leadership we have dead theories,incoherence and a lack of vision to move hearts and minds.

Many of us have given up and gone the way of mysticism. Many of us  of soldiered on in the traditional Marxist-Leninist and anarchist organizations. Many of us are fighting fires in the non-profit sector.

But some of us decided to be brave.

I welcome Organizing Upgrade and Beyond the Choir for taking up the big issues facing radical movements. Still, the world is much more complex and variant than going viral on youtube.

As long as we see socialism as “delivering the goods” and not building people’s capacity to lead,we will lose.

As long as we see revolution one big ass organizing campaign, we will lose.

As long as we see the vitality of our movement energy in mainstream America and not the margins, we will lose.

Revolution is not a flow chart. There is no chart paper big enough to hide the sky.

From Margin to Center or Center to Margin?

It’s funny I’m writing this after the death of Irwin Silber. Silber did amazing things in his life: edited the National Guardian newspaper, help maintain and expand folk music in the United States and was a major leader in the New Communist Movement.

But Silber will always be remembered as the guy who dissed Bob Dylan after he went electric.

Dylan understood then, something Silber understood later,that the vitality of any movements come from bringing the the margin to the center, not the other way around. Dylan did not comprise his lyricism or music to become  popular, but choose to combine his knowledge of folk music with the technology of his time. Similarly, Miles Davis, who also went electric, created more complex music, combining jazz with rock. But Davis and Dylan wrote of and for their time.

I feel Beyond the Choir is a bit conservative like Silber was in the 1960s. While appreciate the necessity to resist festhizing subcultures, Beyond the Choir seems to create straw man arguments for radicals to tone down. There is an overwhelming logic that the only way for activist movements to be effect is to bring the center to the margin: tone down the rhetoric, clean up your act and then people will listen.And maybe they will. But whats the point of speaking if you have forgotten what to say?

That is understandable because the center has gravity: money, connections, power, and popularity. But movements don’t grow from the center. They grow from the margins and take over the center. Think about it; every musical movement in this country has come from the oppressed experiences of Black and Brown people. Blues, jazz, salsa,  hip hop are common currency and they all occurred at the bottom.

At the same time, successful social movements have married avant garde elements with vanguard elements. The Black Panther Party was as much into Bob Dylan, Cuban Poster art and film as they were into Mao Zedong. The German Communists of Weimar married expressionism with jazz and a free sex movement. The Harlem Renaissance was as purple as it was red, with queers like Langston Hughes going to Moscow after the Russian Revolution.
Radical left movements need to offer critical interruptions of everyday life not contain our dreams in soundbites. Beyond the Choir should figure out ways to marry radical resistance and how to use the language of our time to project a beautiful vision. Until then it won’t go beyond the choir, but remain policing the borders.

Organizing the Revolution?

The question of whether revolutionaries should fight for reforms is as old as dirt.

Of course, revolutionaries should fight for reforms, since they serve a base for building people’s power and their capacity to lead.  Not only should they fight for reforms, we should build mutual aid societies, freedom schools etc as models for the future.

But the primary duty of the revolutionary is to make revolution. That means having access to a specific skill set and language and know how to employ it for maximize effectiveness.

We, as conscious revolutionaries have not built that language. As such, folks who want to organize often fall back to Alinksy models since revolutionary organizing has yet to fill that vacuum of actually how to organize as a revolutionary.

This vacuum is compounded by the quiet anti-communism of the left movement. Quiet, because the left movement  does not acknowledge communism as a possibly for the left. Left Turn for example, took revolution off its masthead.

The problem is we have effective community organizers and social workers but not effective revolutionaries. There is a difference between winning for a campaign and setting the stage for taking power. Organizers tend to take  the micro for the marco and bring a reform energy to radical struggles. This is the problem I find with Organizing Upgrade.

Marxism, then becomes a tool in the organizers tool box, rather than a means to connecting the dots and more fully understanding the world. Dialectical Materialism is not just a cool economic program, but the means of going beyond one-dimesionality, integrating art, philosophy, economics and science with the core of fighting for revolution.

To get to this point we have to be willing to take people through a difficult process. While its fun and easy to watch animated breakdowns of Capital, the actually reading of the book acts as a process of decolonization. This is not an advocacy of book worship, since were we agree is that study, practice, reflection is the means of creating revolution.

Last Points-Taking Ls, getting Ws
Making a revolution in the United States is not easy. There are international factors, fault lines within the empire and continued building of forces.
The fact is we are not going to win a lot, for now. Any attempts to reduce our work to easy wins is like doing one push up and expecting washboard abs. To strengthen our core, we need to take Ls and not be afraid to make mistakes. In fact we have to learn to win by losing in order to get to the gaining victories.

We also have to be willing to learn, be bold and to challenge. We have to connect the dots between the healers, freaks, organizers and lovers. We need to make revolution irresistible and to fight to win.