The progress we made in the last period has been essentially quantitative. In our mass work we have deepened our integration and our skills as militant activists. We have contributed to building the program of mass organizations. However our weaknesses stand out the most: fundamentally we have not developed our political line to guide our work as communists. As a result we have not carried out systematic communist agitation and propaganda, we have not developed a solid ideological or political formation, and we continue to operate primarily as individuals rather than as a unified body in our practice. In addition, we failed to systematically take up the struggle against racism in either our internal or external practice. In order to understand these weaknesses and identify their underlying roots, we must briefly review our work over the past year. At the end of this section, we’ll draw out the fundamental errors in our approach to party building.
In the trade union work, most of us are now recognized as militant union activists and in a number of shops we have played an instrumental role in building groups of advanced and middle forces to produce leaflets, ongoing newsletters focusing on shop floor and union issues, and beginning caucuses. Our study has made a contribution to our understanding of the PWOG trade union strategy. The main weaknesses that have held us back have been the failure to particularize the political line to address the questions posed in practice, and the failure to develop political unity that could be the basis for unified practice.
The root error underlying these weaknesses was the separation of theory and practice, and an incorrect view of building political unity. We directed practice towards deepening our integration, and we discussed theory in the most general sense, without trying to apply it to our experience. We expected to build unity through our study, instead of testing our unity through our attempts to put our theoretical perspectives into practice and sum up our results.
We have identified two main errors that became the basis for the weaknesses in our IPA work. One was a right error of empiricism: we began this work without understanding the role of IPA work in party building, leading us to narrowly focus on coalition building instead of developing our party building work in this context. The other was a left error: we viewed the development of our perspective on the issues in relation to the struggle with other MLs, downplaying the work with the advanced.
An important weakness in all areas of our mass work was that each area was developed essentially in isolation from the others. The lack of agitation and propaganda in trade union work meant that to a large extent our trade union work remained on the level of economic struggles or struggles around issues in the unions; we failed to systematically link the struggles in the unions to the political struggles of the class as a whole. In our IPA work, we failed to systematically involve our advanced contacts in these struggles, beyond bringing someone to an event here and there. The impact was that this work was isolated from the base we’re trying to organize in the working class.
Our study in the last period made a contribution to our level of ideological and political formation, as well as political unity, and also suffered from serious weaknesses. The main weakness that prevented our study from qualitatively improving our work was that we lacked a long term plan that addresses our current level of development and corresponding needs. As a result we failed to recognize the importance of deepening our initial understanding of party building line, to insure that we had a general guide for the development of the organization. And even though we recognized the need for fundamentals study, we allowed more immediate questions to take precedence, so that we couldn’t implement much of the plan we developed. And finally, in the study that we did, we tended to isolate our discussions from the questions being posed in our practice, an error that we identified in almost all the study we took up.
The one area of the organization’s practice that we can sum up as over all positive was the work of left relations, locally and nationally.
Through all these areas of our practice as an organization, several key errors stand out. The most fundamental is our basic approach to developing our practice and our theoretical work. In analysing our basic approach, it is clear that neither our practice or our limited theoretical work was oriented to our central task of fusion, because neither aspect was sufficiently oriented to the task of winning the advanced.
The primary error in our approach to theory was a dogmatic error; our study failed to address the particular questions we face or analyse our concrete conditions in the Bay Area. Instead, we tried to develop our understanding in the abstract, on the most general level. This was very clear in our trade union work. Our study addressed questions at the most general level, our program was never sufficiently implemented to provide a guide for our practice, and we failed to sum up our practice in a way that could test our rudimentary understanding of the trade union line. There were also dogmatist tendencies in our failure to particularize our party building tasks for IPA and our study for left relations, where we failed to look at how the struggle on party building perspective is manifested in our practice with other MLs.
A secondary error in our approach to theory was the error of empiricism, identified in the development of IPA work. Our tendency was to view this work too narrowly; we focussed on coalition building. We failed to develop our understanding of how this work fit into our party-building tasks overall, and we didn’t integrate these political issues into our practice in trade union work.
The result of our dogmatic approach to developing theory was that we made the error of pragmatism in our practice. Instead of struggling to take up the advanced tasks of communist agitation and propaganda, we focused on the immediate question of how to become further integrated in the class. In general, we discussed the most immediate problems in a problem solving or tactical manner, rather than systematically summing up our experience. The same approach was used in most of our study, where we took up the most pressing topics at the moment, and sacrificed a long run plan.
A number of errors flow from the fundamental errors in our approach to theory and practice, and at the same time reinforce that error. One was the error of overestimating our capabilities when we were just beginning the process of consolidating the organization. We made an idealist error of developing conception of an organization that didn’t correspond to the actual conditions and resources we faced. In addition, we dogmatically tried to imitate the breadth of work being done in PWOC and El Comite MINP, without understanding the historical development of their experiences.
The result of this was that we didn’t have sufficient theoretical or practical resources to give quality guidance to any area or work. For the most part each area remained isolated from the others and lessons were not even socialized, much less used to develop a unified view of party building.
Flowing from the error of over estimating our capabilities was our incorrect view of decentralizing political leadership from the development of political line. Partly as a result of having too many areas to lead, we took an ultra democratic view of expecting line to develop solely at the base level, through discussions of the practical activists. We failed to centralize the process of summation and deepening line at the level of leadership, which could then lead the process of implementing, refining and developing line through all levels of the organization.
And finally we failed to internalize the centrality of the struggle against racism, leaving our understanding on the most general level. This is the most glaring example of the separation between theory and practice because our practice showed such a low level of understanding of the centrality of the struggle against racism. Despite discussions on a general level, including the writing of an extensive document, our practice showed a lack of consciousness of the centrality of racism. The weaknesses in the mass work, the lack of attention to the NMM-LC, and the error in delegate selection, are some of the most significant examples. We failed to develop a program to concretely take up this struggle in all areas of our work, and we didn’t even draw out many of the experiences we gained in practice and ideological struggle. The result was that our theoretical understanding remained on an abstract level and our practice was very poor.
We conclude from analyzing BAWOC’s work in the last period that we have fundamentally deviated from the fusion party building line in our practice as an organization. In our orientation to theoretical work, we made a left error of dogmatism, by failing to develop theory and political line as a guide to our practice. In our practical work, we made a right error of pragmatism, by failing to take up the advanced tasks of party building Thus, it’s clear that we failed to grasp the essence of the fusion process because we failed to place winning of the advanced at the center of our theoretical and practical tasks.
It is not surprising that we have identified both a left error of dogmatism and a right error of pragmatism, considering the separation we made between our theoretical and practical tasks. We approached each one in isolation, without developing them in the context of our party building tasks as a whole. Our understanding of the tasks of fusion is that our theoretical work must address the need to develop a program and win the advanced in order to lay the basis for a future party; if we forget this, we will error either in the direction of idealism, developing theory without any relation to the concrete obstacles in the class, or in pragmatism, developing day to day struggle without pushing forward the political development of the class as a whole.