The Process of Unlearning

History has proven that necessity is the mother of innovation. From practice, learning from our mistakes should come new directions or theoretical premises. How do we engage in this process; one by two assumptions:

  1. There is nothing permanent in the universe but change.
  1. Everything concrete is based on material phenomenon.

What many of us in our youth failed to have was a long view of history:

  1. That class struggles between the oppressed and oppressors have been continuous for 50,000 to 10,000 years.

And the other:

  1. Liberation or socialism is a protracted process taking many zig zags, twists and turns.
  1. Revolutionary democracy should be from the grassroots up; have more participatory aspects of critical thinking, debate, discussion and involvement than in capitalist democracy.

Socialism breaks out rapidly in underdeveloped countries and it has been a strategy to rapidly eliminate underdevelopment. The weakness has been that revolutionary democracy has been limited in order to achieve this end.

Four requirements of the revolutionary movement

  1. Constantly maintain the principle of revolutionary morality.
  1. Support working class movements.
  1. Constantly keep pace with the change in form and tactics of the mass struggle.
  1. Works around issues that concern the masses “build leadership from the bottom up” developing main cadre from the process.

In the protracted process of building indigenous leadership from grassroots struggles one must be very patient. The people must be peacefully won over through praxis (practice agitation and theory) won over to the revolutionary movement. This takes constant assessment of why we are failing and why we are successful. If our party line is incorrect; then we change it. If it requires a rectification process; a revamping of our whole paradigm, then we do it. Is something wrong with our mass line? Then we circulate around the masses we haven’t reached before to get a broader assessment of why our mass line is failing?

What do we do after summing up our investigation among the masses after failures and/or lulls? The masses are always in the process of motion; we may not often agree with this motion, but it is incumbent as scientific revolutionaries to analyze the how and why of this process, even if it is a backward motion. This takes unlearning what we had previously learned.

Our time frame should adjust to the material “actual social conditions” as they emerge, constantly analyzing the relative strength and weakness or correlation of forces both locally, nationally, and internationally. Ours should be a democratic bottom-up building process in the development of real capacities in leadership skills in the people.

Setbacks may require us to relearn or unlearn some of our most cherished beliefs and practices and whatever length of time is necessary to advance the struggle must be provided. While we should not lose our revolutionary zeal in unfavorable times, based on the protracted struggle that zeal should be tempered and nurtured with the revolutionary practice (staying power).

If we adhere to the basic principles of historical and dialectical materialism we should realize that everything that happens in the world is inter-related. Also, there is often a unity of opposites that produces a new form, and as we resolve one contradiction we have another to solve. There are no permanent allies in this process, just permanent interests. Concepts should come and go and/or transform with conditions.

One of the reasons we are in this room is because we are inflexible, resistant to change, informed, but not content as conditions changed.

My process of unlearning began with sessions with Don Stone of SNCC in the 1980’s. He impressed upon me that we, and most of the left in the U. S., have been ultra left.

What is Ultra Leftism?

Ultra leftism is defined as struggling mainly or only for the abstract idea of socialism. The minor day-to-day struggles or issues bring victories for the masses, enhance the battle for democracy and grant the masses more breathing space within the system. Fighting for this breathing space helps build the masses’ self confidence in collective progressive organizing. Struggling for reform “within the system” allows the organizer to expose the contradictions within the system. This is a “tit for tat” struggle and takes many years through trial and error to win the majority of the masses over to the struggle for socialism.

It should be remembered by the organizer that the early major experiments for building socialism have made major errors in “people’s democracy” and also in protracted economic and political planning, so it will take many years of the masses trying to exhaust all the avenues of reform, before the masses “collectively decide for themselves’ to struggle to build a new socialist society.

Struggling for reforms can bring temporary victories, (in terms of years, or possibly generations) for the masses. Capitalism has proven to be flexible and will bend either way, left or right, depending on the strength or weakness of the workers’ movement. Struggling for reform can lead to revolution, but not struggling for reform usually leads to repression or counter-revolution. Ultra leftism retards rather than advances the people’s movement, so working for socialism calls for critical thinking, continuously changing or evaluating our praxis, and assessing others and us.

People’s attitudes change with changing conditions. The collapse of Soviet and Eastern bloc socialism and the rapid step to market socialism-capitalism in the People’s Republic of China, caused hundreds of millions of people to go the capitalist road. Getting rich and having things: commodities, expensive houses, cars, etc., became a way of life for the post 1970’s generations. Regardless of the social gains of Cuba, Bolivia, now Venezuela, and others in Latin America, millions of Americans negatively compare those countries with the material standard of living here in the U. S. So globalization has set back or retarded the consciousness of the masses.

So how do we unlearn what we have learned since 1917? Can there be setbacks and reversals? Yes, but they are temporary in the long run. In the process of unlearning, I have come to realize we should work on issues the majority of the people are concerned with, and that we need to build zones and bases wherever we are at. We need to develop the majority of the working class in our communities and worry less about servicing the minority of the people who are becoming lumpenized.

So in summarizing my estimate is we need to be just a little left of center, working on winning the small victories that the masses are concerned about. In this way, we can bridge the gap between the elder revolutionaries, and our young and middle aged, who are involved in reform struggles. We should think about organizing the working class element of our people whose conditions are deteriorating everyday.

We need to build workers councils in our communities that create a process of initiating the development, the coming forth of new indigenous leaders who can lead mass organization, and the eventual vanguard that is “fused” with the overwhelming majority, the eventual emergence of a people’s party.

Text of speech, Saturday, October 6, 2007: at the “Our Organization” Educating Programs of Leadership Potential.

St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Martin Hall, 265 Decatur Street, Brooklyn, New York.

February 25, 2008