UNITY AND STRUGGLE
CADRE BUILDING THROUGH CONSISTENCY IN
UNITED FRONT WORK
Revolutionary parties are built by hard thinking and hard work: Hard thinking comes first based on a center of reorientation of cadre. —C.L.R. James
In each campaign thrust and decade of struggle, cadre needs reorientation of what the new conditions mean. If this reorientation is not done, cadre will be groping in the dark, acting as if they were in the 19th or 20th centuries when they are approaching the mid-21st century.
Our theories of liberation, strategies and tactics must be updated to the new, real world and the new conditions that we face. While we may retain some of the old that still seems relevant, our ideas must correspond to the rapidly changing situation (dialectics).
How do we stay grassroots based?
In the process of building a united front, we should keep two goals in mind:
- Promote grassroots participatory democracy that moves to develop the capacity of local communities leading their own movements (move past personalities).
- Develop a “let the people decide” strategy; try always to get input from the masses, and in deciding issues (dialogue) unite the broadest sector of the community in formatting the direction of community control.
We should work around local issues first, or approach a national issue from a local perspective as they arise or become important to the people. Concentrate on building a local “collective” and base, and then connect with other collectives or cadre in other communities.
One of the most important struggles is to resist our own narrowness, “My way is the only way,” “My way is the best way,” or “I must control it for it to work.” We must struggle for objectivity and consciously help to support younger cadre by giving them responsibility, teaching them and ourselves through practice, criticism and self-criticism. We should struggle to maintain objectivity in each given situation.
Each cadre should have ten potential people that he/she is nurturing to join the movement. The more we concentrate on local issues, the more we can get our potential cadres concerned with national/international issues, campaigns and demonstrations.
Remember what Queen Mother Audley Moore taught:
“If you are subjective about the subjective (personal), you will be subjective about the objective (larger picture). But if you are objective about the subjective, then you will be objective about the objective….”
C. L. R. James taught that there is a theory of the three layers of revolutionary organizations:
1. The first or top layer is the theoretical and political leadership.
2. The second layer consists of seasoned cadre, people who are activist leaders in their communities, labor organizations, youth groups, etc.
3. The third layer consists of the rank and file and young, developing cadre.
Three things we want to do to nurture and develop consistent, reliable second-line level cadre:
1. We want to continue to develop a consistent, bi-monthly newsletter to help educate the community as to why it is important for African Americans to organize around issues that the masses of the people are concerned with, i.e. registering to vote, voting, and related matters.
2. We want to discuss, digest and suggest for reading, materials, books, and articles that the collective needs to study.
3. We want to help educate African Americans about the importance of treating one another with love, respect and commitment to our responsibilities. This is based on the code of cadres and is essential if we are going to win our liberation. Treating one another in a respectful manner will help us to work together for “collective self-reliance.” Through literacy training and voter education, the objective of which is to find, develop and guide the potential, indigenous leaders from among the masses, we will be able to train primary and secondary bridge leaders. Bridge leaders are those indigenous leadership forces that are lying dormant in every community. The role of the organizers is to create the process that calls forth those indigenous leaders to provide the bridge between the community and the organization. We want to focus the strategic program to develop second line indigenous leadership with the objective to eventually build a strong, community, grassroots political power base.
“We must recognize that things are always changing, that the contradictions inherent to everything are bound to develop and become so antagonistic so that ideas, paradigms, or strategies that were progressive at one point turn into their opposite. This means that in times of crises, revolutionary leaders must have the audacity that represent sharp breaks with ideas as they themselves had previously believed…”[1]
Queen Mother Audley Moore taught, “In their initial (beginning) stages, national liberation movements are bourgeoisie.” What we as cadre did not understand at the time, was that African Americans, having been denied access to bourgeois (traditional) politics in the capital system, had to go through the process of struggling for democracy within the political system first, (Democratic or Republican parties), before venturing forth and advancing a democratic socialist program. In other words, African Americans, being “politically underdeveloped” as a people, would develop “political ideological maturity” by trying to seek office inside the existing capitalist political system first trying to gain political power for the African American community.
Revolution would not be a viable solution until the masses of African Americans felt that this process was exhausted. It is a protracted one and will take years to advance until the contradictions within the system cause an ideological break or “leap” in which they en masse aspire to advance a democratic socialist program and party. We need more “politically developed” cadres to work with the masses inside the Democratic Party.
Build a base by going into the Democratic Party on the ward or precedent level. Build strong, collective ward organizations with an inner cadre core. Use the system against itself. Develop community learning centers for the retraining of adults; to develop parenting skills for young parents, for alternative and traditional health, for nursing, for foreign language development, for learning computer and math skills, African and African American history, political science and the martial arts.
We should work with the youth in the community. Learning centers within the community should nurture rites of passage programs, circles of recovery and scouts’ groups. The Chinese martial arts should be a key component to instill a philosophy of patient protracted struggle, which develops humility, selflessness and discipline. We should build an economic/educational self-reliant network around churches and masjids on a neighborhood basis. If possible, we should develop a ward organization with free weekly newsletters/newspapers with directories of African American businesses and skilled people in the neighborhood. This ward newsletter/newspaper can also be used to raise political consciousness/educational/re-educational levels and economic self-reliance of the people in the ward.
Democracy, Self-Determination and the African American
One of the first things we must do as a people moving toward the road ahead is to build a national liberation organization of a new type that is capable of waging a scientific struggle toward liberation. This organization must be built around the concept of “collective leadership” or decisions developed on a well thought out program based on an African American Workers’ Congress.
This organization of African American liberation should be built around local cadres on a citywide basis. It would be the eventual African American section of a multiracial people’s party; a democratic socialist party electing candidates on a transitional program exhausting the protracted legal means of struggle. Building an African American Worker’s Congress can solve the question of democratic grassroots mass organization built on the neighborhood ward basis by African Americans. Patient organizing can lead to the development of a citywide African American Workers’ Congress. The Congress should, in turn, initiate the formation of a citywide African American Workers’ Association that will elect its own leadership, develop its own program and determine its citywide priorities.
The dialectic in capitalist society is the masses in motion outside the party. Lenin in 1921 said:
“Our strength in the past as it will remain in the future is that we can take the heaviest defeats into account with perfect coolness, learning from their experience what must be modified in our activity. This is why it is necessary to speak candidly. This is vital and important, not alone for the purpose of theoretical correctness, but also from the practical point of view. We cannot learn to solve the problems of today by new methods of yesterday’s experience has not made us open our eyes in order to see where in the old methods were at fault.”[2]
Combining the humanist socialist culture, which is built on a “new democracy” with the synthesis of race, national, class and gender struggle around issues the people are concerned about will heighten the mass consciousness primarily on a local basis, first “rooting in among the people” that will build the people’s network and party which will be deep among the masses.
The cultural traits that have been transmitted intergenerationally in the African American community are inadequate in the 21st century. Their lifestyle should become one of a scientifically holistic and spiritual, not materialistic one. It must utilize the essence of eastern spiritual systems and aspects of dialectical and historical materialism synchronized with the latest capitalist technology. This new culture would fuse a new people, a new generation, free from all forms of substance abuse, disciplined and prepared to bring in a new socialist world. The party becomes real through the training of cadres in the theory and practice of scientific socialism: principles of successful mass struggles. The key is developing a center of struggle, then relating other struggles around that center. Of course, one always needs a rear, or center of retreat, for resting and regrouping. Successful parties have had training schools that trained cadres, then sent them back into the line of fire (class struggle). Certain cities or areas can function as zones or bases, and can be used as examples for how the new society will function. The key to the survival of the party is to build a political economy to sustain the party.
United Front Work in the African American Community, White Allies and Allies from Other Minorities of Color
We should encourage our white allies, especially those among the youth (on white college and university campuses) to form “progressive” groups on campus and in their communities from where they are from. We should encourage them to run for office in opposition to conservative candidates of both parties when there is no progressive democratic candidate representing the Democratic Party. This would increase the “progressive” sector of the Democratic Party and to put reactionary Democrats on the defensive inside the white community. When those options don’t exist, they should support liberal or centralist Republicans as opposed to conservative Republicans. As a progressive bloc of 54 million plus people, we have the power to defeat the ultra “compassionate conservative” right. Whites presently make up 85% of the U.S. population. If the progressive movement is wise, it will seek to win over as many whites as possible, seeking to split some of the 85% from the racist Republican (fascist) opposition.
African Americans’ greatest allies should be other minorities of color. We should strongly emphasize uniting with other minorities of color, who also face race, class and gender oppressions. African Americans constitute a population of 40 million; Hispanics constitute 44 million and with other minorities of color make up 100 million of the 300 million in the United States. The capitalist class maintains power by keeping people divided, new immigrants against old immigrants, etc. If the people of color unite into a voting bloc of 100 million strong, then with progressive whites they can create a democratic socialist America.
Muhammad Ahmad
6/21/04
Updated 2008
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[1] Grace Lee Boggs, “C. L. R. James: Organizing in the U.S.A., 1938-1953 in Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain (ed.) C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995] pp. 170-171
[2] C. L. R. James, World Revolution, 1917-1936 [New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993] p. 129