Editor’s note: The following is part of an internal document circulated by the Central Committee of the PSL in advance of our 3rd Party Congress in 2016. Here, we focus on ways that communist organizations have historically grown in strength, size, and influence—direct recruitment and organizational mergers. While there are important new openings, there are contradictory tendencies impacting the possibility of such growth. On the one hand, the neoliberal stage of capitalism clearly offers no future for workers and oppressed people. On the international stage, the uncontested hegemony of U.S. imperialism is fracturing at the seams. On the other hand, the era of global counterrevolution exerts a heavy force on the consciousness of the mass movement. The tasks that we have to face are thus both organizational and theoretical.
As we prepare for the Third Party Congress, we need to reflect upon the past decade and the key lessons learned, and sum up the principal needs that confront those who are committed to the task of reviving socialism. While books upon books could be written on such a review, here we will focus on some of the most pertinent parts of an evaluation as we chart a path forward for advancing the struggle for communism.
The objective situation is very favorable for the revival of socialism. The U.S. capitalist class has been waging a war against the rights and living standards of a big part of the working population for several decades. The relative privileges for a huge part of the working population have been destroyed. U.S. imperialism globally has been and will continue to be diminished. The contradictions within and among the ruling class itself are ever more obvious.
The subjective situation has also improved measurably. It is now clear that there can be the popularization of socialist ideas. Popularization has been our focus now since our last Party congress in 2013. At that time, we emphasized the popularization component because we believed that popularization of socialism through the depopularization of capitalism was a prerequisite to reach a mass audience in such an anti-communist country. We also said that the anti-communist fog was lifting and it was now possible to do this.
The Bernie Sanders campaign, even if the electoral effort is doomed, has made a major contribution in creating the atmosphere for the popularization of socialism. We need to thoroughly examine all of our organizational possibilities to reach the maximum potential in taking next steps for popularization, going beyond attracting people to socialism, to having people self-identify as socialists. Even without our efforts, this process is going to continue. The logic and inevitability of this process is located within the real-life dynamics of existing monopoly capitalism.
Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/reviving-the-communist-movement-building-organization-in-2016/
