How should the left organise?

Organising has become fashionable on the left in recent years, but the word is used to mean almost anything. rs21 member Ian Allinson argues that the left needs to change what types of organising it prioritises.

It’s become fashionable to describe almost any activism as ‘organising’, but Jane McAlevey popularised two distinctions that we can build on.

Mobilising and organising

First is the distinction between mobilising and organising. McAlevey described mobilising as turning out the people who already agree with us, which she recognised as an important task. Organising, on the other hand, is the systematic attempt to build capacity and power, and involves winning over those not already convinced.

McAlevey’s second distinction – between self-selecting and structural organising – is related to the first. Self-selecting organising involves putting out a message and working with whoever responds positively to it. Classic examples would include promoting a campaign or event by leafleting on a high street or at a workplace or sharing on social media. This is linked to mobilising in because you are organising those who already agree with you, albeit they may not yet be linked to your campaign. Structural organising involves targeting a group of people that is already defined, such as workers in a particular workplace, residents on a particular housing estate, or users of a service threatened with cuts or closure. Crucially, you try to engage all the people in the group, whether they already agree with you or not. McAlevey argued that because this can lead to involving big majorities of those in the structure, it has a much greater potential for building power.

Three types of organising

For revolutionaries, it is useful to build on this by thinking of three types of organising:

1. Primary organising:
   trying to win over and involve people who are not yet part of the movement. This is related to McAlevey’s organising not mobilising and structural organising concepts, but is more specific – structural organising also includes working with others already in the movement.
   
2. Secondary organising:
   working with people already in the movement, trying to influence it and its organisations in a positive direction organisationally and politically.
   
3. Sustaining and developing revolutionary organisation

These distinctions are useful because they help us understand what different individuals and organisations are doing and think about how that should change.

Working with others on the left dominates

Occupationally, the far left is hugely overrepresented in social science academia, charities, movement organisations, unions and progressive law. It’s a crude generalisation, but all these occupations tend to encourage a focus on secondary organising – engaging with people who already have left ideas and commitments. Of course it’s not as simple as that. For example, some of these jobs can involve dealing with ‘service users’ with a wide variety of views. An additional issue is the constraints on what you can say and do when a large part of your activism is carried out on behalf of your employer.

When we think about the activism of left organisations and the individuals in them, two tendencies can be seen. Most often, secondary organising is overwhelmingly dominant, sometimes with bits of primary but self-selecting organising, and sometimes with bits of ‘party building’ activity. Then there are those for whom party building, without really engaging with struggle, is dominant. This often takes the form of a focus on propaganda or polemicising against other left organisations.

We need a mix

Revolutionaries should be engaged in an appropriate mix of all three types of organising, other than in exceptional circumstances. Of course the exact mix will vary from person to person and time to time depending on the roles they take on, their capacity, and what is going on around them. Sometimes a particular aspect of activism can become all-consuming for a while, for example if someone is in the centre of a strike, media storm or high-profile court case. One of the functions of revolutionary organisation should be to recognise when this is happening to members and ensure they are being supported by other members who can try to provide some balance and perspective as well as practical and moral support.

When individuals and organisations focus disproportionately on either secondary organising or party building, it is worth exploring why each type of organising is essential.

We need to win over workers

It is many decades since we have seen genuinely mass working-class self-activity in Britain. Even for those who are revolutionaries and Marxists, this undermines confidence that the majority can be won to radical action. When the problems facing us are so urgent, and the work of winning over a majority of the working class seems so hard and slow, it is understandable that people look for shortcuts by focusing on those who are already sympathetic and ignore primary organising.

But if those of us who are aiming at replacing capitalism in its entirety and see this liberatory task as something that can only be carried out by the working class itself, in all its diversity, aren’t going to try to win people over, who will? We can’t leave this to reformists who are more interested in triangulating to the middle ground than building power. We can’t leave this to union leaderships who are usually more interested in propping up their subs income by recruiting the ‘low hanging fruit’ than effective organising efforts.

It can reasonably be objected that an individual or a small group can have little impact on rebuilding working-class organisation and combativity. Most of the time this is true. Unionisation on a big scale, for example, historically occurs in tandem with strike waves rather than incrementally. However, in Workers Can Win I argued that trying to organise now, rather than waiting for the next wave, is important because:

1. We can organise and win even in the current situation.
2. Organising and taking action now develops our skills and networks. It changes workers’ consciousness, makes more seem possible and sows the seeds of future struggles.
3. Experimentation is required for workers to learn how to organise in current conditions and is a precondition for a new wave of struggle.
4. Organising now generates sparks of action, the prerequisite for a new wave of struggle.
5. Organising now builds networks of solidarity that increase the chances of a spark ‘catching’ and igniting a new wave of struggle rather than fading out.
6. Organising now can shape the character and politics of the next wave, making it more (or less) likely to succeed.

For revolutionaries there is an additional reason – that if we neglect primary organising in workplaces or communities we isolate ourselves in a lefty bubble and lose touch with the experiences, concerns and views of the majority of the working class.

And we need revolutionary organisation

The case for putting some of our energy into sustaining and developing revolutionary organisation is simple. History teaches us that revolutions happen quite often, that like any social movement, they are sites of struggle between different political forces and strategies, and that without a mass party of those committed to seeing the revolution through, they go down to defeat. While we can’t build a mass revolutionary party without a much higher level of class struggle, it is vital to take the small steps we can, or we consign ourselves to running on the hamster wheel of struggle within capitalism until it finishes us off through war or ecological destruction. Like primary organising, much of this work is less glamorous than secondary organising and doesn’t offer such quick results, but anyone serious about revolutionary politics can’t afford to neglect it.

Because building revolutionary organisation is a necessity, and because this is work that only revolutionaries can undertake, some are tempted to focus almost exclusively on it, neglecting primary and secondary organising. This is based on a misunderstanding of how ideas change and how healthy revolutionary organisation can be built.

We all absorb ideas from the world around us, and as Marx put it ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.’ Luckily, that’s not the whole picture. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘contradictory consciousness’ to describe how workers’ ‘common sense’ comprises both ideas derived from the ruling ideology and alternative ideas. For example, many workers in the early 1980s thought unions were too strong at the same time as having the ‘good sense’ to realise that their own union was too weak. Many accept management’s ‘right to manage’ in general, but object to particular instructions. Workers are ingenious at turning elements of managerial ideology to their advantage, and they also create elements of a view of the world opposed to the dominant ideology. Nonetheless, the dominant ideas do dominate.

It is in struggle that significant numbers of working class people pay attention to matters which seem at other times peripheral to their lives, and find their experience clashing with ideas they previously took for granted. People learn fast in struggle, and that process can be greatly assisted by the participation of socialists making available and applying ideas developed from previous struggles. Naturally, participating alongside others in struggle is the most fertile situation for building revolutionary organisation. So those that neglect participation in struggle – primary and secondary organising – are badly placed to build revolutionary organisation even if that is their focus.

When revolutionaries take part in struggle, they come under pressure to accommodate to those around us and to neglect building revolutionary organisation – what people sometimes call ‘liquidating’ themselves. It is harder to resist this pressure if revolutionaries believe that we win people over by ‘being the best activists’. Quite apart from the fact that there are many talented and committed activists beyond our ranks, a far better formulation is that we gain a hearing by being amongst the best activists, but win people over with our ideas.

Being an effective revolutionary means being serious about our primary and secondary organising, building power and influencing the movement, and sustaining and developing revolutionary organisation.