Organizational Department report presented by Anita Waters to the CPUSA National Committee meeting of July 12, 2026.

A lot of comrades, me included before I joined the Organizational Department, don’t have a clear picture of what it does. The strength of the Organizational Department is that it is a mix of veteran members and relatively newer members of the next generation of party leaders.

Some of our activities:

• Facilitating communication among Districts on important projects like the Target Boycott and Cuba Solidarity.
• Working with areas of the country where there are new applicants, but no established club or district.
• Discussing developments in new clubs in established districts.
• Receiving monthly reports from International Publishers about sales, trends, and new publications.
• Organizing the South updates. (These stopped when one member left the Org Department. We should return to the practice of regular reports from the South.)
• Receiving updates from committees such as the Finance Committee’s report about the low percentage of comrades paying dues regularly.
• Organizing five Club and District Leaders meetings on the second Wednesday of each month, covering topics such as the Peace Action toolkit, National Weekend of Door-knocking, May Day Debrief, National Election Conference District planning, and the Target Boycott.
• Helping districts establish and meet their fundraising goals for the PW Fund Drive.

What we will be working on in the future:

• Building stronger, more responsive district organizations.
• Improving two-way communication between the NC and the Clubs and Districts.
• Organizing in areas of the country not yet organized.
• Assisting in organizing Party-wide initiatives.

One of its primary functions is to work with areas of the country where there are new applicants, but no organized club or district. For some places, the goal is just to touch base with the handful of people that apply from areas like Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. We try to help those comrades stay engaged through National Education Department Marxist classes, all-Party town halls, etc. For other places, like Tennessee, we try to establish regular meetings to lead to a state organization or individual clubs. The Organizational Department regularly receives and discusses reports from International Publishers and from the Finance Committee, and we organize club and district leaders meetings monthly, covering topics like the Peace Action toolkit, the National Election Conference, and the Target Boycott.

A big part of what the Organizational Department handles is new member applications, and only three people actually accomplish this task, not the whole Organizational Department. We have a lot of incoming members. I recently looked at patterns in new membership applications with the help of Laura C., who generated a report on the 4,200 new applications received in the last 18 months. At least since the 2019 convention, we have good procedures for processing new applications. All applicants receive a substantial acknowledgement from the Party. Then, the applications are sent on to district leaders, state organizations, and, if none of these are available, to Organizational Department members who look out for unorganized areas. The system isn’t perfect. Not all the new contacts are adequately addressed. Some states and districts fall behind, and for others, when one email goes unanswered, we give up.

The Organizational Department will continue to work on improving two-way communication between the National Committee (NC) and the clubs and districts and assisting in organizing Party-wide initiatives.

But I also want to talk here about organization more generally. Joe Sims was right in his keynote address – we need more when it comes to organization. In order to take advantage of this revitalized socialist moment, we need to remove the isolation and the fear of taking initiative, to find ways to organize campaigns nationally as well as at the state and local levels. If feasible, we should take action under our own colors.

To strike a decisive blow to MAGA, the working class has a lot of work to do. Our Party, to play our role in helping build this struggle and to add the “communist plus,” needs clear roles with concrete expectations and responsibilities. We need people to fill those roles. We need to give clear direction to clubs and districts as they organize, elect leadership, and devise and implement plans of work that recognize national priorities as well as local ones that foster a pro-democracy, anti-MAGA movement.

By the way, we agreed on the responsibilities of NC members a while ago, and we’ll send that out again after this meeting so that the new members can understand those expectations and responsibilities.

If we want to be, as comrade Jarvis suggested, a communist party of a million members, we have to build the infrastructure. We need district leaderships that are willing to commit to responsibilities, to work on the political development of comrades in their jurisdiction, to hold regular meetings to mobilize members, to take responsibility for raising funds to support People’s World and the Party, to form collectivities that represent the working class in their areas, and to develop plans of work in sync with national priorities and that specify realistic goals.

On the question of leadership of national campaigns, I believe we have before us exactly the model it needs to take. Our biggest task this year is the defeat of MAGA, and executing that initiative involves the work of national leaders, the commissions, districts, and clubs — all of us together. We had leadership from a planning committee for the May 23 Election Conference involving PAC members and others. They organized two weekends of national canvassing for No Kings 3 and for May Day. The Organizational Department helped districts develop plans for in-person meetings for the afternoon segment of the Election Conference, and organized report-backs and follow-ups on specific electoral situations across the country. People’s World published articles about electoral politics and will continue to focus on defeating MAGA at the ballot box. We encouraged clubs and districts to consider opportunities for our own members to run for office. A national campaign like this necessarily involves multiple collectivities across the Party.

I look forward to seeing these coordinated actions help to build an effective People’s World conference as Joe described.

Some leadership in these campaigns necessarily comes from the commissions where specialized knowledge of the situation resides. In spreading the demand for a National Day of Solidarity, the Labor Commission has worked with clubs and districts to make meaningful alliances with local and state labor organizations. For the Cuba solidarity campaign, members of the Peace & Solidarity Commission have come together with members of the International Department to form an Americas Committee. The Target Boycott Campaign found its leadership among members of the African American Equality Commission. But these campaigns also require participation by the clubs and districts in planning and implementing actions.

Getting the whole party together is not only possible; it is actually already happening, and it has to intensify as we go through the year.

That brings me to one organizational task, that is, developing new districts and revitalizing older ones.

As I mentioned, I believe we want to encourage state organizations to develop into districts that can in turn usher the clubs in their jurisdiction to organize and execute the Party program.

Thinking this through, we recommend a two-step process:

First: obtain the endorsement of the appropriate national body regarding what the comrades in the state have already accomplished and what their plans for future work are. National permission to move ahead is an endorsement of the intention to create a district; it does not proclaim that a district is in place.

Second: after a convention occurs with national consultation, the NC will evaluate the outcome of the convention. Given the level of unity in the state and way the convention unfolded, is the state leadership ready and willing to commit to the responsibilities of district leadership? Is the state ideologically unified, rooted in and consistently supportive of the Party Program and Constitution? If so, and the NC believes it is appropriate and consistent with strengthening the Party and the working class, the NC may vote to form the district. If the comrades are not quite ready to take on the responsibilities of district leadership, the NC can decide to give it more time to complete its organizational tasks and ideological consolidation.

Because districts have a larger role in naming delegates to the National Convention, which I hope we decide to have in 2029, that is, after the next presidential election (when we know what we’re in for), it’s imperative that we get these matters attended to. The recommendation of those who have discussed a proposed district formation process is that the process does not happen in the year before a national convention, because we want to avoid hasty decisions. But we also want to remove ambiguity.

I move that we endorse this general process for district formation.

Image: Fred Barr / CPUSA