This article is part of the discussion leading up to the Communist Party USA’s 29th National Convention May 21-23, 2010. CPUSA.org takes no responsibility for the opinions expressed in this article or other articles in the pre-convention discussion. All contributions must meet the guidelines for discussion. To read other contributions to this discussion, visit the site of the Pre-Convention Discussion period.

All contributions to the discussion should be sent to discussion2010@cpusa.org for selection not to the individual venues.For more information on the convention or the pre-convention discussion period, you can email convention2010@cpusa.org.

There have been some rumblings about the “disappearance” of the Party’s National Organization Department and its Org. Secretary. Since I was the Org. Secretary, and myself proposed the changes, I thought it made sense to jump into this conversation, and re-state what the changes were and the context for making them.

During the last decade, our Party has been grappling with a whole knot of problems, political, organizational and financial. We have been in a continuous process aimed at adjusting our strategic line and tactics, modernizing our methods, streamlining our structures, and bringing our finances into the black.

All of these changes had one aim: keeping our Party alive, well and relevant to this new century.

In the course of this process, it became abundantly clear that we had too much structure, too few people, and too little money. We are a tiny organization in a huge country with a big task. The leadership of the Party has been discussing what are the Party’s “core functions” and how to “strategically deploy” our very limited financial and human resources.

Last spring, we took some major steps in this process, with a two-fold goal.

The first was to achieve a balanced budget. The second was to prioritize our staffing, given the financial decisions.

On the finance side: we have been steadily working on bringing our spending in line with our income, and have gone through several rounds of cuts. Although this has been very difficult for many reasons, it was necessary — staffing costs are about 80% of our budget. And anyone who has worked on Party finances knows how difficult it is to raise the money we need.

Contrary to what has been said in some of the preconvention discussion, we are NOT in a financial crisis. Quite the opposite: we have secured our most valuable resources, turning our real estate investments into actual income generators. We have modernized and consolidated our financial-administrative work. We have continued to grow the automatic sustainer program. And we launched a campaign to build our endowment.

These extraordinary accomplishments of our Finance Department are some of the most important Party building steps taken in the last decade.

The second goal from last spring was to arrive at our new staffing bottom line, given the financial constraints; to determine how to best deploy our volunteer and paid staff.

Through many discussions, the Party leadership ended up agreeing to focus our staff in two main areas: communication/ideological work, and local organizing. 

Another way of putting it is that we decided to prioritize staff whose job is to disseminate our ideas and experience to as large an audience as possible, and staff who are our local Party representatives.

The prioritizing of our “messaging” staff is based on the fact that the new information technologies, and especially the Internet, present us with a historic opportunity to overcome longstanding objective obstacles to growth and influence. And therefore we correctly decided to put as many people as we could into this area of work. Again, we are a tiny organization in a huge country with a big task.

The local Party organizers are involved in day-to-day struggle of our class and people, and help build our public presence in some of the main centers of our working class.

So what happened to the Org. Dept.? While it is true that we do not have an “Organization Department,” we have something better, the Coordinating Committee.

Last Spring, when I proposed to move from Organization Secretary to another assignment (fund raising), I made the case that we could and should restructure and improve our organizational work.

I argued that what was essential was a collective, not one person; a body that brought together the comrades who are the most experienced leaders when it comes to “org work.”

My criteria for that is comrades who are leading the Party’s participation in mass struggle, party building and promoting our media.

The Coordinating Committee includes the national chair, the head of our labor commission, finance department, and media/Internet work, as well as all of our full-time district leaders. It has met regularly in the 10 months since the changes were implemented, and has played the role of implementing Party policy, which is the point, after all.

In the past, our concept of the Org. Dept. was that it should include all of these comrades. But the reality fell far short of this, for many reasons, too many tasks, too few people, as well as too many layers of structure.

Now, we are trying to accomplish in other ways the many tasks that had previously, and routinely, been “referred to the Org. Dept.,” even if the Org. Dept. was too small to carry them out.

The Peoplesworld.org and Political Affairs leadership collectives are actively working to build our readership.

Our automatic sustainer program has given us a solid basis for our finances, allowing members and friends to include their contributions in their regular budgets.

We have simplified the approach to the People’s World and Party fund drives. Districts and their leadership collectives are continuing to do what they always did, namely, struggling to raise enough money, have successful events, and find new contributors.

While I don’t believe that our organizational work has suffered greatly from the lack of a national organization secretary, if we had more money and could pay for more staff, we’d probably want someone in that position — there’s always a lot to do.

But let’s put to rest the idea that the party leadership has abandoned organizational work. It’s simply not true. The decision to go without this staff position was made for the real life, material reasons described above. Serious steps have been taken to involve other individuals and collectives in carrying out organizational tasks. It does not reveal any ideological shift or abandonment of organization work.

Do we need to build the Party, raise money, circulate our press, increase our influence and public presence and educate our members? Absolutely. What we’ve done is re-configure how we accomplish those tasks, given the two sides of our situation: the financial constraints and the huge opportunities that the internet gives us for reaching people in much larger numbers than ever before in our history.

Comments