How to Build a Left that Doesn't Fucking Suck

And isn't ruled by Meangirl-Americans or (un)charismatic Boomers

A couple years ago, reeling from the preposterously ruthless scorched-earth campaign that ‘social justice’ world had just unleashed on Clementine, she and I joined a local communist organization. We wanted to search out and give our time to what we were calling the ‘Offline Left’: normal people doing stuff in real life, with tangible goals and some semblance of discipline. Clementine looked around and found one such group that had a presence in Montreal. We each had a lengthy phone call with one of their organizers and then were invited to start attending their online meetings (at that time, in mid-lockdown, everything was happening on Zoom).

It became clear very rapidly that the group was more or less the personal fiefdom of a single Boomer man who could not exactly be called charismatic but was certainly very passionate in a bug-eyed kind of way. Much of the meetings were taken up by unnecessary bureaucratic procedures and ‘reports’ on ‘actions’ taken by other chapters. We took part in one such ‘action’ in Montreal, a poorly-attended march about something to do with migrant workers, which circled the block a few times and then stood outside a government minister’s office for a few hours. Mostly though our meetings were ‘political education’ sessions in the form of the Boomer lecturing us. I think the Montreal group had about 6 members when we joined.

It was fairly depressing, but we stuck around for a bit. Then something pretty insane happened. A member of the organization, who was also a member of our Montreal chapter, had run for leadership of the federal Green Party on an explicitly socialist platform, and had come in second in a very close race. This represented, I think, a very interesting proof that entryism¹ in the Green Party was at least feasible, and was potentially a fruitful direction for socialist political activity in Canada. The leadership of the communist group reacted not by congratulating this member’s initiative or studying his success but by censuring him and informing him that his continued affiliation with the Greens would result in him being expelled. They justified this by explaining that the group’s ‘democratic centralist’ procedures had determined that the NDP was the only ‘workers’ party’ in Canada, and that the task of socialists was therefore to take over the NDP, and that the Greens were a ‘bourgeois party’ with which members were not permitted to affiliate.

Clementine and I watched this go down in amazement. At the next meeting, the member in question was ‘summoned’ to explain himself. He was obviously a very busy guy, who had just run a gruelling campaign and was also a practicing lawyer. He showed up out of good grace and politely explained his views and that while he didn’t want to leave the communist group, his work trying to build a socialist presence in the Greens was important to him. I looked on open-mouthed as the uncharismatic Boomer man scolded this member for having tried to actually do something proactive.

Afterwards we pushed back. The guy’s perspectives made a lot of sense. It’s pretty obvious that decades of socialists trying to push the NDP to the left haven’t been very effective; not saying that it’s a strategy that should necessarily be abandoned, but this guy came a few hundred votes away from transforming the Greens into an openly socialist political party. Had he succeeded, the leader of the Greens would have been a member of a communist group — our communist group. Why not support him? Why not study the situation? Why not start prepping for the next leadership race? Why not recognize this guy’s ambition and leadership qualities and throw our weight behind him?

But no. Democratic centralism. Once a year the old-timers got together and decided the path of the organization, and the rest of the year was mainly spent trying to recruit more members than they lost. Local chapters were subordinate to the national organization, and the national organization was more or less just the uncharismatic Boomer man, who, it was painfully obvious, would brook no competition in the leadership department. And the path of the organization was clear: ineffective demonstrations, criticizing other socialist organizations, ’political education’ sessions on Zoom, and a vague commitment to somehow, someday, taking over the NDP.

We quit after the Green Party thing. It was too crazy for us. It was like being part of a political party run by the most intolerable middle manager you’ve ever had to work for. And not even a political party with a snowflake’s chance in hell of ever achieving anything; if anything they seemed actively opposed to getting anything done. It was a depressing experience, but it did make me think a lot about some political principles of mine.

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If you search for communist and socialist parties and organizations in Canada you’ll find literally dozens. Most of them have a presence in Montreal. They are all, obviously, tiny. When I did my phone interview with the organizer from the group I’ve just been talking about, I went through some of them with him, asking him, essentially, why I shouldn’t join them instead. He had an answer ready to go for each of them. The Revolutionary So-and-So’s are ultraleft adventurists. The People’s This-and-That (Marxist-Leninist) are revisionists who are soft on the Cuba Question. The Parti populaire de quoi-que-soit are a bunch of crypto-chauvinists. And so on and so on. Obviously, his organization was not too hot, not too cold, but just right; everybody else was hopelessly misled. I was willing to put up with this arrogance up to a point, but in the aftermath of the Green Party Incident, it really struck me: the number one criteria I have for whether or not a left organization is serious is whether it is actively trying to coordinate and merge with other left groups or whether it is trying to split and diverge.

I think the communist urge to splinter, which is pretty much a meme at this point, has a lot of root causes. To be generous, at least part of it comes from the understandable need to defend organizations from bad actors who want to debate everything infinitely; it can seem better to just split off with the people with the ‘correct’ interpretation rather than see the party descend into ineffective woolliness. However, in the case of Canada’s constellation of tiny communist sects, a much bigger factor is the desire of big fish to keep their ponds small. These groups tend to be run by very weird and obsessive types, the same kinds of people who become volunteer moderators on web forums or run Warhammer 40k nights at the local game shop with an iron fist. And to be clear there’s nothing wrong with being that kind of person, and they can actually be incredibly useful organizationally. But (no offense to undersocialized nerds), some undersocialized nerd whose whole life is ‘the Party’, who spends all their time scheming to sideline people and accumulate scraps of power and influence, who will literally plan for years to get their take on some Important Question be adopted as the official Party Line — these types fucking hate letting go of power. They’d rather burn it all to the ground then let their little principalities be incorporated into something bigger. They don’t want to give up their position of unofficial chairperson-for-life. And they hate letting go of their secret dream, kept half-alive in the basements of their souls, of one day being the official chairperson-for-life, of the whole country.

I get the desire to have a clear policy position on everything. I understand the need for clarity and discipline in a group that fancies itself revolutionary. I know that the stakes can seem extremely high, leaving no room for incorrect lines of thought. Most of these groups follow a Leninist organizational model called democratic centralism, which essentially it states that everything can be debated and voted on, but once it has been decided, all members must accept the decision and, moving forward, adopt the winning position as their own. Again, this model has obvious advantages, as it produces discipline and unity, and it helped various communist parties around the world win power. But it also has some serious fucking drawbacks, perhaps especially in the context of 21st century Canada.

Democratic centralism means that over time, as the organization adopts positions, you could end up in an organization which expects you to publicly uphold every single one of a series of decisions you personally disagree with. Pretty much automatically, this would tend to lead both to organizations full of people who don’t even truly believe what they’re saying, and to unchecked, perpetual splintering whenever the cognitive dissonance gets to be too much for them. It wouldn’t be so bad if these groups were making decisions about anything relevant, but since they are almost universally tiny and ineffective, they are constantly having Congresses and Assemblies where they will argue heatedly about what to do about ‘the Cuba question’, as if they could do anything at all about it, and then fissure into two even more tiny and ineffective sects. All of this makes people feel insane, and is also extremely off-putting to new members.

It can also lead to the same kind of surreal situation you get when the Pope uses his magic power of infallibility to declare that limbo not only doesn’t exist but actually never existed. Things are either true or untrue, correct or incorrect, in a binary manner; and they can switch from one state to the other with no observable interim, like an electron hopping into a different atomic orbit. Not only that, but their essential truth and correctness — or untruth and incorrectness — are self-evident and unassailable and have always been self-evident and unassailable. Personally I hate this type of shit and always have, seeing it as clumsily heavy-handed at best and the peak of intellectual gaslighting at worst. Like, I can see what you just did. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.

And, most importantly for our purposes here, it just makes it fucking impossible for communist groups to merge. It makes it impossible for them to agree to disagree on certain things because the whole thing is premised on everybody (at least pretending) to agree. And it’s not just formally difficult, it’s also psychologically difficult, because people in these groups pour enormous mental and spiritual energy into getting their favourite takes adopted and then expend enormous mental and spiritual energy enthusiastically upholding takes they aren’t sure they even agree with; to just let all of that go violates our instinctive belief in the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

So we’re left with a couple dozen tiny groups immobilized by their own ideological rigidity, squabbling over theoretical esoterica, while literally millions of working class people who might be amenable to socialist ideas are completely without political representation and leadership, and thousands of devoted socialists have no serious organization to join. When I look at this situation, and look at the leaders of these little sects, I’m filled with contempt. Merge your organizations together and become something useful or just dissolve yourselves and stop sucking up the energy of all the poor chumps you have in your thrall.

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After we left the communist group, we stayed connected with a couple of its members, and talked to them about how insane that whole situation had been. Coming from an AA background, both Clementine and I had extensive experience with, well, going to meetings, but also with running a participatory organization, and both of us have always thought that the left has a lot to learn from the Program. We mentioned this to them, and they were interested, and we had a couple of planning sessions to build up an experimental socialist group aligned along 12 Step organizational principles — more or less the precise opposite of democratic centralism. Ultimately the group never materialized, killed off by the stultifying misery of The Covid Years and people’s personal lives and responsibilities getting in the way. But I think about it a lot.

Most people don’t know how AA actually works, which is a pity. This model successfully holds together literally millions of members all over the world, operating pretty much totally outside the domains of the market, state, or church, with essentially no leadership whatsoever and with very little in the way of central administration. There is no formal membership process and no real records kept of members, who are free to join and leave as they wish, nor are there fees or dues required. There have only been one or two major, structurally significant disagreements within the organization in its entire existence, which is to say almost a century.

In any given big city, there are hundreds of independent meetings. A city the size of New York has more than a thousand. Each meeting has its own name and happens in the same place at the same time once or twice a week, and they’re all listed in a directory. There is a small but significant distinction between the meeting and the group which runs it. The meeting itself is open to anyone who has a desire to stop drinking (some are open to anyone, period); that means anybody can just walk in off the street and grab a cup of coffee and sit down and that’s the extent of the membership process for that meeting. The group which runs the meeting is made up of regular attendees who have voluntarily undertaken to do administrative and maintenance work on behalf of everyone else. Becoming a member of the group typically involves nothing more strenuous than giving the secretary your first name (or any name, no one is checking IDs). Participation in decision-making for that group involves showing up to the administrative sessions, which are called ‘business meetings’ and are usually held once a month after or before the main meeting. At a business meeting you might volunteer to fulfill one of the rotating roles that group members need to undertake. Also at these administrative sessions if anything about the meeting needs to be changed, anybody can bring up a suggestion and provided it doesn’t conflict with a couple of basic principles, it gets voted on by everybody present and passes with a majority. You can be a member of multiple groups at the same time, or a member of none. You can show up to one business meeting, make a suggestion, and never go to another business meeting again. AA guidelines state that ‘each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole’.

As a result of this structure, no two meetings are exactly the same. Their structure and particularities have been decided by a history of direct democracy. At some, the focus is on reading AA literature together and then discussing it. At some, they’ll read a page; at some, a chapter. Some meetings don’t read much from the literature at all and instead invite people to speak about their experiences, which can be followed by a discussion portion – or not. Some meetings just suggest a topic which everyone then discusses. At some you have to raise your hand, at some it goes in a circle, at some you just talk if you want to talk. At some they require that you keep it about alcoholism, at some they’re open to talking about other addictions. At some the chair has been empowered to tell you to wrap it up if you go on too long, at some it’s much looser. There are AA meetings where the introductory remarks and readings go on for half an hour, others where it takes five minutes; meetings where they pray, and meetings where they don’t. Some are special interest groups like women’s or LGBTQ or young people’s or indigenous people’s or foreign-language meetings. I’ve heard of a meeting where they would listen to punk music and have a moshpit (a ‘moment of violence’ instead of a moment of silence) at the beginning of every meeting. One meeting I used to go to had developed an elaborate system of heckling the chair and secretary that everybody would learn to participate in. Others are dry, dreary and deathly boring – to me. The beauty of it is that if I don’t like it, I just go to another one. If people are still going to that meeting, then it means it must be working for them.

Each ‘area’ – usually a chunk of a state or province with a couple of million people in it – has an area office, and then there are regional offices, and finally the AA head office in New York City. The people staffing these offices are usually volunteers, have very little power over anybody else, and are in no sense leaders. I have absolutely no idea who the current batch are, and they’ve never done anything that I’ve noticed, which means I assume they’re doing a great job. It’s a representative structure, like a representative democracy, but the balance of power is inverted. Local-level decision-making has the most power to decide on specific issues directly related to what people are doing, and as you rise in the structure, power decreases proportionally. The higher the number of people affected by decisions you could potentially make, the less power you have, and what power you do have is carefully circumscribed. AA guidelines state that ‘our leaders are but trusted servants, they do not govern’. A very strong tradition of anonymity in AA also means that charismatic figures developing followings around themselves and amassing political power simply cannot exist. There is no organizational space in which for them to do so and no respect for that kind of grandstanding. Other than a few of the now dead founding members whose legacy is inherent in the literature they wrote, I don’t know the name of a single AA figure outside of the meetings that I have personally attended. As far as I’m concerned, that’s an amazing quality in an organization.

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One of the most straight-forward ways in which this whole thing differs from democratic centralism is that AA very explicitly refuses to take positions on ‘outside issues’. Not only is AA not interested in taking a decision on ‘the rehab question’ or whatever, but it is structurally unable to do so. This is often enraging to new members who think AA should be supporting whatever political or social cause they are invested in, but it has had the very clear advantage of having kept AA from imploding. Like communists, alcoholics are often extremely pig-headed and belligerent, and giving us any opportunity to lord it over each other is bad news. AA got rid of that possibility altogether to great effect.

Another effect of this organizational structure is that if members of an AA group end up strongly disagreeing about something, they can easily split into two groups while all remaining part of AA. Half of them can go off and start the Saturday Morning Early Birds group and the other half can start the Pitiful and Incomprehensible Demoralization Group meeting on Friday nights. In this way the unity of AA is preserved while allowing for great internal diversity. This internal diversity is not infinite, however. Any organization needs to have a set of principles which cannot be negotiable. Where democratic centralism extends this to practically everything, AA is governed by a set of twelve very simple principles that people came up with almost a century ago and which haven’t needed to be changed since.

Without trying to copy the AA structure exactly — after all, AA is about staying sober, not building political movements — let’s imagine what this kind of approach could mean for socialists. Imagine that Red Struggle, the Mouvement socialiste, the Revolutionary People’s Party, the Anticapitalist Coalition, etc all agreed to affiliate themselves with a bigger umbrella organization: call it Socialist Montreal. Each of these groups would agree to host public meetings or meet-ups once a week and list these meetings in a directory. At AA meetings the secretary will often read news items briefly at the beginning: such-and-such a group is having their 10th anniversary meeting on Tuesday, there will be cake, everyone welcome. These groups could do the same: Fuck The Landlords is having a klezmer concert and fundraiser, come one come all.

People could be part of Socialist Montreal without being members of any of the individual groups, and the individual groups would be able to interact with these people and with each other’s members, sharing expertise and strategies and reaching more people. There are enough socialist groups in Montreal that there could be such public meetings twice a day easily; people interested in getting organized could easily turn up to one of them and get connected right away. People could also turn up to a meeting, find they don’t like it, and simply try another one the next day to see if they vibe more with that one.

Socialist Montreal would, as an organization, emphatically not have an official opinion on The Cuba Question. It would in fact avoid taking positions on anything but a narrow range of basic proposals and leave the ideological nitpicking to individual members. This would have the double advantage of, first, avoiding schisms and splits, and second, allowing as many socialist groups as possible to buy in to the basic program. If you insist that members must denounce, for example, Quebec nationalism, you exclude basically the entire organized labour presence in Quebec; if you demand that members oppose the police in all their forms you exclude most working people; if you make support for North Korea a condition of membership you exclude everyone normal; and so on. Instead, you let the groups themselves hold positions on these things if you want, so long as their public meetings remain open to everybody, and as an overarching organization you have a number of simple but clear principles which any socialist can agree with, and work from there.

Without further ado, here is the set of ten principles Clementine and I came up with for such a theoretical socialist umbrella organization, based on the Twelve Traditions underlying AA’s organizational structure. Contrary to the bold claim of the title of this article, which was clickbait to get you to read it, I present these not as a prescription or solution to all of the ails of the left, but just as an example of how a socialist organization could exist without infinite in-fighting. I believe these principles could result in a flexible, long-lived organization resistant to power-grabbing, bureaucratization, schisming, and cancel culture, and one which might stand a chance of actually growing, rather than always falling apart.

• Socialist Montreal stands for the social ownership of the means of production; the end of class rule by the rich; pragmatic cooperation between socialists; and solidarity between all working, oppressed, and exploited people.

• Socialist Montreal neither endorses nor opposes any school, tendency or denomination within the socialist left.

• Socialist Montreal is made up of socialists who may be affiliated with other groups, but is not itself affiliated with any outside group, organization or institution, except through bonds of solidarity.

• Leadership positions within Socialist Montreal are nonprofessional and are for coordination only, and authority ultimately rests with the membership.

• Any person who is a socialist and agrees with these traditions may call themselves a member of Socialist Montreal, and there are no dues or fees for membership.

• Members of Socialist Montreal should strive to maintain solidarity and anonymity, refraining from gossip, slander, and insults about other members, and not revealing the names of other members without their consent.

• Any group of members may form a cell of Socialist Montreal.

• Cells of Socialist Montreal are autonomous except in matters affecting other cells or Socialist Montreal as a whole, and are financially self-supporting through voluntary contributions from members.

• Cells of Socialist Montreal have the purpose of furthering the cause of socialism, extending and fostering the bonds between socialists, and carrying the message of solidarity to the people.

• Solidarity is the overarching principle of Socialist Montreal, encouraging us to act with humility and in a spirit of generosity and cooperation.

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1. Entryism is the strategy of trying to sneakily or not-so-sneakily take over an existing political party from within.