I’ve been thinking a lot about effective communication and coordination recently. It really is the only strategic question for communists: how can we coordinate to take effective mass collective action at a scale to disestablish capitalism and establish a world where we freely coordinate at scale to meet each others’ needs to the best of our collective ability?
So if we owe anything to our comrades, it’s probably that. We owe our comrades the dedication and commitment to work through our conflicts and issues that are smaller than the big conflict against the capitalist mode of production—to commit to communicating as effectively as possible, and to commit to becoming better communicators so that we may coordinate liberatory movements at mass scale.
“Effective communication” is not merely about the logistical efficiency required to coordinate mass movements (although it is about that too!). Effective communication is, at its core, about reaching mutual understanding. Once we can discover that with others in the working class, all the rest falls into place. It’s not easy—there will be many times where it feels extremely compelling to write off a comrade as someone who cannot be reasoned with, or who holds too different of views to be able to organize with effectively. Yet, if we cannot reach mutual understanding with people who ought to be our comrades, we’re in a historically dire situation indeed.
Enter to win in conflicts against the bourgeoisie, enter to reach mutual understanding in conflicts with comrades in your political home. Make a mass organization your political home—not a faction or caucus or splinter group.
No Shortcuts in Building a Culture of Effective Communication
The barriers to reaching mutual understanding are taught to us by the dominant cultures that result from class societies and the capitalist mode of production. People have internalized a kind of individualism and non-interdependence that makes us far more willing and comfortable with closing people out of our lives who we cannot immediately see how to work alongside. If someone bothers us too much, we can avoid them, or tarnish them, to try to never have to interact with them in the future—but we don’t have that luxury if we want to win.
The discomforts of having to work through conflict will continue to exist for long as we have not yet won. If we want to overcome the easy-but-detrimental “ways out of conflict” of prioritizing individualism and non-interdependence, then we must learn, develop, and put into practice socialist ways of resolving conflict by building mutual understanding. We cannot ultimately win if we create a splinter group or faction at the first sign of conflict. (—or second or third sign of conflict, at that!)
This is obviously not me saying that we should be putting all our efforts into convincing working-class fascists—start with the easier people to win over to socialism. We should all learn from other socialists about what’s missing in our own analyses. You may not agree about everything immediately, but it’s a good start to agree about the long-term goal of communism, and the short-term points of strategic overlap.
You will not necessarily grow closer to comrades simply by “doing things” and “working together”—finding mutual understanding and more overlap in strategic goals requires socializing, intentional strategic discussion. Above all else, it requires us to intentionally and regularly engage in conversations until we can represent each others views better than even the other could originally. That is how we learn about each other and ourselves in a meaningful sense.
A Note on Bourgeois Morality
We don’t “owe” or have “rights”—in the liberal sense of it all. These idealist conceptions of justice that float out there in the universe aren’t real.
Nevertheless, we feel a certain subjective pull towards doing some kinds of actions rather than others, and a great disconcerting feeling when we notice ourselves and others not acting according to those maxims. I think we are committed to some basic things, like acting according to the promotion of a certain sense of freedom in the universe.
So, in that particular pedantic way, I don’t think we can say that we “owe” our comrades anything—or, if we “owe” people anything, we owe them all of it in the sense that the concept of “owing” becomes redundantly unnecessary. Most accurately, I think we can say that insofar as we make decisions and choices, we commit ourselves to promoting a kind of pragmatic and deontological freedom in the universe. This can be difficult to remember sometimes—the seductive call of individualism and non-interdependence, of writing others off as “too-difficult” or “not my comrade”—is strong in moments of tension.
While our comrades may bristle us at times, they are the ones who are in this journey with us. If we are to be free beings, and if we are to create a free world, we must commit ourselves ten-times-over to finding mutual understanding with them in particular. If using the language of “owing” helps you to remember that fact, so be it.