Affirm and Hold to the Primary Tasks

The purpose of this article is to orient communists in the Salt Lake Area particularly toward the practical tasks that must be undertaken if a revolutionary movement is to be built at all, and to correct persistent strategic errors that have repeatedly derailed such efforts.

On one side, sections of the left assume that the working class will spontaneously develop the consciousness, organization, and discipline necessary for revolutionary struggle. Of course, if this was the case it would have happened by now. On the other, some on the left correctly insist that consciousness must be brought to the working class, but detach this task from real struggle, treating theory as something that can be transmitted rhetorically rather than produced and assimilated through practice. Aside from being condescending, this view is also ahistorical and is in reality an easy excuse for many of our “communists” to spend their time in books rather than in the struggle.

Both errors share a common misunderstanding of the medium through which revolutionary consciousness is actually formed. Revolutionary Political consciousness does not arise automatically from economic motion, nor does it arise from exposure to “radical” or “revolutionary” ideas alone. It is forged through organized practice, through struggle waged by capable social forces under conditions where victory is materially conceivable. This distinction is important. When struggle carries real stakes and has a plausible path to winning, participants relate to it differently. They think strategically, discipline themselves collectively, evaluate leadership critically, develop confidence in their own power, and assess their ideas scientifically. When struggle is symbolic – e.g. undertaken with the idea of abstractly raising “political consciousness” –  collective knowledge and ability stagnates, regardless of how radical the language surrounding it becomes.

The question before us is how to balance the necessary tasks to develop forces capable of sustaining viable struggle, learning from it, and advancing it. Revolutionary work proceeds through dialectical unities, but these unities are not politically equal. Certain tasks are primary, others dependent upon primary tasks. Some must be developed first, or nothing else can advance meaningfully. What follows is an attempt to set out those tasks in their correct relationship, and to situate them explicitly against the errors that obscure them.

I. Party Building as the Strategic North Star

For communists, party building is the necessary strategic horizon. Without a revolutionary political organization capable of synthesizing lessons across struggles, coordinating activity, exercising leadership, and maintaining continuity over time, there can be no sustained revolutionary advance. Spontaneous upsurges, however militant, cannot substitute for such an organization.

At the same time, party building cannot be treated as an intellectual, pedagogical, or administrative project. Forces that recognize the need for a party but attempt to construct it primarily through programmatic proclamation, internal education, and/or rhetorical intervention reproduce a different version of the same error as spontaneism. They both presume that revolutionary consciousness emerges as something distinct from and thus alien to real world struggle, rather than as an outgrowth from it.

Revolutionary theory cannot be correct unless it is derived from real struggle, and specifically from struggle that poses concrete questions of victory and defeat. Only under such conditions do strategy, discipline, leadership, and sacrifice cease to be abstractions.

This is not a moral claim, this is just factual. Unity that is not tested under pressure is hypothetical and unrealized. Discipline is not learned and acquired through assent to rules but through coordinated action in individually risky and/or costly conditions. Loyalty is not demonstrated through declarations but through learned and demonstrated endurance in struggle. A party built without these tests will either fracture when confronted with reality or compensate for its weakness through bureaucratic rigidity and rhetorical grandiosity.

This is why party building cannot advance far ahead of the mass movement. The actual growth of the pre/party must be understood as the growth of the level of practical capacity, collective discipline, and confidence produced in the struggle of revolutionary organizations. This can only happen in the context of a mass movement. When organizational consolidation outpaces real experience, the result is an apparatus more interested in academic discipline than the kind of practical discipline Lenin insisted upon so persistently. Such formations often become preoccupied with internal debates, boundary maintenance, and ideological policing, precisely because they lack an external laboratory to test their ideas in a real way.

Correct party building therefore means advancing organization, theory, and leadership in constant relation to the development of viable struggle, never treating the party as a substitute for it.

II. Mass Movement Building Under Present Conditions

Present conditions make party building exceptionally difficult, not because the need for a party is unclear, but because the material foundations required for one are weak. In much of the United States, and especially in the urban centers of Utah, the working class exists in a highly fragmented and disorganized state. For example, union membership is 4.1%, and the quality of that membership is highly questionable, as most union members tend to understand unions as a service they pay for rather than a real political association tied to their daily life. This is discussed at length in a prior piece in this journal. Basic forms of collective organization are thin, episodic, or absent altogether. Where struggle does occur, it is often symbolic, short-lived, or immediately routed into institutional channels that neutralize its development.

This reality imposes strict limits on what party building can mean in the immediate term. A revolutionary organization cannot be built in abstraction from the forces it intends to lead. Without an organized working class capable of sustained collective action, party building risks becoming rhetorical, scholastic, or self-referential. Under present conditions, the primary obstacle is not theoretical confusion alone, but the absence of viable struggle through which theory, leadership, and unity can be tested and forged.

For this reason, mass movement building must be understood as the necessary foundation for all other revolutionary tasks. However, this task is often understood vaguely, as a matter of mobilizing large numbers, producing visible protest, or accumulating episodic actions. Such activity may generate attention, but it does not generate power. Viable struggle means something more demanding. It refers to struggle waged by organized working class forces capable of exerting sustained pressure and plausibly winning concrete gains.

When struggle is viable and the intention is to actually win, participants are forced to confront real constraints and real possibilities. They must decide how far to go, how much risk to take, whom to trust, and how to respond to repression, compromise, or betrayal. These conditions produce a qualitatively different relationship to struggle than symbolic action. People are compelled to develop judgment, discipline, confidence, and collective responsibility. Struggle becomes a school that teaches how to build and navigate real world power.

Economic pressure alone does not produce this outcome. Left to itself, mass participation tends to fragment, exhaust itself, or be absorbed by existing institutions. The history of the US labor movement repeatedly demonstrates that spontaneity without revolutionary consciousness does not culminate in durable gains or revolutionary struggle.

At the same time, revolutionary consciousness cannot be built with slogans, moral appeals, or abstract political education. Revolutionary consciousness does not develop because people are persuaded by speeches or social media that they are oppressed. It becomes possible to develop in a real way when people encounter the limits of existing arrangements of power through struggle and acquire the practical capacity to act collectively against those limits. Revolution is a conscious struggle for power, neither workers nor communists learn what power is in a real sense before confronting it as a practical problem.

These realities define the specific role of communists and the pre-party under present conditions in Utah. The level of basic working class organization is extremely low. Even elementary forms of collective structure are usually absent. This means that for communists here, mass movement building is not one task among many. It is the primary task that all other tasks depend on. It requires conscious intervention to raise the level of organization, discipline, and strategic coherence of working class struggle from near zero.

Even the act of unionizing must be understood in this light. It is not a technical or neutral process, but a political intervention that shapes how workers understand leadership, power, and victory. By ceding this terrain to establishment unions, social democrats, and Democratic Party affiliated nonprofits while confining themselves to commentary, communists have historically separated themselves from the primary site where consciousness is actually produced.

In Utah, however, this pattern presents both a problem and an opportunity. Existing forces, including organized labor, liberal nonprofits, and social democratic formations, have demonstrated little capacity or desire to undertake the basic organization of the working class. At the same time, unions and class struggle enjoy broad popular legitimacy, and there exists a significant, though unrealized, desire for organization. This contradiction is sharp; organization is wanted, but no force has yet demonstrated the ability to provide it.

This creates real stakes. The political force that first develops the practical skills necessary to organize workers at scale will wield disproportionate influence over the emerging movement. This influence will not be secured through ideological clarity alone, but through demonstrated usefulness (in the eyes of workers) in struggle.

These conditions place concrete requirements on revolutionaries themselves. Viable struggle cannot be built by individuals who lack basic practical organizing skills and social competence. Revolutionaries must be able to talk to strangers, listen seriously, build trust, facilitate meetings, resolve conflicts, identify organic leaders, and sustain relationships over time. These are not secondary traits or optional talents. They are preconditions for embedding oneself in mass struggle. An organization composed of individuals who cannot function in this way will fail to rise to the occasion and instead get stuck in rhetoric, abstraction, or purity contests.

The immediate task of revolutionaries should be understood as the development of a dialectical unity. On the one hand, revolutionaries must enter into real sites of struggle and participate in and in fact instigate class conflict. Examples of instigation are any process that forces struggle; a prime example is a unionization campaign that forces workers to confront the power relationship in their workplace. Through this participation individual communists need to learn, in practice, how to organize workers, develop leadership, and sustain collective action under pressure. To beat this point to death: there can be no collective ability to carry out these essential tasks without your individual capability.

On the other hand, communists must consciously summate the lessons and skills produced through this participation and deliberately proliferate them among the working class. As mass struggle advances, it becomes possible for communists to acquire new knowledge and capacities. By further spreading this knowledge and these capacities, and thereby raising the general level of organization and struggle, new conditions and new problems again emerge. These in turn produce new lessons that can be systematized and taught, further raising the level of struggle. This iterative cycle of participation, summation, and proliferation must form the basis of how revolutionaries understand their essential immediate tasks today.

III. United Front Work as an Expression of Power

United front work should be understood as an expression of power, not as a substitute for building it. Detached from a real mass base, united front efforts become speculative, performative, or opportunist. Alliances cannot be meaningfully tested without stakes, and stakes cannot exist without organized working class forces.

Various social forces (e.g homeowners, small business owners, students, labor bureaucrats, etc) only reveal their real positions when confronted with conflicts that matter materially. Viable struggle creates these conditions. Without it, assumptions about progressiveness, reliability, or shared interests between various classes and class strata remain hypothetical, and united front work collapses into declarations of unity or symbolic coordination.

Effective united front work therefore necessarily presupposes a mass base capable not only of mobilization, but of disciplined action oriented toward winning and altering conditions on the ground. Effective united front work also presupposes a communist organization capable of maintaining political independence while engaging tactically. Without such an organization, alliances tend to dissolve into liquidation when mass movements adapt themselves to the least contentious political line in order to preserve unity.

In the present moment, it is possible for common cause to be built around the immediate task of expanding the real organization of workers and increasing the capacity of struggles to win. This creates the concrete basis for collaboration with sections of existing labor leadership, parts of the left, and elements of middle strata actors – such as middle class liberals with concerns for democracy – whose interests align with strengthened working class organization. Communists forming alliances  with these forces is neither a principled endorsement nor long-term strategic bloc. Rather, this is a practical arrangement rooted in concrete struggle and stakes.

United front work must be continuously evaluated through practice. Who holds under pressure? Who retreats when costs rise? Who attempts to redirect struggle into “safe” channels? The answers to these questions can only be observed in the midst of conflicts that carry real consequences.

For all these reasons, united front work can only advance in proportion to the size and capacity of the mass movement and the strength of communist organization within it. Attempts to conduct it in advance of these conditions reproduce the illusion that political effectiveness can be achieved without material force.

IV. An Iterative Process Grounded in Viable Struggle

The relationship between party building, mass movement building, and united front work is not linear. It is iterative and mutually conditioning.

Party building cannot outrun the development of viable struggle, but it must advance alongside it. Mass struggle that does not aim at winning will exhaust itself or collapse into ritual. Political organization that cannot lead viable fights tends to compensate for a lack of substance with grandiosity and sectarianism. United front work can only develop to the extent that both exist as real world forces.

At every stage, the basic organization of workers engaged in struggles with real stakes and the possibility of victory remains foundational. From these struggles emerge lessons. From lessons emerge theory, which guides further organization. From organization emerges the capacity to wage struggle at a higher level. This cycle cannot be short-circuited without producing errors and distortions.

The essential task of communists today is therefore not to correct errors in words alone, but to overcome them in practice. We should measure our work not by how radical or correct we sound or how large our movement appears, but by whether we are demonstrating a capability to produce stronger forces, deeper discipline, and an increasing ability to confront and defeat real adversaries.

Immediate and Dependent Priorities for Revolutionaries.

This ordering is not a checklist but a discipline. Each level depends on the ones before it.

1. Development of individual revolutionary capacity. This is the acquisition of basic practical organizing skills, social competence, discipline, and the ability to function effectively in working class settings on an individual level.
2. Embedding capable revolutionaries in real sites of struggle. This is sustained and constant participation in concrete conflicts where organization, leadership, and winning are live questions.
3. Building viable mass organization of workers at sites of struggle. Specifically with the objective of generally raising the level of discipline, durability, and strategic coherence of struggles so that victories become materially conceivable.
4. Collective synthesis of lessons from struggle. Specifically with the goal of producing theory grounded in practice and embedding it organizationally rather than rhetorically.
5. Proportional development of communist political organization. Communists must foreground the long term goal of advancing party building in step with the real experience, capacity, and consciousness produced in mass struggle.
6. Proportional united front work. Forming and testing alliances based on the strength of the mass movement and the influence of communist organization within it.