Organisation and Substitutionism
Nineb Lamassu
United Kingdom
Oct. 8, 06
“A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves”. Frantz Fanon
In a recent exchange of emails between a friend and I, he wrote, “Everyone is born patriotic (Umtanaya) and then one joins a political party to become a partisan (Gabbaya), and only then one becomes a politician.”
I was bewildered as to how can my friend’s conclusions lead to such a linear evolution, one that would make Khalti Khinzada – if a party member - a world class politician and Noam Chomsky an apolitical patriotic.
Since this anonymous friend of mine holds certain political weight in a leading Assyrian political entity, I felt it necessary to reduce my two cents on this subject to writing. It is my hope that this humble attempt will initiate a necessary discussion on organisation, its role and necessity within our community.
What is an organisation? This question would appear to be very simple and amongst the readers there will be without a doubt many members of various organisations, who will perceive this question an idle one. But this is not so at all. As Zinoviev correctly noted, “When we are dealing with scientific definitions in those fields where masses of people are involved in a living way – this is entirely applicable to social organisations – then you will nearly always see that the representatives of different classes and world-outlooks define differently the essence of this or that social organisation.”[1] For example the initial wave of Assyrian Diaspora that has by now semi-assimilated – if not fully - within the western societies and succeeded in forming a special Assyrian bourgeois class, may perceive the Assyrian American National Federation (AANF) to be a platform to socialise and sometimes render petty deeds to feel good about ones self, while the capitalist among them see it as a waste of time or as an exploitative medium to maximise profit. But the wretched Assyrian in today’s Iraq may expect the organisation to offer relief, and better ones status by advocating and securing Assyrian rights in the new Iraq .
Despite this the fact remains that a group of conscious Assyrians established the AANF as a desperate attempt to attend to the plight of the Assyrians immediately after the Semele massacre of 1933. This the AANF clarifies in the following words, “Historically, the Federation, as the Assyrian National Federation, had its birth in the fateful year of 1933, and was inspired by the merciless massacres of the Assyrians in Iraq .”[2] The AANF believed that this can only be achieved if all the Assyrian association of America worked in concert, “Pride and glory in the ancient dignity of our ancestors entail the assumption of certain obligations towards the remnant of our race, the numerous unrelated and disconnected associations, no matter how great or useful individually, cannot fulfil such obligations. The essential nature of the Assyrian American National Federation, Inc., is to assure functionally unity among Assyrian organizations.”[3]
Therefore the need of establishing an organisation advocating the rights of the Assyrians through unity was deemed necessary, and AANF was to fill that void.
Why do we need organisations? In an ideal world the people are capable of changing their situation, yet most of our people do not perceive themselves to be able to change their deplorable conditions. If our people were conscious of their capabilities then change would have been very simple.
Since our nation has lost power for a while now and has been under the yoke of foreign rule, our people have been forced to hold all sorts of different ideas inside their heads, and the level of consciousness among our people is never uniform. My late father used to remark, “Our people carry a foreign head on their shoulders”. Therefore, we maybe able to think more like Arabs, Turks, Kurds and westerners rather than think Assyrian.
Consequently our people can be segregated into three different categories. Some – usually a relatively small minority – accept nearly all the values of the powers ruling over them.
Others – again a usually small minority – reject the dominant view put forward by the media, education system and other major institutions of the ruling power. Instead they develop a view which challenges those ideas and present an alternative.
But the majority of the people most of the time hold to neither of these total views. They reject some ideas of the ruling powers while accepting others. They tend to accept the basic organisation of society as it is, but want to alleviate its worst effects.
It is precisely due to this that we need an organised group of people. History has shown that people need a coherent theory and organisation to chart their way from oppression to emancipation. An organised leadership homogenised in thought, in touch with its people, and capable to lead must provide this theory and organisation.
But this leadership must come from the people and not be imposed. It is this fact that Frantz Fanon warns against, “If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go swimming across the river or going by boat. The bridge should not be ‘parachuted down’ from above; it should not be imposed by a dues ex machine upon the social scene; on the contrary it should come from the muscles and the brains of the citizens.”[4]
Why do we need leadership? Leadership is necessary precisely because of the unevenness in thought and stance among our people, and because the dominant ideas in our society are those of a foreign culture and people. But every member of the community has to regard him or herself a leader. Leadership has to exist at all levels – local and international – and stems naturally from democratic centralism. It means that those building the organisation fight for their ideas and tactics within the organisation and within the community. So an organisation does not consist of a fixed leadership which always knows best.
Thus, although leadership is necessary, we must however, be vigilant not to substitute leadership for a leader; again, Frantz Fanon warns against this by saying, “We ought not to cultivate the exceptional or to seek for a hero, who is another form of leader. We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their brains, fill them with ideas, change them and make them into human beings.”[5]
Any successful organisation presents a special programme upon its inception. Through this programme the organisation analyses a phenomenon and offers an alternative and means to achieve this proposed alternative, i.e. set some objectives for itself as the representative of the people.
The leadership of the organisation must be in touch with its people and their needs, otherwise it will remain a small utopian minority. For the organisation to maintain a strong bond with the people and be in touch with its needs it is necessary to recruit individuals into its ranks and turn them in to cadres.
Thus defining what constitutes a member is a necessity. The organisation is not to be made up of just anybody wishing to belong to it, but only those willing to accept the discipline of the organisation. In normal times the numbers of these will be only a relatively small percentage of the people but in periods of upsurge they will grow immeasurably. For example, the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM) had relatively small followers during the eighties but this fundamentally changed in the nineties after the UK and US imposed a “Save Haven” policed by the “no-fly zone”.
Thus an upsurge naturally leads to an increase in membership. This membership or base growth is usually referred to as horizontal expansion which must be paralleled with vertical growth i.e. the organisational education of the new members. The education of the cadre is of pivotal importance and if not implemented it would result in opportunism and other negative manifestations. Therefore any horizontal growth without its vertical counterpart will naturally lead to an organisational imbalance, one that would either produce divergence from the proclaimed objectives, partisanism, substitutionism, divisions and/or even coup de grace.
On this momentous task of the leadership educating the cadres, Lenin remarks, “To forget the distinction between the vanguard and the whole of the masses gravitating towards it, to forget the vanguard’s constant duty of raising ever wider sections to its own advanced level, means simply to deceive oneself, to shut one’s eyes to the immensity of our task, and narrow down these tasks.”[6]
So how do we end up with subsititutionism? The horizontal growth without its vertical partner, the leadership’s inability to educate its cadres who in turn are responsible to educate the masses through agitation, produces an organisation where differences are covered and the undisciplined cadres are unable to weigh the importance or unimportance of these differences and to determine where, how and on whose part inconsistency is shown.
This would lead to a state of affairs in which – as Trotsky puts it – “the organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the central committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the “dictator” substitutes himself for the central committee.”[7]
This is clearly demonstrated in a letter written by the legendary Agha Pitrus in 1922. In this letter Agha Pitrus paraphrases an Assyrian leader (one which he has kept anonymous) as saying, “two Assyrians under my control is better than a million; each with his respective direction”.[8]
What is meant by subsititutionism in other words is when a potentially capable organisation seeks to put itself in place of the people it represents and seeks to take and hold power in its name, which usually results in a confusion between the organisation and what it represents. For example, until this very day many western Assyrians would construe “I am Assyrian” as being a member of Assyrian Democratic Organisation (ADO) and the reverse is also true.
To avoid this calamity the leadership must promote a discipline that exposes differences existing within the organisation to the full light of day so as to argue them out. Only in this way can the mass of members make scientific evaluation. The organ of the organisation must be open to the opinion of those it considers inconsistent. Instead of substitutionism the task of the leadership is to connect with the problems and experiences of its members and sympathisers in such a way as to achieve a synthesis that is both a practical guide to action and a springboard for further advance. Such a syntheses is meaningful to the extent that it actually guides the activities of participants and is modified in the light of practice and that changes in circumstances which it itself produces.
In conclusion, do we need organisations? Yes, as much as we need the masses: together, the people and the organisation represent a complete whole. As Trotsky puts it, “Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam”.[9]
In light of all that has been said in this article, does my friend’s equation of patriotism = partisanism = politician hold any ground? Well, that depends on the organisation and its leadership. Do we currently as Assyrians have such an organisation that could put my friend’s theory into practice and prove it correct? If there is one I am completely ignorant of it!
Despite this, the need is still to build an organisation of conscious activists that will subject their situation and that of their people as a whole to scientific scrutiny, will ruthlessly criticise their own mistakes, and will, while engaging in everyday struggles of the masses, attempt to increase their independent self activity by unremittingly opposing their ideological and practical subservience to tyranny.
Do such activists exist among us Assyrians? My recent trip to the USA lecturing for the Annual Assyrian American Convention, and my travels among the European Assyrians, and my observation through these travels allow me to hold an affirmative answer. Having said this, it is important though not to judge the capabilities of our people through individuals. That would lead to complete demoralisation because none of us is perfect. We must seek the positive in each individual, perceived as an inseparable particle of the community as a whole. Then, one would see a collective goodness worthy of ones sacrifice.
Notes:
1. G Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, ( London 1973) p1.
2. http://www.aanf.org/
3. Ibid.
4. F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London 2001) p162
5. Ibid, p158
6. V I Lenin, Collected Works, Vol VII, p265.
7. T Cliff, Trotsky on Subsitutionism, in Party and Class ( London , 1996) p, 56
8. N Nirari, Agha Pitrus Sennacherib of the Twentieth Century, translation F Pola ( San Diego , 2005) p. 258
9. L Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols ( London 1967) Vol I, p17.
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