Modern Communism and the Political Legacy of Hardial Bains - Part 9: The Basic Organization

In the last issue, we looked at Hardial Bains' position that for democracy to function a communist party must not only uphold the right to conscience, but must also adopt concrete measures to ensure its guarantee in practice. Of course, such a principle also holds for the society as a whole. However, he insisted that guaranteeing the right to conscience is only the starting point of democracy within an organization. Without internal structures to ensure that the opinions of the membership are both heard and acted upon, then democracy is merely a hollow shell devoid of content.

Within a modern communist party, decision-making flows from the bottom to the top (democracy), while implementation of those decisions flows from the top down (centralism). Finding the right balance between democracy and centralism, that balance which ensures that the membership is sovereign, is one of the main problems which must preoccupy all of the members and supporters of a communist party on a permanent basis if it is to avoid the bureaucratism which has destroyed so many revolutionary parties in the past. Hardial Bains insisted that the key to solving this problem was to ensure that the basic organizations of the party functioned as they should.

The basic organization, the foundation of any Leninist party, is a collective comprised of a relatively small number of members who are involved in common political work. The size of a basic organization is kept small, not for security considerations, but because there are practical limits to the size of collectives beyond which they lose initiative and efficiency. Hardial Bains often commented that the basic organization was the greatest discovery of the twentieth century, but unfortunately also the most neglected and resisted form of organization within the international communist movement. He went so far as to state that all of the failures and setbacks of the communist movement during the latter half of the twentieth century could ultimately be traced to the failure of the basic organizations to function as the political base of various communist parties.

In order for a basic organization to exercise its sovereignty within a communist party, it must be a genuinely political organization. In other words, it cannot be content with coordinating the work of its members or with leading the day-to-day struggles of the workers. A basic organization must be profoundly political in the true sense of the word. Whatever specific work it carries, it must also be capable of analyzing the local, national and international politics and providing leadership on all of these fronts. Only if they belong to such a basic organization will members of a communist party be capable of exercising their right to participate in decision-making or be capable of defending their party against opportunism and bureaucratism.

The Constitution of CPC(M-L) has always attached the greatest importance to the basic organizations. They are the only organizations within the Party which have the power to admit, discipline or expel members, or to select delegates to congresses. These measures were adopted as a safeguard against the kinds of abuses of members that occurred in many communist parties and to protect CPC(M-L) from any attempt to divert it from its revolutionary goals, as had also occurred in many other parties.

However, constitutions alone are meaningless without the development of a political culture and organization to defend them, and in a communist party that culture and organization must originate in the basic organizations. So it is not surprising that, during the last few years of his life, Hardial Bains' main work to implement his vision of a modern communist party was aimed at building and strengthening the Party's basic organizations. He led a consistent struggle to defend the integrity of the basic organizations, to ensure that they were political organizations and not reduced to mere coordinating committees. He fought for the principle that every member of CPC(M-L) must not only belong to a basic organization, but also that no member, no matter what position they occupied, could place themselves above the basic organization. He emphasized that unless the problems of building and strengthening the basic organizations were solved, no other problem of party-building could possibly be solved. On the ideological front, the main struggle was against the bourgeois concept of individualism, in which individuals refuse to work collectively and place their own interests in opposition to the interests of the collective. During the last few years of his life, Hardial Bains led a concerted struggle within the Party to eliminate this culture of individualism and to strengthen the culture of collective decision-making, beginning with the basic organizations. The speeches he made in 1996 and 1997 reflected this struggle.