Time To Think
“The Workers Party was born on Christmas day, 1921, and no date could be more appropriate. It is not that Jesus Christ was born on that day, although the chances are at least 1 to 364 that he was. And it is not that Christmas is the one day set aside by our highly specialized culture for the business of charity and the love of the neighbor — or at least for the mailing of an engraved neighborly formula to all the addresses contained in a card catalog.
The reason why it was appropriate for the Workers Party to be born on Christmas day, 1921, is that on that day, once in every seven years, the workers get two days of liberty in succession. They get that much opportunity to think.”
- Max Eastman
Like Max Eastman pointed out, holidays are important most of all as a time to think. As a public sector worker with a meager 3 weeks of vacation a year, federal holidays have a special significance for me. Not because I honor Presidents Day in any meaningful way, but because I get a chance to think about how to do away with presidents.
These days, it’s been hard for me to think. I’m perpetually overcommitted to activism, in too many group chats, and not getting enough sleep. I work a manual labor job that I’ve always valued for letting me work with my hands and let my mind wander. But banging and clanging in the cold weather saps at my energy. I used to switch off driving with my coworker, affording me a cherished hour or so hanging in the truck where I could read or chat. Lately we have larger crews who aren’t yet authorized to drive, so I have to drive both directions. Not much time to think, mostly just traffic.
In our party, too, it’s hard to find time to think. It’s easy to fall into the pattern of meeting, meeting, meeting, chat argument, meeting, meeting, event. It’s hard to carve out time to debrief and build relationships outside of transactional one on ones. To ask your crew to take a second to step back and assess where we’re at feels like making yourself a burden, or adding another thing to every one’s to-do list when we’re overcommitted enough as it is.
A recent article on Trotsky’s struggle for intra-party democracy in 1923 shows that this isn’t a new problem. It claimed that his critiques of the bureaucratization of the Party were seen by party officials as “counter-productive of the basic imperative of establishing a stable economy and political order” (Harris 110). The previous debates stirred by the Workers Opposition in 1920-21 had led to practical work being ground to a halt amidst the “angry debates about what had to be done.” The lesson taken was that “it was better to have a single agreed policy about which officialdom could be rallied, a clear chain of command and a flow of detailed instructions” (Harris 112).
The Politburo responded to Trotsky’s Declaration of the 46 with a call for Trotsky “to be more involved in the ‘practical work of the Party and Soviet organs of which he is a member” (Harris 118). Basically, he needed to shut up and “do the work.” In this atmosphere, party discipline was placed at odds with party democracy, or preconditioned it when it should have been the other way around.
Stalin’s road to power wasn’t (solely) through dirty tricks or secret police, it was through a call to focus on practical tasks and administration and to cut out the noise. Stalin’s appeals were rooted in a deeply held belief in the party – that there was an enormous amount of work to do. Factions were at best a distraction and at worst an active threat that foreign powers could exploit to destroy the Union.
My intention is not to draw exact modern day parallels to the party battles between Trotsky and Stalin. I’ll leave that for the ever sharp polemicists of the cruise missile left like Arash Azizi. What I intend is to draw out the long history of democracy being framed as a burden on discipline and efficiency. To be clear, it isn’t easy and doesn’t guarantee success to have more democratic organizations. But in a society where time to think is precious and hard to come by, we should be more generous in our Party than we are now.
This holiday season, take time to take a break from immediate tasks and sit down and think. Open up a blank page and write down your lessons from the past year. Meet for coffee or dinner with a friend you made in The Work and talk about why you do what you do. Enjoy the holiday and the time to think it allows.
