Mark Phillips: The American Question

Draper:

From the point of view of the individual socialist who wants to 'do something', we would summarize our suggestion as follows:

(1) Crystallize a circle of co-thinkers around you wherever you are, in the course of your activity in the arena of the social struggle that goes along with your situation. You are the smallest-unit political center there is.

(2) Make contact with a political center that makes sense from your own point of view, for help in literature, advice, and outside linkups, and work with it to whatever extent you find useful. But there is no reason against having this relationship with more than one political center, if they suit your own political views. Such a political center may even be a sect; but if you do not join it, it relates to you only as one political center among others. This relationship is a hang-loose relationship: if you do not have a vote in deciding its affairs, it is likewise true that it cannot tell you what to do by exerting its sect 'discipline' over your own judgment. You do not erect an organizational barrier between you as the adherent of one sect and someone else who cleaves to another sect or none. In your work, you use whatever literature you wish, whatever their source. You will use your money not for the sect's fund drives but to finance your own work. If enough take this course to break up the sect system, that would be a good thing for the future potentialities of an American socialist movement.

There is a better chance of a genuine socialist movement arising out of such a hang-loose complex of relationships than out of the fossilized world of the sects. We are not under the impression that a very large number of individuals are going to start tomorrow by following the course we have described above. We have been interested so far simply in illustrating the way in which socialist movements have arisen elsewhere - the only way, in broad outline. We have sketched the kind of development which provides an alternative to the sect mode of organization which is driving American socialism into the ground.

--Hal Draper, "Sects and Sectism", 1973, collected in Socialism From Below.

Draper's proposal of "political centers" seems similar to what we here at Trouble-Tickets have meant as we've tried to examine the logic of "networking". By network "node" -- analogous to a server computer somewhere on the Internet with its own unique network address, like the one which serves the Trouble-Tickets web site -- we've meant a grouping of reasonably like-minded friends who have a point of view, who like working together, who don't like working in the various sectoids they've encountered, and who are comfortable with the approach of making their contribution in a way which suits their personal talents and inclinations.

This is more specific than Draper's broader concept. For instance, Draper's political centers could be grouplets of people who detest each other but who feel the martyristic need to band together from principled agreement over something or other. We don't want to do that, or I certainly don't, anyway. The point is, Draper's political center and Trouble-Tickets' node seem similar when viewed from the outside. Small grouplets with something distinctive to say.

There are a couple of other differences. Draper doesn't show any interest in how his political centers might interact. Trouble-Tickets has suggested that -- following the logic of the analogy with computer networking -- nodes must have protocols for relationship. What those are, we don't know, merely that without them things are a mess.

Also, Draper leaves the door open for his political centers to become organizing centers in the manner of Iskra. We're not interested in becoming an organizing center, and I suspect anyway that Draper's analogy with Iskra is false because overly abstract. Iskra's network of agents was necessary because Iskra was contraband. It had to be smuggled, necessitating an underground apparatus, that is, a specific type of organizing. Iskra didn't have "organizers" per se, it had smugglers. I'm not sold that this analogy makes sense for us.

What most interests me about Draper's vision is its organicism. His political centers emerge from real life: workplaces, groups of acquaintances, local struggles, small issues. It's a vision of how uneven development works at the smallest level, the level of relationships between leaders and the people around them. It needs to be concretized, IMO, particularly by looking at what its protocols would need to be in order to be healthy.