Seattle Communists 2017 Summation

(Note: This is purely an individual reflection, not any kind of official or collective statement.)

The Left needs a better culture of self-reflection, as opposed to boosteristic self-praise (or hyperbolic “self-criticism” focused on individual moral failings rather than collective decisions, good and bad). So, in that spirit, here are 4 failures and 3 successes from Seattle Communists’s first full year as an independent CLP chapter.

SC has focused on:

1. re-establishing Q-Patrol as our first mass work project;
2. building ourselves into a fully-logistically-developed organization with a functional democratic process;
3. developing internal political education;
4. establishing a presence in general as what is (to my knowledge) the only nondenominational revolutionary group in our city;
5. towards the end of the year, establishing a mutual aid grocery delivery program (Serve the People).

First, our mistakes:

1. Q-Patrol should not have started out as organizationally independent. There was no material need to develop two parallel organizational structures (SC and Q-Patrol) simultaneously, especially given the heavy overlap of individuals. Writing a constitution for Q-Patrol sucked up a lot of time and energy early on that would have been better spent on other things. Instead, it should have just been a program directly under the SC aegis and not spun off until it was…