Regarding Collectivity and Discipline

The Communist League of Uganda is already existing for over one year. We have advanced in the construction of branches and cells, still the organization is somewhat disjointed. The reason is the simultaneous growth of central and local organs.

Collectivity is needed as the “grout” among our members. This is what differs a communist party from a bourgeois party like the NRM or NUP which might have a common identity as party members but lack a collectivist spirit. But what is a collective? The Soviet pedagogist Makarenko had a clear answer to this question:

“It is a wrong imagination of a collective if it is being only thought of as a sum of single individuals. The collective is a social, living organism. It is an organism because it has organs: It has authority and responsibility, mutual relations and mutual dependency. When all of this is missing, then it is not a collective; then it is just a bulk of or some kind of gathering of people.”¹

The only authority the NRM has is brute force and the only responsibility is towards Museveni himself; the only authority the NUP has is blind faith into Bobi Wine as a political leader, responsibility is absent due to the lack of political power. Both parties lack a clear ideology that permeates the hearts and minds of their followers. Instead both claim, along with the UPC, to be social-democratic parties. This issue was already addressed by me in an article last year². I will not repeat it here in depth.

Currently not all factors are functional within the CLU. We have to achieve the mentioned “mutual relations and mutual dependency” by subordinating all branches and organs of the CLU under the principles of democratic centralism. If we don’t do so, we will work disjointed, isolated and would be an easy target therefore. The young role model communist Lei Feng wrote into his famous diary:

“Drops of water go to form the ocean. A man only acquires strength by linking himself with the collective cause.”³

Linking with the collective cause also needs organizational discipline. This discipline also grows out of the role model function of every communist. A communist party that is not in charge cannot rely on the state apparatus to back up its authority, it has to be rooted among the masses by trust and therefore a natural authority. The first step is the recognition of the necessity of discipline for the socialist cause among the members of the CLU. Every member has to recognize to give up some illusory “personal freedom” for the liberation of the collective as a whole. Engels said: “Freedom is the insight into necessity.”⁴ Free will of humans is not nonexistent but limited by the material conditions they live in. Therefore recognizing these material conditions and their necessities are not limiting us but give us the freedom to fully max out their potential instead of dreaming about the impossible.

What does this have to do with discipline? You cannot enforce discipline only with punishments; punishments are ineffective when there is no functional collectivist mindset. Then those who got punished will just evade their punishment by quitting. The best guarantee for upholding discipline and the correct political course is taking care that the membership is composed of comrades with a clear proletarian class consciousness and knowledge in the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. This is like building a house: The best guarantee for the stability of a house is having a solid foundation. Without a solid foundation the walls and the roof might be well-made and still be under the constant threat of collapsing.