By Sean Malloy
"This is a unique historical period. The collapse of Stalinism has opened the way in the US for some regroupment beyond the old formations and the old currents", said Malik Miah, a member of the leading committee of the northern California Committees of Correspondence.
Miah spoke to Green Left Weekly at length about the committees while he was in Australia last month as a guest speaker at the Democratic Socialist Party Activist Education conference.
The Committees of Correspondence (which takes its name from a group involved in the American Revolution of 1776) was formed after a split at the 25th convention of the Communist Party. CPUSA members and delegates critical of the party's leadership were denied entry into the conference. As a result, 200 delegates met in an alternative venue and formed the CoC with an initial base of 900 members. In July 1992 the CoC held a founding conference in Berkeley.
Miah emphasised that "the CoC is an organisation in formation, it is not yet an organisation.
"It was founded in July 1992, with 1300 people, the majority of them not from the Communist Party.
"Its objective is to reach out to all left forces with the idea of regroupment of the left and socialist movement and build either a new democratic socialist or democratic movement. I say either because there are differences on whether it should be a democratic left or democratic and socialist left."
Miah estimates CoC's membership at around 1800, with the biggest components, making up around 1200 members, in California and New York. The CoC is present in 36 out of 50 states.
"It has been growing at roughly 100 new members a month since July", said Miah, "just by people hearing about it.
"Mainly a lot of leftists are joining, people who are involved in union politics, women's politics, environmental politics — people involved in politics as radical activists or socialist activists who recognise you can't just be an individual radical in one movement; you need a party or some kind of structure that is broader.
"There haven't been a lot of new young people yet because the CoC hasn't reached out with a paper or activity. But the fact that you can recruit 100 or so radical activists who have been involved in politics for 10, 15, 20 years without doing much shows the CoC's potential; it shows people really want to build something new.
"It's like a coalition at this stage, which in the US political sense is a step forward. The idea that people from very different political same room and say 'Yes, we all agree we need something different to what we've been' is a step forward."
Joining the committees means paying US$25 a year. Members receive monthly discussion bulletins and can get involved in CoC meetings in their region.
Miah used northern California as an example to explain how CoC meetings and task forces worked.
"We have monthly branch meetings where everybody in the San Francisco branch gets together. We set up task forces out of the branches on gay rights, economy, peace, elderly, trade unions etc. So different people who work in those areas can get together and discuss what they are doing and report back to the branch.
"We also have monthly meetings of CoC trade union activists in the district. These meetings discuss what people are doing in the unions and how CoC can try to build progressive ideas in the unions. We also try to organise discussions and forums.
"The youth comrades," Miah added, "also meet every couple of months to do the same thing, to discuss how to take the ideas of the committee, and progressive ideas, to young people. The women's liberation task force is in the process of doing the same thing.
"The most developed work right now is probably the trade union work, because a lot of people who are meeting are already active.
"Some of these other task forces are more uneven. The whole point, however, is not just to have theoretical or discussion politics but also to get involved in some activity in the name of CoC."
There are differences on the question of political activity in the CoC.
"I should say this is my conception of how the process is unfolding; there is no agreement in the Committees.
"Some people say let's do less activity; I would say do more activity. I don't think activity is counterposed to discussion. Some people say we should go slow in activity because we must first decide whether we should exist and what kind of group we should be. The problem with that perspective is that most people are already active. The point is to make members identify their activity more with the CoC. However, all of these things are being discussed.
"In a year we'll have a real founding conference to decide its character and what CoC is; now we are in discussion."
Miah highlighted the speed in which a broad spectrum of left activists have joined CoC and have adopted a fresh approach to working together.
"It has been less than a year, six months since the July conference, and people coming out of Trotskyist traditions, Stalinist traditions, Maoist traditions, Social Democratic traditions, anarchist traditions om and said 'OK, we need to build a new left in this country' and decided, instead of starting with differences, to start with agreements.
"Objectively speaking, CoC has great potential, because there is such a void on the left in the US right now. There is no major left formation that is trying to present a progressive perspective to workers or the social movements in a coherent way.
"As an organisation like CoC coalesces into a formation that stands for socialism and stands for progressive ideas, it will attract new members. Once CoC establishes itself, in a year or so, and goes out and says 'We want to recruit you to our organisation if you agree with these basic ideas, anti-imperialism, anti-racism etc', we will get a lot of people to sign up.
"CoC is such a leap forward in such a void", added Miah. "Despite the illusions many people have with the collapse of Stalinism there are enough young people and others who do believe we need some kind of radical or left movement functioning to get things moving. I think the biggest challenge for those of us trying to organise it is to begin with what we agree with instead of what we don't agree with."