by Comrade Drake
It is an unfortunate reality in our capitalist society that divisiveness is endemic in our daily lives. Despite our best efforts such divisiveness can enter our organizing spaces, manifesting in sectarianism and compromising unity and impacting our ability to effectively organize our workplaces and our communities.
The rich history of our movement grants us the privilege of looking to the past to determine our path forward, and in this vein I’m reminded of a phrase from the Chinese socialist period: “Cure the sickness to save the patient”. In context:
Finally, in opposing subjectivism, sectarianism and stereotyped Party writing we must have in mind two purposes: first, “learn from past mistakes to avoid future ones”, and second, “cure the sickness to save the patient”. The mistakes of the past must be exposed without sparing anyone’s sensibilities; it is necessary to analyse and criticize what was bad in the past with a scientific attitude so that work in the future will be done more carefully and done better. This is what is meant by “learn from past mistakes to avoid future ones”. But our aim in exposing errors and criticizing shortcomings, like that of a doctor curing a sickness, is solely to save the patient and not to doctor him to death. A person with appendicitis is saved when the surgeon removes his appendix.
So long as a person who has made mistakes does not hide his sickness for fear of treatment or persist in his mistakes until he is beyond cure, so long as he honestly and sincerely wishes to be cured and to mend his ways, we should welcome him and cure his sickness so that he can become a good comrade. We can never succeed if we just let ourselves go, and lash out at him. In treating an ideological or a political malady, one must never be rough and rash but must adopt the approach of “curing the sickness to save the patient”, which is the only correct and effective method.
There was a comrade in my old organization who would show up consistently late to meetings and events and forget to complete tasks they had volunteered for. Perhaps understandably, this was incredibly frustrating for not only me but for the other members in the organization as well, and this frustration ultimately came to a head when they were an hour late to an event we were tabling at they had committed to bringing supplies for. In our debrief meeting we brought this up, and they apologized for it, saying that they had a variety of personal issues that made it difficult for them to keep on top of a schedule, and also correctly criticized me for being undisciplined about planning events ahead of time.
My own frustration blinded me to not only the underlying issue behind their truancy but also to my own unprincipled behavior. Had I approached the issue as “curing the sickness to save the patient” then perhaps I would’ve also seen the sickness within myself that needed curing. With this in mind, we reengaged from a place of mutual best interest. They committed to showing up on time, and I committed to being more disciplined about event planning.
The analogy isn’t exact in the sense that all of us hold some mix of correct and incorrect ideas and in practice they are often rarely as clear cut as something like appendicitis is. However in today’s “rough and rash” political environment where debate amongst the broader left tends to be fought in the heavily polemicized social media thunderdome we should actively work within ourselves to approach disagreement with the understanding of mutual interest. Like an immune system fighting off an infection we are all constantly waging a struggle between bourgeois and proletarian ideas within ourselves and it would be a disservice to ourselves, our movement, and our comrades to be unnecessarily harsh during periods of ideological conflict.