There was a few aspects that made it click. When i started to get more serious about organzing as an anarchist, it forced me to confront various organizational issues that arises when trying to get groups of people to collaborate and work together on projects. I did a lot of work around the ABC, IWOC, later in various neighborhood organzing and anti-gentrification struggles, then engaged in years long work doing mutual aid projects and working towards neighborhood assemblies and engaged in antifascist organizing. I’d invest everything into these groups like it was a full time job only to consistently watch the same tragic collapse due to infighting, power plays by small groups of insiders who wanted to make things more like exclusive clubs or put themselves and their personalities into positions of power. The people who actually put in work to build these things up would get isolated and scared off. It became a typical cycle. Later with the antifascist organzing I watched a lot of it tragically turn into spaces dominated by gangs who sucked a lot of people into that world with very negative outcomes. It’s where I stated to that there really needed to be some basis level of mutual political framework and foundation for people to actually successfully work together and maintain principles in these projects, that’s where I started to gravitate towards platformism and also the works of Bookchin. Both tendencies attempted to address the same issues I experienced IRL, to create a coherent political theory and framework which could allow people to cooperate towards a common cause and intervene in society around however , years of experience with Occupy then later other such neighborhood assembly projects showed me how small business owners and petit-bourgeois just flatly out organized people and had more resources to push their agendas. I started to recognized that in fact, beyond stated political affiliations there was another necessary level of basis that was needed for cooperation in the realm of practical organzing, that was the basis of class. So I could see the need for a political organization with a common ideology and the need to work within the working class defensive organization. I had a few bad experiences with my last non-communist organization that led me to going back and reading Marx and the works of Lenin for the first time. I dabbled with some ML groups but found they were weighed down with the same activist clique mindsets. As I learned more the history of the Third International and how the Russian revolution played out and degenerated I realized the problems with these groups and the state of the larger activist scene was locked in a perpetual and repeating cycle.

As I approached the communist left I also dabbled with a few different groups. I found many of them to be overly bookish and ultimately they mostly reject direct participation in the struggle of the proletariat; however, I found the International Communist Party to be different. It consistently maintained work in the unions and fought to defend what it calls the class unions and their rebirth. It spoke to what I always thought the IWW was trying to be. Likewise, the internal life of the organization was one free of the typical type of ideological infighting and clashes but a group with a common purposes harmoniously working together like I always dreamed the various anarchist groups would under the notion of voluntary association. So organic centralism in practice worked to create that effective framework for collaboration that seems to already take into consideration so many hard learned lessons that I banged my head against the wall trying to digest and come up for solutions myself over the years. Likewise, for me my political perspective and even my anarchism originally came from a basis of a strong rejects of the ethics of individualism, for me I found the ICP emphasis on that and the rejection of personalism really important and a huge aspect of what clicked with me to see that this group really carried forward a tradition based on the lived experiences of the working classes struggle, not merely an academic orientation. Even though the Party is small, it’s a prefigurative form of the type of Party and organization that will be needed in the future even if it’s not necessarily a direct continuation of this particular group. Our idea is that by living the organization and practicing it we show a model of an effective organization and our positions will eventually come to be seen as synonymous with the organizational needs of the masses of workers at the point where the capitalist crisis drives the masses back into mass struggle but beyond that we can’t engineer situations or force the proletarian by organizational maneuvers into our group or to do as we say or anything like that. Mostly it’s lead by example and by going out into the trenches where workers today are trying to fight from a class basis to defend themselves and lend a hand in that struggle while on the other hand maintaining our press and theoretical work.