EDIT: The original article I posted kinda sucked. I’ll keep it here for posterity if people want to read it, but I’ll replace it with a link @RedWizard posted with original resignation letter and the PSL internal response. If you want to read just the resignation letter with the PSL criticisms without any preamble, it is here.
EDIT 2: Here is the leaked PSL internal response.
Comment by @chana in the general thread: (Sorry to copy your comment here but it’s the only comment I’ve seen so far on this and it’s a good way to start off the discussion, along with summer discussion questions I’ll add below)
Comment text
Notable resignation and letter from PSL Central Committee member and related fomenting split in Brooklyn over PSL being run as a bureaucratic clique (which many will already be aware of from speaking with various PSL members trying to do more than participate in protests). PSL is good at specific local levels despite the national level dysfunction, and the vast majority of its membership good comrades. But the criticisms certainly ring true to me and are reasonable to cite as existential flaws. There is a bit of clown nonsense from the top on a regular basis (like the call for a general strike, cited in the resignation letter, lmao that is baby liberal idealism stuff).
If you’re currently unorganized don’t let this stop you from joining, it is more important to be active and learn locally from any non-abusive left space than to do nothing organized.
Discussion Questions:
- There’s a lot of PSL fans or members here so what do you think? Like overall on this news?
- Do the complaints have merit, or not? Do some do, and some don’t? Which ones? – If so, what does this mean for the left in the US? What are the solutions and what is the path from here? – If not, why don’t you think so? And what does it mean for the left in terms of factionalism and splitting?
- Do you still recommend the PSL as an organization to join? What about the DSA? Join the Democratic Party? FRSO?
PSL is now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to employ software developers to build an A.I.-powered secret police system with the objective of spying on members of every PSL branch in the country
Come the fuck on. “North korean defector” tier shit
I recommend ignoring the article and just skipping to the letter and response.
Reading the letter now, did the article just make that up and hope nobody would notice? 😭
Pretty sure yeah. They do that quite a lot.
where is the response?
Also would love to read the response if it already exists.
It’s another Google Doc. Note that it says it isn’t to be reshared anywhere but was immediately leaked. https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTpCO1itqmzDPE3h_4tt1nrp4Gqp0h7PZV03PjCZmqEIeJzDk1HmLbKHZ9TzifS5Oe9mCO4h_7QbW0Q/pub
Yeah this claim from the article has nothing to do with the resignation letter, which is much more reasonable (though I have no association with PSL and cannot say how large or non-existent these problems are–I am only discussing the content of the letter itself in a sort of vaccuum)
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I should’ve made the letter my OP post link probably instead of using the article I found on reddit, the worst place on the internet. My bad.
I just wasn’t sure if I can make a Google doc my OP post link, but I can see if I can.
Can just discard the whole thing flatly ridiculous 1984 baiting
This is the only part of the letter that I could find a reference to this “secret police system”:
Currently the NOD is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars employing highly skilled software developers to create an AI-powered app to compile comprehensive reports from all areas of the Party for the top leadership circle without having to deal with time-consuming personal engagement with branch leaders. This app will be used to ensure compliance with national directives and surface openings like Minneapolis for the national leadership to opportunistically claim credit for. The National Liaisons system – initially developed to be a network of support that surfaced the needs of the branches and facilitated the development of schools, trainings, resources, and consultation, is today overseen by the leaders of the National Organization Department with an almost singular purpose of ensuring compliance with national directives. There have been no schools, trainings, educational materials, or organizer-to-organizer exchanges developed by the NOD in now over a year. Forums for the engagement of leaders beyond the top leadership circle like the Party Organizer and the National Council have rapidly degraded into just more echo chambers for Brian and Ben Becker and sites to enforce the
into just more echo chambers for Brian and Ben Becker and sites to enforce the latest agitational initiative.
They were building a
?I know that’s meant to be a joke but a guy did build a pretty cool Marx bot on top of deepseek: https://marx-bot.vercel.app/
Awesome
I should’ve made the letter my OP post link probably instead of using the article I found on reddit, the worst place on the internet. My bad.
I just wasn’t sure if I can make a Google doc my OP post link, but I can see if I can change it now.
Alright so I read the whole letter. All the leadership shit can be dismissed, leaders concealing their views because they’re unpopular and might result in them losing their power is not a solveable problem, it’s going to happen in every organisation until the end of time. You are not going to get an organisation with a leadership that does not actively try to keep their popularity and leadership, it doesn’t exist, the dynamic that matters is that even with the leadership secretly opposing projects those projects are still going ahead because the leadership can’t air their unpopular views and properly shut them down. That’s all a non-issue really, just a matter of efficiency being harmed because leaders are fucking around and projects are battling sabotage, harming their success. Alright fine. Whatever.
The more important part of this entire thing basically boils down to the difference between build the party or build the base.
In the UK, I’ve watched for a very long time now as the communist parties pursue a goal of building the base. Some of them with some degree of successes.
The issue however is that all the parties pursuing this have reactionary policies on cultural issues. CPB, CPGB, CPGB-ML, all of them are transphobic terf fuckheads to some degree. The argument the leadership of PSL makes “it makes the members more conservative” is accurate in my experience.
The problem this creates is that the reactionary lines that these parties have become dealbreakers for new members. You will never get me to join a party with the positions they have, you will never get anyone who knows lgbt people (and cares about them) to join those parties either. They know the parties have lines that throw the people they care about under a bus.
The organisers of the working class are all radicals, the vast majority of which are the most progressive people on all issues, particularly the culture war ones. If you create party policy that turns away radicals, you have no fucking organisers. From my perspective, I prefer PSLs approach and think it’s more effective. Solving the issue of the distance between the party and the working class should come once the radicals themselves have been gathered, you can’t do shit without organising them and you can’t organise them without party lines that are attractive to them. Growing while maintaining enough central power to re-orient later and unleash all the organisers in one single task seems like the better method, at least from what I have seen.
The steps as I see them are:
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Organise the radicals of the country into one party.
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Orient the radicals into mass organising and agitation. They get to keep their progressive views and a party line that is appealing to them, but they put their efforts towards mass organising.
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Keep enough central authority within the party so you can set ALL these radicals onto one single task together all at the same time. This enables a small number of people to do very big things with an outsized impact. My belief is that if you set all of them onto the same task of mass organising simultaneously, around one issue or thing, you’ll get better results than distributed groups all doing their own separate things on separate issues. Easier said than done though.
You are not going to get an organisation with a leadership that does not actively try to keep their popularity and leadership, it doesn’t exist, the dynamic that matters is that even with the leadership secretly opposing projects those projects are still going ahead because the leadership can’t air their unpopular views and properly shut them down
I wish this was the mainstream understanding of how a party should be
It’s such an obvious dynamic too. They might not want a project to go ahead but if they can’t openly oppose it due to unpopularity of opposing it then in order to keep their leadership role the project will go ahead. Right?
As long as you have that occurring and not genuine success at secretly shutting things down then there isn’t a huge problem, it’s just annoying fucking around. I’m not really an alien to internal organisation sabotage so like, all this really does is reduce efficiency of projects and leaders because they’re fighting instead of cooperating. That’s fine though, eventually one side or the other demonstrates they’re correct.
Not that it especially indicts the PSL or anything, but it does seem like a problem because they can still work privately to get other leaders on their side and basically do a coup.
The question has to be asked, as well, at what point in the history of Marxist-Leninist parties, were those parties simply “micro-parties” comprised and focused on courting “radicals”. I feel like this would have described the burgeoning party in Cuba and even the Bolsheviks at some point in both of their histories. Even the CPCs “mass line” concept is one that very likely came after a dedicated cadre of “radicles” had been formed (just a guess, my knowledge of this history is lacking). The attached article is nothing by cynical dribble, and from what I can tell through skimming this letter, it appears there is very little substance on what exactly is the plan for “what comes next”. Also, it should be worth mentioning that ideological struggle within the party is what comes with building the party, isn’t it? Marxist-Leninist history is awash of internal party conflict, one that builds until there is a clear political, and strategic path that separates one internal group from the other. I don’t really see that here? Just a kind of vague gesture towards “mass work”. No mention of what this new venture will look like structurally, and how that restructuring isolates this new formation from the kinds of issues being alleged here. Also, considering this was directed internally I feel like it says even little. If I was a PSL member who received this, what am I supposed to think coming out of this?
Anyway, apparently, the Central Committee within the PSL responded, and you can read that here: https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2026-06-16-the-psl-letters/#%3A~%3Atext=Response+from+the+Central+Committee
I do not know how Clarion/USU gained access to this internal letter. I couldn’t independently find it anywhere. So take it for what it is. I wrote the above before I even read it.
I also think you should be able to do both, build your party and do base building, using something like the PSL has been doing ironically enough - create or help kickstart sister organizations, like Code Pink, ANSWER, etc that are more focused. My local PSL has started some great organizations that have been helping fight ICE and working with other orgs and the community to do so. The fact that they’ve done a good job on this front imo makes it weird to me that the leadership is being accused of sabotaging other base building projects.
Great response.
I wonder if a lot of the issues about top-down control could perhaps stem from trying to keep the ML and non-reactionary character of the party as it goes through a period of rapid growth, which I understand it’s been doing since this latest Trump administration. The strength of the PSL, over let’s say the DSA, is its Dem Cent unity, but keeping that line between the national org and the more influential bigger local branches may be difficult in a huge country like the US.
I can’t vouch for the resignation letter aside from the fact that I’ve heard most of its criticisms from existing and former PSL members. But I can say that attempting top-down control and alienation to hold a line would mean having a very unhealthy internal structure, itself an existential risk. This kind of thing has to be maintained via educated cadres and internal struggle and resolution by membership. The party is strong through its membership not despite it. If you run an org, education is always the best strategy unless there is a seriously dangerous individual or internal microsect that has to be removed, and even that has to be done semi-openly (internally).
Of course, internal leadership structures exist so that you don’t have to mass deliberate every single thing. But the circle has to be completed with that educated membership when they elect them (not implying anything about PSL just describing a successful method of struggle and unity).
I mostly agree but I think there are a couple possible issues stemming from the material conditions of the places these struggles are happening that make implementing all that more difficult in practice. Like @Awoo mentioned as the situation in the UK, the membership is being recruited in the imperial core. It takes a long time to undo a lifetime of propaganda from growing up in the West, but people want to participate before going through all that educational process, which btw I agree should be long and detailed.
You could solve this by recruiting extremely slowly I suppose. But at the same time, growing the party should be a priority to have any semblance of influence and money, and candidates should be able to participate in the struggle while the party learns theirs views and helps educate them while they do the work. The vanguard should be small, but not too small. The ML and anarchist left is virtually nonexistent in the US, democratic socialists are finally getting some numbers but are still really small. The left need to be bigger than that.
There’s some contradictions there I can see that have to be delicately handled. Democracy is 100% important to any real socialist project or party, but you run the risk of being tailist and making another transphobic communist organization, or a DSA-like org where everyone surrenders to electoralism, or doesn’t have a strong consistent line on imperialism. All possibilities I can see if you completely surrender to the membership before it’s ready.
That’s why my ears were kind of piqued by the author’s criticism of education coming from the top down, from national down to branches. I don’t trust every communist in the US, there are racist white ones, transphobic cis ones, sexist men commies and nationalist ones as well (CPA), and sometimes it’s subtle and not obvious, so I can understand being wary and wanting to know for sure what every branch is teaching their members. On the other hand, if the national branch isn’t providing those additional education resources being asked for, or being overly critical of honesty helpful educational resources being provided on a local level at the branch level, those are viable criticisms, but definitely fixable ones.
To be clear, overall I agree that these things need to be enforced from a membership level and shouldn’t require the leadership to have the right line for the membership to have the right line. But also, I could see how balancing the contradictions of organizing in the imperial core leading to some missteps, or even correct decisions that look like missteps to others. It’s hard to tell, which makes it hard for me to judge.
PSL already has a pretty lengthy recruitment process and groups like FRSO have separate general membership vs cadre membership tiers. I think an extended education and onboarding makes sense for becoming a full member with internal voting rights and so on. But it’s also one of those things where the specifics really matter, there are many ways to subvert basically any structure, again not picking on PSL or FRSO it happens in so many orgs that they declare “I am demcent!” and then it is just 3 people in charge for a decade and little development of other members ever happens so the org is full of underdeveloped members that can’t (and shouldn’t) make decisions and higher ups that feel like they either have to do everything or let the project fail. And that without even touching on potential issues of questionable ethics or decisions. So on one hand I think it is possible to build a committed communist org in the imperial core (hey PSL is arguably basically that) but also possible to overlook serious structural issues, so it ends up de facto as if you don’t have one. I know of orgs that spend seriously 80% of their time dealing with internal issues.
Re: participation I think that is where the front group / provisional membership model makes sense. New members can take action but can’t represent the org or make big decisions to overrule cadre members in the party. But that’s a tricky balance because there is a very real tendency to not run those fronts particularly well and use them too cynically as a feeder for membership, leaving aside doing actions well, working in coalition, having a strong standing in community. Again not specifically a PSL thing. Trots are most guilty of this in my opinion. But the core idea is still fine: bring people into your orbit with organizing projects but don’t let them control branded party stuff until they are full members.
All of this is really a balance. Just doing party building or just doing base building makes no sense, you can do both. It is just a question of how you split your resources, and honestly sometimes you have more resources than you’d think if you just let people work on what they have passion for. Not practical to always do, that is disorganization, but too often people decide that only one direction is good and correct and as we all know, these parties are all so very small and that is their main challenge.
I personally don’t know enough about PSL’s education pipeline to comment on it. I have met full PSL members with wildly different levels of political education but none that are like DSA socdems or anything like that.
I thought about it some more, and this whole letter is just an ad for his new org that he’s forming with former PSL Brooklyn cadre. It’s just some dude who disagrees with the leadership and direction of an org and decides to form his own org with a core comprised of the org branch that he was a part of. The target audience of the letter is current members of his old org who he’s trying to poach to his new org.
There’s a self-aggrandizing element to this as well because usually when splits like this happen, the letter of grievances against the old org, if it is actually publicly circulated, is penned by and on behalf of the collective membership of the new org.
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Somewhere in this country, a microparty of forty men is in the process of becoming two microparties of twenty over a question with no merit. A faction expels a faction. A city committee declares the national leadership revisionist and secedes, taking the mailing list and Twitter account with them. The overwhelming majority of such events are of no consequence to anyone.
Lol
Y’know I’d like for one of these orgs to get big enough so shit like this doesn’t matter to people. A disgruntled party leader or prominent member leaving for a mix of inter-personal shit and the party not going his way isn’t anything outstanding, like at all, but since leftists online for as radical as they claim to be are actually really squeemish about joining an organization they’ll dig up every single complain about an org before considering asking on reddit if they should join.
Like imagine if a top democrat or republican left the party, no one would give a shit, you’d still have to join them to get something done, but since the actual organized radical left in many countries is so marginal the orgs don’t have enough gravitational pull on their own for these infighting and bombastic denouncements not to matter.
His framing of “gaining influence amongst radicals” (bad) vs “organizing the working class” (good) makes him sound like a tailist. Unless there is a clarification of his political positions in that google doc that no one should click, that is a significant enough political break that this could just be opportunist slander.
It’s weird to me that such a difference in strategy could exist in such a high up member for so long. He’s been with them for years, wrote a lot of their propaganda. I guess it didn’t matter until they got bigger, though.
I agree with this. There is a real chance that the tailist tendency is hidden under this whole thing + a misplaced hope that leadership will be very flexible.
“He writes: As capitalism inevitably produces injustices, the revolutionary party [PSL] calls or joins protests. It recruits participants in these protest movements by expressing views that participants come to see as correct. When there are not protests, the party does agitational outreach to show itself and change the minds of more people. Capitalism’s own dynamics ensure that this cycle can be relied on to continue. Eventually, the capitalist system produces a crisis acute enough to throw the system into question, and if the Party is big enough, the protests can become a revolution. This is essentially it. The PSL dresses up this simplistic concept with the socialist consciousness thesis—the idea that unique historical conditions [in modern America] preclude any path to revolution but to widely popularize our particular definition of socialism, positioning the party for the abrupt seizure of power at the time of a revolutionary crisis. What makes the thesis attractive to PSL is that it explains and excuses the sheer marginality of the organization—if the only road to revolution is the popularization of a given line, regardless of its resonance (or lack thereof) with mass struggle, then a group that “popularizes” is discharging its historic duty, and it does not need to analyze anything beyond assuring the presence of this line in the public.”
The only criticism here is that they are small. There is no magic formula for gaining more influence other than organising activities and repeating your own message.
“Smolarek then rejects PSL’s delusional self-conception as a party. He writes: PSL calls itself a party but, by concrete measures, it is an ideological tendency… A party is an organization that can credibly claim to represent a class or a section of a class… A tendency is an organization that gains ground not by organizing the working class but by gaining influence amongst radicals.”
Once again: what is the criticism here, apart from ‘being small’? I’d also love for us to be successful straight away, but unfortunately you have to build things up patiently if you want to establish a large organisation.
“People are afraid to say out loud what they suspect—that not joining any such sect may really be better than the PSL if the goal is to fight the class struggle in America today.”
Doing nothing isn’t better than doing something. Who on earth thinks like that?
“It uses that influence to do one thing: it persuades a generation of young radicals that revolution in America is impossible. ”
How does that work? This is a serious accusation, but is there any evidence to back up this claim?
“All three [PSL, DSA-faction ‘Red Star Caucus’ and the American Communist Party] share the same idealist core: that consciousness is transmitted from above, that the organization’s growth within its chosen turf is a worthwhile measure of progress, and that the working class will eventually fall in line behind the correct slogan—a formula that, as Smolarek notes, ignores the atomization of the working class, the strength of the right, and the simple fact that the masses make history only when they are organized as a class.”
- The ACP exists only on social media. Comparing them to those other two is not a serious undertaking.
- It is true that a party is built from the top down. Nobody is born a communist; you become one through ideological training within a party.
- The growth of a party is indeed a worthwhile goal. I agree with the author’s assessment of the opponent’s strength, but why is that an argument against trying to grow within the circles where you have influence? Again, I too would like to see things move faster, but there is no magic solution. The author acts as if one exists and is being kept secret by the PSL leadership. If he knows of it: make it public!
I think your response and @Awoo response are the best ones to the arguments themselves presented by the author.
Thank you for the kind words!
Doing nothing isn’t better than doing something. Who on earth thinks like that?
I have met an incredible amount of people who think like that. They tend to justify it through purity of action and outcome (“[insert action here] will hurt someone therefore its bad”) or universalization of their own incapacities (“I can’t do this therefore no one can do it”). But a fuckoff amount of people think this way, and it is exhausting.
The question is whether those people think the same way in other areas of life as well.
“I’m romantically interested in that person; I must never, ever get in touch with them.” Or “I’m interested in this sort of job; I must absolutely not apply for any vacancies.”
I don’t think anyone behaves like that, unless there’s a genuine psychological issue. If that isn’t the case, the action (or rather, the lack thereof) is probably due to the fact that they aren’t really convinced of the things they say.
That guy sure sounds a lot like a Menshevik complaining that Bolsheviks are too insular and should just allow anyone in and start tailing the masses because otherwise the party will be too small.
Only interesting part of the letter:
I am leaving alongside the leadership of the Brooklyn District to take the next step in the formation of a viable socialist movement in this country. While we will leave smaller in number than if we remained in the PSL, we are confident that in the long run, cultivating a healthy seed is a better choice than continuing to tend to a dying tree. We will engage respectfully with the members of the PSL who remain, understanding that it is hard to grasp the true nature of this organization without the proximity we have had.
So a branch of the PSL has split from PSL. There will be PSL cadre that will follow the leadership of the Brooklyn branch into the new org.
I do not care if he is right. I am calling him a fed and a wrecker. Sometimes you just need to push on forward and not fall into infighting.
Update: I have read the article. I still do not care if he is right from the small data I have observed
Fed? Trots do splits naturally, nature is healing
Pretty dogwater smear piece, should’ve just posted the actual letter and the response.
You’re so right and sorry about that. I’ve updated my post link with a new one that should contain both the letter and the response.
Full disclosure I read the full letter, I did not read OP article. I think it’s a far cry from most of the PSL resignation letters you see out there, which seem like fed shit, seem to harden both nonsensical anarchist cases against them, & PSL members against structural criticism based on the history + financial of orgs descending from the Worker’s World Party network. From what I know about Brian Becker it rings true. My question is, what does this base-building in Brooklyn look like? Is this an old man bullshitting & crying because his nonprofit is getting turned into the DSA, or is it the fabled “actually doing something” PSL stans seem to imply will occur after years of No Kings rallies + Twitter clapback quotas met being shut down by built-in failsafes
Also OP, FRSO leadership has weird connections to US congress & let black activists rot in prison but was willing to pull those strings for some students. Please just leave the United States when possible
FRSO leadership has weird connections to US congress
Can you elaborate or point me to someone who has?
Yes I just need a minute since Wayback Machine is going really slow now that I loaded like 15 articles in a row to ctrl-f (all near misses related to other parts of antiwar movement cointelpro history grr), otherwise I will just go through my bookmarks
If there is a large delay in followup (switching IPs is not helping the pages load ???) I will try to hurry up on a full post about this & ping you, I’ve been frustrated with this for a long time! I sent this same piece to a prospective FRSO member on Discord like a year ago maybe I track him down ffs
I will add that there is plenty of other shit, I mean the whole thing of prisoner advocacy that serves to prevent prison riots and never actually frees anyone goes back decades. FRSO is connected to Liz Warren. But no fuck that I need THIS ARTICLE NOW
Thanks!
Unrelated, but there was also this put up like 6 months ago, which levies a lot of criticism at FRSO leadership. Idk how on point it is, but the author seemed to come by their position honestly.
I think that’s the thing. I’d like to know more about these base building projects that are getting sabotaged by the PSL leadership.
Is this an old man bullshitting & crying because his nonprofit is getting turned into the DSA, or is it the fabled “actually doing something” PSL stans seem to imply will occur after years of No Kings rallies + Twitter clapback quotas met being shut down by built-in failsafes
Curious what this means! I’m having trouble understanding it.
Also OP, FRSO leadership has weird connections to US congress & let black activists rot in prison but was willing to pull those strings for some students. Please just leave the United States when possible
Also their leadership are anti-Indigenous settlers who reject the notion of settler colonialism and think tribal nations should be erased
Sad to see this. Probably for the best that issues with the national leadership are being exposed though.
My position is: I’m still gonna vote for whoever they run for president
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Lately I’ve been thinking this too. US regions have such different conditions, I think it requires extremely autonomous cells at the very least.
More and more people are saying it!
Socialism in North America pretty much depends on the balkanization of the US to at least some extent. Hopefully when that happens it won’t be a particularly violent process, but hopes are low. Might not even happen in our lifetimes idk
I don’t think blakanization is necessary, but I do think there will be some type of autonomisation. Ala the fall of Russian Empire being replaced by a union of socialist republics + autonomous regions.
That’s kinda what I mean, somewhere along the spectrum. It could be an EU-like confederation too.
I don’t have much direct knowledge about PSL, but in the spirit of this more general discussion: I think of “leninism” as a series of relativity simple theories that originate directly from Marxism, and that synthesize some historical lessons of that era. It’s all very basic, very sound, no real credible counter- arguments in my opinion. And yet, the “Leninist” model of party-building we’ve been using in the west for a century has been an indisputable failure.
I was hoping, based on their relative success, that PSL had at least partially overcome some of the problems of this model of organizing. I’ll be following this topic carefully to find out. But based on how familiar this sounds, I’m concerned it’s the same pattern.
So, back to the more general discussion, what have we (as western “Leninists”) been getting wrong all this time? Basically, what is to be done?
I think it’s crucial to understand that Leninism is not a complete theory or a playbook. It’s an analytical model. A lot of unsuccessful parties take Leninism as a playbook rather than doing the hard work and analyzing local condition. The parties that do analyze can be more successful (see workers party Belgium for one, but also AES like Cuba).
Leninism didn’t itself generate the whole revolution. They were just ready to act when the conditions were there. In an alternate history, say if WW1 was delayed by 20 years, we wouldn’t have seen a revolution in 1917. The Bolsheviks would have been just a small party desperately propagandizing just like the rest of us. It’s not an indictment of the theory, just a recognition of how history turns and that individual effort does not act upon the world in isolation from the broader historical conditions.
Also not to forget that the majority of wars America wages have literally no negative material impact upon the people of America, meaning that losing it is really no big deal. In fact, this war with Iran really is an exception considering their trump card of closing the strait. Every other war they have waged has only really seen performative opposition, mostly concerned with the lives of their imperial stormtroopers, rather than great sympathy for the invaded nation. You could also argue that in fact, considering they ended the Bretton-Woods system after their loss in the Vietnam war, losing that war actually helped their ambitions and goals rather than hampering them.
Also, no western nation up to this point has been as weak and incompetent as Imperial Russia. And no western nation was actually faced with losing territory and therefore their people being directly affected.
Lenin himself stressed that three things are necessary for a communist movement to seize authority. Mass disillusionment with established authority, a situation where established authority can no longer exert itself, and a pre-existing communist organization with the structural capacity to commit revolutionary actions. My read on that, plus the historical circumstances, is that it’s assumed that communism is a pseudo-criminal movement. Lenin and similar theorists were writing in circumstances like exile, prison cells, threats of police stalking them, etc. And I truly believe the history of every successful communist party (bolsheviks, 26th of July, etc) is also the history of organizations openly willing to commit violence, theft, or whatever else is necessary.
This isn’t me judging them from a moral angle. Absolutely not. They did what was necessary at the time and eventually seized victory, so they should be lauded for their efforts. They managed to walk the tightrope of surviving against state suppression through criminal organizing, yet also managed to keep their intellectual foundations.
What I mean to say is that organizations in the capitalist west like PSL are in a really rough spot. There really isn’t a successful playbook on what to do if you’re not a semi-criminal organization that openly commits violence. I’m also not advocating that PSL needs to start throwing molotov cocktails. I don’t know what to advocate for honestly. I don’t know what is to be done because I don’t know of any precedent that could give any clues.
I wouldn’t say “openly commits violence” is a necessary component at relatively early stages of the process. There needs to be a legal and an illegal side, and a weak organization openly committing violence cannot have a legal side.
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Yeah but I don’t know if PSL or any other party in America is prepared for that. I do really admire how PSL does have countermeasures against cop and fed infiltration though. I don’t know how effective they are, but the time I’ve spent organizing with PSL at least told me they are aware of it
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I think the usual failures are more about having no clear understanding or commitment to the idea rather than it being inappropriate. If I had to estimate I’d say 90% of Westerners I’ve met appealing to Lenin, the vanguard, etc etc can barely describe it as anything other than “we make a good party”. I hear the term “building dual power” maybe 10X as often as anyone referencing dual power itself accurately and historically. Also most people calling themselves Leninists are actually Trotskyists thinking they’re being very clever by saying that instead of Trotskyist.
What is to be done is organizing, of course, and into parties. Understand, embed, agitate, recruit, educate, repeat. Do real things relevant to your communities, be actively present and of them, and bring them back to your org more and more often for education. Unfortunately the vast majority of Western orgs just plain don’t do half of these things. A white org (and somehow getting whiter) in a POC town alienates itself from community. A small sect decides to only be a reading group, forever. An org just tails protest months to recruit but doesn’t really organize the protests. An org binds itself closely to electoralism and fails to educate, have any standards at all. An org tries to do labor work despite having no understanding or background in it, just alienates others. An org has an understanding of labor and tries to do work in it but it’s clearly inauthentic and transactional. An org implodes because leadership protected an abuser - more about internal democracy, structure, and discipline that is usually missing.
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On Contradiction should be required reading, or in this case, the section on the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction. At every stage in the development of a process, there is only one principal contradiction which plays the leading role.
In the empire itself, dismantling it with a pure anti-imperialist focus tends to be anemic. Many dedicated and correct anti-imperialist orgs (with not many people in them) struggle to gain membership and take meaningful action. Anti-warism is easily a dead end if left on its own, which is one of the appeals of a party - you can enjoin an anti-imperialist struggle to other work, building membership via labor, local community action, really anything relevant to them, and your task becomes turning them into anti-imperialist along the way.
Nothing at all against anti-war orgs but they do have to work in coalition (or be a front group) to be relevant because of these challenges.
Building and org and angling at a merger is more appealing to me than joining an org and trying to build a split, that’s for sure.
The US is a fake settler-colonial entity. By having a national anything, you are already tacitly saying that the US ought to exist on some level. Like, imagine a Hawaiian branch of any national org. The immediate goal is for a sovereign republic or kingdom of Hawaii, so what would happen to the Hawaiian branch? Do they just separate into their own party, so the Hawaiian branch of the CPUSA becomes the CPH? But if that’s the case, why not just have a CPH from day 1? Why go through the motions of being a Hawaiian branch of a US org only to then separate and become an independent org at an unspecified time? Are they supposed to wait until the Republic/Kingdom of Hawaii becomes a UN state before going, “okay, we need to have our own Hawaiian org?”
You can apply the same reasoning to every other Indigenous nation and it just seems like a national anything makes no sense. And every “national” that I’ve seen (BLM, CPUSA, DSA, and now PSL apparently) is full of either out-of-touch blowhards or full blown corrupt grifters.
The US is a fake settler-colonial entity. By having a national anything, you are already tacitly saying that the US ought to exist on some level
That’s like saying the Bolsheviks having a national anything was tacitly saying the Czarist Russian Empire ought to exist on some level (incidentally this is a thread western historians have tried to push), it’s essentially an argument for self-marginalization
Even under a situation where the US balkanizes, a national organization would be necessary to manage the process, otherwise you concede ground to reactionaries who inevitably fill that vacuum and balkanize the US to their advantage
That’s like saying the Bolsheviks having a national anything was tacitly saying the Czarist Russian Empire ought to exist on some level (incidentally this is a thread western historians have tried to push), it’s essentially an argument for self-marginalization
Not really since there is a Russian nation, whether in a general civilization sense stretching back to Kievan Rus or the sense used by Stalin of a people sharing the same language, geography, culture, and economic system. There isn’t a US nation no matter how much patsocs try to argue otherwise.
Even under a situation where the US balkanizes, a national organization would be necessary to manage the process, otherwise you concede ground to reactionaries who inevitably fill that vacuum and balkanize the US to their advantage
Not really. Should the US balkanizes for real as in multiple successor states that war against one another for regional dominance while a rump state that is nominally recognized as the US helplessly looks on, then socialists need to seize power within a successor state and flip it into a socialist republic before fascists seize power and flip it into a fascist state. Once a socialist republic has been establish, the socialists need to either help socialists in nearby successor state flip their states or defend themselves from rival fascist and liberal successor states. The US rump state, presumably based in DC, Northern Virginia, and possibly NYC, can file a complaint in the UN.
The Kievan Rus didn’t include most of what is today Russian land or what are today Russian peoples.
There’s a reason Lenin called it “a prison house of nations.”
people sharing the same language, geography, culture, and economic system.
If this was true of the Russian empire, this is true of the continental US. The US has more homogenized language and culture than the Russian empire did.
I disagree that this would justify maintaining the existence of the US.
Not really since there is a Russian nation, whether in a general civilization sense stretching back to Kievan Rus or the sense used by Stalin of a people sharing the same language, geography, culture, and economic system. There isn’t a US nation no matter how much patsocs try to argue otherwise.
There were many nations that made up the Soviet Union and the Czarist Empire certainly had a settler colonial character in large parts of its territory; the Bolsheviks absolutely had to contend with that reality and forge a pan-national union that could incorporate one of the most diverse collections of peoples in human history
then socialists need to seize power within a successor state and flip it into a socialist republic before fascists seize power and flip it into a fascist state.
How is this supposed to work when the fascist rump states control all the military bases and their armories? Are you assuming these localized socialist blocs will have all the guns? What happens when the fascist rump states form an alliance under a national organization and utilize foreign aid to overwhelm your regionalized, decentralized, disconnected socialist microstate? You really want to replay the Catalonia experiment?
Point taken about the character of the Russian Empire.
How is this supposed to work when the fascist rump states control all the military bases and their armories? Are you assuming these localized socialist blocs will have all the guns? What happens when the fascist rump states form an alliance under a national organization and utilize foreign aid to overwhelm your regionalized, decentralized, disconnected socialist microstate? You really want to replay the Catalonia experiment?
I don’t foresee a fascist “national” alliance lasting that long since fascists are prone to infighting over stupid fascist reasons. Frankly, they’re more prone to infighting than socialists. In general, I don’t think any “national” org at that point would be strong enough to manage their branches. This goes for fascist, socialist, and liberal orgs.
I don’t foresee PSL being able to order their entire cadre to flee to a Socialist Republic of Michigan when every individual branch would rather fight for socialism within their localized region because that’s where their family and friends live. Apply this reasoning for every single leftist org and you get the LA branch of DSA, PSL, FRSO, CPUSA sticking around in LA, the NYC branch of DSA, PSL, FRSO, CPUSA sticking around in NYC, and so on. With an irrelevant national office and more common cause with branches within the same region from other leftist orgs, the next step would be those regional branches disassociating themselves from their parent orgs and merging together to form a new regional org. So instead of the LA branches of DSA, PSL, FRSO, and CPUSA and the NYC branches of DSA, PSL, FRSO, and CPUSA, you have DSLA and CPNYC. You might have a lot of “united fronts” where each branch org hasn’t phoned home to the national office in years.
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You’re ignoring the issue of domestic fascists in the controlled territories like the fascist movement in Ukraine, which repeatedly tried to carve out its own fiefdom.
Handing off gitmo to Cuba is totally irrelevant. Obviously that should happen, but it’s trivial to this issue.
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Do they just separate into their own party, so the Hawaiian branch of the CPUSA becomes the CPH?
Not your main point, but I’ve met comrades from the Democratic Socialist of O’ahu, who are affiliated with DSA.
You organize at the national level because that is the political entity you’re combating even if you wish to overcome it. This has been the case in communist movements in any large country historically
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But presumably the Democratic Socialist of O’ahu is only concerned with issues pertaining to Hawaii. I seriously doubt the org is accepting members from Kansas or Maine. Other branches of the DSA call themselves DSA-[branch] like DSA-LA and NYC-DSA, so even calling themselves DSO instead of DSA-O’ahu goes back to my initial point of forming regional Hawaiian orgs. I guess they are already thinking ahead in terms of Hawaiian branches of US orgs separating and doing their own thing.
This exact line of reasoning is the reason I made this alt. From looking at this thread it sounds like there are some comradely disagreements, but I think it provokes some good discussion.
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There are arguments for supporting a kingdom of Hawaii against US colonialism, obviously, but to describe having a kingdom anywhere as an “end goal” is not defensible.
Do they just separate into their own party, so the Hawaiian branch of the CPUSA becomes the CPH? But if that’s the case, why not just have a CPH from day 1? Why go through the motions of being a Hawaiian branch of a US org only to then separate and become an independent org at an unspecified time?
Because Hawaii is deeply entangled with the US and however you want to label things, having their communists working in an organized, systematized fashion with the communists in the continental US is better for them.
But moreover, I think there are problems with appealing to “national sovereignty” not just on a basis for anticolonialism but as an end goal. I think this is a nationalist distortion of Marxism and we should be considering how to go beyond the model of atomized nation states, as the USSR tried and failed to. If you want to have communism, you can’t just have these huge bodies controlling natural resources with no accountability to anyone else, there needs to be an organizational level above them based on international opinion or they will just invent neo-neo-imperialism by leveraging their advantages against weaker entities.
There are arguments for supporting a kingdom of Hawaii against US colonialism, obviously, but to describe having a kingdom anywhere as an “end goal” is not defensible.
Eh, that seems to be what Hawaiian separatists want and whatever path towards Hawaiian republicanism should be decided by Hawaiians. Obviously, I don’t think monarchies should exist anywhere.
But moreover, I think there are problems with appealing to “national sovereignty” not just on a basis for anticolonialism but as an end goal. I think this is a nationalist distortion of Marxism and we should be considering how to go beyond the model of atomized nation states, as the USSR tried and failed to.
I mean, I envision the Indigenous nations of Canada and the US eventually forming a continental federation. But I think most people would think that a Communist Party of (non-Spanish speaking) North America would be silly right now.
Eh, that seems to be what Hawaiian separatists want and whatever path towards Hawaiian republicanism should be decided by Hawaiians. Obviously, I don’t think monarchies should exist anywhere.
Clearly the end of minoritarian ruling classes like monarchies, and therefore the establishment of socialism, are not the basic thing that you are reasoning from, hence me saying nationalist distortion. We can talk about how making sure monarchies don’t exist anywhere should be accomplished in a stable, durable way, but what you said explicitly, directly cast having a monarchy as an acceptable end goal. Alliances of convenience with domestic nationalists for anti-colonial purposes can often make sense (see the CPC working with the KMT to remove Japanese colonizers), but we can’t let that distort into letting nationalist movements override socialism.
I mean, I envision the Indigenous nations of Canada and the US eventually forming a continental federation. But I think most people would think that a Communist Party of (non-Spanish speaking) North America would be silly right now.
I keep repeating “end goal,” but it seems to only register selectively. Communists in the US have little reason to be in a comintern because a comintern does not functionally exist and the US only has micro-parties that don’t really have business spearheading the foundation of one because they are too busy splitting, but that’s a very historically specific reason and conditions will change.
but what you said explicitly, directly cast having a monarchy as an acceptable end goal
The end goal is a stateless classless society. I’m not sure why you think I want a monarchy as an end goal since a monarchy is a type of class society. I mean, I also think Hawaii should be part of a socialist Oceania federation and that federation should eventually link up with a socialist Asian federation to form some Asian-Oceania federation that federation should link up with a unified Africa to form an Afro-Asian-Oceania federation and so on until there’s just a world federation of all the world’s peoples living under communism.
I keep repeating “end goal,” but it seems to only register selectively.
I honestly don’t know what you mean by “end goal” then. With regards to Hawaii, step 1 would be independence from the US, step 2 would be being a member of an Oceania federation, step 3 would be the Oceania federation being a member of a greater Asian federation, and so on. The abolition of a potential Hawaiian monarchy would probably occur by step 2 since the only states in Oceania with a monarch as head of state are essentially Commonwealth countries and I don’t imagine a decolonized Australia or New Zealand having the King of England as head of state. It then becomes a “if you want to join the club, get rid of your king.”
Edit: Oh I see the confusion. Poor choice of wording on my part lmao. I’ve changed the wording to better express what I was trying to say.
Edit: Oh I see the confusion. Poor choice of wording on my part lmao
Got it, sorry if I jumped on you too much, I just see a lot of people who actually do say what the initial wording looked like to me. I basically agree with everything you said here.
American Railway Union (1893) > Social Democracy of America (1897) > Social Democratic Party of America (1898) > Socialist Party of America (1901) > Socialist Workers Party (1938) > Workers World Party (1959) > Party for Socialism and Liberation (2004)
another split to the pileEmoPhillips.mp4
Two communists walk into a bar. Soon after, three parties are born.
Maybe it’s a mark of progress when your party starts producing prominent splits because it seems to always happen
Like even PSL formed from a split of a split of a split
It’s a sign of a party incapable of having convincing enough debates and discussions. There are correct answers to many questions and otherwise are correct strategies to find the correct answers (testing one while enforcing centralism and going to another position if it is shown to be unsuccessful). When parties split, it’s because the debate didn’t convince them of the new position/strategy enough to even want to test it out (or the party dysfunctionally refuses to self-crit after a strategy fails and so the faction assumes that decisions are absolute)
I think a large portion of this comes down to the weird self-referential bullshit that communists do now–every debate is a literary debate about what Lenin etc said (not testable) instead of a debate about strategies where Lenin etc can be utilized to communicate the position more clearly. I genuinely dont give a fuck if a quote supports my argument or not, and I’m tired of being forced into that debate, and I see it lead to factions often. Debate the concrete, decide on the concrete, and let older theory stand as a communication tool after a decision about what current theory and strategy is used.
Sorry, I’m not really ranting to you specifically, but I needed to say this which had been pissing me off recently
