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?
I feel like national organizations are kind of useless. Everyone wants some national organization to join that is “the one”. It would be much better for each locality to get together and for the local communists there to form their own networks and work locally. Then you can create a national organization once there are enough people actually engaging to make it work. The internet has made everything so disjointed. You could go to events with various groups and feel people out individually and find the ones who are legitmately dialectical materialists and network with them. No need to decide on a specific group and commit to that. It’s not as if we have an actual vanguard party that we can go join. The US is a political wasteland. You’ve gotta start small.
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.
All revolutionary action will inevitably be criminalized. That is the reality of endeavoring to overthrow the status quo.
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
They 100% are not. I had some experience with them recently and its really not very effective. Atleast in my area. I think we should be network building at this stage. Getting local socialists to actually know eachother personally. At this point it’s mainly people who show up to a protest then go home. That’s no different than what liberals do. They just carry different signs.
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.
Frankly I think it boils down to one basic thing. You have to start with anti-imperialism. Before anyone can start working toward socialism we have to dismantle the empire. There is absolutely no point trying to organize for a socialist revolution if the empire still exists.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
IMO this is exactly why we need to dismantle empire first. Any attempt at revolution prior to the US exhausting itself militarily will fail. But if it has its empire collapse and loses most of its military power then we would be able to stand a chance using asymmetric tactics. We have to be at a point where while we are fighting the revolution in the US Cubans can take guantanamo bay back at the same time, and China can take guam, and so on. The US is a global entity so if we try something without that global empire collapsing then it would be easy for it to just destroy us from military bases we can’t touch.
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.
You misunderstood me. I meant Cuba taking Gitmo by force. Not handing it off to them. They do not need our permission to take their land back. Domestic fascists have nothing to do with the point I’m making here. That’s a seperate issue. What I am pointing out is that the US is a global empire. If a domestic revolution were to ever succeed it would have to coincide with a collapse of US overseas holdings. otherwise the US will use its global forces to suppress the uprising at home. So we would have to rise up while other anti-imperialist powers are already actively keeping the global forces busy. Then it would be OUR job to handle the domestic fascists while they handle the global forces. Does that make it more clear what I mean?
This is moralistic grandstanding. If Cuba wants gitmo back, it’s very unlikely to accomplish that goal without the destruction of the US either by revolution or it simply becoming an impotent failed state, neither of which Cuba can do on its own. The US would sooner burn the entire island down. You’re surely going to reply “that’s what I went on to say in the same comment” but then what is this?
When I said domestic fascists, I didn’t mean domestic to us, I meant domestic to the liberated territories (which is why I mentioned Ukrainian fascists and not Russian fascists).
I think the US is different in that the US is already kind of Proto-balanized. Like its got a federalized system as it is. And its so vastly more different over different regions. Like a commander in New Mexico and one in Michigan need very different strategies. You kind of need local orgs with a degree of autonomy to have them work. I agree we need national coordination but that can be achieved by having local and regional parties that simply coordinate and use democratic centralism to decide on national or regional strategies.
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
I agree, but I think there’s an important distinction. You don’t need to be a single national organization to organize at the national level. You can have multiple regional organizations that work together at a national level to achieve national goals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Yeah local parties that are allied against the national government but are at the end of the day their own thing would be best. Like CPH and CPC(California) could help eachother. But they shouldn’t be the same org. and the #1 goal should be splitting the US up and dismantling empire. Anti-imperialism first and foremost then a revolution AFTER is the better strategic plan.