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?
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).
If you know I had already said that then why did you reply to me saying it lol
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.