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?
THERE’S NO REAL LEFT IN THE US. The true left in the world doesn’t need a leftist US (nobody with brains would believe them). Just a few collaborationists to report during the invasion.
and you are basing this on what exactly?
ViBeS. its always the same with this third worldist shit
I have no genocide supporters as neighbors. Can’t have mode materiality than that, first worldist “feel good” “”“communist”"’
Ah yes I forgot the best way to over throw capitalism is just to give up cause Americans aren’t pure leftists and can never change. Holy shit you third worldists are embarrassing.
USians are 0% leftists.
go back to ACP twitter
Im way more suspicious of people who love to point the finger at others for not being “left enough”. America has 350 million fucking people in it, you can find every single type of person there. Including the most radical communists.
This is cringe and I’m rather sick of it after living in Europe for a while. I hear many European “leftists” complain about the US in the same way that liberals in the US complain about
, it’s just a very annoying and lazy analysis. Communists are supposed to be concrete, not fall into dogma
Are you basing that view on what you’ve seen about euro “”“”“communism”“”“”?
It’s a fact, not a view, that America has 350 million people with incredibly diverse social circumstances and class position.
You are making an argument of the same structure as any other essentialist argument, which is flawed thinking in all contexts including this one. Read what Marx had to say about notions of a “human essence” and think about why he disliked that reasoning so much. It gets right to the heart of his materialist dialectic and that’s why you are incorrect to make such a lazy statement about a society, as though each individual is reducible to an essence
My assessment is based on what that Society is able to produce, that is death and misery. I couldn’t care less about “individuals”, but of course the sick individualism is a core of USian arguments.
The opposite of essentialism isn’t individualism.
Marx wasn’t American, so what’s your explanation of his insight into the brainworm of essentialism?
Read for example his 6th thesis on Feuerbach, part of which says, “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”
You can’t get a theory of class society if your conception of society is one that reduces things into ideal categories or essence that says, in the final analysis, that the explanation of difference is essence, not the historical-material conditions in which an individual (or a class) is situated. Like that’s the whole triumph of Marx’s materialism over the Feuerbachian materialism. Both Lenin and Mao also had similar writings on this same problem so this isn’t some esoteric debate.
My views are based on the present and that no really sizable foot work is been done to change the current material conditions in the US.
So what are you doing to fix it? What specifically can US left do better?
Some other guy asked me just that. My long answer then could be shortened to “stop being USAmerican, your values are all fucked up since birth.” Even calling themselves American is a filthy exceptionalism.
There are dedicated anti-war groups in the US that, among other things, do direct action to decrease US military capacity. Surely that is helpful to the global left.
You have my attention.