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?
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.
On one hand this is a privileged suggestion to make, on the other hand it’s irrational because where the hell will 350M people physically go? Or do you mean like “just have a revolution” lol
You keep regarding the whole people of the US as a monolith. Idealist, undialectical, arguably racist. In the first place, the US has a long history of racial and other internal struggles. Where does race figure in your understanding of the US? Do you understand US beyond the headlines you read, beyond a simplistic class analysis that flattens everything to worker and capitalist? This is why I mentioned Europe because this kind of “analysis” of the US is ubiquitous here.
In the abstract yeah… but that’s the way history went. Complaining about a misnomer while ignoring historical usage is ahistorical and petty.
I’ll answer in the appropriated time. But
Race is the one thing you all are the only ones overtly, unhealthily obsessed over, and you had the gall of suggesting I’m a racist. One drop, pure blend, half shit. No normal human being is too fixated on this.
Don’t you dare drop an Angela Davis on me, the intersectionality debate is still too liberalized in the US. I hardly believe your take is better than hers and even hers, a good one, isn’t the best one worldwide.
Any labor emancipation in the US necessarily must also be racial emancipation. Capitalism in the Americas is a racial capitalism. You cannot just take Capital volume 1, which presumes equality of labor, and apply it to a context of unequal labor on the basis of race.
Race is not an obsession, it’s a material fact in today’s world. You are saying reactionary things based on vibes. The utopian socialists thought money could be abolished by decree. Likewise it is utopian to think that race can be abolished by anything other than a struggle against its basis, ie the racial capitalism currently existing across the Americas.
To be a good Marxist you have to analyze things in their context. You should be learning about America in its own context, not applying some universal theory of race.
Isn’t the symbol in your profile picture from the United States?
A relic. Like saying the 🌹 is a socialist symbol today.
Like, c’mon, guys. Show me praxis, effective work to demolish propaganda, individualism, jingoism, and racism in that society that was forgotten by any hypothetical altruistic deity. And the building of international working class solidarity.