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?
Thank you for being understanding about my error.
Yeah, I think it can be okay to idly speculate, but my point in mentioning it isn’t that we need to be drafting utopian blueprints and fitting things to those designs, but that while we should focus on what’s before us we should be conscious of the continuous process in a broader sense and not cause ourselves trouble by arguing along excessively or too fundamentally nationalist lines (the USSR’s struggle with the national question also demonstrates somewhat more immediate significance to this question) when the fundamental goal is the liberation of humanity and giving national sovereignty primacy over human welfare can and has had negative consequences.
There will always be a need for governance at several different levels of governance going down, functionally, to the level of individual apartment complexes and workshops, but the only people who think centralism or a world government means that one politburo in the communist global capitol of Kerala will feed a bunch of data to some servers and have arguments among themselves and then hand down orders that include informing you, personally, “how many nails you need to make each hour of shifts this long on these days” are the Stalinists that exist in the fantasies of Austrian school fanatics. Each level of government has its own level of specificity, with the highest organ being responsible for only very broad issues and what it is uniquely able to administer in terms of coordinating entities that are otherwise their own subdivisions (in consultation with those entities, the equivalents of federations or whatever).
This is dangerously in error. Accelerating the defeat of imperial projects like the war in Iran makes sense, and that incidentally will hasten the collapse of the empire (and already has hastened it), but hastening that collapse for its own sake is only helping fascists who will then cause an inconceivable volume of death and destruction both domestically and abroad. We should be imperial defeatists, but beyond that our goal should be to construct socialist movements to be more effective opposition once that collapse takes place to put down whatever neo-neo-Nazis take over the semi-dead empire and presumably try to literally destroy the world in nuclear hellfire or whatever. Accelerationism is a bad ideology, and if anything the empire collapsing more slowly (insofar as that can happen while still being undermined in its aggressions) is more beneficial to us, because it collapsing very soon is basically the best case scenario from the point of view of the avowed Nazis who are much more equipped to fight than all the socialists are.
I guess the point where we diverge is that I just don’t see the west as the force that will bring socialism to fruitition. Like I see the west as the obstacle to socialism.
This is the point where I think maybe we’re just looking at things differently. I don’t think we need to do this. Why? Because those socialist movements already exist. They are China, The DPRK, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos. If we can pull off a functional vanguard in the west before it collapses then great, but we’re always going to be the junior partner to a global south led anti-fascist coalition.
In the west sure. But globally? My money is on the PLA.
One final note I want to add. I think the fascists are ALREADY in power. So the idea that we need to be worried about the empire collapsing because then fascists will take over? It doesn’t compute for me. The US is already fascist. It kills millions already.