Recommend them The Red Pen or Dessalines instead. Western Marxism is better not receiving any traction at all. Fucking dogmatist Piece of shit!
Recommend them The Red Pen or Dessalines instead. Western Marxism is better not receiving any traction at all. Fucking dogmatist Piece of shit!
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11468794/8142738
The facetious response? The angry parade party. As others have said when you repeatedly issue demands and they do not comply to your demands, and then nothing happens, then your teaching everyone your organisation can be safely ignored. Even some radlibs understand this. The PSL has the audacity to not only do this but also call themselves MLs. Like what is the strategy for leverage here beyond electoralism because like a very basic tenet of understanding the political economy is you cannot play by the rules of the class you are hoping to overthrow and then win?
I have other glaring issues with them but the problem is the average westerner, despite any hardship and whatever leftist aesthetic they don, absolutely refuse to learn from those who won. Like right now could one point to a serious PSL strategy where they outline the pitfalls of bourgoisie electoralism, how they going to overcome this, and what scientific analysis they have done so they can focus on populations with the most revolutionary potential? I could keep going and on but I am just going to leave it there. This ain’t about some nonsense about purity. I am saying the leadership is a bunch of pseudoscientifc clowns.
All the original BLM leaders were killed off with the quickness but the PSL still stands because they are not a threat, but useful idiots where the state can go “look at these feckless commies”. That’s the most charitable explanation that they’re liberal career oppurtunities. But when you have folks trained from the George Washington University with openly genocidal polices on platforms they promote then this is way more than just ignorance at play here.
People cry wrecker because they haven’t been to a third world country where organisations with way less privilege and wealth, in way harsher environments, have done way more, ML or not.
(Rant not directed at you. Please feel to swap any “you’s” to a less affrontive pronoun)
i dont necessarily disagree with your arguments, but i feel like you are putting impossible standards on PSL. by your logic, any communist org that exists in the US is useless because it exists. so the only good org is one that doesnt exist. a bit unreasonable, no?
You’re absolutely right to point that out. The answer is: underground organising and cells, till you have accumlated either enough mass or capital to take on selected strategic aspects of the state ie you can generate leverage so that when your demands are not met you can use them, with increasing demands everytime they concede. (I’m not sure how to word it more precisely before it starts look like fedposting)
There may be a still more scientific and successful approach than the above but I do not know what that is, and the PSL are not even at the level of scandinavian socdem labour parties in the early 20th century - nevermind ML. (This sounds like there is a linear trajectory from socdem to ML - that is wrong but for now I will leave this paradigm as it is)
I want to also clarify: I used to think they were just incompetent, now I wonder if it is worse than that. A system’s intention is what it does.
the problem is that this strategy is counter to building a mass working class movement, which is what PSLs strategy is right now. they need to popularize socialism and anti-imperialism to get the masses on board with their project.
this is also done to solve the main issue in US, that labour is not organised at all. you cannot build up unions as an underground cell. i dont think the socialist movement is at a stage where they can actively confront the government right now, which is what i understand you are proposing.
Everyone does not need to be communists, or even socialists or even left wing. In fact the majority need not be. The vanguard can be small. Every successful AES had a relatively tiny vanguard. You need quality over quantity, not big tent idealism.
However, what you should be targeting are folks for the wider mass movement who will materially benefit from the downfall of US hegemony and those that are fine with going along with that programme because they will materially benefit from it within the short to medium term. The PSL has no such offer.
You’re right it needs to be built, so we have to consider if they are what they say they are then why are they hatching before they’ve incubated
“Anti-war” + welfare state =/ ML
There are underground ML orgs in the US already. The problem is, the workers are still disorganized. And with gig economy growing in the share of the whole job market, the problem is only getting worse.
I do agree that you need a strong cohesive organization and for that you need a clear political line. However this habit of ideological purity fetish that is common to all ML, Trot or Maoist orgs has also led to an immense fragmentation that made organizing in the mass scale impossible. Even worse, it made the Marxist parties irrelevant in the dispute over public subjectivity.
While I don’t question that Lenin’s methods worked in Tsarist Russia, specially because they achieved a revolution there (praxis), we need to understand that at Lenin’s time political organizations (even bourgeois ones) were strictly forbidden. It means that carrying activities underground was not simply a choice, but a response to their historical material conditions. Even Lenin, before building the Russian social democratic party, participated in an adventurist org before so he also had experience in doing so. Today, even though we can’t let our guards down because repression by state forces is still a very real thing, the conditions are not the same.
I see a lot of orgs trying to replicate the Bolshevik’s physical newspaper, and even though I think this kind of effort has its merits, nobody reads physical newspapers anymore. So most of the time see purists as HEMA practicioners trying to hone their swordsmanship skills based on old manuals. The problem is that HEMA practicioners don’t take themselves very seriously (and they know it’s a historical re-enactment, not a practical skill for today’s needs) while some purist orgs still think they are doing the real thing.
Instead of just thinking on replicating what the Bolsheviks did, why don’t we instead think on the objectives we want to achieve? The real merit of Bolshevik organization was that they were able to create a big network of Bolshevik chapters around Russia, and create an organized propaganda and information gathering apparatus. Not only that, but they were able to fund their operations to a point were people could be dedicated revolutionaries, not simply amateurish voluntaries whose revolutionary work was the fourth priority in their lives.
So even though the Bolsheviks strived for a very clear political line, I disagree with the view that they were extremely factionalists. After the 1905 revolution they even became more open and accepted more proletarian members, they didn’t stick with just a small cadre of die hard intellectuals. And they had to do this otherwise the other orgs (Memsheviks and SRs) would become more important than them.
There needs to be at least a scientific approach, a statistical deep dive of which sub-demographics to target of who is going to be most fruitful for targetting? We are beyond simply targeting a general labour class in the 21st century when the west as a class acts as the bourgoisie against the global south; the labour aristocracy/bourgoisie proleteriat is so ingrained into the imperial machine you need actual data to know were to begin. You need anti-westerners. For a flavour, look up probablykaffe on twitter for a start on what I am talking about. The PSL has nothing of the sort to offer.
I disagree with your POV. Don’t idealize the non-Western working class, because people outside isn’t progressive, revolutionary or extremely class councious. What makes them revolutionary is their material conditions and the work of some existing organizations which are disputing their conscience. For example, the Brazilian mainstream media is more pro-Israel than the US media. If you ask Brazilian people about Muslims, most will associate them with terrorists, and even so we have seen some growing support for pro-Palestinian movements.
So I completely disagree, you need the same effort of propaganda and agitation work even at the core the empire. The working class is very fragmented, we have very specialized professionals in tech with entrepreneurial views, the office worker who becomes a drag queen at night, the bigoted factory worker, the gig worker that does not have a stable job, and many different others. They all can be revolutionary, conservative or reactionary. Organizing a very heterogeneous class is challenging, but there’s no other way. And while promising revolution is good, most people have immediate needs that need to be addressed. In order to effectively organize you need to keep an eye on the now and on the future, and try the best you can to make both those views converge.
And keep this in mind, if the existing political work is not producing fruits is not because your workers are inherently bad, but because our existing analysis, strategy or tactics are wrong.
I didn’t. You need to consider learning from where organisation has been successful not where it has not. The whole reason I said we need a deep dive statisitical analysis is because of the complexities since workerism and trade unionism isn’t cutting it.
None of the rest of what you said is what I am saying so I don’t have much else to add. Westerners in the imperial cores have distinct class characteristics against the Global South that needs to be tackled. Brazilian politics overemphasises the non-favelas over the favelas (to generalise) rooted in colorism/anti-indigienous/anti-black politics based on relative class characteristics + their own comprador bourgoisie demographics and own colonialism - the islamophobia is USAmerican politics bled over (as it is the world over).
What’s your opinion on the push from them and their network of orgs pushing for general strikes?
What are their demands? Do you need an ML organisation for a general strike? How does this self-purported ML organisation differentiate itself from a socdem call for a general strike? The likes of DSA/Bernie/Justice Democrats are all pro general strikes.
OK… So you don’t have an opinion or what? If you did some investigation you would know that the strike movement would have fizzled out in Michigan because local liberal leaders didn’t want to do it and the PSL pushed for it anyway. The liberals you’re talking about are tailing behind them.
How closely do you really follow these developments?
So they have progress to the level New Deal era socdem labour movements at best? Managed to spread the loot of imperialism a bit more equitably? Your lynchpin is reactionary trade unions? I’m not USAmerican, what you’re saying is really not that promising. Hopefully I am proven wrong over time but if this is the best you folks have to offer then we’re fucked. I suspect you will have truly revolutionary movements but I suspect the PSL ain’t it.
I’m not sure what your expectations are or your level of understanding of the material conditions in the mouth of imperialism and how they impact organizing.You might be better off asking questions of full PSL members if you want to know what the PSL is about, and their current goals.
Historically, revolution has been most successful where the chains of imperialism are weakest. I wouldn’t be waiting for a revolution in the west. Advancing and guiding the development of class consciousness is a huge necessity in the west. Almost a century of assault on revolutionary ideology has its population wildly propagandized. I mean, the state invented a whole perversion of Marxism to keep the population misguided and to discredit Marxist-Leninist movements and actually existing socialist states.
Almost a century of counter revolutionary action within it’s own borders, likely developing an effective playbook for stifling movements. Now with tools the McCarthyists of the past could only dream of.
So I hear your frustrations, but I do wonder how much you have investigated these ideas yourself.
I’m still learning ML but the PSL for me (not a USAmerican here) is not impressive. If this is the best on offer then I hope I am really wrong.
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Firstly, I’ve read this essay a few times. Secondly, being propagandized is not simply “brainwashing” and that’s exactly the distinction the essay makes. It doesn’t counter my statement at all. The author explicitly acknowledges the massive scale of the propaganda apparatus and its real effects. What he rejects is the lazy “zombie masses” model that makes despair feel intellectually respectable. Instead he argues that Western populations are licensed, they’re not mindless dupes, they’re rationally going along with imperialist narratives because their material position as a global bourgeois proletariat makes that the smart short-term survival strategy. That’s a far more damning and materially grounded explanation for why class consciousness is so hard to build here, and it fits completely with my point about a century of counter-revolutionary assault. If the essay actually argued that propaganda doesn’t work or doesn’t exist, there’d be no need for capitalists to pour billions into it. The fact that they do, and that it operates by licensing people to cling to reactionary ideas,is precisely why “advancing and guiding the development of class consciousness” is such an enormous, patient task in the imperial core.
I get the sense that your frustration, and maybe your disappointment with PSL, comes partly from still being early in learning Marxism-Leninism and expecting a more dramatic or pure expression of revolutionary potential. But that’s a trap. The essay itself is a brutal critique of the “enlightened rebel vs. brainwashed masses” mindset that leads to exactly that kind of despair. So if you’re going to cite Roderic Day against me, it’s worth absorbing his central point: the masses aren’t cattle waiting for a heroic vanguard to wake them up, they’re people whose complicity is rational under current conditions. That doesn’t make organizing futile, it makes it harder, and demands a strategy rooted in material reality, not moral indignation. If you think that reality makes organizations like PSL unimpressive, I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why building any revolutionary pole in the belly of the beast is such a long-haul project, rather than using the difficulty as proof that nothing worthwhile exists.
Yup - I believe propaganda as such are a social license for acceptable politics that aligns along with their material conditons - USAmericans are generally correct that historically aligining with imperialism benefits them materially and their politics reflect that. It is partly that labour aristocratic bribe that challenges the notion of workerism as an effective anti-imperialist strategy.
So when one is asking who has revolutionary potential (similar to the beginning of the 20th century where it was discovered peasants in addition to the proleteriat had potential in Russia and China), in the 21st century we are asking which groups material conditions within the US will benefit from the fall of US imperialism. That is what requires a deep statistical study and the PSL does not appear to give the impression that they have done so.
The article is essentially a materialist challenege to the idealist notion of brainwashing. I’m glad you have read it and you can see the challenges ahead
no investigation, no right to speak. all your “criticisms” are vagueposting and rhetorical questions.
Those questions could be answered. The fact you opted not to is telling.
Never at any point do you make an argument, you simply suggest that there must be a compelling argument, thereby proving your point.
So you’ve got nothing.
The PSL is a socdem party with sickle and hammer aesthetics. I am being relatively mild in my criticisms. You’re going to have an uphill battle if you are tripping up even here.
The west is so fucking hopeless. Like this ain’t that hard, this is an ML space and the apologism is pathetic.
I am not even USAmerican but I have to know your fucking politics too because your country has made the rest of the world such a shithole that I have to process your people’s fucking bile while you tell me it’s good for me.
Let’s see in a year’s time (maybe not even that) where we are and then you can lecture the rest of the world on your (collective you) mistakes.
It’s funny to say that I’ve got nothing. You aren’t being “relatively mild” in your criticisms, you aren’t presenting any criticisms at all! You are slinging around some slogans without ever bothering to explain your position, and then demanding others prove you wrong, somehow. You have demonstrated no understanding of either PSL’s tactics and strategy or of the actual conditions of working class political struggle in the US. If, at any point, you presented anything resembling a coherent argument, then we would be having a different conversation, but you are just handwaving it away while refusing to elaborate at all, and acting superior because of it.
Ah good, so its not just me who is being hit with a smoke screen of vague accusations here.
Cool we’ll see over the course of the next 12 months or so how it all progresses if not sooner.
Fucking western hubris.