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!
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
I’m not sure why you have this impression. You seem to not want to explain your position at all. You just make these broad claims about the party. I’m not a party member, but you can read their 2005 assessment of the US working class here: https://liberationnews.org/05-04-01-the-us-working-class-today-html/ obviously this is dated, but I have no reason to believe that they haven’t continued to build on this analysis over the last two decades.
Their party program is here: https://www2.liberationschool.org/program-of-the-party-for-socialism-and-liberation/#part1 updated last in 2022. Its unclear to me If you’ve read either of these.
Lastly, they produced a book entitled “Socialist Reconstruction: A Better Future for the United States.” Which you can find here: https://1804books.com/products/socialist-reconstruction-a-better-future. I haven’t read this yet but its on my list.
So, the answer to your question of “which groups benefit?” isn’t a mystery. They argue the vast, multinational working class, particularly its most oppressed sections (African Americans, other oppressed nationalities, immigrants), has the greatest objective interest in dismantling U.S. imperialism, as it would end both the super-exploitation of the Global South and the domestic austerity and racism used to divide the working class at home.
I’m not sure if “statistical analysis” is what you meant here. I’ll assume not. Since both revolutions you mentioned were built on the backs of rigorous political analysis from a Dialectical Materialist world view.
You accuse them of having not performed similar work, and almost seem to imply that you know the answer that the PSL doesn’t. You again are not saying anything, you are simply making claims that you are not backing up with any sort of personal analysis from what I can tell.
And its not that the PSL isn’t beyond criticism, but I’m not even sure what your criticism even is to begin with.
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.