I’m doing my part!
It’s fun how every country reinvents the newspaper-selling machine. It’s like carcinization, but for politics.
I’ve been in PSL for three years and never once have seen people try to sell a newspaper
If you’re an earthling, join TST.
If you are an American, join the insert party that I’m a member of
PSL gets a lot of love on lemmy, that’s fine, lot of PSL members here evidently. You can just as easily join any of the other parties that will reflect your personal line better or worse. All the big rallys and protests I see are run by a wide combination of parties and groups (although I’ll admit PSL and FRSO are usually the largest by attendance).
Always remember you’re joining to do work, it’s not just a cool club you join so you can go to a protest once a year and say “look at me I’m a communist now” (you can do that outside the party too!). You can join PLP, you can join the Avakianites, you can join one of the 100s of trot orgs, any of em, just don’t join a party you know nothing about and be disappointed when you disagree on something. Study the party program. See what kinda positions the party has held in recent history. Be ready to dedicate substantial regular amounts of time to this group. Different parties will have you spending your time differently, but they all will appreciate a member keeping themselves busy.
Also don’t join a political cult. My friend and I were briefly wrapped up in a political cult thinking we were part of something cool. Then they started demanding more time from us. They made my friend feel stupid for needing to spend less time in the cult to take some classes.
I mean, was it a case of being cultish or was it a case of not having the time to be a fully active party member?
There is a difference, and there is no shame in not having that level of commitment. You can always participate in the various mass/front orgs.
It was cultish. What really woke us up to that reality was googling the org and finding a bunch of people online who got wrapped up in it and how they were isolated from friends and family. The “cadres” were basically living off the grid upstairs from the office living off of donated food. Anything that wasn’t 100% time commitment was not enough.
Never forget the PSL walked off on LA and left it on the people themselves to resist ICE when the raids first began in LA. We don’t need PSL.
No they didn’t. PSL is not a militia. They defined their strategic boundaries and have been consistent with those boundaries for years. They do not engage in physical confrontations and they do not go toe to toe with police forces.
Telling people to physically engage ICE is not only irresponsible as a party but grounds for federal investigations and disruption of the party itself.
Yeah they did. They also did it again a few days later in Austin and we brought this criticism forward a few days before DTS did there’s. We intentionally made it non-attacking. I couldn’t find this one at first so I sent the one from DTS that at the time we felt was more akin to grab the pitchforks and attack PSL than a constructive criticism. This one was by me. I could not open this on my connection so apologies if it isnt. I’d highly advise peoples defense and Defend the streets over PSL. DSA already fills the role PSL has decided to take. https://www.instagram.com/p/DK69IDpxS5J/
DSA does not in any way fill the role PSL has decided to take up. Again, PSL is not a militia. It does not engage in physical confrontation and it does not encourage physical confrontation. It is not a decentralized leaderless org that is immune from disruption by the state. It is a mass movement building engine along Leninist revolutionary lines.
If you think PSL and DSA are equivalent, then your obviously poorly informed and if you’re poorly informed and also encouraging people to abandon the PSL then you’re a wrecker
The principle argument here is whether PSL is in a position to organize direct attacks against the state or not, and I retain my position that PSL is not yet a vanguard and as such needs to truly integrate itself into the masses of people for such a strategy to be useful. DSA is not a revolutionary party, nor a Marxist party. As freagle said, telling people to engage directly with the state before PSL is the undisputed vanguard of the proletariat is just asking to get destroyed by the state, without the protection that comes with being a mass workers party.
I guess this is the moot of the arguement?
PSL doesn’t have nearly the size required to start an armed resistance. Though they are doing electoralism. But even for an armed resistance, step one is getting enough members before starting the armed resistance.
You’re correct, PSL is a party but not yet the vanguard, and as such their primary goal should be to gain membership and whatever material gains through mutual aid and labor/tenant organizing they can, protesting for Palestine and opposing imperialism, etc. Direct confrontation at this stage would be adventurism.
Do you have a source?
DTS’s principle complaints here are that the NYC PSL discouraged people from directly engaging with the police, and took that to be collaboration with the NYPD and stated that they will treat PSL as NYPD collaborators and enemies of the people going forward.
DTS doesn’t seem to have any clear goals themselves, though. They don’t appear to be a revolutionary party, they denounce mutual aid, tenant and labor organizing, and call those that “pass around boring literature” unserious. It seems more to me that they are more adventurist in nature, and as such are attacking PSL for not being so quick to directly engage with the police.
Above all, DTS reminds me more of the SRs and PSL more the early bolsheviks. PSL isn’t a vanguard party yet, and DTS is well behind PSL in terms of organization. There are genuine risks to above the ground combat with the police right now that I wouldn’t say is worthy of wholly condemning PSL and treating them as an enemy.
Do you have a better org as a suggestion?
this thread is a perfect example of how Western Maoists are losers totally out of touch with both the radical left and the general masses
I’ve done 129 cop watch actions on the behalf of the people, survived attempted murder by police and cofounded the peaceful streets project. I’m most certainly better connected to the people.
Is that still active? The website is dead for sure.
While in Peoples Defense, I no longer am, I made sure our criticism was not attacking or insulting. DtS’ was and we can’t criticize another group for trying like DtS was after their experience in LA. So I take criticizing another organization very seriously. It was a pretty serious situation where they were organizing a lot of rallies marketing them as a militant front. We didn’t want them to go away. We just wanted them to confusing people with the wrong messaging and then those people show up expecting to really confront ICE. Then when PSL walked away it made us look really, really bad to the people from the community that really thought they were going to a vanguard action. That’s all I wanted to stop.
I can’t speak to any specific party actions or decisions happening on the other side of the country, but I hope and expect, if what you’re saying is accurate, that this was an error of communication and messaging that can be resolved. In my experience, the party takes public safety (especially from the cops) and good coalition relations very seriously.
Anyways, keep up the good work yourself in your community. I’m obviously very pro-PSL, but we know we aren’t a univeralist org that encompasses all possible paths of struggle at all times. If what you’re doing is productively building the revolutionary movement, then you are a comrade of mine.
Nice work
In 2018 the hold over Libertarian members all voted against barring MAGA people from membership. It dissolved over night and was banned from the Austin Activist Community shortly after under threat of violence by the Red Guard. I was not Red Guard. I was the one who brought the MAGA ban forward. It sucked. But that’s movements. We trip ourselves up.
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ok
