What's the deal with Socialist Alternative

What's their aim? To participate in bourgeois elections?

I know DSA and SAlt have pretty decent relations.

That's not half bad considering the stranglehold capitalists have on electoral politics.

To revive Rosa Luxemburg and waterboard her.

The left in this country is a joke. There are more Esperantist in any given cities than Socialists.

I am glad that the left is collaborating instead of bickering like armchair revolutionaries.

Yes, ISO is what I was thinking of. Do you think a broad coalition between groups as diverse as DSA, ISO, SAlt, PSL, and WWP would be possible?

If they all got behind DemEnter with the Greens, it'd be an instant coup on the Democratic Party.

marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/transprogram.pdf
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_Program

Heck, at this point I think that even the Communist Party USA is worth collaborating with, even if everyone considers them to be disgusting. They are actually doing decent things on the ground.

As far as I can tell, DSA and the ISO work along pretty fruitfully and respectably. The wobblies and SAlt are a bit cultish and do not trust everyone else but they do show up.
The PSL are the craziest in the bunch. They need to learn how to get along and not push their tankie mentality on everyone else.

Ausfag here. Socialist Alternative seems like the only remotely decent Holla Forums organization here. Does anyone know of anything better?

Yes! Uphold the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism-Hillaryism!

I hear they have a high level of cointelpro infiltration, but I don't know if that's just hearsay.

Funny, this is what I've heard of ISO.

How so? Other then being tankies, I've never interacted with one irl, but have heard okay things about them. I read some of Sam Marcy's writings years ago on marxists.org, it seemed like good stuff, someone on revleft once called marcyites "trots for mao", like "jews for jesus", thought it was funny and it always sticked with me.

Yeah they are.
Their goal is to take over DSA from the inside and turn them in Trotskyist.
Every entryist brociaist organization is doing the same thing atm nationwide.

The only non-cultish organization in this list is DSA because they are big-tent by definition.

Yeah the PSL are fine. They just do not know how to share a stage. They try to get all the attention. I once saw them march into a conference room like soldiers with their PSL swag.

I actually like the local PSL, but they are fucking terrible at messaging and outreach. With the recent anti-war protests in my city, which to their credit they set up very quickly and efficiently, had multiple of their speakers talk about how great Assad is to the normie crowd and immediately evoke the russian revolution. Like, I get it if it's just inter-leftist talk, but this was supposed to be broadcast to the masses. Come the fuck on

Yeah, never let PSL organize normie outreach. They will march in their and make some Stalin apologist comments to the liberals.

From what I understand they're almost pathologically incapable of hiding their true power levels.

Australian Socialist Alternative is different from Bergerland Socialist Alternative.

Aussie Socialist Alternative is essentially an estranged faction of the Australian ISO that eventually outgrew its former org (or at least appears to have done so, I don't have any actual numbers on that)

Burger Socialist Alternative is the American branch of the Committee for a Workers International. The Australian equivalent is the Socialist Party of Australia.

Who? ISO or SAlt?

Is this what the DSA's Left caucus looks like right now?

Fucking tankies.

A DSAer told me that besids internal political education, the best new DSA member should pretty much become educated via the IMT and try to push DSA into the left.

The two factions that exist in DSA current are the Left Caucus (Luxemburgists) and the Right Wing (Harrington, Berners, SocDems).

The ISO is definitely trying to take over from the inside in smaller chapters. They also used to try to poach DSA members all the time. But they may have stopped recently.
Everyone is trying to play friendly with DSA and they see themselves as the true future vanguard of the revolution. Everyone from ISO, Salt, and your mother.

to their credit, Lenin would be proud

Luxemborgists seem to have more control in the central org. They have banners of Rosa and pamphlets about her shit everywhere.

It's actually an internal battle.
The Luxemburgists began taking over Occupy Wall Street.
The new wave of Berners are mostly SocDems, but they are more willing to listen to revolutionary politics than settle for Bernie/Harrington stuff.

However, DSA needs to play this smart. They need to be a bit more subtle than PSL, let's say. Normie SocDems scare easily, especially when they are surrounded by other recent liberals.

DSA is in a weird situation where the vast majority of their members are new and surrounded by other recently revolutionized comrades.

began taking over after OWS*
DSA had a huge growth. A lot of the SocDems were diluted from the conversation. That is why DSA's stance radically changed between 2008 and 2012.

I hope they get pushed to the left, they're the trending org in the US and I doubt they'll be able to really build a coalition if they're just some socdems

I'm starting to read up on the PSL, they seem pretty based tbh. Other than being tankie-ish is there any other reason not to like them?

When you're around a new convert, it's important to just focus on critique of capitalism. Answer any direct questions they have about your ideology, but don't push it on them.

Let them come to the conclusions on their own through research and questioning.

If you're a tankie and they end up a trot… that's a win.

If you're a market socialist and they end up an ancom… that's a win.

Fuck off trots. See you in ten years when PSL is running the show and you'll be begging people to buy your shitty newspaper.

Not really. PSL is fine, if you can overlook their tankie-ism/defense of North Korea.

But PSL will not bring about the revolution. They are a dead end if you want to help grow a strong left in the United States.

I agree. Pushing recently radicalized individuals to the left is a win for sure.

Sounds good to me. If other groups want attention, maybe they should try fucking organizing too.

==PURE=
O P P O R T U N I S M

Honest question, in what ways does Luxembourgism differ from the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, I know Luxemboug was in a position where she criticized both SocDems as well as Bolsheviks, but I've never seen anyone layout what her criticism were.

What has PSL actually accomplished that makes you think they'll overtake Trot groups?

None of the current parties will, by the time it comes to revolution, all the groups will have different names. But the only proven revolutionary theory is Marxism-Leninsm, so the revolution will by definition be run by people who look and act a lot more like PSL. You don't get revolution by pandering to moderates, you get revolution when everyone is so fucking pissed that they're ready to become extreme.

Yeah, I get that feeling too. Lots of new people are pouring in, but there is a lot of acceptance of the more revolutionary luxemborgist rhetoric among them.

The DSA seems to be doing a decent messaging job, beginning with their endorsement of bernie, and lack of endorsement for Clinton when she won the primary. Their work with organized labor has also been promising. The social media presence of their chapters, and the local chapters themselves go a long way towards linking local issues to socialism and providing a wide range of critiques of capitalism and reactionary ideology, though there may be the odd idpol-shit. Not to mention their connections to Jacobin help. Though Jacobin can be hit and miss, I think it's an overall very good propoganda front for the left.

Actual anti-war protests, for one. Trot groups are too busy reprinting NATO propaganda to oppose a massively unpopular war under a massively unpopular president.

I agree, but they seem pretty cool

the one near me is hosting a discussion of State & Revolution, I kind of want to go

To build the Left atm a softer touch is needed. Even if the economy collapses again it'll be harder than you think to radicalize the US proles. Maybe the PSL could do it, but it'd have to abandon defending regimes most americans deem evil dictatorships

Luxemburgism isn't really its own separate thing. I look at it as Leninism with an emphasize on promoting horizontal democracy.
Basically avoiding some mistakes of the Bolsheviks.

She really admired Lenin a lot.
Although she believed that the vanguard must mainly work on agitation and propaganda instead…

They only seem to defend North Korea insofar as they don't want the US to invade it, which I think makes sense, they don't ever go to turd worldest levels of retardation on the subject. But I agree, I think the tactics of MLs and Trots just won't fly in the US, rehabilitating the USSR or China is something that could only ever happen post-radicalization, it's definitely not a starting point, and hardly a way to get mass support. But at the same time I think it'd be impossible to rebuild the Left in the US without cooperation from most ML and Trot orgs.

Disdain for a centralized party, emphasis on organic, spontaneous revolution and proletarian democracy. Also shit about workers councils.

You can organize without making an ass out of yourself.

Where have Trots supported war with Assad?

Yeah, I think she was right in the end. Cliques will always form in a party, to give it sole control of the state would be to give a handful of individuals the state, and not the proletariat itself.

This is what I've always assumed, that it isn't a rejection of Leninism, so much as a modification. It seems similar to Bordiga actually. Can you recommend some literature? Or is all of this outlined in Reform or Revolution (that's the one everyone says to read)

Revolutions have only occurred in third world countries. I am not an accelerationist and I don't believe the material conditions are ripe for such revolutionary change yet.
We need to raise class consciousness and educate people, marching around and defending Stalin or even Trotsky to liberals is not the way to do it.

We are such a small margin. Everyone has a huge boner about DSA but they are only 20,000 people. There are more people who support Jill Stein out there than actual Lefitists.

'no'

I agree. These are baby steps. We need to nurture our leftist baby. Not send it to war against the capitalist machine while it can barely walk.

But the DSA is growing quickly, and they've got great PR at the moment, as Trump continues to fuck up, and as the Dems continue to support war in Syria (if not even Iran) while continuously cucking Bernie, Ellison, and Warren, then believe me, more and more people are going to switch to DSA, especially when the Greens do nothing but shill for Hilary.

I think groups who want to push their man cults on the rest of Americans are retarded larpers. We need to spread socialism. Not defend Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao to the masses.

It's all about tactic for a first world country. The United States is not rural China or Europe. It is its own element. Vanguard cults do not work in this theater.

this

Do American leftists really believe that a revolution can occur in their country?

To build the left, multiple approaches are both necessary and inevitable. If 100 Berniecrats turn into DemSocs, that's great. If 10 DemSocs turn into real communists, that's just as important, if not moreso in the long run.

Do you know who Americans hate??? AL QAEDA! Americans hate Al Qaeda! The PSL stance is the correct one for connecting to the working class. If they have to change anything, they just have to emphasize that the SAA is fighting Al Qaeda more heavily.

Marching into a room to make a statement is a tactic as old as time, and it works. You must think any kind of demonstration or action is "making an ass of yourself."

When have they not?

It's a perfectly fine way to do it. If nothing else, the more prominent "extreme" politics gets, the more moderate the DemSocs look, thus making them even more appealing to the stupid liberals.

If you're not spreading communism, you're not spreading socialism either.

It does seem like one of the biggest problems the DSA is facing right now, if I'm to believe earlier posts in this thread, as well as some things I've heard people mention in passing, is that the Trots and MLs they've been dealing with seem to operate largely in bad faith and are broadly more interested in infiltrating and wreking.

Agreed comrade. We need to learn how to communicate with dissatisfied liberals. People who view Bernie sympathetically. etc.

We need to use langauge that educated them. And not scares them away into ignorance or into Trump's ethnic chauvinism.

I am glad that DSA, SAlt, ISO, WWP, Wobblies, PSL, etc are working together in any way. We need to learn from our past mistakes and fight for a better world.

Probably not for a long while, I'll probably be an old man and the country will be underwater before anything like that happens

I think it'd be easier to use already existing groups, but I agree, any group cannot spend time defending old leaders, the past is the past

Good point pal

Revolution? Yes, maybe even inevitable tbh. Armed struggle? Probably not, and if we even get to that point we've already lost.

The past is not past, we are living in history. If you are against analyzing and fighting over history, you are against Marxism.

This post gives me a lot of hope for the future, thank you comrade.

It's how cults operate.
The ISO is one of the best allies DSA has But most of the members were extremely hostile to Bernie Sanders. Now they're desperately trying to recruit Bernie Liberals into their organization.

Is this a bad thing? No. But the same thing is being done by every organization. As what happened in Mexico, it is very possible that the cults of personalities, the vanguard parties, will destroy the Big Tent organization that was growing.

DSA needs to continue to grow as a big tent organization. If you already belong to a different organization and do not wish to leave for ideological or emotional reasons, it is important to actually support real solidarity with the biggest socialist organization in the country and not work in bad faith.

Analyze, sure. Moralize, no. Stalin, Mao, ect, ect, only require defense to the extent their legacies are hurled against us.

Who said anything about moralizing? The morals of a society are the morals of the ruling class.

To add, the left is indeed very weak. DSA is the biggest now. SAlt could be the biggest five years from now. But good faith, political education, and solidarity are indeed important.

Has DSA restructured into an actual party yet?

What's this now?

You know what I mean. Sure, you can say the eastern bloc wasn't as bad as the US and NATO would like you to believe, but there's no reason to say we need to defend their reputation beyond that.

...

People in DSA criticize Bernie all the time, though he is great for messaging for normies.

As far as I know that is not something they are planning to do any time soon. The general consensus is that electoral politics is only worth it once you have an actual base. Otherwise you embarrass yourself like the other "parties" on the left.
I think DSA is supporting DSA members who are running for local office currently. They are also support Democrats, Green Party, and WFP members.

It would be nice if DSA became an actual party. I personally think that even 2020 would be unreasonably to soon to organize a real party for the national level.

Mostly because the way the US law has structured its legal system third parties are highly restricted. You have to spend more resources on actually getting on the ballot than actually campaigning. Their plan for the moment is to run candidates in democratic primaries, although I know a DSA guy is running with the Green party in New York city municipal elections.

Uh, what about their actual achievements and their unprecedented durability in the face of hardship? What about the fact that they wrote the entire book on revolution, and their way is the only tried and tested method of overthrowing capitalism?

Achievements such as literacy, healthcare, lower mortality rates and industrialization should all be credited. But considering they didn't actually overthrow capitalism, much needs to be criticized over their ideas of revolution

They came hella close a hundred years ago when all they had was steam trains, while today the means of production are insanely advanced compared to back then, but all the stupid anarchists and socdems in the world will never be able to take advantage of it.
Moreover, the communists overthrew imperialism in countries like China and Vietnam, which is a massive achievement even if they are implementing state capitalism. If the imperialists had their way, 25% of China would still be addicted to opium and they'd still all be digging around in the mud for rice.

Yet Chinese workers are dying in sweatshops.

This is literally nothing compared to what the British, the Japanese, and the Americans visited upon China. We are talking dozens of millions dead every year from overdose and starvation, at barrel point. And, it's nothing compared to what the imperialists are still doing in the Middle East and Africa. The worst you can say is that they live about as good as American proles.

Not an argument.

And I mean actively supporting US intervention in Syria, not failing to properly glorify Assad.

Yea and SA are run by the IMT. I'm in the IMT and sell SA newspapers.

They're fucking SJW cucks, pretty good on socialist economics but IDpol as fuck

SA is run by CWI.

IMT and CWI used to be the same organization called Militant, which was an entryist tendency in the U.K. Labour Party. They split over the question of entryism, CWI preferring to form their own parties while IMT continued the policy of entryism in labor parties. IMT doesn't pursue entryism in the United States because they don't regard the democrats as a labor party, which means that IMT and CWI are probably on good terms here, Being basically the same political faction with only the question of strategy between them.

Kek fuck off, Australian Socialist Alternative are SJWs who spend all day doing nothing but autistic screeching in inner city Sydney and Melbourne

I never said they weren't. I was just pointing out that they're not affiliated with American SA.

Oh fuck just realised it's Socialist Alternative not Socialist Appeal. Socialist Appeal is the IMT. mb.

PSL

Well if you think socialism is Suporting islamic jihadists and US imperialism them sure they a viable option.

US Socialist alternative is affiliated with the Committee for a Worker's International (CWI). CWI in Aus is the Socialist Party. I'm a member if you wanted to ask anything.

This is an outright lie.

This. It took me multiple years as a leftist to begin to see more historical nuances in the history of China and the USSR. Both of these projects genuinely had a period that went very, very wrong (Stalin's purges and Great Leap Forward/cultural revolution), many normies think this sort of period of mass killing/dictatorship is an inherent part of socialism. At best I think you can tell normies the sort of simplistic lenin=good, stalin=bad narratvie, but overall I think the more we avoid talking about the xxth century socialist experiments the better.

Also I'd say only talk about foreign policy post-radicalization no one wants to hear their country is an evil empire.

Wtf is up with this? Why do people try to make use of personality cults that existed decades ago in far away countries as a recruiting tool? It is so clearly counterproductive and the actual epitome of LARPing.

Has DSA successfully elected anyone yet? I saw stuff on their twitter about DSA candidates standing for election but never heard how it turned out.

That was just relegated to the officers corps wasn't it?

Because these Personality cults are the the only thing that has existed in the left for decades. Anyone that didn't worship a figurehead either directly or indirectly was called a Liberal or a SocDem.

We need to move beyond the larping. We cannot deny that there is a lot of vulnerable knowledge and history to cultivate from the past but in order to be successful 100 years after the Russian Revolution, we need to be strategic.

It's obvious that some people have been involved with the larping brocialist cults for too long. They will definitely cause more infighting and splits within the left. For the sake of everyone, I hope we don't split into a million tiny factions. That is what porky would want.

No. Afaik Stalin executed most of the prominent Bolsheviks who served in the Vanguard Bukharikn, Trotsky, Karl Radek etc. He also carried out indefensible purges of the intellegensia not to mention the Kulaks who despite the memeing didn't actually deserve it.

I agree that most of these cultist groups are next to useless, I'm not sure why you're using brocialist as some kind of slur though. Are you new, /r/socialism might be more up your alley.

Brocialists-Cadre of middle class white men who worship Trotsky, Mao, or Stalin. Complete economic reductionist with no tactic for modern material conditions.

Brocialist is pretty much just a gendered slur for real socialists ie people who think the central contradiction in our society is between class' and therefore think that the class struggle should supersede identity politics.

Also if you criticize socialist orgs based on the gender/race of their members rather then their politics you are probably just a retarded hillary-tier liberal.

...

Go back to reddit you are not welcome here.

I've been here longer than you have. You can ignore identity politics all you want, but it is part of the modern discourse.
Class struggle is at the center of it, but hanging out with other bourgeois white men won't bring about the revolution.
That is assuming you leave your basement and aren't just an armchair revolutionary.

You say brocialist, we all know you're a white middle class guy already. Also fuck off to reddit.

The issue of socialist orgs in the USA isn't that they ignore feminism or other identity based issues, if anything they spend too much time on them.

lol. Get out.

I highly doubt that you seem fresh off the boat from /r/socialism. If you go around spergin about "muh white male" on here you get bullied pretty hard.

How much you want to bet this poster is a middle class white male?

It's pretty much guaranteed.

you're a shitty socialist if you don't see that the feminist struggle goes hand in hand with the class struggle, and spending any more time on it past that, aside from general analysis and theory, is a waste of energy and resources.

Are they? Why are they smaller than the DSA and probably PSL?

I agree but this won't happen. SAlt, PSL, and WWP hate the DSA for growing so big so fast and prohibit their members from joining.

DSA has a retarded rule keeping out members of democratic centralist organizations, but it's not really enforced and there's talk of changing it.

lol failed model.

Yeah, excluding membership from other orgs is pointless. DSA should be a big tent where everyone can work together and bring normies into leftism.

As far as i can tell, what DSA mostly does is some political education but mostly they work with local established struggles. Such as housing rights, homelessness, police brutality, etc.

What are your three fav threads from last year and before?

yeah they were involved in some clean water efforts and affordable housing demonstrations in my city, they do good work

Unlike DSA, SA actually talks about socialist politics and not some broad notion of "coalition building." SA seems to want to use electoral politics to build hegemony and demonstrate that the spectacle is in fact a spectacle, which seems fair enough.

But yes, I don't know why they are Trots. Labeling yourself as such only pointlessly connects yourself to early 20th century politics, making them seem like LARPers at times, and requires you to run a newspaper.

...

It's not my club, I've been to one meeting of both SAlt and DSA. At DSA, some guy was just asking what people thought the weaknesses and strengths were of the organizations they belonged to, which seems CIA as fuck. SAlt was talking about how to get urban workers interested in class politics (their answer was of course, newspapers.) SAlt seems like less of a honeypot than DSA, but that doesn't make them good.

Because we all know Americans are so adverse to man cults.

Sounds like Socialist Alternative where I'm from, Adelaide.
Go join the CPA or something, if you're in such a dire need of a party. Or, you could organise grassroots.

The purpose of running candidates (and it is done very selectively) is to build support for a specific platform and "show socialist politics in action" insofar as you can at a local scale. The belief is that a broad platform, with provisions beyond the abilities of capitalism. is necessary to unite the working class.

yeah but SALT are capitalist

No, white college students shoving newspaper to the faces of black workers while quoting Lenin is the only way to start the revolution.

Depends on the country you're in. Australian Socialist Alternative actively tries to break work related protests by infiltrating them and changing them to the party issue of the day, and for a good part of a year, shoved all socialist policies to the backseat of their documents and websites to make way for identity politics.

I don't think it would help much if the college students were also black. Most of my YDS chapter isn't white anyway.

Wait, aren't they posadists?