What are your thoughts on the Party for Socialism and liberation in America??

Entryism is a Trot tactic and has never worked. Simply bad praxis. Also the PSL makes an effort to be at least publicly non-sectarian. We never start shit with other groups, never poach members from other groups (even liberal ones). In fact there wasn't even a public reason given as to why the PSL split from the WWP. The leadership just wanted to move on and actually get to work. As you can see given the relative size and strength of the two groups, the PSL's path has proven to be the successful one.

Im OP I was asking this because a I was genuenely interested.
How is from your experiencence the party?
Although they seem to do faily well for a socialist party, do they have many memebers?Do they have some kind of group in every state?
What is the best amd worst rhing about it?
Would you recommend joining? And if so why?

Hi, OP. Glad to hear you're interested. I'd be happy to discuss this, as would any member of the PSL in person. I suggest letting them know you're interested in learning more. You can do this through the website, although it may take a few days for them to get back to you. Different branches have different response times.

Sorry I'm not exactly sure what you mean but I'll do my best. As I said above, there are a lot of new members who are still in the process of learning theory. Some people come to the PSL already ML, some come because they hate Trump/Republicans and learn Marxist theory from scratch, some come from Trotskyist groups and learn more about Lenin, the USSR, and actually existing socialism. Some come from groups like the IWW and learn about the necessity of a political party. It's all over but we grow stronger and smarter by the day. The struggle itself is an educative act. We learn by working with people and leading struggles in the workplace, classroom, street, and elsewhere.

I do not know the number of national members and frankly I don't want to share the numbers of my branch. I will say that we are literally professional revolutionaries. Quality is more important than quantity. There are groups in almost every state. Sparser states do not have branches per se but "at large" members. There's no organization in Alaska or Hawaii, something we are trying to rectify.

Being a part of a highly dedicated group of revolutionaries. I can't stress the professionalism of the group enough. Each member understands what it means to commit to revolution and are unafraid of giving our lives to the cause. The PSL is highly committed to anti-IDpol which is a refreshing breath of fresh air.

I'd say that it can be difficult to exercise the discipline necessary to be part of a group like that.

I certainly would. I learned a lot about organizing and theory from them. Frankly, I used to be a little homophobic and transphobic before joining. After meeting more revolutionary members of the queer community, I was able to see past my bigotry however I still hate the bourgeois gay identity while recognizing that that is unrepresentative of queer people in general. When people say the PSL does stuff, they mean it. We are really working for revolution. Come join us, comrade.

That's totally fair, I just hope you guys give them the crash course. I've talked to PSL members who were clearly very passionate and ready to fight for communism, but had almost no dialectical or materialist analysis. Their actual viewpoint was indistinguishable from someone in BLM or from Tumblr.

Getting successfully elected to local positions makes more of a splash than flailing at the national elections, and you get something out of it. Run power candidates, not protest candidates.

Political platform. No, you don't have to publish your revolutionists manual. But there should be a comprehensive platform that clearly states the PSL stance on every major issue. What is the PSL's vision of America after communist revolution, what are the short-term goals, how do they think modern idpol relates to class struggle, what level of cooperation with liberals, etc.

I'd like to stress again that joining the PSL has a daunting monetary cost. If you want a mass party that's accessible to proles, you can't ask for big membership dues and fundraising drives. We're making minimum wage FFS. You get more money by getting more people, not draining the small number who have already joined.

Just some friendly criticism. I hope PSL gets bigger. If a chapter gets started where I live and it fixes the problems I've noticed, I'd definitely join and put time and energy into it.

wat
I think you may be mistaking the membership of your local branch for the whole organization. The fact is right now, all of the socialist parties and organizations in the USA can have wildly different vibes from chapter to chapter, regardless of whether they're democratic centralist.

Dems and GOP are not parties, they are politically based money generation factories. GOP didn't give a single fuck until teabaggers started being elected in their place and all that sweet donation money wasn't going to them anymore. Dems won't give a single fuck about primarying their dudes with other dudes with a D next to their name. They won't change until we have a leftish tea party that kicks them out of their seats and their money.

bump

I've never even heard of this guys. Is this what you call astroturfing?

Some questions for the PSL member (from a European):

1. How would PSL prevent the US from transforming into a North Korean style state when preventing counterrevolution?

2. Do you think that the current US political system can be changed without violent overthrow?

3. Aren't you afraid that the people who joined because of opposition to Trump, only joined because they are against him and are not very interested in communism and Marxism?

I like it because Jodi Dean is in it. They are right about most things and don't disrupt other left efforts but I don't see a future in it. However I'm a trot and not a tankie so.

You do call any ML tankie?

Can't speak for them personally, but from reading their affiliated newspapers, it looks to me like they're actively trying to draw those people in.

Hey it's the PSL member again.

We have a 6 month candidacy period during which there are mandatory classes which are designed to give a background to Marxism-Leninism. The content of these classes varies and I don't want to go too much into it, however there are classes on economics, the necessity of a vanguard party, imperialism, union work, history of USSR, Cuba, China (modern and Maoist), and Eastern Europe. It's a good overview and is more reading than the average leftypol user does however can, and is, always supplemented by additional educational work.
We are a national party and our focus is national. I think you are overestimating the value of having a socialist on a city council seat. From what I understand the national campaign wasn't a major drain on resources either so the point is kind of moot.
I agree with you, the PSL must be more forthcoming about our exact positions. This is not to say we do not HAVE positions on the matters you mentioned but they are not advertised in an easy to access way on the internet. Like I said in my previous post, I think that we could do a better job with our website.
Monthly dues are negotiable. If you can't pay, you can't pay. End of story.
Like I said, we're happy to take it. The party does its best to be non-sectarian and are open to discussion. I hope you look to getting involved. We do take "at-large" members.

While branches do have our individual flavors, we are a vertically organized party. That means we will agree on all basic points of discussion and work to advocate the party line. I think people on leftypol have this strong aversion to IDpol, rainbow capitalism, black liberation, whatever because of its co-optation by the liberals and anarchists for their bourgeois goals. This overcorrection can go too far in the opposite direction, denying that, while class unite us and race is used to divide the working class, many members of the poor and working class are oppressed because of their race or gender identity. It's important not to forget that. Not accusing you of anything- it's just something I've seen on leftypol. Again, beware of overcorrection.

Hi Euro friend. Just came back from France. J'aime bien ce pays. Etes vous francais?
Socialism in North Korea developed the way that it did thanks to the incredible privations visited upon the Korean people by the US military. Millions of Korean civilians were slaughtered in the war by the US airforce and army- a fact forgotten about by the non-communist world. When you couple that with the fact that since 1957 thousands of nuclear warheads and nuclear capable bombers have been stationed in the South, it is easy to see how their particular brand of socialism developed in a somewhat… interesting manner. Essentially Juche is an outgrowth of the siege mentality that arose from confrontation with the most powerful imperialist county of all time. It's lunacy to believe that America would develop the same way.
Well, history tells us that it cannot. There has never been a national bourgeoisie that has willingly relinquished their class position. If a peaceful revolution was possible, we would be all for it. But just as the feudal class had to be violently overthrown, so do we expect the current bourgeois class of the US to be liquidated.
Many have joined in opposition to Trump and become communists. The education programs we have make it very clear that simply opposing Trump is not enough. Trump is the symptom, capitalism is the disease, socialism is the cure. Do you expect people to come to a communist party because they are fully formed revolutionaries with 100% correct praxis and theory? No, we must educate them. It's a process and Trump has helped us grow exponentially.

Yes we are trying to draw them in and make them communists.

liberationnews.org/socialism-organized-labor-and-working-class-ohio/

Bump

What? Sauce on this? That would be fucking awesome if true.

This basically seems like a truism. You can be a national party without running in the federal general election. And how exactly can you become a national party without first building a base of political power in municipalities? It's putting the cart before the horse.

No, I am definitely not for overcorrection, but the PSL people I have met were about 50/50 class struggle and identity issues, where it really should be closer to 80/20 or even more focus on class, with the understanding that class war is the #1 most effective way to address most of the real concerns of oppressed minorities. Still, I believe you if you say that idpol is not strong in your experience of PSL.

DSA and PSL will unite into the popular left front by 2020. I promise.

Not if DSA maintains its anti-communist stances.

Check out her Twitter.

New England should break off and form a socialist state.

We have the biggest and strongest economy in the whole country.

well I found a single tweet where she told someone to join PSL, so I guess she's in it.

On the topic of a coalition: other than that one criticism of the IWW, why not try to form a coalition with them? I think a lot could be gained for a "Popular Left Front" that has a subgroup that puts emphasis on unions and whatnot, though I admit I don't know all that much about the IWW as they are nowadays, so I dunno if they're basically just like the DSA

I've talked to IWW people but got no real idea of what their specific politics are.

Specific like what?

PSL member back.

Yes Jodi Dean is a member, I was talking with some of my friends about this at a recent internal conference. Don't have any proof, though. Sorry.

The PSL is open to coalitions. As I said above, our sister organization is the ANSWER coalition which used to be full of groups mobilized in response to the imperialist war against Iraq. Those other groups lost momentum and disbanded and left the PSL in it alone. It essentially works as a way to get normies in the door and prole-pill them on communism. We, as a party, would be happy to join parties with some of the similarly minded groups in the US- provided we have similar goals and methods. This means we will not be teaming up with the DSA to betray the poor and working class.

As far as the IWW goes, their history and revolutionary bona fides are there. They NEED to be a part of a political party. It has completely hamstrung them in the past and led to their slide into irrelevance. No horizontal organization has ever waged a successful revolution against the ruling class of a country. I love where the heart is at. IWW members are my comrades. They need to be part of a ML group to make a real difference.

Hey, different user here. Sorry if this has already been answered, but is there an estimate on how many members are in PSL? I wouldn't exactly consider myself a Marxist-Leninist (just a non-sectarian Red), but I've been looking to probably joining something for the longest time.

Hi comrade,
We don't publish our numbers but we are the largest ML party in the USA. There are branches across the country and in almost every major metropolitan area. Still missing branches in Alaska and Hawaii.
We are a democratic-centralist party therefore we are ML. That said, the PSL makes a great effort to be non-sectarian. The PSL never gets into public arguments with other political parties on the left. That said, there are legitimate disagreements over tactics and policy which decreases our desire to work in a "big tent" coalition. Other good parties are FRSO and WWP. The PSL has warm relations with them and, despite splitting from the WWP, we hold no ill will towards them as an organization and believe they do good work. There wasn't even a public reason given for the split. We have moved on. Unfortunately, the numbers of these other groups make it difficult to participate in as many actions as we do.
I highly suggest stopping by a meeting of the PSL before joining. The members of your local branch would be happy to speak with you.

That's fair, and that's impressive. Is there a branch based in Georgia (I tried look around but couldn't find anything on that)

DSA member tweets: 90 % super-ironic and random posts, 10 % politics (and most of that could be written by social democrats)
PSL member tweets: 80 % on-topic tweets, from local issues to anti-imperialism

>That would be fucking awesome
There is a saying that Japanese people have that is appropriate here I think: Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh? Is there another person named Jodi Dean I don't know about?

"I reject the critique of representation. I think the critique of representation is confused. I think it's confused, because I think it combines two different, I think it's a, a weird active it's, it's become a weird problem that combines some theoretical problems of what are the limits of representation with political problems with real existing democracies. And eh those two have become kind of conflated so it's like theoretical limits on representation somehow are seen to be the same thing as political problems of representation.

Umm, one problem with th-the way that manifests for horizontal groups is they say they're against representation, but they act as if an individual can represent her own interests. So the individual becomes the locus of representation. There is representation, it's self-representation. That's it. If however, you accept any basic ideas of psychoanalysis, you know there is an unconscious, and that someone can never fully represent themselves. If you accept most post-modern theory-theoretical positions, you recognize that the individual is a fiction, that the individual is em em ahn entity created with all sorts of in- urr exclusion you represent its ideological structure and so this idea of self-representation doesn't make theoretical sense. But yet, horizontalists speak as if k-you know they can just say, oh critique of representation and this has a kind of political, theoretical coherence. So the first problem is, it is basically individual self-representation but that's theoretical faldada dats a mistake. Ahm, I think, ahm, the second problem is the supposition that you can have politics without division…"
-Jodi Dean

I remember seeing there was a branch in Atlanta but I believe it's one of our smaller branches, unfortunately. I would submit a query through our website to try to get in contact with members in ATL. pslweb.org/contact

Personally, I don't know too much about Dr. Dean. She appears well known in the ML community in the US. Psychoanalysis is not really my thing so I try to stay clear of most post-marxists/Zizek influenced culture critics with their loose language and rejection of revolutionary politics. From what talks I've seen online i.e. half of one Dean seems to be authentically revolutionary as opposed to Mr. Sniffman who I would wager is a little more concerned with how he can get paid by name dropping Lacan and talking about fist fucking. This quote seems a little cherry picked, comrade. I think you could find another quote from her where she is more articulate and less hand-wavy.

I have read two books by Dean: Crowds and Party and Communist Horizon. She doesn't have an atom of Marxist economics in her. Instead it's Lacanian psycho-babble and some criticism of liberal writers that seems to be based on skimming Wikipedia articles.

Little ironic but I always knew it would be a great commie flag

Like I said, I don't know much about Dean so I'll defer to you. We need everyone who can contribute to contribute. Even if a lot of her writing is academic nonsense as you say, she is a well known figure who can help bring more attention to our party.

PSLanon, why is PSL so secretive about stuff? Is it literally following the "conspiratorial" tactics from What Is To Be Done? I mean, OPSEC is one thing, but refusing to publish numbers and stuff like that seems a bit odd.

Is there supposed to be something objectionable about it? She's arguing against anarkiddie/occupy-style horizontalist individualism, and in favor of a party with hierarchy. She's right.

pros: extremely professional, good politics mostly

cons: falls into the same democratic centralist trap of trying to build a party instead of a movement, attending union rallies and healthcare demonstrations with the goal of recruiting

also PCOR is a great idea and i hope it works out. but since they're a democratic centralist org, they're missing out big time by making it a party-thing and not teaming up with SAlt and DSA. everyone thinks we need to duke it out over who's gonna be the vanguard party when in reality we don't have any sort of mass organizations building worker power

uh actually just finished reading this thread and you're a faggot nerd

and also insanely creepy

SA would be pushing it, teaming up with DSA in its present condition would be pure opportunism. Their unofficial magazine Jacobin has published nothing but anticommunist, anti-third-world propaganda as of late.

the PCOR literally lists a branch of Our Revolution (the Sanders campaign org) as an endorsing body.

This is bullshit. A few hyper online DSA members don't represent the organization. If I was to judge DSA by it's members twitter presence, though, I would despise it.

In what way is ANSWER a coalition? Very little breathing room in it. Always felt to me like another deceptive front campaign. The type SAlt loves.

DSA under Harrington and his old guard after he died were anti-communist. Since the 90s DSA has not in any significant way been anti-communist. They have never come close to supporting regime change in Communist states.

DSA as a paper organization doesn't equal what most organizers and leaders think. But this will all be resolved at their convention and tankies can finally BTFO for a second.

Tankie's praise North Korea and Juche. Anti-Imperialist MLs defend it against Western Imperialism but (hopefully) recognize it has problems other than the fact the West's pressure hurts them.

Jacobin has done neither of those things. It's published soft self-criticism of the left. It's honest and sticks to their democratic socialist line. Sometimes the left seems to forget Jacobin's function is to engage with the liberal left and a broad audience.

that anti-TeleSUR piece was pure trash even i'll admit

it's fucking trash that calls for regime change.

I'm against horizontalist individualism as well. The problem with how Jodi Dean is "arguing": "If however, you accept any basic ideas of psychoanalysis, you know there is an unconscious, and that someone can never fully represent themselves…" The party somehow knows better than you what you want because it somehow knows what not even you know about your own subconscious wishes.

I don't think she's necessarily making that argument A->B. More that since we aren't able to fully "represent ourselves," a party can be just as valid a representation, and it can be argued that if it represents a class in terms of the interests of that class, it is a rational/theoretical representative and is more valid in many ways than our irrational and conflicting desires.

bump

Might be poor timing to post on their social media, but it's from their most recent edition on the pink tide, so it makes sense.

Also 95% of the MLs hating on social media didn't read the piece. It recognizes TeleSur as fundamentally good, but increasingly unwilling to criticize Maduro even in mild ways. And if Left Independent media doesn't recognize the crisis/critique from the Left, all of the criticism/explanations are taken up by the right. Author missed out on some points he should have mentioned but it really isn't the worse.

Jacobin has never come close to calling for regime change, and preemptively mentioned Exxons/Washington's interest in regime change. Jacobin celebrates Chavez's victory in the attempted 2003 coup on their social media. Their pink tide magazine edition details how most of their criticism of Maduro is how he has left social movements to die and he might not have the masses support when another coup comes around.

It's light self-criticism of the Left. Tankies will always be tankies I guess.

Jodi Dean's opposition to horizontalist individualism isn't purely from psychoanalysis. On a practical level she realizes that you can never truly have everyone represented at once in full, and if you attempt it then it will probably be near-constant consensus building meetings.

Watch Jodi Dean and Doug Henwood BTFO some anarchists at a Jacobin panel during Occupy Wall Street. Jodi explains it thoroughly here and the whole thing is really entertaining on it's own.

vimeo.com/30743195

Jacobin has literally called for regime change in Syria.

Do you have a transcript? I can't watch videos over this connection.