Yeah I tried joining up as people advised me to do and felt the last lingering gobbets of my enthusiasm for it shrivel into dust when they made it clear to me they don't do mutual aid or anything like that and it's entirely bullshit

Getting on the Presidential ballot for a corrupt system that's going to fall apart in less than a decade does not strike me as realistic or forward-thinking

I hear you but I think the party's goal is still sustained growth which may at some point enable state chapters to start running serious local campaigns. I'm not a member however though I plan to begin the process once I'm back in the states next year.

However some of our other comrades who do work with them have said that there is not much money spent on the campaigns, there is just the volunteer time to get the signatures and of course whatever events Claudia and Karina partake in (but these double as general socialist agit prop so I'm sure you'd agree they aren't a waste of time either). I'll agree though that the rhetoric could use a little tweaking because "we now have a path to over 270 electoral college votes" probably seems like a delusionally optimistic statement to many from the outside. But that's small change in the grand scheme of the party's goals and activities.

Let's hope that at some point we can start getting socialists on county boards of supervisors' and fuck up landlord's lives on a direct level.

It's only a "vanity ticket" if you consider winning elections to be the goal of a party. The PSL is under no illusions they're going to succeed in bourgeois democracy. Pivoting to actually trying to win state ballots is a step backwards—it would represent a slip into electoralism and they'd become effectively indistinguishable from the DSA.

The goal of participating in bourgeois elections is to draw attention, nothing more.

💯 This is why I finally got fed up with the green party. Where they ran local candidates they actually won and made real impact (I lived in Richmond, California where Gayle Mclaughlin was on city council and then a 2 term mayor!) But the focus on national elections that they could never win given fptp, and the subservience of the California GP to the national party annoyed me enough to switch to no party preference.

It's not in any way a "pointless vanity ticket". It's a specific strategic choice the party explains here: https://www.liberationschool.org/why-we-are-running-in-the-2024-presidential-race/

Working and poor people need their own class-conscious organizations where their needs are subordinate to no one. Elections allow working class parties to directly contrast their program to the capitalist parties in their entirety, demonstrating that socialism is superior to capitalism at proposing solutions that meet the scale of the problems facing the majority of people.

The general sense that a socialist program is “implausible” in the present system gives elections the further ability to expose the thing standing between the substandard status quo and a fulfilling future: the capitalist state, or, said differently, the current political system.

Elections, along with strikes, rebellions, and protests, are a rallying point, where the broad mass of those disillusioned with capitalism can gather and turn their scattered protest into a large-scale positive force for change. Furthermore, they are a unique arena to educate and organize greater numbers to work towards building a new system. Winning power is a long, complex process, but it will never happen unless we openly contend for it and explain what an alternative world could look like.

It's fundamentally about utilizing the massive attention driven towards the presidential circus to promote a socialist platform in contrast to the bourgeois parties, extends the reach of the organization, and builds the revolutionary party.

Our campaign is explicitly pitched for power. What does this mean? First, it means that focusing a campaign on proving the capitalist ideology of the major parties (and some minor ones) is totally bankrupt. Instead, we must go further to show how socialism is the best solution for the problems of the working class. It becomes clear that real power for workers can’t be achieved within the current system, something made apparent by the very “implausibility” of our sound solutions. Finally, in this campaign, we are raising the key issue of how to make deep social change: the need for a Party.

Running a presidential campaign gives access to places and people who might otherwise be unreachable. It is not about winning the presidency or promoting our candidates. It's about leveraging every opportunity to demonstrate the necessity of a Marxist-Leninist communist party and making that organization bigger and more formidable.