I appreciate everyone's responses a lot. I also think it was good to remove the post because there was some reactionary stuff in the google doc I linked. I found it through one of the articles that Bad Mouse's link led to, not in any of the other comments. I only looked at the "first hand accounts" links in the doc and didn't even double check what else there was so that's my error.
I had a feeling the take would be that there are certainly big flaws, as there are in any org, with any group of people, but PSL is still one of the few vehicles for socialist agitation that there actually exists, and by joining it we can help improve it.
I'm likely going to be moving to San Francisco when I'm back in the states in case anyone has recommendations about specific orgs in the bay that are certainly good.
Also I got to say Bad Mouse's ultra turn also bummed me out a little. It seems like such a baby leftist thing to do to just shit on a socialist party from across an ocean and then refuse to elaborate.
No idea what this is about but the Republicans and Democrats both secure unlimited financing for business partner nations' genocide, and enable/coverup JeffEp-style intelligence operations. Whatever grievances one can find regarding PSL, probably the only organized socialist political body in the country that stands to attract even 1,% in the polls, rest assured they will probably be made moot by whatever scandals would come about if a hypothetical PSL ever actually gets a single politician into any office at any level.
OP asked about PSL the other day, one of their links linked to some reactionary sites. ButtBidet's comment
If I were to give you a personal rec it would be to feel comfortable joining PSL but also don't lose yourself in any problematic behaviors a given local chapter might have. There's a risk in any (imo prematurely) Demcent org to feel a need to follow the line lest you lose your friend group / organizing group and it's okay to give yourself permission to say no to bad ideas and to raise issues. I've seen plenty of folks stay in places they don't really feel safe because of those fears, including a trans comrade that felt completely alienated by a class reductionist org but didn't want to remove themselves from their friends/comrades by leaving and joining a different org. They're still having a hard time with this.
I see. It's something I'll definitely look into and I think I'll give it a shot in the case that I can actually make it past the onboarding phase. I'll always have family and friends outside the org so that is probably a good boundary to keep myself from getting swept up in any organizational drama.
Do you think it's worth any of our time to try to steer DSA into a better direction? I feel like if they could sever their ties with the Democrats it could become a vehicle for some real agitation and organizing. Again it just takes involvement. It's funny how "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" actually applies to socialist organizing because we are trying to change the world for the better but not to voting for genocidal capital-simp freaks because they are, you know, actually trying to do bad.
Nice! Glad to hear you're still interested in joining an org! For most people just taking that first step is the major inflection point in becoming an organizer. You can do it!
Re: DSA, imo it's in decline and continues to be full of liberals and old semi-reformed Trots with completely unrealistic ideas. It varies wildly by locale, though. There are chapters that are dominated by Trots, chapters dominated by MLs, chapters dominated by environmentalist SocDems, etc etc. The most common DSA member is one that forgot to cancel their dues and has never been to a meeting. I would rate DSA as middle of the pack in terms of a first org to join. You probably won't learn any theory through it and it probably won't give you proper training in anything, but you can also craft your own direction and self-teach without others getting in the way and there's a decent chance they're involved in some labor stuff (but probably not in a particularly powerful way). It will waste your time on drama if you pay attention to it. Luckily, it's very easy to leave the DSA lol.
The major issue with the DSA is that it mostly grew due to Bernie so it's people whose leftward transition more or less arrested at "slightly left of Bernie" or went off in one of several disillusionment pipelines and these people do not agree with each other about anything and most of them haven't read basic theory or are media illiterate. So there's two issues: it's aimless as an org overall, with many liberal tendencies, and they have absolutely no idea how to grow the org, having benefited from an event that will probably not happen for them again. It is possible to join groups trying to make DSA better overall, but to be realistic you're looking at a decade of struggle and no guarantees. Also the few decent subgroups tend to be specific to a given city. Just don't want you to burn out on that reform project - so enter it with clear eyes!
Re: pro-capital genociders, DSA struggled for like 1-2 years with merely criticizing Bowman for funding the iron dome. DSA's resolution to this was, over time, to disband its Palestinian-focused working group, punt on censuring Zionists and support for Zionism within its org, and spreading a bunch of nonsense about how they've gotta support their few elected members. Bowman then said he'd left the DSA a year earlier lol. That's the kind of stuff you'd be forced to observe. But you also won't be joining a culty org or one that actively teaches you incorrectly so just take all of this as a suggestion to engage critically if that's the org you try first.
Finally, the best org to join will often be the one that is active and large in your area. At least you know it's doing things. It might be none of the ones we discussed. I would recommend looking at the orgs that are active in Palestine solidarity actions, including protests, because that will rule out a number of opportunist orgs and put you in the general orbit of the "best" org in your region, whatever it might be. If an org is coordinating those actions and does well-regarded labor work I recommend joining that one.
The is going to be a bit of a controversial take but it's my own and I'm willing to die on this hill:
I put BadMouse into the same category as BadEmpanada tbh. Both make/tend to make good video essays. That's all I'm willing to engage with and give them credit for.
They are not people who I look up to as people who I should follow. I neither trust them nor respect them enough for that.
In the case of BadEmpanada, he has some unhinged behaviour on social media and he just has some garbage takes that increase in inverse proportion to the proximity to his main channel. In the case of BadMouse, he is so self-assured that I feel like the only right thing is to make up for his lack of skepticism by having enough skepticism of him for the both of us - he cycled through ideologies like a westerner window-shops for new outfits to wear and I'd argue that he's more of a convincing speaker than he is a person who has done the reading and put in the effort to enact his politics (I can't speak for his more recent turn away from being on YouTube to primarily being a grass-toucher but everything that is visible in his YouTube era is representative of him spending his time on creating online hot takes so...)
So I will listen to what each of them have to say, and most of the time I really appreciate what they have to say and the way they formulate their video essays. But the more they start straying out of their lane, the more I start taking them with a pinch of salt; I'm not about to start taking organising advice from BadMouse lol.
With regards to the PSL - they do not operate in my country and I am not personally familiar with them. I have definitely heard about some of the concerns with the organisation and how it deals with matters. This is based on second-hand reports and it should be taken into consideration but it should also be taken with due skepticism because it's easy for a wrecker to concoct a story to sway sentiment against an organisation baselessly (not saying that this is the case here but we should always have a healthy skepticism about these claims against organisations and comrades unless we have good cause to believe it.)
As the PSL matters are internal and they are contended, I am happy to sit this one out - it's not my place, it's not my organisation, it's not my struggle.
If I were considering the PSL personally, I would observe the organisation for a while and read their statements etc. while engaging with the local branch and its members as a fellow traveller. Very often with large or national organisations, the people on leadership are not reflective of the people in your branch and there are questions about organising and strategy that people need to hash out with themselves like whether they think the org itself is good enough on sufficient matters that you can deal with disagreements etc., whether you want to be part of driving a cultural change within the organisation, if you are satisfied with how the organisation resolves conflict and how the leadership addresses their own flaws and fuck ups etc. etc.
Ultimately, this is my position: I am not perfect, organisations are not perfect, and whatever party I'm in or associated with is not perfect either.
I have a hierarchy of things that are most important to me and I seek alignment with enough of the most important issues. With the lower priority matters, I'm interested in seeing if or how the organisation's line has developed on that and how/if it has managed to develop on other issues where it has had a bad line; an organisation that is willing to change and admit past errors is more important to me than perfect ideological alignment because I see that as a crucial sign of a healthy org.
Idk where I'm going with this ramble but it's just some of my thoughts.
In the case of BadEmpanada, he has some unhinged behaviour on social media and he just has some garbage takes that increase in inverse proportion to the proximity to his main channel. In the case of BadMouse, he is so self-assured that I feel like the only right thing is to make up for his lack of skepticism by having enough skepticism of him for the both of us - he cycled through ideologies like a westerner window-shops for new outfits to wear and I'd argue that he's more of a convincing speaker than he is a person who has done the reading and put in the effort to enact his politics (I can't speak for his more recent turn away from being on YouTube to primarily being a grass-toucher but everything that is visible in his YouTube era is representative of him spending his time on creating online hot takes so...)
There's an opportunist streak about BadEmpanada, especially how he treated BayArea, and honestly, he's still a sexpat until proven otherwise just like all Anglo male immigrants in Global South countries.
And as for Bad Mouse, I just don't trust some dude who constantly changes ideology. It's one thing to do so when you've just been exposed to leftist thought, but at this point in the game, he has heard the arguments and talking points of all the major tendencies. There's absolutely no way he would have experienced consecutive life-shattering events that would cause him to reevaluate his core beliefs over and over again, which makes me think he was never sincere in the first place.
Agreed on both fronts.
There are people like Socialism For All who call out people on the left but it's not about drama at all.
I'm sure there are people who engage in drama farming for clout in a principled way (idk any examples because I honestly do not care for it).
But then there's BE who really seem to relish in drama farming and use it to chase clout for its own sake and I have a strong distaste for all that.
I went a bit easy on BM above because I don't want to stir up drama here but there are a few archetypes of characters you see that end up following particular paths and tbh he's the kind of person that I could absolutely imagine taking a "How I left the left" arc sometime in the future. Not saying that it's guaranteed or that I'm accusing him of being a rank opportunist but I've seen people who bounce between ideologies or who rapidly cycle through them and it's not unusual for them to settle on a position that makes outsiders go "Huh??" while jaded people like me go "Yeah, they were never truly grounded in radical theory/principles in a deep way so I'm really not surprised to see this new development..."
For me, I was an anarchist for basically all of my adult life until fairly recently and, if I'm being completely honest, it pains me to talk about it because I still grieve for the loss of my old politics (and it really was pretty life-shattering, like you said) and so I look at people who cycle the way that BM has and I simply cannot fathom doing that myself. If I was going to put an analogy to it, I'd say that I approach my politics like it's a marriage whereas people like BM seem to approach politics like it's a hookup app.
tbh he's the kind of person that I could absolutely imagine taking a "How I left the left" arc sometime in the future.
IMO, he'll eventually become a Trot (because that's the last major tendency he hasn't been yet) before then turning right.
There are active branches of Socialist Alternative in the Bay Area.
Current organization priorities are building a viable working class party through Workers Stike Back and supporting the union drive at Amazon's KCVG airhub.
As a heads up to others this is a Trot org with the worst international takes you've ever seen
Super solidarity comrade.
It's an active organization that has a made a number of material gains for the working class, more so than other organizations in the modern imperialist core as far as I am aware. It's democratic centralism to the core, so there is solid reasoning behind the things you might disagree with.
Respectfully, the takes I have seen from
Socialist AlternativeSocialist Workers Party regarding international issues are beyond the pale. Like “unwavering support for Israel against the capitalist regime in Tehran” level shit.I don’t have a huge problem with Trots in theory (if they put Trotsky’s ideas on a pedestal and express distaste for Stalin, for example). But my problem is when Trots start taking positions that happen to perfectly align with the US State Dept, then we have a problem.
SAlt doesn't do "unwavering support for Israel". They're more guided by a knee-jerk "neither Washington nor Moscow rise up workers" characterization of every geopolitical question.
A relevant example regarding Israel and Iran: https://www.socialistalternative.org/2024/01/31/gaza-crisis-unfolds-into-deadly-regional-war/
From that article:
"Amidst the New Cold War conflict for global domination between US and Chinese imperialism"
"Many working people correctly see the diplomatic efforts of the US-aligned Arab and Islamic capitalist dictatorships like Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as completely ineffective in stopping Israel’s massacre of the Palestinian people. However, the militarism of the China-aligned Iranian regime and its allies do not pose a way out."
"However, the regional imperialist mullah-regime of Iran, backed by China and Russia, and its allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, have shown time and again that whenever they are confronted with the threat of working people and youth fighting against their immiseration, they won’t hesitate to use bloody measures similar to what the IDF uses on Palestinians. Any wider war would only use the working class as cannon fodder for the interests of each of these imperialist blocs."
Articles like these are nearly always rambling, hitting a series of criticisms in order to distinguish SAlt itself. Everyone else does it wrong, only our bottom-up class struggle will ever solve the problem, etc etc. Material analysis is clearly not a priority and there is no real point to these articles aside from what serves the org itself. Standard stuff for Trot newspapers. It's incredibly formulaic and amounts to, ironically for self-described Marxists, attempting to confirm reality to a very particular idealism.
They're quite stupid and wrong criticisms but you're also missing the point.
You can't even refer to them without using your little nickname, it's childish, petty and extremely off-putting for any point you are attempting to make.
I'm not sure what you mean by my "little nickname". Sounds like a subject change though.
Apologies, it was the Trot Socialist Workers Party and not the Trot Socialist Alternative. This is where I saw that take, though: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/01/20/laura-garza-us-senate-candidate-2024-primary-election-questionnaire/
Appreciate the clarification. Would be great if you edited the original post.
It's an org I actively recommend people do not join. I usually don't mention it by name because I'm not petty, but it's probably the org I'm referring to maybe 1/3 of the time I give examples of bad organizing and treating members poorly. For example, they're the org that bumbled its way into a local shop and got two people fired for no reason trying to do a rank-and-file strategy without thinking about, say, whether they were in a probationary period that would've ended in a couple weeks and ensured they could organize militantly and not get fired. I've heard the same kinds of stories across several cities.
Things like this are part of why they alienate basically everyone that tries to work with them. It's no surprise that the various projects you mentioned are all just SAlt, there's basically nothing to those front groups that isn't people who were already in SAlt doing the lefty version of astroturfing. For example, basically every KCVG image includes 3-5 SAlt members from nowhere near KCVG trying to give the impression that it's "the workers" holding up the signs, lol. Kind of par for the course, unfortunately, and more or less the opposite of external organizing.
Anyways my actually practical point is that when I'm being critical of orgs it's because I want folks here to take that first step of doing real-world organizing and not get burnt out, learn bad habits, or create dependencies that become toxic relationships. I would recommend that people specifically do not join SAlt because they won't learn good organizing skills, they'll learn very bad habits in building and maintaining coalitions, they'll be exposed to very condescending (yet miseducated) contacts that dictate your experience with the org, become miseducated through its stereotypical Trotskyist legacy, and gain patterns of speech that are robotic and obvious to everyone else. If there's something to learn from SAlt, it's the power of unity in action, but unfortunately it is misdirected due to its poor analyses and choices.
If anyone is on the fence about PSL and is considering SAlt, absolutely go with PSL instead. Even if your local chapter is mostly a book club, it will be a better experience for your development as a socialist and therefore your capacity for useful impact.
For example, they’re the org that bumbled its way into a local shop and got two people fired for no reason trying to do a rank-and-file strategy without thinking about, say, whether they were in a probationary period that would’ve ended in a couple weeks and ensured they could organize militantly and not get fired.
An individual took action that was not in step with the organization and I think he got the boot because of it.
I'm not here to rag on any organization, I like SA because they have made material impacts to the community I live in, Seattle. Minimum wage increase, mandatory sick leave, Amazon tax that goes to affordable housing (and not wasteful NGOs), it's actually a long list. And the things they pushed for but didn't win, all I saw from other local groups was zero support and fingers crossed that SA would fail, damn the working class impacts.
You have a problem with Workers Strike Back and call it a front group, but there is no attempt to hide the connection. They are trying to funnel political energy that is fed up with democrats but not radicalized enough, or not willing to be involved enough to join SA. That's not how fronts work, and eventually they would like for it to be it's own self sustained party separate from themselves, one they could then caucus in and push left. I think that's Two Stage Theory but I'm not huge on theory and could be wrong. A front group is more akin to Refuse Fascism and how I've met people tabling on the street that didn't know they were apart of the RCP.
I'm not a member of SA, I straight don't have the time between raising my kids and keeping my job. I am exactly who they are trying to engage with in forming WSB. I had heard they get hated on in communist spaces, it just really sucks to see. They do good work.
An individual took action that was not in step with the organization and I think he got the boot because of it.
It happened multiple places.
I'm not here to rag on any organization, I like SA because they have made material impacts to the community I live in (...)
Yes I'm familiar with this style of salesmanship.
You have a problem with Workers Strike Back and call it a front group, but there is no attempt to hide the connection.
In this case it's usually a lie of omission. A WSB event that is presented entirely (or almost entirely) by SAlt members but they all get introduced as every other thing they are (a worker at X, an organizer at Y). The really weird subreddit that was created before they announced, had random labor-ish posts for a while, and then started getting WSB posts after they announced, but still doesn't say much of anything about SAlt. It's all a very familiar feeling of someone trying to pull one over on you.
They are trying to funnel political energy that is fed up with democrats but not radicalized enough, or not willing to be involved enough to join SA. That's not how fronts work
That's exactly how many fronts work. Being called a front isn't a bad thing in itself. One of the orgs I work with is a front.
and eventually they would like for it to be it's own self sustained party separate from themselves (...)
Yes I know the pitch that script was used on me for months before the announcement. It's actually more of a copy + paste job from their sister org in the UK, hoping a few of the same things happen. The main underlying goal is to grow SAlt through labor. I'm not sure whether they internally believe it will ever be the potential coalition they sell it as, but in terms of how they actually function in practice it's very unlikely to ever be one. Like... they do the literal opposite of building coalitions, they try to orchestrate everything themselves and for themselves and alienate everyone else in the process.
I'm not a member of SA, I straight don't have the time between raising my kids and keeping my job. I am exactly who they are trying to engage with in forming WSB. I had heard they get hated on in communist spaces, it just really sucks to see. They do good work.
That's the thing, they rarely do good work. Over and over again they do bad work. They put others at risk by not coordinating with them, they fuck up when they're trying to enter new spaces, seemingly due to recklessness rather than just unfamiliarity, have terrible political analysis, particularly internationally, get themselves kicked out of spaces, aren't part of important coalitions to begin with because they're not trusted...
They've succeeded at basically one thing, which is running some electoral campaigns and raising the profile of socialists, though they also allowed much of their successes to be claimed by liberals in their orbit. But they're abandoning that one thing they're kind of good at to go chase this thing they're kind of bad at instead. I'd wish them luck but it's probably better for the labor movement and creating a functional opposition to reaction if they don't get much of a foothold in that space and go back to running electoral campaigns. I can tell you, 100%, that WSB is insufferable in radical labor spaces due to the way they position themselves relative to and interact with others, leading to (justified) distrust. Luckily they seem to have given up even trying to work with anyone else on this and are just fundraising instead.
