https://twitter.com/SocialistNY/status/1599139288389939200
https://twitter.com/SocialistNY/status/1599421220143140864
:cringe:
CO-ORGANIZERS + ENDORSEMENTS
Manchukuo Decolonization Movement | Friends of Henry Kissinger | Jack Ma Imperium | FBI Agent Wearing a Dollar Store Mustache | Institute for the Study of Institutions | Asiatic Brainpan Society | DSA New Tang Dynasty Caucus | Tibetans Against Land Reform | A Handful of Mummified Unit 731 Collaborators
I love starting an organic anti-cultural revolution party 20 years after the cultural revolution ended!
brb starting a government in exile for stuart scotland, exiled in 1609 but still hoping!
Damn I thought our government was pretending that the ETIM weren't terrorists anymore, but apparently they're pretending that the ETIM doesn't even exist anymore.
Not just any bus. They targeted engineers working to build a hydroelectric plant.
Absolutely ghoulish.
Maybe the way to approach these folks is to ask them what they would like to happen to China. Ask them if balkanizing a country has ever benefited the people of that country. Use the USSR as an example of how that would play out in reality. Ask them if the U.S. would ever allow free and fair elections if there's a chance in hell they'd be won by anybody left of Reagan. Point out all the times the U.S. has overthrown elected reformers. Ask them how any of this is to be accomplished short of nuclear war or a massive campaign of foreign propaganda. Ask them if a massive foreign propaganda campaign might elicit any sort of legitimate response from a sovereign state.
Get them to think beyond "China Bad." Force them to play out what they are asking for.
Some people will double down, some will ignore it, but some will come around, even if not immediately.
:sankara-bass:
We can never stop explaining, and all that.
I agree that the group who will come around after that sort of conversation is a minority, but I think it's a significant one. The last several years (since about 2015 in the U.S.) have seen a generational explosion of interest in the left. And it doesn't stop at free healthcare -- it's deep enough that we're seeing members of congress talk about imperialism and media-savvy gulf dictatorships use that language to defend their sovereignty. Neither of those are "real," international leftist sentiment themselves, but they reflect a growing segment of the imperial core's left that will go that far.
A lot of those folks simply haven't thought through their stances on foreign issues to the same extent they've thought through their stances on domestic issues. They aren't intentional social imperialists; they just pay less attention the further away an issue gets, which means they fall back on the Democratic Party line or at best "this country is bad but we shouldn't get involved."
In short, they're reachable. If we can't move those people in the right direction, how are we going to build a mass movement?
Many of them don't need to be asked these questions because they see domination by a state, any state, as fundamentally worse than domination by the market. If Jack Ma did a coup and sold off state owned assets to oligarchs and imposed austerity, millions would die, but since they theoretically had the opportunity to make wise financial decisions, it's their fault. They believe in the fundamental religious tenets of neoliberalism, they just justify it differently.
Trots are going buck wild in the nyc political scene with imt, SA, and the internationalist group trying to get everyone to buy their newspapers and they all hate eachother lol plus you got weirdos like cpusa running around
IMT is probably the least cringe of them but PSL is the only ML game in town that I know of that isn't doing annoying trot shit.
If I recall PSL has its roots in Trotskyism, difference being that its, if I recall correctly, is Sam Marcyite trotskyism which has roots in the original Trotsky v. The Comintern split but marcy himself began to split with trotskyism through out his life with it's culmination arriving during the Gorbachev period of revisionism and outright separated from mainstream trotskyism during the collapse of the USSR to returning to the Communist position that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a really big fuck up.
While it's not the party for me, I do respect their history and intellectual tradition of managing to returning from ultra-leftism.
The PSL is definitely not Trotskyist or even Marcyist imo. Whenever this is brought up, it is essentially guilt by association, as if a split from another party could not develop into its own independent political analysis. There is some limited influence of Sam Marcy within the party, predominantly his "Global Class War thesis" (which was just identifying the Cold War as a period global class war, and as such, imperialism as the primary contradiction world-wide), but the PSL does not uphold Sam Marcy, or any other line of thought. PSL is anti-factionalist and ML in structure and ideology. Members are encouraged to read and study all communist thought, and not mire oneself in the inter-party struggles of the 20th century: only to study and learn from them. Those struggles are important to understand and learn from, but of limited use when organizing in the US in 2022.
It is antithetical to marxist thought, or should be, to divorce the decisions of communists throughout the world from their material context, and then to try to apply them to a wildly different context. That is an error of idealism. Albania in the 40s, the USSR in the 20s, China in the 30s, 40s and 50s, are all completely different contexts than organizing in the imperial core in the 21st century. Ultimately, arguments and "debates" over the different inter-party struggles in history and over various "tendencies" are alienating to working class people, and detract from building working class power within a the historical background of 100 years of anti-communist propaganda. What is more, the development of communism in the USA is so nascent at this point, that most of these arguments are largely moot; too premature to have much consequence. This isn't to say that there isn't a right or wrong answer to some or all of these questions, but that it isn't our job to constantly re-litigate the past and critique socialist projects in the global south or in the past. Often times, deliberate study of the past easily reveals a correct course of action or idea. But if you want to build communism here, in the imperial core, you need to focus on building a party and working-class power here, in this context, and maybe more importantly, build a movement opposing the imperialism that suffocates all liberatory movements abroad.
It's literally in the PSL founding statement that " As former leaders and members of Workers World Party, we defend that group’s historical tradition and mission, particularly that of its founder Sam Marcy"
There's no denying that it, like all political organizations, has grown and changed as the years go by yet it does not change the historical facts.
There is no denying a historical connection to Marcy and the WWP, but that does not really establish an ideology in itself
:squidward-chill: literally had nothing to do with what I was talking about anyways but thanks for sharing your tedx talk without prompt or circumstance
CPUSA are weird, generally good and I respect the YCL especially for participating in the ALU, but whenever election season rolls around, they turn into diehard blue dogs
The CPUS has a really stark generational divide. Like the chapters tend to be pretty radical places full of young people, while the national org is like all over 65 boomers who think FDR is still in charge of the democrats. Thats what causes the weird schizophrenia in the CPUSA, basically all my chapter members just roll their eyes at the main branch when they send us their lib bullshit.
There's hope for the future then. I think the same is happening here in Canada's CPC to a subtler extent. Im hopeful we'll both see an increase in young and in-touch/dedicated leadership pretty soon, as more young folks turn to real-world organizing (which, inshallah, is becoming a regular trend). For the moment though i'm helping to revive my city's YCL and central seems enthusiastic abt it.
IMT is pretty cool in my experience. I've seen IMT people at picketlines with 0 literature and 0 IMT branding, just there to contribute good vibes. They even defended the picketline from the annoying pamphlet-pushing trots. Said something like "This is not the time for propaganda, this is the time to support workers!"
Yeah there's a lot of good people in IMT and while it's technically trot they barely emphasize this and it seems to be coming into it's own thing. The democratic centralism stuff is cool too EDIT: like anything else everyones experience will vary on a chapter by chapter basis and I peaced out because my working group was filled with too much anti china stuff
Yeah valid.
Not to start a struggle session but I don't even know why I should worry about China, whether pro or anti. Wtf am I gonna do about that anyway? Being opinionated one way or the other would take an amount of amount of studious discipline that I'm not even close to possessing. If someone has any kind of take on China my response will just be "damn that's crazy."
There's a growing labor movement in my own town. So how about I focus on this extremely-not-complex conflict that I actually have some power over?
https://www.marxist.com/big-bang-alternative300402.htm
The head of the IMT wrote a book where he disputed the existence of the Big Bang. I don’t think he actually was arguing for anything that weird, but he isn’t a scientist and it’s something they’ve been made fun of for since.
Bet you could get some chuds on board with cutting aid to Taiwan this way.
:frothingfash: How can we still be sending tax dollars to the Republic of China when the Uighurs and hongkongers are being genocided!?
This is what gets me about the "Neither Washington nor Moscow/Beijing" mode of thought prevalent in so many Western Leftists. Okay, it's great that you're somewhat consistent (assuming China is a capitalist country like most do), but what does that amount to? The State Department already funnels hundreds of billions in propaganda campaigns to mobilize the population against America's rivals. Your "contribution" is so minuscule it may as well not even exist.
Dang, I wonder what's 'alternative' about their 'socialism' maybe it's more national?
No, they’re Trotskyists, so they’re super into internationalism. They’re just kind of dumb.
i mean, what's more international than the US empire? they've got cool bases eeeeverywhere, and their spooks are whispering into a thousand ears in every country.
"We're promoting something new, we call it 'neighborhood socialism'. But that's kinda long so we like to shorten it to 'Neizis', we find it has a vibe we can really get behind"
ostensibly left orgs in america don't be liberals challenge: fucking impossible
