Everyone's always talking about PSL, SRA, DSA, RR, CPUSA, and I'm just over here like "I just wanna grill for god sake!"
There's a million little random leftist organizations with slightly different goals and ideologies, but which one should someone looking to, in the words of Father Matt, 'log the fuck off' go to? Which ones are crank warehouses? Which are honeypots? Which are full of libs?
Bitch and complain about your least favorite orgs and shill for your favorites here. Reply to others telling them that their org is full of libs and FBI agents. Etc.
EDIT: also anyone with a specific recommendation in the Quad Cities area in Iowa/Illinois definitely drop me a line
Could a cadre of well-read leftists feasibly hijack a DSA local and use it to do, like, actual leftism? I'm curious if the structure of DSA lends itself to reformation by informed actors.
it's been tried a bunch and the org invariably tends back towards its rather liberal center. generally the smaller locals are more radical but they lack the resources that should come with being part of the larger organization - the national org has repeatedly voted to deny them those resources. so yeah, you can capture one of the smaller chapters but you generally don't need to because those chapters are already where you'd want them to be but then you have to fight the national org to get resources to do anything bigger than your limited resources allow.
and I guess that's the core issue - if you have to fight the national org in trying to do anything useful, you have to justify that cost against the benefits and I could never make that math work out.
It sounds like the most utility that can be drawn from DSA is to join, form smaller blocs of leftist voters, and then peel off when that organization outgrows what DSA can provide for it
Very enlightening answer, I appreciate the feedback
yea, that's ultimately what we ended up doing.
In my experience, the most utility that came out my local DSA chapter was providing a forum for various smaller independent groups to come together and talk about the actions they are planning, report on updates, and share news. The chapter itself helped organize a handful of immigration justice demonstrations, but a large portion of the local action is being pioneered by other groups and using DSA meetings as a place to plug their orgs and upcoming actions. There's a fair amount of Cosecha and IWW people in there, as well as people with labor union roots.