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
I agree! If anybody sees this thread that is being discouraged. DON'T. Orgs are there for you to make a difference, if that includes trying to make a change to the org's structure or activities, even better!
I wanna make fun of you for being a lib but you've literally done more politics than like 90% of people on this website so good on you honestly
I really hate city subreddits lmao they're always the most CHUDdy places on the site
Not that anyone is asking, but I used to go to meetings for the local Dems. Without me, the average age was probably 75. People would ask why no young folks were there. I said that if you want young folks, you need to support Bernie. They ignored me so I stopped going. (One lady thought that young people are huge fans of Beto lol). I wish we had an org where I live but this place is very very rural and so many left-leaning people here are also hardcore fucking anti-vaxxers. It drives me insane.
Edit: also the local dems have been run by the same handful of gerontocrats FOREVER and they will only offer token support to any leftist candidates who actually win their primaries.
Seems to me like that's how rural local politics works everywhere; a cadre of fossils who essentially form an affinity group just control everything and shut everyone else out. Fight fire with fire, form your own circlejerk vanguard, take over
This was actually one of the little-known objectives of Our Revolution starting in 2017. Given their limited reach, they were actually wildly successful, imo. Anyone who says, "you can't take over the Democratic Party" probably doesn't even understand the mechanics of how you would even do it.
Check out the archive of their site for the project: https://web.archive.org/web/20180105021240/http://transformtheparty.com/
At the end of the day, it's not that big of a deal, because the party apparatus is more or less vestigial; it has almost no power. The party is mostly run by the elected public officeholders or their various committees. Political "parties" in the USA are bizarre quasi-public election apparatuses.
You should've ran for precinct captain. You'd actually get a vote in the local party. There are tons of empty seats in rural areas, you would probably be able to run unopposed.
I did actually run and win, but the other officers were libs who refused to allow me to do anything. (I attempted to organize local meetings for activists.) I live in an extremely bourgeois area where the only people who actually care about things will lose their jobs if they speak up. All this being said I will keep trying. This thread has given me some ideas for organizing locals who seem to be pretty cool.
Here my one and only experience with PSL:
There was a large scale teacher strike in the state and some anarchists set up a table at the rally. The anarchists let PSL drop off some flyers at the table so the anarchists could hand then out for them. I got one which said there was a meeting that weekend.
I show up a little early ~5-10mins , and of course no one is there. I wait around for about 20 minutes and finally someone, a white lady, shows up. She swears she's not the only member and the rest are in the way. We have some small talk about the strike and probably another 10 minutes later a van pulls up. What follows is the most "American leftist moment" of my life.
First guy to get out is a young white guy. Once his feet hit the ground, he immediately take a massive hit from his modkit and blows a quite impressive sized cloud. Then a old white guy get outs and starts unloading boxes of..guess what? Newspapers. The 3 sit down and we're all given newspapers. It becomes clear to me now this is everyone that is going to show up.
Remember how there was a teacher strike in my state? Well we immediately launch into a discussion about Assad, Syria, chemical weapons and imperialism since that's the front page news of their newspaper. This dominated the majority of the meeting but we all agreed that the US should fuck off. We have a quick 10 minute discussion about the strike before everyone has to leave.
Overall org rating: Better than trots because at least they don't support imperialism in the newspaper
Yeeeeeeah everyone who's told me anything spesific about PSL has had a bad story about them involving newspapers
I really don't get how they became such a big meme on chapo after Warren got owned and it wasn't really funny to subvert their "she's electable if you vote for her" memes anymore
DSA and PSL are both hugely prone to "American leftist moments". It really gets exhausting.
If you walk into one of their meetings and escape without a shoulder bag covered in buttons and pins, consider yourself lucky
Fuck The People’s Front of Judea, fucking revisionists! And those splitters in The People's Popular Front of Judea didn't improve anything.
All true revolutionaries are proud members of the Judean People's Front.
Food not Bombs is kinda perfect because, while illegal in places, it's a project that hardly anyone could disagree with, so libs will often pat you on the back when they hear you're feeding people for free. It's also easy and accessible to start with, can teach you cooking/serving skills, and will link you up with other local activists.
Yeah, there's just no way I'm gonna give my information to any group that is such a clear target for hacking.
Lots of disorganization and infighting. It's been in a permanent struggle session for awhile now.
The last couple of months have been absolutely LOL at the national level and they just had a bunch of resignations over the issue of opsec.
I've been wary about them since they made it clear that they were willing to hold rallies with fash groups locally. they also seem to believe that they aren't political?? we've done some joint events with them and they're very strange - even the people who are part of both groups can't really explain it all in a way that makes any sense.
well yeah, best to participate in second amendment rallies, right? obviously the fash are the people they want to recruit. this definitely makes sense to somebody.
I don't think they were formally marching but the chapter turned out and they were there formally to table. DC
SRA is cool as long as you remember the org is your local chapter and not the national. National is a fucking shitheap garbage fire.
could you share a bit about PSL? I've been thinking about joining them as supposedly the local chapter is decent.
My suggestion? Join the most potent political force of the working class in your area, and push it left if you can.
Your local democratic party may not allow you to push it left, even if it is the most potent political force. Forget that. But maybe a lot of workers in your area are in a union. Join up and go. If there's an active DSA chapter in your area, join up and try to raise class consciousness.
If you're a Marxist like me, the search for the perfect org is idealist. Rather, we need to go where we can best raise class consciousness and escalate class struggle by organizing the working class. For me, that's DSA, specifically the Reform and Revolution Caucus, SRA, and the union I'm joining.
My suggestion? Join the most potent political force of the working class in your area, and push it left if you can.
This is the best suggestion really. Revolutionaries must go where the people are and agitate even in the most reactionary organisations. That means that no org is categorically really off the table, it just has to make sense in your local conditions, which I guess is the tricky part.
Just to be clear, if the org is utterly undemocratic, it may be impossible to push it left even if you agitate. I would join an org that I can influence, not just act in concert with.
ofc, grassroots left-leaning orgs are the most ripe for this kind of thing as opposed to a local Democratic Party chapter or something
I'm going to try and send my dues straight to the my local DSA and try and get it to become more Marxist. Problem is DSA is a very flawed and disconnected organization as well as having a bad rep among many non white activists. That is going to be beyond something I can do alone even with a more Marxist base. DSA needs to help out local groups more than anything to gain trust.
I'm part of a rural dsa group. There is no major impact we can really accomplish, but about half the group are vocally radical, so its not too bad. Probably works since its the only left leaning group in like a 50 mile radius
DSA is hot shit in most of the country, especially in the big cities. the politics runs liberal but even more than that, the org is captured by the worst sort of people, more obsessed with their personal power in the org than with what they might accomplish. I spent about two years trying to make the org less useless but the last convention convinced me it wasn't a worthwhile use of time. but that and my time in a chapter's leadership means I have a lot of stories about the org. AMA, I guess.
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
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.
What mistakes do you think the DSA has made that have led it to being so captured? What do you think another organization might do to avoid such an outcome?
this question is kind of backwards because it presumes the DSA isn't exactly where it always intended itself to be. it's history is - from the start - deeply socdem and it's always seen as its highest calling the capture or defeat of the democratic party. that means it's core purpose is and pretty much always will be to recuperate a leftist movement and shephard it back towards the realm of bourgeois politics.
but if we assume that the org might have been something else, political education would be critical. the org today is rife with people using social justice or communist rhetoric in reactionary ways and people generally don't know how to discern those kinds of bad faith arguments which leads to a lot of abusive people being given political power on the basis of their confidence.
but generally, the thing you're fighting is the iron law of institutions: as an organization grows, people with power in that institution will work towards the accumulation of their own power, even at the expense of the organization itself.
Just stopping by to bolster your point with this article on the history of the DSA: https://struggle-sessions.com/2020/04/20/dsa-are-capitalist-pigs/
I met a lot of good people through the organization, mostly with those similarly frustrated with the org. but lots of people meaning in and through means a number of decent folks.
That almost definitely is what happened in the largest city in my state. The city's Democratic party endorsed a number of ballot measures
including an 8 dollar minimum wage hike (with another 2.50 of Covid pay)and banning police surveillance. Idk what they're actually doing to help the efforts because it's being organized under a coalition, but that's way more than any other Democratic organization I've seenEdit: I take some of that back, they've still endorsed a few of the ballot measures which are pretty good though like rent control and banning surveillence
Is anyone in the IWW ? Have they been active recently or is it still a book club coasting off of the success of 100 year old dead organizers?
I'm not in it but from all the information I've gathered, it's the second one still
I'm an at-large wob since the branch in my (quite large) city dried up after passing underneath some kind of minimum membership threshold. I pay dues every month out of begrudging respect for what they used to be. All they do is send me emails every now and then and a stamp in the mail each month.
I guess they're a mixed bag. I've never met another wob in person, despite trying to get in touch with some of the locals. Someone on the facebook page said they'd get me in touch with some people with the General Defense Committee, but that was 3 years ago and I never heard back.
I'm a wob. Locally we're actually doing some pretty cool stuff. The branch was mostly a book club up until a couple years ago when membership rose sharply. It became an org for people in other orgs, we have actually done some amount of real impactful hot shop organizing.
Other local branches do really good stuff near me. PDX IWW has done a lot of really good work, they've had a lot of victories, actually stood up to a real corporate boss and established a union at a burger chain.
The headquarters is nothing but larpers. It's parlamentary style gridlock all the time, they're truly just coasting off a bunch of dead heroes and sitting on your dues money and doing fuck all with it. My roommate was a convention delegate this year and there was a lot of really behavior from people who thought they were too radical to do anything useful for the org.
I was involved with DSA for a couple years, til 2017 "officially" (I'd moved away a few months before my dues ran out). It was a weird group: a clique of succdems, a clique of idpol obsessed Maoists, and like 4 folks who wanted to engage in "normal" direct action. It got better as the Bernie obsessives left, the Maoists tried to launch their own group and split from DSA, and more folks interested in direct action joined.
Eventually (surprise!) the Maoist group fell apart and narced to the cops on each other, the direct action types took over the DSA, and I occasionally join their actions, and the succdems ran for positions within the Democratic party. I've not renewed my membership, though, and don't plan on it.
And I'm still wary of self proclaimed Maoists since then. Just hearing the toughest talk from them for two years, to then find out they ratted each other out after some pretty mild police pressure.
I couldn't make it 3 seconds into the video, that was some potent cringe
i feel a bit bad for posting it cuz i have met the cosplayer in person and, well, i don't know of a nice way to end this sentence.
There was a self- proclaimed maoist in my local IWW chapter and he owned a house he rented out to his friends that they all lived in together and when Coronavirus happened he evicted them all and he got kicked from the org 🙃
I'm not so sure that they are, but in the American left, historically they've been the cause of a lot of splits. Like, we make fun of Trots for splitting, but recently, since the 60s on, white Maoists seem to have been the real driver of splits.
Still, the only Maoists I've dealt with IRL were the local ones, so it's entirely plausible I'm painting with an overly broad brush. I tend to discount most online tendency talk as just keyboard commando stuff. If you're busy typing out screeds about how the People's Front of Judea screwed you over by reserving the library meeting rooms for two straight months, so that your group couldn't book them, ya probably ain't gonna be leading a revolution anytime soon.
I'm a wob. Locally we're actually doing some pretty cool stuff. The branch was mostly a book club up until a couple years ago when membership rose sharply. It became an org for people in other orgs, we have actually done some amount of real impactful hot shop organizing. It's a lot of fun, we're trying to make a lot of stuff happen and there's never any lib shit.
Other local branches do really good stuff near me. PDX IWW has done a lot of really good work, they've had a lot of victories, actually stood up to a real corporate boss and established a union at a burger chain.
The headquarters is nothing but larpers. It's parlamentary style gridlock all the time, they're truly just coasting off a bunch of dead heroes and sitting on your dues money and doing fuck all with it. My roommate was a convention delegate this year and there was a lot of really behavior from people who thought they were too radical to do any non symbolic organizing.
So yeah, your milage may vary. CHI and SEA are kind of up their own asses, fuck those guys.
What the fuck are you talking about? GHQ has two people, FW Cameron and whoever it is FW Travis hired to run the Lit Department after the last person got canned. Both do their jobs admirably, and FW Cam even helps with organizing campaigns, doing one-on-ones and stuff. He doesn't need to. FW Travis didn't do much organizing when he was GST. Furthermore, check the budget in the GOB. GHQ distributes funds as they are supposed to, it's then up to the various subcommittees to actually use that money (as an example the ODB is using their funding to focus heavily on their branch development program), please actually look at the budget, GHQ retains a fraction of the dues money. If you feel like your campaign needs more money put in a request for funds. Hell, they'll even give you a per diem if you're doing actual union business.
Yeah, convention was a shitshow this year. It's usually a lot better. I'm personally thankful I abstained from serving as a convention delegate this year. I blame the fact that his year we couldn't all get together and drink vast quantities of homemade hooch :p.
Edit: I'd like to ask what issues you have with the Greater Chicago GMB and the Seattle GMB? Because just writing them off entirely is writing off 1/6th of NARA branch members. That doesn't strike me as fair. If you have issues with individuals within these branches you should take it up with the individuals and not the branches.
