The DSA has done more praxis than almost any other organization in recent US history. Are they good? Debatable. Are they out there trying? You're goddamn right they are. Go to literally any leftist or left adjacent protest or action and DSA is either there officially or unofficially because DSA members are there. Like them or not they have a lot to teach to further leftist organizations about how to get shit done
Praxis is when you test the tenets of Marxism through acts of social struggle and then refine your theory based on the outcome.
An organization that isn't undergirded by a Marxist framework and isn't informing it's strategies off of past Marxist parties successes and failures isn't engaging in praxis.
It doesn't mean they can't do good things or that we can't occasionally learn something from them, but it's an important distinction between what a Marxist party does and a party that tolerates eclectic theories like the DSA does. A bunch of people operating with different ideologies and methodologies "getting shit done" might win some short term gains, but it won't ever bring about a rupture from capitalism.
I'm not saying they're the only ones doing anything or even that they're doing the most or that they're doing it alone. Go to any leftist event and DSA is there almost regardless of the size. At least in my city they do a good job of bringing members to events and letting the events happen: they aren't taking the event over they're just ensuring people are there. DSA turns people out, and that's I think their biggest value and why I say they're so important. It doesn't matter how many events your Marxist book club puts on if nobody is there, but if you coordinate with DSA you can be sure people will be there
Like them or not they have a lot to teach to further leftist organizations about how to get shit done
Is this a bit? Please tell me this is a bit
You're getting downvoted but the last time I was at a DSA meeting they were all just planning how to do door knocking for democrats. didn't seem to be much building socialism talk.
The biggest thing DSA has done as a national org was donating tens of thousands of dollars of member dues to Bernie, who didn't need the money.
The DSA is an organization that can at the very least be used to radicalize people and I’ve watched it happen (despite having just officially joining last week myself)
I figured fuck it, I’ll join the local Marxist chapter too. The organization can only ever outwardly be representative of the people inside of it. If enough marxists join well then it will be a Marxist org
Edit to actually address the post: It’s awesome and huge that two very visible people are joining it though. I hope they are able to send that message out and mobilize those on the American left who are otherwise disengaged
Don't make me tap the sign
spoiler
Almost everything has aspects that are good and aspects that are bad, arguing over whether something is "good" or "bad" in its entirety is both meaningless and impossible to ever resolve
The DSA is the only one that has even begun to approach the mass scale needed to make a workers party (which imo is going to take a very different form from past parties due to how the us political system works), 10x more people joined the DSA in the last couple months than are in PSL, doubly for PCUSA. 15 thousand people joined in our October recruitment drive. They are better funded, have more active chapters doing multiple forms of organizing, bringing together and creating many socialists without risking splitting due to enforcing a particular line and imo less susceptible to the marginalization that the PSL has been trapped in for 16 years now (and WWP, PSL's predecessor it split from was for 50 years before it). We have now surpassed the CPUSA's membership peak from 1944 (hundreds of thousands never joined it btw, it maxed out at 80k) and are on track to surpass the SPUSA 1912 peak by next year.
PCUSA is the only org in the US that can properly be called a Communist Party, both in terms of its structure and scope of what they want to achieve. They practice democratic centralism, Marxism-Leninism is enshrined in the points of unity, and they explicitly reject the idea that socialism can be brought about in the US without a revolution.
If you are a Marxist-Leninist, and by that I mean that you agree in not only the necessity of a worker's party, but of a democratic centralist party with ideological and programmatic unity, then this is that party. If you aren't quite on the ML side of things, but you're burnt out on DSA and PSL never got back to you, give it a shot. As long as you come in willing to learn and uphold the points of unity , you'll be fine and you can see whether this kind of work suits you. I can also vouch for the people I have met in PCUSA being very principled, diligent, and good-natured people.
Honestly, something about this just seems...dumb to me and just kind of alienating to anyone who isn't an ML. It seems more like a defense of Marxist-Leninism and the Soviet Union and like...larping then it is so much looking at conditions and revolutionary potential of the US and trying to make a movement from that. Obviously there are things we can learn from past socialist experiments and we shouldn't demonize them, but I dunno if the situation in modern America is the same as in feudal Russia a century ago to warrant the kind of dogmatism. Granted I don't know what kind of outreach they are doing or or projects they are working on, but something about it just rubs me the wrong way.
Are you seriously suggesting that Marxism-Leninism is only applicable to feudal Russia?
No, but America is in the heart of the imperial core not a feudal country or under threat of colonialism or imperialism, I guess you could argue there are groups in the US that suffer from and under our imperialist and colonialist system and they could apply these kinds of thing like the Black Panthers did, but even the Black Panthers were Maoists.
Like, I am just an idiot, and maybe I am judging them unfairly when I don't know alot about them, but it just seems kind of ego-stroking and larpy to me, maybe their approach will actually be successful, but tbh I don't foresee it being so. Although tbh, I don't see much revolutionary efforts in the US being successful so maybe just call me a doomer, at the very least I think we should have a semi-big tent socialist movement to start with and then maybe when some progress has been made and some serious pressure applied we can see whose practices come out on top and are best suited for meeting the current situation (spoiler alert, probably the ML's).
Larping is saying you are a socialist and selling out to the bourgeoisie by supporting social democracy fueled by imperialism.
Mao was an ardent Marxist-Leninist and Marxism-Leminism is part of the Chinese constitution to this day. He reformed it both philosophically and with additions to organizing like mass like and guerilla tactics.
Listen, you want to be an anti capitalist using anarchist means for organizing? That's good for you, but don't say Marxism-Leninism is larping when it's pretty clear you don't know what you are talking about.
The Black Panthers weren't Maoists in any official sense. They just kinda found the little red book or whatever to be neat.
This is completely false. They practiced mass line and democratic centralism. They may not have been ML or MLM openly or officially, but they consciously practiced ML and MLM organizing strategies.
"I think we should have a big tent socialist approach. ML are LARPers." Wtf lol
Obviously there are things we can learn from past socialist experiments and we shouldn’t demonize them
The USSR is a past socialist experiment. Marxism-Leninism is a method of political organizing that has been used VERY extensively all over the world over the past century and has led to many successful revolutions and national liberation movements in African, Latin America and Asia.
Marxism-Leninism is just scientific socialism. It would be a great mistake to uncritically mimic what happened in one place and time and expect it to work in different conditions. That said, even across space and time, there are certain wisdoms and best practices that are figured out by years of hard earned experience, which are condensed into theory.
There is nothing about the conditions in the US that imply that a party following democratic centralism would be ineffective, in fact it was very effective in the early 20th century when hundreds of thousands of people joined the CPUSA. After that period came the brutal state repression (McCarthyism, HUAC purges, etc.) and bribery of American workers (New Deal) that drove the communists underground and prevented them from shaping most of the social movements of the latter half of the 20th century. If anything, the history after the heyday of the CPUSA has proven that a party apparatus like that is necessary to not only prevent the kind of rollback of concessions we saw starting in the 70s, but to be able to make a cohesive strategy for the seizure of power in this country and replacing it with a democratic institution capable of taking over the task of governing.
Without a party, none of this is possible and we are simply twiddling our thumbs hoping that it will happen spontaneously, or at least get "figured out" at some later time.
I mean, I am willing to believe you might be right, but I am just saying how it comes off to me.
Maybe I am just jaded, because it seems like we only see parties like these prop up with a few hundred or thousand people and then nothing comes of it. But I guess you have to start somewhere, just seems like they should meet the people where they currently are, and maybe they are idk, but it just seems like these things just kind of preach about the validity of Marxism-Leninism and get soundly ignored.
I understand where you're coming from, I definitely wasn't always ML and I've been in many orgs with more ecclectic politics and "horizontal" ways of organising. It was that experience that drove me to read theory and made me realise the necessity of the party, but it took me a long time to settle on a specifoc party precicely because I was jaded and was worried I'd join some tiny ML sect that is content doing low-grade praxis and being irrelevant.
As it turns out though, the US just doesn't have a real communist party, a historical development with a lot of causes, culminating in Sam Web becoming chairman of the CPUSA in 2000 and more or less gutting the organisation and grafting what was left to the hip of the Democrats. This forced the MLs still in the party to split off and rebuild from scratch as the PCUSA, which is incredibly difficult and unideal, but necessary. The intention isn't to be a tiny sect but to actually gain the confidence of the masses the way the CP had in its prime (by meeting them where they are at now, not mimicing the old party's tactics and strategy), which will allow the party to galvanise the masses in strategic action for better material conditions and more working class power. That is the vision, but before we get there we need to (re)build the party.
I'm not American so it's a moot point, but some of those points of unity would rub me the wrong way, as someone stuck firmly between Luxembourgist and ML camps. Not so much in the substance but in the tone.
That's an extremely hardline interpretation of DemCent for instance. And the somewhat over-forceful denouncing of other tendencies as well would make me wary, especially as someone who's dealt with real sectarians like the Spartacists before.
EDIT: I mean dude, this here is not a great look.
"We will defend that legacy against defamation by revisionists, Capitalists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Social Democrats, anarchists, Cold War liberal bourgeois and petty bourgeoisie “phony left” radicals that undermine the revolutionary history and struggle of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. We reject the so-called "21st century socialism" and Euro- communism as revisionist attempts to promote reformist schemes and "market socialism" over true revolutionary struggle and socialist collectivization. We reject all unscientific and dogmatic vulgar Marxism."
Honestly the Spartacists were pretty based for what they did in Germany in 1919.
I'm talking about the 1960s era Trot group that uses the same name.
Rosa of course is based and cool
PCUSA isn't a party which you can put down when you register to vote, like PSL is, so there isn't any public record of that sort of thing. In general though, when you register to vote under a party, such as PSL, that doesn't reflect having actually joined the party; it's a totally separate thing. In the case of either party, when you formally join as a member, there is no public record of that.
.... what is an actual party, per se? Asking for a dumb American... friend
In other countries, normal national level political parties (like say, the Labour/Labor Party) aren't things that you register for and are then funded by corporate political donations.
You join as a member, there are rules and responsibilities you have to follow, and you usually pay an annual due to support the party. It's much more closely knit, you have much more input into policy and political actions. Sometimes you even directly vote for the candidates as members. Other times it's a combination of the rank and file, the parliamentary party, and other groups like affiliated unions.
The Australian Labor Party, for instance, practices a weak form of Dem Cent. Parliamentary members and Party Staff must publicly follow the party line and vote down that line.
@Mardoniush nailed it.
In essence if you're not going to meetings you're not in a party. The candidate of a party for an election is also determined by the membership of the party through some form of democracy. If you're not a member you don't get to have a say. A party is a political institution that's there to advocate for the political goals of its members, who have responsibilities to that organization.
That's just your standard bourgeois party, a workers party is even more of an all encompassing institution. It should be the organization where the proletariat becomes a class onto itself. It's here where workers make their own parallel institutions. Like, the historic German and Austrian Social Democratic Parties (before they killed Rosa) had their own bicycle clubs and cooking clubs and stuff. Being a member in a communist party is also more of a burden than in other parties because you had more responsibilities than normal. If you were a member of the CPSU you had less free time because you also worked for the party and gave up some privileges. If you didn't meet the criteria you were also expelled from the CPSU. Another example is the CPC. Becoming a member is really hard, it's like becoming a doctor and there's an entrance exam. And only like 10% of applicants get accepted.
Now compare that to the US parties where the only actual organization is the National Committee and the two Hill committees that are only about elections and funding whose membership is determined by the elected officials who day they are a member of that party. A normal person can't become a member of one of the big US parties.
I don't want to imply all Americans are dumb only that their political structures are so beyond fucked and they are so immersed in them that they have no idea that they are completely alien for any other person on the planet. I always feel guilty when someone like you sincerely goes "please help me the dumb American, I'm just so lost" because I'm clearly the asshole here lol.
Edit: the US analog to members of political parties can be what the US media calls "activists".
Find the nearest chapter on https://www.dsausa.org/chapters/. Reach to them directly.
