Joined DSA as a "progressive". Here I am two years later casually defending Stalin and advocating for communism.
DSA is good.
flirted around with joining my city's branch of PSL in 2017 and 18. Went to a bunch of meetings, never became a candidate or full member or anything, just talked a lot with them and attended events.
While they were really pleasant, there was a very amateur feeling to all of it. Don't get me wrong, everyone I met was extremely pleasant and had noble intentions. What I mean is it seemed distinctly aimless and powerless. Most of what we did was meet in bars and cafes and do readings of the PSL's newspaper or talk about theory. They'd also occasionally meet up with a larger citywide protest or do charity work. Maybe my expectations are a little too high, but it never felt like anything was getting off the ground. It felt like being in a social club for discussing leftist viewpoints, so it wasn't much for me. I'm not exactly good at being social. I have shut-in tendencies and bad anxiety. I do better when I have doable tasks to complete, which they didn't have a whole lot of.
Maybe they've expanded since then and have become a more established presence and that's when I'd consider going back to actually join. I hope I don't sound like I'm on a high horse by the way. I'm also an amateur at these things and I fully understand that PSL and leftists in general have no real foothold where I live.
From what I've read, joining PSL can be vastly different depending on where you live due to the great deal of regional autonomy they have, so y'all's experiences may not match mine.
I was in an org where the term "productivist" was thrown around at a meeting as an insult. After I looked it up, and stopped laughing at the notion that flyering and some light mutual aid was "productivist", I left that org.
the people I knew weren't opposed to doing ground work, they just had no idea how to start or where to go, nor did there ever seem capacity to do much beyond talk about news. It was more of a resigned desultory confusion than any sort of ideological commitment against doing things
Joined my local SRA chapter. They're a good lot and we've done a bit of mutual aid for the homeless, but COVID has made meeting up or doing range days a nightmare and national is an absolute shitshow, to the point where one of the LA chapters up and left the org entirely recently. I imagine even if the national level org implodes we'd just reform our chapter under a different banner/name though, so 8/10 would tentatively do direct action again.
Some drama involving the national level org/leaders, a general lack of any buy-in towards local chapters (national controls the finances, limited as they are, and have been absolute dogshit at directing funds to chapters), being flippant towards the LA chapter when they reached out with concerns, etc.
national is an absolute shitshow
This has to be feds, right? There's a 10,000% chance they're wrecking an explicitly-armed, explicitly-socialist organization.
Joined my local DSA a month plus ago. I wanted to find leftists near me and don't live in a very urban place. So far everyone has been cool, we do mutual aid work, have started power mapping to start exerting influence, have had a couple of good educational sessions where we learn about who needs help and what needs to be done in our area, got 2 members into local gov seats, created fliers and distributed them about the cdc eviction info, and have just generally been hanging on discord. Its a major improvement over doom scrolling and making a material difference is good praxis.
Edit for your spoilers
When we meet on webcam it has been totally cool just to have people on voice. There are plenty of socially awkward people but everyone is cool about it. A broke college student can do a lot, people give each other rides to different things but even beyond that, having more comrades in the group is good for morale, you help just by existing. If you want to work on things, there's always plenty to do that doesn't require having to be really comfortable with people.
My PSL chapfer does frequent zoom screenings of cool comunist propaganda bur with covid on thats about it.
along with knowing fuck all about guns or being able to afford them
If you can get $500 together that should be enough for a gun, some ammo to practice with, and all the necessary paperwork. That's a lot of money for a lot of people, but sometimes people get more sticker shock than necessary because the first gun they look at is $1700 or something. This is a good post that's also on the gun comm if it's something you're thinking about.
PSL in general will regard you as suspicious until you get through all the screenings and education. It's one of the main reasons why you join as a candidate at first. They are extremely serious about sniffing out cops so if they seem cautious about you that's really standard.
Though I absolutely understand the desire to weed out cops, I am a bit worried that it's a waste of effort. If the feds want to, one way or another they'll get their people inside the org.
What do they do that they feel a need to worry about cops. If anything you want cops to join so you can get some sweet fbi terrorism funding.
I don't know much about joining PSL but I do know the neurodiversity movement is growing very quickly. I'm sure if you felt comfortable disclosing that you're on the spectrum they would be super amenable.
I'm not an official member of PSL but I've gone to a lot of their events since the uprising in the summer as well as marching with them at events they've gone to. Its a really great way to get to know other socialist or ML leaning people, especially if you're like me and don't really have friends who lean that way politically. Things have kind of slowed down since the election and I'm pretty sure Covid has a lot to do with it but I hope to get more involved and hopefully join the party proper next year. You do have to go through a candidacy process and they don't just let anyone in which is good.
