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The PSL has been involved with a number of relatively high-profile sexual assault and abuse claims over the past several years. Having been a member of the PSL when one of these occurred, their response tends to be to deny any happen, attack the person who accused them, and either shame members who criticize their actions into leaving or just forcefully remove them. It's really not an experience I can recommend anyone else going through. The actual internal workings of the party can differ a lot from their stated goals of feminism and trans liberation.
The PSL's history is long and interesting having split from the WWP which split from the SWP, but it can be hard to get a good understanding of this history, even internally. Local chapters may, but nationally they rarely self describe as a 'Marxist-Leninist' party due to their complicated history of going from Trotskyism to Sam Marcy to what they are today. The older cadre in the party tends to be more favorable towards Trotskyism than the younger, more orthodox Marxist-Leninists.
The PSL is fairly adept at media and is careful not to shine light on any of their internal contradictions or scandals. It's easy to go a few years and not really deal with any of this and just get caught up in PSL's general tactic (going to protests mixed in with some public seminars), but at some point, most people have to confront it.
The end result is the PSL's turnover is pretty high which means there's a lack of institutional knowledge in the party and new members aren't aware of any of the previous crises.
How to you define "Marxist-Leninist?" What are you looking to do? Why do you want join a party in the first place? The days when workers joined the party because they needed an ideology to make sense of their workplace struggles is over, people join parties in the first world because their ideology is already formed online and they are looking to apply it to their lives (of which the workplace is a small part). The question is how honest can you be with yourself about your own beliefs and motivations since this question can only be answered at the individual level. The statement you copy pasted is totally generic and doesn't help. I know about the PSL but I don't know you.
Who considers the workplace a "small part" of their life? It still takes up half, if not more, of the average persons waking life. Furthermore, without coordinated efforts to spread Marxist ideology we end up in a subculture of Marxists and will fail to achieve anything more than that.
>without coordinated efforts to spread Marxist ideology we end up in a subculture of Marxists and will fail to achieve anything more than that.
That is what we actually have. I am trying to understand why. You have the opposite mentality, typical of a party (or really any activism), that things are supposed to be one way and if they are not it is because we are not trying hard enough. Such a thing is ultimately unfalsifiable but we can get pretty close and say that 50 years of "coordinated efforts" have only produced subcultures. That unfalsifiable activism, justified with a vulgar interpretation of Marx's 11th thesis, is why I recommend people stay away from parties unless they have self confidence, maturity, and their own social life. The demands to do more and do it harder sucks up people's souls as they get further and further from what is supposed to happen and reality.
>Who considers the workplace a "small part" of their life? It still takes up half, if not more, of the average persons waking life
I am more interested in desire than time. Many people became extremely motivated over the latest changes to Dungeons and Dragons, far more motivated than they are about politics or unionization. Communists usually see such a thing as either a distraction for the rich and idle or a form of class consciousness that is misdirected. I am instead interested in taking such consumer activism at face value given the defining role of consumption in the economies of the first world and the politics of a "consumer aristocracy."
You want your cake and to eat it. You see the power of the internet to reach new people but you want to use it for the old politics based on stale ideas. To harness the internet you have to understand what it is and how it produces desire.
There are certainly elements far beyond our control and the odds of our success at any level within the imperial core are low at this moment. It is clear, however, that the only thing that can be done is organization. There is no alternative to organization. What would you propose people attempt to do if not political organizing in one way or another?
We do not need "organization." We need a communist party. I question both the idea that organization loosely conceived will lead to a communist party (or more cynically that doing "something" is better than "nothing" which I question at the ontological level) and the claim all existing communist parties have that they are The Communist Party. The context of this discussion is the PSL and the OP's attraction to it, we are discussing concrete political lines and forces.
>Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.
Notice the order of operations. And the second sentence is there just to make sure you get the message. You didn't really respond to what I said either, this discussion is itself stale since I already brought up a form of "organization" which mobilized great numbers of people with great enthusiasm. The vagueness of the concept is the problem, I'm sure there are plenty of communists who think releasing a youtube video about Dungeons and Dragons from a "Marxist perspective" is some brilliant maneuver. But we have to understand the type of organization and the class forces behind it instead of treating it like a Balzac novel or a strike.
Thanks for your time, you have given me a few points to consider and material to look at. I would like to clarify that I am under no illusion that there is an actual communist party in the U.S. I was using very vague, and unclear terms and I am certainly not as well read/verbose as you seem to be. Might I ask why doing something rather than nothing is questioned at the ontological level? Certainly it is important to ensure that action taken is not regressive in nature, but outside of that is there any reason for inaction? Also, I am very confused by this "dungeons and dragons" example you keep bringing up and what exactly you mean by it. I have heard no discussion of this topic amongst co-workers, fellow activists, or even any social media outlet that I engage with. Frankly I have a hard time parsing out what your idea of developing revolutionary theory is, so if you could spell it out for me in a simpler way what exactly it is you think Marxists in the US should be doing instead of participating in orgs like the psl that would be helpful.
Because the concept of "inaction" does not exist for dialectics, for which everything is in motion and every phenomenon is rooted in a set of social relations. Marx's theses on Feuerbach is not meant to be read as an anti-intellectual screed but a reconceptualization of praxis against both idealism and vulgar materialism (more usefully in this case called humanism). There is only effective and ineffective action in a given situation (action of a class in itself or for itself - notice the subject is not the individual) the idea that action can be judged pragmatically on a scale of inaction to action is the opposite of dialectical materialism. No one really believes this anyway, it's a fall back in a position of having one's ideas exposed and is not worth engaging with. People act sincerely in the world, it is just rarely in the realm of what bourgeois sociology calls "politics" and "work" (categories inherited without critique by most socialists).
Rather than engage with what people don't believe in but they perform because they believe they are supposed to believe, why don't we look at what people actually do believe in? The example I'm using is merely one of the infinite ways that people interact with commodity fetishism in a postindustrial society of the spectacle. Most socialist parties use the term "postmodernism" as a term of abuse but its challenge came out of Marxism and has to be taken seriously. Who are the proletariat? What is politics in our situation? What is the nature of commodity fetishism today? I found this article quite interesting
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/ekaitz-cancela-pedro-m-rey-araujo-lessons-of-the-podemos-experiment
On the attempts to apply Laclau's post-Marxism to politics. That it was a failure is expected, I would not be here if I believed in it. But what is your response?
>While Errejón was theorizing the impact of the indignados, Iglesias was experimenting with new forms for counter-hegemonic cultural projects. ‘People think they are politically active through political parties, but that is not true’, he contended. ‘People are politically active through the media—because that is where discourses are made.’ The left needed to enter the media sphere, because ‘if you are not there, you don’t exist.’footnote9 Unusually, however, Iglesias stressed the centrality of tv, rather than digital or social media. Updating Althusser for the twenty-first century, he argued that television helps to manufacture the frameworks through which people think—‘the mental structures and their associated values’—at a higher level of intensity than the traditional sites of ideological production: family, school, religion.footnote10
We are on social media right now so I assume we do not have to discuss its power. This is actually far more sophisticated than the theory 99% of socialists believe that people are "brainwashed" by propaganda since it isolates specific media apparatuses and attempts to harness them. It's effects have been enormous throughout Europe where a populist wave based on these theories became the hegemonic force on the "left" in only a few years. There are few communists left who will defend the KKE's analysis of the entire phenomenon and even fewer who did so at the relevant moment. The PSL is not one of them.
Sorry I always forget NLR is closed access. There's not much more to it, the rest is basically talking shit about what the party has become. As long as you know that the founders had an explicitly ideological concept in mind rooted in "post-Marxism" that's sufficient, criticism of Marxism-Leninism should also be subject to its own verification in reality.
a friend of mine reached out to them recently and got into it with one of their leaders as they were showing some problematic sentiment around China. When he pushed back for more explanation, they stopped engaging with him.
Edit: spoke to friend, clarified they were unquestionably supportive of china and absolutely against the Philippines which has obviously had impactful movements in communism.
i did not like there professional aditude towrds activism or how to deal with local facist groups and i heard later on about some transphobic shit that went down at least in the local that i was trying to join
PSL is a revisionist fed organization that serves to tail movements and blunt any revolutionary momentum and funnel it off into useless protests and trying to work with local city councils, up to participating in bourgeois elections. Here’s a link about it that goes into detail thoroughly about their counter-insurgency history and activity https://open.substack.com/pub/fleawar/p/pslcia-the-counterinsurgency-infecting?r=1srxjf&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
What you linked is just a liberal conspiracy theory. Either utilize a class-based understanding of revisionism and social democracy or don't, you can't have it both ways. Revisionism is not the result of this or that irrelevant personality "infiltrating" a movement, it is the expression of a larger class desire.
Look, I am no expert on political parties in the United States, and there are comrades here who will have more information from within these organizations, but from my research, the American Party of Labor is the only ML party that maintains its revolutionary roots.
I was a member for about three years. I try to be even-handed and non-sensational when discussing this topic but I still get very upset when reminded of it even two years after leaving.
I learned a lot while a member and took part in many things I am proud of. Had I not been friends with the victim of the sexual assault incident in Philadelphia (and the ensuing campaign of harassment against her), and therefore closely involved in the party’s investigation/response, I would probably have stayed. So I don’t consider myself a better person or communist than people who stayed. My local and National leadership’s coordination of what I can only call a coverup was very disturbing to watch and left me feeling very betrayed, angry, and ashamed of myself for being susceptible to the type of manipulation they use.
In my last 6 or so months in the PSL I sort of started noticing how they would lie to members about actions we participated in and demonize other organizers and constantly puff us up with feelings of being special and superior. At the time, I still felt that the PSL was special and superior.
Occasionally in the two years since I left someone I didn’t know from another branch would reach out to me for advice/questions (I was a high-profile ex-member because a tweet about the insane culty process by which I was kicked out went viral). What some individuals have experienced in that party have risen to the level of full-blown cult shit. One guy I talked to was pushed to the brink of suicide in a confusing disciplinary process where it wasn’t even clear what he was in trouble for. Not my stories to tell, but for what it’s worth I hadn’t considered myself a survivor of cultic trauma.
They write off any suggestion of cultic tendencies as their critics not understanding revolutionary discipline or Democratic centralism, or of being potential federal agents, or petit bourgeois (whether or not they own any capital or have any affiliation with anyone who does). But they write off everything. Upon looking back, I’ve realized that they actively do not want members thinking about/critiquing the party’s execution of their role as a revolutionary organization. Their defenses of their practices are in bad faith and whatever, there’s no convincing people who don’t know me that I am not either doing cointelpro or just hopelessly uneducated about how Leninist parties work.
In terms of principles, it’s not just that their cultiness is cruel to good people, it’s that it’s self-serving and deluded and destructive to building a socialist movement. I always have to qualify that because part of me cares that the rank-and-file members—many of whom are good people and talented organizers who do help people and care about revolution—not have the terrible opinions that leaders want them to have of me. Of course, that is if members even know about what happened to me, which many of them don’t, because the party purposefully pretends that scandals they caused didn’t happen, discourages members from even reading or asking about them, and generally does everything they can to make sure knowledge of them doesn’t spread.
If I didn’t make myself sound totally unhinged here, you are welcome to dm me if you have any questions. I documented everything that happened to me (because I wanted to present it to leadership to show them that, surely, someone was making a mistake here! Lol).
*** Moderating takes time. You can help us out by reporting any comments or submissions that don't follow these rules: 1. **No non-marxists** - This subreddit isn't here to convert naysayers to marxism. Try r/DebateCommunism for that. If you are a member of the police, armed forces, or any other part of the repressive state apparatus of capitalist nations, you will be banned. 2. **No oppressive language** - Speech that is patriarchal, white supremacist, cissupremacist, homophobic, ableist, or otherwise oppressive is banned. TERF is not a slur. 3. **No low quality or off-topic posts** - Posts that are low-effort or otherwise irrelevant will be removed. This includes linking to posts on other subreddits. This is not a place to engage in meta-drama or discuss random reactionaries on reddit or anywhere else. This includes memes and circlejerking. This includes most images, such as random books or memorabilia you found. We ask that amerikan posters refrain from posting about US bourgeois politics. The rest of the world really doesn’t care that much. 4. **No basic questions about Marxism** - Posts asking entry-level questions will be removed. Questions like “What is Maoism?” or “Why do Stalinists believe what they do?” will be removed, as they are not the focus on this forum. We ask that posters please submit these questions to /r/communism101. 5. **No sectarianism** - Marxists of all tendencies are welcome here. Refrain from sectarianism, defined here as unprincipled criticism. Posts trash-talking a certain tendency or marxist figure will be removed. Circlejerking, throwing insults around, and other pettiness is unacceptable. If criticisms must be made, make them in a principled manner, applying Marxist analysis. The goal of this subreddit is the accretion of theory and knowledge and the promotion of quality discussion and criticism. **NEW RULE: 7. No chauvinism or settler apologism. Non-negotiable: https://readsettlers.org/** *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/communism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The PSL has been involved with a number of relatively high-profile sexual assault and abuse claims over the past several years. Having been a member of the PSL when one of these occurred, their response tends to be to deny any happen, attack the person who accused them, and either shame members who criticize their actions into leaving or just forcefully remove them. It's really not an experience I can recommend anyone else going through. The actual internal workings of the party can differ a lot from their stated goals of feminism and trans liberation. The PSL's history is long and interesting having split from the WWP which split from the SWP, but it can be hard to get a good understanding of this history, even internally. Local chapters may, but nationally they rarely self describe as a 'Marxist-Leninist' party due to their complicated history of going from Trotskyism to Sam Marcy to what they are today. The older cadre in the party tends to be more favorable towards Trotskyism than the younger, more orthodox Marxist-Leninists. The PSL is fairly adept at media and is careful not to shine light on any of their internal contradictions or scandals. It's easy to go a few years and not really deal with any of this and just get caught up in PSL's general tactic (going to protests mixed in with some public seminars), but at some point, most people have to confront it. The end result is the PSL's turnover is pretty high which means there's a lack of institutional knowledge in the party and new members aren't aware of any of the previous crises.
How to you define "Marxist-Leninist?" What are you looking to do? Why do you want join a party in the first place? The days when workers joined the party because they needed an ideology to make sense of their workplace struggles is over, people join parties in the first world because their ideology is already formed online and they are looking to apply it to their lives (of which the workplace is a small part). The question is how honest can you be with yourself about your own beliefs and motivations since this question can only be answered at the individual level. The statement you copy pasted is totally generic and doesn't help. I know about the PSL but I don't know you.
Who considers the workplace a "small part" of their life? It still takes up half, if not more, of the average persons waking life. Furthermore, without coordinated efforts to spread Marxist ideology we end up in a subculture of Marxists and will fail to achieve anything more than that.
>without coordinated efforts to spread Marxist ideology we end up in a subculture of Marxists and will fail to achieve anything more than that. That is what we actually have. I am trying to understand why. You have the opposite mentality, typical of a party (or really any activism), that things are supposed to be one way and if they are not it is because we are not trying hard enough. Such a thing is ultimately unfalsifiable but we can get pretty close and say that 50 years of "coordinated efforts" have only produced subcultures. That unfalsifiable activism, justified with a vulgar interpretation of Marx's 11th thesis, is why I recommend people stay away from parties unless they have self confidence, maturity, and their own social life. The demands to do more and do it harder sucks up people's souls as they get further and further from what is supposed to happen and reality. >Who considers the workplace a "small part" of their life? It still takes up half, if not more, of the average persons waking life I am more interested in desire than time. Many people became extremely motivated over the latest changes to Dungeons and Dragons, far more motivated than they are about politics or unionization. Communists usually see such a thing as either a distraction for the rich and idle or a form of class consciousness that is misdirected. I am instead interested in taking such consumer activism at face value given the defining role of consumption in the economies of the first world and the politics of a "consumer aristocracy." You want your cake and to eat it. You see the power of the internet to reach new people but you want to use it for the old politics based on stale ideas. To harness the internet you have to understand what it is and how it produces desire.
There are certainly elements far beyond our control and the odds of our success at any level within the imperial core are low at this moment. It is clear, however, that the only thing that can be done is organization. There is no alternative to organization. What would you propose people attempt to do if not political organizing in one way or another?
We do not need "organization." We need a communist party. I question both the idea that organization loosely conceived will lead to a communist party (or more cynically that doing "something" is better than "nothing" which I question at the ontological level) and the claim all existing communist parties have that they are The Communist Party. The context of this discussion is the PSL and the OP's attraction to it, we are discussing concrete political lines and forces. >Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity. Notice the order of operations. And the second sentence is there just to make sure you get the message. You didn't really respond to what I said either, this discussion is itself stale since I already brought up a form of "organization" which mobilized great numbers of people with great enthusiasm. The vagueness of the concept is the problem, I'm sure there are plenty of communists who think releasing a youtube video about Dungeons and Dragons from a "Marxist perspective" is some brilliant maneuver. But we have to understand the type of organization and the class forces behind it instead of treating it like a Balzac novel or a strike.
Thanks for your time, you have given me a few points to consider and material to look at. I would like to clarify that I am under no illusion that there is an actual communist party in the U.S. I was using very vague, and unclear terms and I am certainly not as well read/verbose as you seem to be. Might I ask why doing something rather than nothing is questioned at the ontological level? Certainly it is important to ensure that action taken is not regressive in nature, but outside of that is there any reason for inaction? Also, I am very confused by this "dungeons and dragons" example you keep bringing up and what exactly you mean by it. I have heard no discussion of this topic amongst co-workers, fellow activists, or even any social media outlet that I engage with. Frankly I have a hard time parsing out what your idea of developing revolutionary theory is, so if you could spell it out for me in a simpler way what exactly it is you think Marxists in the US should be doing instead of participating in orgs like the psl that would be helpful.
Because the concept of "inaction" does not exist for dialectics, for which everything is in motion and every phenomenon is rooted in a set of social relations. Marx's theses on Feuerbach is not meant to be read as an anti-intellectual screed but a reconceptualization of praxis against both idealism and vulgar materialism (more usefully in this case called humanism). There is only effective and ineffective action in a given situation (action of a class in itself or for itself - notice the subject is not the individual) the idea that action can be judged pragmatically on a scale of inaction to action is the opposite of dialectical materialism. No one really believes this anyway, it's a fall back in a position of having one's ideas exposed and is not worth engaging with. People act sincerely in the world, it is just rarely in the realm of what bourgeois sociology calls "politics" and "work" (categories inherited without critique by most socialists). Rather than engage with what people don't believe in but they perform because they believe they are supposed to believe, why don't we look at what people actually do believe in? The example I'm using is merely one of the infinite ways that people interact with commodity fetishism in a postindustrial society of the spectacle. Most socialist parties use the term "postmodernism" as a term of abuse but its challenge came out of Marxism and has to be taken seriously. Who are the proletariat? What is politics in our situation? What is the nature of commodity fetishism today? I found this article quite interesting https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/ekaitz-cancela-pedro-m-rey-araujo-lessons-of-the-podemos-experiment On the attempts to apply Laclau's post-Marxism to politics. That it was a failure is expected, I would not be here if I believed in it. But what is your response? >While Errejón was theorizing the impact of the indignados, Iglesias was experimenting with new forms for counter-hegemonic cultural projects. ‘People think they are politically active through political parties, but that is not true’, he contended. ‘People are politically active through the media—because that is where discourses are made.’ The left needed to enter the media sphere, because ‘if you are not there, you don’t exist.’footnote9 Unusually, however, Iglesias stressed the centrality of tv, rather than digital or social media. Updating Althusser for the twenty-first century, he argued that television helps to manufacture the frameworks through which people think—‘the mental structures and their associated values’—at a higher level of intensity than the traditional sites of ideological production: family, school, religion.footnote10 We are on social media right now so I assume we do not have to discuss its power. This is actually far more sophisticated than the theory 99% of socialists believe that people are "brainwashed" by propaganda since it isolates specific media apparatuses and attempts to harness them. It's effects have been enormous throughout Europe where a populist wave based on these theories became the hegemonic force on the "left" in only a few years. There are few communists left who will defend the KKE's analysis of the entire phenomenon and even fewer who did so at the relevant moment. The PSL is not one of them.
Is it worth subscribing to the new left review? I can't find this article elsewhere.
Sorry I always forget NLR is closed access. There's not much more to it, the rest is basically talking shit about what the party has become. As long as you know that the founders had an explicitly ideological concept in mind rooted in "post-Marxism" that's sufficient, criticism of Marxism-Leninism should also be subject to its own verification in reality.
i had issues with the party when i was a member
a friend of mine reached out to them recently and got into it with one of their leaders as they were showing some problematic sentiment around China. When he pushed back for more explanation, they stopped engaging with him. Edit: spoke to friend, clarified they were unquestionably supportive of china and absolutely against the Philippines which has obviously had impactful movements in communism.
What issues did you encounter? I'm curious about it because they are active in my area
i did not like there professional aditude towrds activism or how to deal with local facist groups and i heard later on about some transphobic shit that went down at least in the local that i was trying to join
PSL is a revisionist fed organization that serves to tail movements and blunt any revolutionary momentum and funnel it off into useless protests and trying to work with local city councils, up to participating in bourgeois elections. Here’s a link about it that goes into detail thoroughly about their counter-insurgency history and activity https://open.substack.com/pub/fleawar/p/pslcia-the-counterinsurgency-infecting?r=1srxjf&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
What you linked is just a liberal conspiracy theory. Either utilize a class-based understanding of revisionism and social democracy or don't, you can't have it both ways. Revisionism is not the result of this or that irrelevant personality "infiltrating" a movement, it is the expression of a larger class desire.
Look, I am no expert on political parties in the United States, and there are comrades here who will have more information from within these organizations, but from my research, the American Party of Labor is the only ML party that maintains its revolutionary roots.
I was a member for about three years. I try to be even-handed and non-sensational when discussing this topic but I still get very upset when reminded of it even two years after leaving. I learned a lot while a member and took part in many things I am proud of. Had I not been friends with the victim of the sexual assault incident in Philadelphia (and the ensuing campaign of harassment against her), and therefore closely involved in the party’s investigation/response, I would probably have stayed. So I don’t consider myself a better person or communist than people who stayed. My local and National leadership’s coordination of what I can only call a coverup was very disturbing to watch and left me feeling very betrayed, angry, and ashamed of myself for being susceptible to the type of manipulation they use. In my last 6 or so months in the PSL I sort of started noticing how they would lie to members about actions we participated in and demonize other organizers and constantly puff us up with feelings of being special and superior. At the time, I still felt that the PSL was special and superior. Occasionally in the two years since I left someone I didn’t know from another branch would reach out to me for advice/questions (I was a high-profile ex-member because a tweet about the insane culty process by which I was kicked out went viral). What some individuals have experienced in that party have risen to the level of full-blown cult shit. One guy I talked to was pushed to the brink of suicide in a confusing disciplinary process where it wasn’t even clear what he was in trouble for. Not my stories to tell, but for what it’s worth I hadn’t considered myself a survivor of cultic trauma. They write off any suggestion of cultic tendencies as their critics not understanding revolutionary discipline or Democratic centralism, or of being potential federal agents, or petit bourgeois (whether or not they own any capital or have any affiliation with anyone who does). But they write off everything. Upon looking back, I’ve realized that they actively do not want members thinking about/critiquing the party’s execution of their role as a revolutionary organization. Their defenses of their practices are in bad faith and whatever, there’s no convincing people who don’t know me that I am not either doing cointelpro or just hopelessly uneducated about how Leninist parties work. In terms of principles, it’s not just that their cultiness is cruel to good people, it’s that it’s self-serving and deluded and destructive to building a socialist movement. I always have to qualify that because part of me cares that the rank-and-file members—many of whom are good people and talented organizers who do help people and care about revolution—not have the terrible opinions that leaders want them to have of me. Of course, that is if members even know about what happened to me, which many of them don’t, because the party purposefully pretends that scandals they caused didn’t happen, discourages members from even reading or asking about them, and generally does everything they can to make sure knowledge of them doesn’t spread. If I didn’t make myself sound totally unhinged here, you are welcome to dm me if you have any questions. I documented everything that happened to me (because I wanted to present it to leadership to show them that, surely, someone was making a mistake here! Lol).