Internally active DSA membership ranges from communist to anarchist, but there is still a small faction of entrenched Social Democrats in the "Socialist Majority Caucus". But everyone hates them. Who knows about paper members. Discussion on the national forum ranges from "how can we explicitly break from the democrats", to "why are we bothering with electoral politics?"

The current plan is to run "Tribune of the Plebs" style candidates wherever we can until we build enough infrastructure to run our own party. IE building replacements ActBlue and NGP Van. The latter being the hardest. Please keep that in mind when you talk about needing a workers party and who's actually trying to make that happen.

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Please keep that in mind when you talk about needing a workers party and who's actually trying to make that happen.

Are you saying the PSL is not doing that?

[–] ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They're not trying to win any elections or hold any offices. Whatever workers party the DSA is trying to build is. The PSLs concept of a workers party is a militant movement primarily engaged in direct action. This is something I've heard from an actual PSL member on this site, any others are free to clarify, but as I understand their position is that electoralism is futile. Which I sympathize with and probably most actual DSA organizers do to. But you do the Mao thing and go to the people and they really want to vote socialist and see change.

[–] Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The PSL is working on running more candidates at the state and local level. It's just hard to find suitable, well, candidates. I can't say anything more than that.

[–] ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Is that a recent change in decision or have they always been trying to run local candidates?

[–] Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This is super late but I've been running through my replies today

The difference between the PSL and an org like the DSA or Greens is that we have an explicit ideology. In order to be a full member, you have to take candidacy classes biweekly for almost a year.

Other parties find candidates by some egocentric grifter going up to them and saying "Hey I'm running for [X] I'd love to have your endorsement, yeah sure I'm a Socialist." The PSL has higher standards. If we're going to be fielding candidates, they need to be members, and they need to follow the party program and submit to the Party's authority.

Put these two things together, and it means that while your local PSL Branch may have a large periphery and is very active, it might only have a dozen or fewer full members. And only a very small percentage of those full members are going to be "electable".

What makes a person electable? For many positions, there are age prerequisites, and people prefer candidates at least in their 30's. It's bad optics to run a white Socialist against a Black Democrat in most cases. Some people are too ugly, they're poor public speakers, they are imminently "cancle-able" due to posting behavior or problematic romantic relationships.

So leftist orgs have tons of GenZ autistic transbians and neckbearded schlubs but not a lot of people fit for political office - GenX/elder millennial, attractive and well-spoken, has credentials, no embarrassing posting/romantic history, stable independent household. These are just not the sort of people who are joining the PSL in droves.

As the PSL is building it's membership base, I think the most likely path will just be maintaining legitimacy until our current members who are in their 20s get into their 30s and start to "settle down". At the moment, there are very few "electable" people in my own branch and, out of those few, even fewer actually want to go through it. But we do have a few, where we would have hardly any as of even 5 years ago. Given time, we'll find and build more.