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The best time to start organizing with PSL is yesterday, second best time is now
PSL is at best a SocDem party... And that's my showing good faith toward them.
Care to elaborate?
Let me see:
Predilection for electoralism instead of building working class' power in the manner of Leninism.
Their program reeks of reformism instead of revolution, trying to alleviate the symptoms of Capitalism instead of overcoming it. With the appeal to some kind of nostalgia toward the 60s (Vietnam's 60s???)
Lack of rupture with the system (better housing laws instead of abolishing that shit), their optimism kinda keeps the corpse fresh instead of burying it once and for all.
Too much emphasis at being the voice of reason for the Democrats instead of creating a revolutionary party.
And to me they can't be comrades without a revolutionary praxis.
They do both. A large part of their cadre wouldn't have heard of them if it wasn't for the electoral campaigns
Not sure what you're referring to, their program is to decommodify food, housing, energy, etc, nationalize the 500 largest companies, end finance, establish a unitary governing structure with popular input through unions and other orgs, and use planning to set the economic agenda. Alongside giving native americans, African Americans, and all oppressed nationalities liberation. They want a system like china but much further down the path to socialism to reflect our material conditions
They want to decommodify and socialize/communalize housing, the book Socialist Reconstruction goes into it
The rhetoric works on a lot of people. You could definitely argue it's a trap that could eventually bring people back to the democrats (assuming democrats overcome their class character and pivot to the left, which has yet to be observed), but a mission of PSL's is to massively grow the party without compromising in the slightest on the revolutionary program. I'm not sure if you're referring to something specific, but getting people to talk about their frustrations with the Democratic Party is an easy way to get them interested in an alternative. And historically, I'd argue the republican party was a revolutionary party when it was founded. It had success due to people's frustration with the whigs and democratic parties
They have a revolutionary praxis, they see their current work as the path to a proletarian revolution and educate their members in marxist theory
I'll refrain from making more criticism before reading the book.
But let me put out this cynical question: how communist can the average USAmerican be? You guys are strong individualists. The collectivism is, in a certain manner, anti-Americanism. I can see other late-stage capitalist dystopias like Japan and South Korea becoming communist because the cultural path is there. But you guys are too egoistic, too pecuniary brained, too hopeless for that.
I think having revolutionary optimism is critical here. The working class will need to relearn how to organize and assert its power. The inability to have a revolution is, at least in part, propaganda. 100 years ago we had militant unions and socialist/communist parties that threatened the two-party system. It can happen here again. The alternative is not organizing, which means we'll never have socialism
But is that really a revolutionary optimism or just idealism? Since you have alluded to Gramsci, what are the material conditions to collectivism reach the hegemony in the USA?