No condemning Cuba coming from this campaign 😏
No condemning Cuba coming from this campaign 😏
good luck comradesHope it goes well but damn PSL you’re going in the exact opposite direction of building a successful electoral apparatus from the ground up. Start with president, then a Senate campaign? Why not try city council or mayor? With the right funds and cadres you can win an election on that scale by having a good chunk of your org focused on just that one locale, a strategy with which Socialist Alternative (unfortunately Trots) succeeded for Kshama Sawant. A PSL Sawant would be great.
If your goal is to win any electoral power at all immediately, sure. But that’s not the strategy with these. It’s pure movement building and mass political outreach. Bigger campaigns have bigger splashes. Every single possible metric we could have for the success of the party at our current stage was met during the presidential campaign. Now the strategy can be carried out in a more developed, broader fashion. The party is much bigger, stronger, and more deeply rooted than it was before the presidential election. We contested where the eyes were and it worked.
We’ve done the city council and school board thing. We’ve even won some. It’s not effective at building a party or a movement, given the position we were in. It won’t be too long until this is a much bigger, much more well-trained organization able to tackle many elections at once across the country at all levels. Going in this order means the core of the party’s strategy, connections, and membership are centered on the local in an extremely grassroots fashion that is vibrantly revolutionary. The bulk of all cadre work by far is non-electoral and that is what we need to build. We only take on an election when it won’t get in the way of that. Starting too soon leaves you suctioned helplessly to electoral politics because it’s the only thing you were able to do before developing the maturity and practice PSL’s current strategy has created. It’s what you practiced and what you trained on.
Sawant is a good example of what we don’t want. A cluster of fractured organizations hyper focused around one historically progressive city and a single political figure who can’t win anymore elections. That shit’s going nowhere and it sure as fuck won’t be a nationwide revolutionary vanguard party.
The goal is not “successful electoral apparatus”. It’s “successful socialist revolution”.
I view the presidential campaign as more of a way to discuss and popularize socialism with the masses. Most people’s conception of politics is limited to electoralism and the campaign provided the opportunity to meet people where they are at and redefine what socialism and what politics could be for them
national elections are a very expensive form of advertising, although apparently in some states you have to have to do some horseshit to have downballot candidates.
national elections are a very expensive form of advertisin
You pay for them by building organization and party cadre far more than you do by spending money. You’re not “advertising”, you’re speaking to people face to face - the essential work of mass politics.
idk you could do the same effort tabling or going door to door for local elections and get more and higher quality interest than a presidential candidate in places where you have no state or local examples.
all the yelling to liberals about voting PSL or Green in “safe” blue states didn’t amount to much and if people aren’t interested in electoral efforts at all you’re not going to pick us up by running for president.
idk you could do the same effort tabling or going door to door for local elections and get more and higher quality interest than a presidential candidate in places where you have no state or local examples.
Oh, you say this from all your experience?
Your assumption is wrong. You do not get the same results. We’ve done it. We still do it. It is not at, at all, the same results.
i have only ever seen people get laughed out of the room, but it’s been a while and the democrats are even more depraved than dronebama so i could believe things have changed
For the presidential campaign that makes sense, though it is actually offputting how much local PSL people talk about the campaign and this or that debate or speech. I think they get into it a bit more than is warranted for a cynical PR campaign, which is not reaply the fault of the individual members, but an inherent weakness to prioritizing bourgeois electoralism without complete clarity. If folks have to put so much time into it, I think they want to think it has more value than a PR campaign.
For a MA Senate campaign, though, I don’t really get it unless they are super interested in doing the exact same thing but only for Maine.
MA isn’t the worst place to campaign. It’s a fairly progressive state that’s also not a center of the DNC political machine like NYC and LA. Sanders got his start from Vermont after all. Vermont is a state that Democrats took for granted which allowed him to wiggle his way in as a third party dark horse.
I think a US branch of Palestine Action was also formed at MA, so there’s definitely a well of leftists that PSL can tap to. Not the worst place to recruit cadre.
an inherent weakness to prioritizing bourgeois electoralism without complete clarity
This is your misunderstanding. The impossibility of electoral victory makes it very clear we aren’t “prioritizing bourgeois electoralism”.
It is all the local PSL people talked about and it was literally an electoral campaign. What they talked about was things like who won a debate.
Clear to who? What do you tell people going door to door?
That we need to build a mass working class movement for socialism
What are the practical differences between an electoral campaign about building a mass working class movement for socialism, and a purely educational/social campaign about building a mass working class movement for socialism?
The Boston PSL gets pretty large showings to their events as they are quite active and there are plenty of people in the city interested in some sort of vague radical politic. A lot of people I know attend the rallies but don’t know really what the PSL is. They just show up cause of the messaging and it getting shared on social media. And it’s not like they talk through the full party program at each rally. So I can kinda see the senate run as maybe a good PR move to really put the name of the org itself out there more to turn the attention they get from rallies into membership or more dedicated followings. Idk how successful it’ll be. Obviously I hope it works. The Boston PSL does a lot of great stuff
I think it’s potentially instructive here to take a look at the 34th Congress of the United States. The new party that year was an upstart abolitionist party that called itself the Republican Party, you might have heard of it. In that Congress, the (brand-new as of 1854) Republican Party started with 7 and finished with 11 senators in its column, versus 0 and 1 House representatives at the start and end, respectively. Maybe the times are different enough that this isn’t the right approach, but the way the Dems have utterly failed to tune into the attitudes of their own voting base puts them in a very bad historical position by my reckoning, so there just might be an opening.
There are many, many parallels to the birth of the Republicans and the pre-Cvil War era. It’s easy to imagine an alternative path where a Republican party with deeper democratic structures enabling the Radical Republicans to stay in control of the party, complete Reconstruction, and build far more racial and social equality. Lots of lessons to be learned in that period.
I agree
the big campaigns are mostly for organizing and recruiting new members, i do think they could probably at this stage go for a few city mayors in like california, but the leadership probably wants to wait to grow for a bit more
Fuck yeah!
Not trying to be a Debbie downer here, but how do PSL candidates like this avoid the “third party stink” and being completely ignored by the electorate? It feels impossible to break through the prisoner’s dilemma of the two-party system…
that’s not what prisoner’s dilemma means
I’m probably using the wrong term. What I mean is that feeling that voting third party is “throwing my vote away” because of first-past-the-post and the fact that voting third party might help the worst candidate win over the “lesser evil”.
Basically how do you not be the Green Party?
the point of a workers party campaign is to show that the bourgeois system (ie dems and reps alike) are the enemy, to raise class consciousness, increase party membership and organising capacity.
edit: so the party’s goal is not to pander to the “electorate”
Time for What is to be Done?, a Lenin pamphlet about engaging with the broad party politics of a bourgeois government written a full 15 years before the successful October Revolution. Building power and organizing don’t happen overnight, all avenues must be used to build a revolutionary socialist movement/vanguard. We don’t get the weeks where decades happen without the decades where “nothing” happens.
- If I have mischaracterized WITBD? In some way, yell at me. I’m as much encouraging myself to complete reading it as anyone else here.
Gotta hit that cut pentagon budget and anti-trust bits as well
(sorry don’t have instagram, only see blurb here)
hell ya! i wish him well
hell yeah i love my fucking Party
looking forward to more of these from the PSL and to doing my part to bolster these campaigns and their immense base building and consciousness expanding potential
I hope he does an Inquisition of the libs.
The cop slide at the end
