Post text from reddit /r/socialism thread:
PSL's Top Propagandist Resigns, Publishes Tell-All Letter — geese magazine.
What does this tell us about PSL? What should disillusioned PSL members do?
“A dramatic resignation letter from one of the PSL’s top leaders accuses the organization of secrecy, factionalism, and bureaucratic decay. The controversy has reignited questions about the future of America’s socialist micro-parties.”
“The letter is long, wide-ranging, and damning. The letter is a confession as much as an indictment. Smolarek states his role as a leader in the PSL included perpetrating, covering up, or merely ignoring abuses. He describes a pseudo-democratic structure whose only purpose is to conceal an unelected Becker family clique capable of overriding every decision made by members. He documents a culture of compulsory applause and outright worship of the leadership. He alleges that bylaw changes for the organization were pushed through in secret because the leadership was afraid to face a vote. He reveals that the party’s core political documents were not the product of the combined knowledge of the organization, as members were led to believe, but were one person’s random thoughts and scribbles. He notes that they are increasingly drafted by A.I. chatbots, which he jokes has actually improved their quality.”
“Why was a group of petty tyrants with no interest in organizing the American people granted the standing of a serious tendency on the left? Because the micro-party left that platformed it, recommended it, and treated it as a peer is playing the same game. It recruits from the same few thousand radicals and measures itself, like the PSL, by its reputation on the left rather than its reach among the people. As marginal as the PSL is, among the microparties, respecting the PSL as a leading rival is the only serious position.”
"Smolarek has no intention of re-treading the same ground with the same line and re-cannibalizing the same old radical milieu, as Brian Becker and Gloria La Riva did when building PSL
He is calling for a fundamental course correction. He and his supporters recognize that the PSL is a dying effort not merely because of its decrepit leadership but because of its political orientation. Smolarek, however, was himself a chief author of that orientation, which leaves important questions: What will he keep, what will he add, and what will he abandon? To succeed, he and his people will have to do more than discard the WWP/PSL playbook; they will have to build a politics that actually constitutes the masses as a historical agent. What the letter has on offer is a critique of the PSL, but it is not yet that new politics. It is only a re-invocation of the basic Communist ideas that the PSL long ago threw away.
Smolarek and his supporters depart the PSL with substantial political goals and substantial baggage. Whether they will be able to free themselves from this baggage and reorient themselves towards the struggle for communism in America will be answered the only place such questions are: in practice, among the people the PSL had long given up on."
Comment by @chana in the general thread: (Sorry to copy your comment here but it’s the only comment I’ve seen so far on this and it’s a good way to start off the discussion, along with summer discussion questions I’ll add below)
Comment text
Notable resignation and letter from PSL Central Committee member and related fomenting split in Brooklyn over PSL being run as a bureaucratic clique (which many will already be aware of from speaking with various PSL members trying to do more than participate in protests). PSL is good at specific local levels despite the national level dysfunction, and the vast majority of its membership good comrades. But the criticisms certainly ring true to me and are reasonable to cite as existential flaws. There is a bit of clown nonsense from the top on a regular basis (like the call for a general strike, cited in the resignation letter, lmao that is baby liberal idealism stuff).
If you’re currently unorganized don’t let this stop you from joining, it is more important to be active and learn locally from any non-abusive left space than to do nothing organized.
Discussion Questions:
- There’s a lot of PSL fans or members here so what do you think? Like overall on this news?
- Do the complaints have merit, or not? Do some do, and some don’t? Which ones? – If so, what does this mean for the left in the US? What are the solutions and what is the path from here? – If not, why don’t you think so?
- What to do if you want to organize in the US now? Join the DSA? Join the Democratic Party? FRSO?
EDIT: The original article I posted kinda sucked. I’ll keep it here for posterity if people want to read it, but I’ll replace it with a link @RedWizard posted with original resignation letter and the PSL internal response. If you want to read just the resignation letter with the PSL criticisms, it is here.
Great response.
I wonder if a lot of the issues about top-down control could perhaps stem from trying to keep the ML and non-reactionary character of the party as it goes through a period of rapid growth, which I understand it’s been doing since this latest Trump administration. The strength of the PSL, over let’s say the DSA, is its Dem Cent unity, but keeping that line between the national org and the more influential bigger local branches may be difficult in a huge country like the US.
I can’t vouch for the resignation letter aside from the fact that I’ve heard most of its criticisms from existing and former PSL members. But I can say that attempting top-down control and alienation to hold a line would mean having a very unhealthy internal structure, itself an existential risk. This kind of thing has to be maintained via educated cadres and internal struggle and resolution by membership. The party is strong through its membership not despite it. If you run an org, education is always the best strategy unless there is a seriously dangerous individual or internal microsect that has to be removed, and even that has to be done semi-openly (internally).
Of course, internal leadership structures exist so that you don’t have to mass deliberate every single thing. But the circle has to be completed with that educated membership when they elect them (not implying anything about PSL just describing a successful method of struggle and unity).
I mostly agree but I think there are a couple possible issues stemming from the material conditions of the places these struggles are happening that make implementing all that more difficult in practice. Like @Awoo mentioned as the situation in the UK, the membership is being recruited in the imperial core. It takes a long time to undo a lifetime of propaganda from growing up in the West, but people want to participate before going through all that educational process, which btw I agree should be long and detailed.
You could solve this by recruiting extremely slowly I suppose. But at the same time, growing the party should be a priority to have any semblance of influence and money, and candidates should be able to participate in the struggle while the party learns theirs views and helps educate them while they do the work. The vanguard should be small, but not too small. The ML and anarchist left is virtually nonexistent in the US, democratic socialists are finally getting some numbers but are still really small. The left need to be bigger than that.
There’s some contradictions there I can see that have to be delicately handled. Democracy is 100% important to any real socialist project or party, but you run the risk of being tailist and making another transphobic communist organization, or a DSA-like org where everyone surrenders to electoralism, or doesn’t have a strong consistent line on imperialism. All possibilities I can see if you completely surrender to the membership before it’s ready.
That’s why my ears were kind of piqued by the author’s criticism of education coming from the top down, from national down to branches. I don’t trust every communist in the US, there are racist white ones, transphobic cis ones, sexist men commies and nationalist ones as well (CPA), and sometimes it’s subtle and not obvious, so I can understand being wary and wanting to know for sure what every branch is teaching their members. On the other hand, if the national branch isn’t providing those additional education resources being asked for, or being overly critical of honesty helpful educational resources being provided on a local level at the branch level, those are viable criticisms, but definitely fixable ones.
To be clear, overall I agree that these things need to be enforced from a membership level and shouldn’t require the leadership to have the right line for the membership to have the right line. But also, I could see how balancing the contradictions of organizing in the imperial core leading to some missteps, or even correct decisions that look like missteps to others. It’s hard to tell, which makes it hard for me to judge.
PSL already has a pretty lengthy recruitment process and groups like FRSO have separate general membership vs cadre membership tiers. I think an extended education and onboarding makes sense for becoming a full member with internal voting rights and so on. But it’s also one of those things where the specifics really matter, there are many ways to subvert basically any structure, again not picking on PSL or FRSO it happens in so many orgs that they declare “I am demcent!” and then it is just 3 people in charge for a decade and little development of other members ever happens so the org is full of underdeveloped members that can’t (and shouldn’t) make decisions and higher ups that feel like they either have to do everything or let the project fail. And that without even touching on potential issues of questionable ethics or decisions. So on one hand I think it is possible to build a committed communist org in the imperial core (hey PSL is arguably basically that) but also possible to overlook serious structural issues, so it ends up de facto as if you don’t have one. I know of orgs that spend seriously 80% of their time dealing with internal issues.
Re: participation I think that is where the front group / provisional membership model makes sense. New members can take action but can’t represent the org or make big decisions to overrule cadre members in the party. But that’s a tricky balance because there is a very real tendency to not run those fronts particularly well and use them too cynically as a feeder for membership, leaving aside doing actions well, working in coalition, having a strong standing in community. Again not specifically a PSL thing. Trots are most guilty of this in my opinion. But the core idea is still fine: bring people into your orbit with organizing projects but don’t let them control branded party stuff until they are full members.
All of this is really a balance. Just doing party building or just doing base building makes no sense, you can do both. It is just a question of how you split your resources, and honestly sometimes you have more resources than you’d think if you just let people work on what they have passion for. Not practical to always do, that is disorganization, but too often people decide that only one direction is good and correct and as we all know, these parties are all so very small and that is their main challenge.
I personally don’t know enough about PSL’s education pipeline to comment on it. I have met full PSL members with wildly different levels of political education but none that are like DSA socdems or anything like that.