I appreciate everyone’s responses a lot. I also think it was good to remove the post because there was some reactionary stuff in the google doc I linked. I found it through one of the articles that Bad Mouse’s link led to, not in any of the other comments. I only looked at the “first hand accounts” links in the doc and didn’t even double check what else there was so that’s my error.
I had a feeling the take would be that there are certainly big flaws, as there are in any org, with any group of people, but PSL is still one of the few vehicles for socialist agitation that there actually exists, and by joining it we can help improve it.
I’m likely going to be moving to San Francisco when I’m back in the states in case anyone has recommendations about specific orgs in the bay that are certainly good.
Also I got to say Bad Mouse’s ultra turn also bummed me out a little. It seems like such a baby leftist thing to do to just shit on a socialist party from across an ocean and then refuse to elaborate.
As a heads up to others this is a Trot org with the worst international takes you’ve ever seen
Super solidarity comrade.
It’s an active organization that has a made a number of material gains for the working class, more so than other organizations in the modern imperialist core as far as I am aware. It’s democratic centralism to the core, so there is solid reasoning behind the things you might disagree with.
Respectfully, the takes I have seen from
Socialist AlternativeSocialist Workers Party regarding international issues are beyond the pale. Like “unwavering support for Israel against the capitalist regime in Tehran” level shit.I don’t have a huge problem with Trots in theory (if they put Trotsky’s ideas on a pedestal and express distaste for Stalin, for example). But my problem is when Trots start taking positions that happen to perfectly align with the US State Dept, then we have a problem.
SAlt doesn’t do “unwavering support for Israel”. They’re more guided by a knee-jerk “neither Washington nor Moscow rise up workers” characterization of every geopolitical question.
A relevant example regarding Israel and Iran: https://www.socialistalternative.org/2024/01/31/gaza-crisis-unfolds-into-deadly-regional-war/
From that article:
“Amidst the New Cold War conflict for global domination between US and Chinese imperialism”
“Many working people correctly see the diplomatic efforts of the US-aligned Arab and Islamic capitalist dictatorships like Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as completely ineffective in stopping Israel’s massacre of the Palestinian people. However, the militarism of the China-aligned Iranian regime and its allies do not pose a way out.”
“However, the regional imperialist mullah-regime of Iran, backed by China and Russia, and its allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, have shown time and again that whenever they are confronted with the threat of working people and youth fighting against their immiseration, they won’t hesitate to use bloody measures similar to what the IDF uses on Palestinians. Any wider war would only use the working class as cannon fodder for the interests of each of these imperialist blocs.”
Articles like these are nearly always rambling, hitting a series of criticisms in order to distinguish SAlt itself. Everyone else does it wrong, only our bottom-up class struggle will ever solve the problem, etc etc. Material analysis is clearly not a priority and there is no real point to these articles aside from what serves the org itself. Standard stuff for Trot newspapers. It’s incredibly formulaic and amounts to, ironically for self-described Marxists, attempting to confirm reality to a very particular idealism.
Those are valid criticisms, you just disagree with them.
They’re quite stupid and wrong criticisms but you’re also missing the point.
You can’t even refer to them without using your little nickname, it’s childish, petty and extremely off-putting for any point you are attempting to make.
I’m not sure what you mean by my “little nickname”. Sounds like a subject change though.
Sauce boss?
Apologies, it was the Trot Socialist Workers Party and not the Trot Socialist Alternative. This is where I saw that take, though: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/01/20/laura-garza-us-senate-candidate-2024-primary-election-questionnaire/
Appreciate the clarification. Would be great if you edited the original post.
It’s an org I actively recommend people do not join. I usually don’t mention it by name because I’m not petty, but it’s probably the org I’m referring to maybe 1/3 of the time I give examples of bad organizing and treating members poorly. For example, they’re the org that bumbled its way into a local shop and got two people fired for no reason trying to do a rank-and-file strategy without thinking about, say, whether they were in a probationary period that would’ve ended in a couple weeks and ensured they could organize militantly and not get fired. I’ve heard the same kinds of stories across several cities.
Things like this are part of why they alienate basically everyone that tries to work with them. It’s no surprise that the various projects you mentioned are all just SAlt, there’s basically nothing to those front groups that isn’t people who were already in SAlt doing the lefty version of astroturfing. For example, basically every KCVG image includes 3-5 SAlt members from nowhere near KCVG trying to give the impression that it’s “the workers” holding up the signs, lol. Kind of par for the course, unfortunately, and more or less the opposite of external organizing.
Anyways my actually practical point is that when I’m being critical of orgs it’s because I want folks here to take that first step of doing real-world organizing and not get burnt out, learn bad habits, or create dependencies that become toxic relationships. I would recommend that people specifically do not join SAlt because they won’t learn good organizing skills, they’ll learn very bad habits in building and maintaining coalitions, they’ll be exposed to very condescending (yet miseducated) contacts that dictate your experience with the org, become miseducated through its stereotypical Trotskyist legacy, and gain patterns of speech that are robotic and obvious to everyone else. If there’s something to learn from SAlt, it’s the power of unity in action, but unfortunately it is misdirected due to its poor analyses and choices.
If anyone is on the fence about PSL and is considering SAlt, absolutely go with PSL instead. Even if your local chapter is mostly a book club, it will be a better experience for your development as a socialist and therefore your capacity for useful impact.
An individual took action that was not in step with the organization and I think he got the boot because of it.
I’m not here to rag on any organization, I like SA because they have made material impacts to the community I live in, Seattle. Minimum wage increase, mandatory sick leave, Amazon tax that goes to affordable housing (and not wasteful NGOs), it’s actually a long list. And the things they pushed for but didn’t win, all I saw from other local groups was zero support and fingers crossed that SA would fail, damn the working class impacts.
You have a problem with Workers Strike Back and call it a front group, but there is no attempt to hide the connection. They are trying to funnel political energy that is fed up with democrats but not radicalized enough, or not willing to be involved enough to join SA. That’s not how fronts work, and eventually they would like for it to be it’s own self sustained party separate from themselves, one they could then caucus in and push left. I think that’s Two Stage Theory but I’m not huge on theory and could be wrong. A front group is more akin to Refuse Fascism and how I’ve met people tabling on the street that didn’t know they were apart of the RCP.
I’m not a member of SA, I straight don’t have the time between raising my kids and keeping my job. I am exactly who they are trying to engage with in forming WSB. I had heard they get hated on in communist spaces, it just really sucks to see. They do good work.
It happened multiple places.
Yes I’m familiar with this style of salesmanship.
In this case it’s usually a lie of omission. A WSB event that is presented entirely (or almost entirely) by SAlt members but they all get introduced as every other thing they are (a worker at X, an organizer at Y). The really weird subreddit that was created before they announced, had random labor-ish posts for a while, and then started getting WSB posts after they announced, but still doesn’t say much of anything about SAlt. It’s all a very familiar feeling of someone trying to pull one over on you.
That’s exactly how many fronts work. Being called a front isn’t a bad thing in itself. One of the orgs I work with is a front.
Yes I know the pitch that script was used on me for months before the announcement. It’s actually more of a copy + paste job from their sister org in the UK, hoping a few of the same things happen. The main underlying goal is to grow SAlt through labor. I’m not sure whether they internally believe it will ever be the potential coalition they sell it as, but in terms of how they actually function in practice it’s very unlikely to ever be one. Like… they do the literal opposite of building coalitions, they try to orchestrate everything themselves and for themselves and alienate everyone else in the process.
That’s the thing, they rarely do good work. Over and over again they do bad work. They put others at risk by not coordinating with them, they fuck up when they’re trying to enter new spaces, seemingly due to recklessness rather than just unfamiliarity, have terrible political analysis, particularly internationally, get themselves kicked out of spaces, aren’t part of important coalitions to begin with because they’re not trusted…
They’ve succeeded at basically one thing, which is running some electoral campaigns and raising the profile of socialists, though they also allowed much of their successes to be claimed by liberals in their orbit. But they’re abandoning that one thing they’re kind of good at to go chase this thing they’re kind of bad at instead. I’d wish them luck but it’s probably better for the labor movement and creating a functional opposition to reaction if they don’t get much of a foothold in that space and go back to running electoral campaigns. I can tell you, 100%, that WSB is insufferable in radical labor spaces due to the way they position themselves relative to and interact with others, leading to (justified) distrust. Luckily they seem to have given up even trying to work with anyone else on this and are just fundraising instead.