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.
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.