cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6116584
I’ve seen comrades argue this talking point as a reason to support the GP over PSL and then use “We can radicalize the Greens with time and effort” as a justification when you point out the irony, as if fixing any faults of PSL to further develop that party instead wouldn’t be easier.
We can radicalize the Greens with time and effort
Psh stupid libs thinking the dems can be pushed left. Anyway come over here and help me with moving this boulder, I am certain we can do it incrementally over time
You might actually be able to since it seems pretty likely that addressing climate change and preservation efforts are going to require a pretty significant economic restructure. Pushing Dems left doesn’t help them with their goal (of doing nothing, I guess?) but Greens will need to pursue it or societal collapse, so seems possible.
To me campaigning for PSL seems more important than actually voting for PSL. Neither are deluded into thinking they can win the election. But the Greens have a 5% goal where they get can get national campaign funding. I’m not sure what the goal is for the PSL other than publicity.
Probably the same goal as any ML party: Spread revolutionary ideas to wider audiences, expose contradictions in the bourgeois political system, develop organizational capacity and connect with and educate the masses. The vote number itself can also be helpful as a structure test for self-analysis. Where was PSL successful, what tactics worked, how did that contribute to cadre growing, larger protests, etc.
It’s sad to see S4A dying more and more on this hill. Just a few months ago they offered both Green’s and PSL as alternatives, but it seems like they doubled down and got very butthurt by commenters questioning their “anti-revisionism”. They keep posting a 2007 article from PSL’s Liberation School that was more critical on the CPC then their party line is today as proof that they “de-evolved”, but frankly I read through it and basically they just said that Dengism has sucked because it brought capitalism back to China but also that it would be disastrous for the CPC to lose power unless it were somehow replaced with another Communist revolution (which… ain’t gonna happen in the near future). So the conclusion was to remain critical but support the socialist tendencies that still exist.
The kicker is S4A literally used to work with the Green’s and then left because they viewed it as a dead-end, not-explicitly-socialist party. And now they are actually better to support than PSL because… PSL has a wrong line on China?
It’s especially stupid because an ideological disagreement in the US left about a foreign country’s challenges building socialism truly will not matter until far, far down the line, and that’s assuming we ever find a modicum of success.
I do want to say that if people would rather vote for Green’s over PSL to try to reach the 5% threshold, I find that pretty reasonable. It would be great to have a real leftist 3rd party get the chance to actually callout dems and repubs directly. I’ve been more impressed with Hawkins’s writings than I expected, and so I will check out Green’s as well as PSL local chapters when I’m back in the states.
it would be disastrous for the CPC to lose power unless it were somehow replaced with another Communist revolution (which… ain’t gonna happen in the near future). So the conclusion was to remain critical but support the socialist tendencies that still exist.
this is a fact and one of the main reason I despise the people who say “USSR was State capitalist sweaty” ,the USSR’s existence even at it’s sad final days was a good thing for the world and for the people of the 3rd world and the global south
Can anyone explain the revisionist thing for a non american who’s not familiar with revisionism in socialist parties?
In this context they’re saying the philosophy of PSL is a revised form of Marxism(-Leninism, probably). With negative implications.
S4A is anti-China, they are an Ultra. In the video they elaborate on their statement here (that I watched out of morbid curiosity) and they accuse PSL of being revisionists for being Dengists.
If PSL is anything, it’s Maoist, and they seemed to have leaned a bit on the ultra side when they first started the party, but I believe they have improved since then.
One of their old articles on China is somewhat ultra and idealist: https://www.liberationschool.org/what-do-socialists-defend-in-china-today/
I mentioned this article here where I was able to get outside perspectives.
It basically means “they are impure and have made too many concessions/strayed from the true path” and is something ultras, especially Hoxhaists who can get up to like a third of a given text just being the word “revisionist” prefixed to every single noun, like to use as a catch-all term for why they’re unhappy with an ML party or AES state. Sometimes it’s actually cogent, like the Hoxhaist critique of China’s foreign policy after Mao, other times it’s just sectarian whining from people who want to feel like the most pure and clever special lads with the best theory untainted by praxis.
It’s full/literal meaning as used by leftists is just something like “going backwards” either in theory or praxis, but like I said in its normal use is just calling a policy, tendency, party, or state impure.
Typical ultra
Not just an ultra, S4A has a taste for drama too. I don’t go out of my way to call him on it because his theory reading is good work, but this is the kind of guy you need to watch out for IRL in groups because they’ll eat up all your time with bullshit infighting that aren’t constructive to growing an org.
