Hello, it’s me again
This is another article that’s been going around. I talked to some comrades up in Rhode Island and apparently the author of this kind of has some eh stuff going on and was actually kind of a jerk but still here’s more kind of evidence of what’s going on.
Notably one thing is that they say that the PSL Miami branch is dissolved. I don’t know like anything about this.
It kind of feels like live archaeology at this point, just trying to archive and document the kind of discussions that have been going on. I honestly really have incredibly little faith in the party to continue to survive and end up being the party that we need. I think a new party is clearly going to need to form.
If you have any thoughts or additional points of information that can be used to, like, bring together the understanding of what went wrong and what’s been going wrong, please put it below.
Well, they clearly generated too much heat, either through their own incompetence (most likely) or through cointelpro operations (less likely but still possible). Either way, they need to purge the top brass, and get back the leadership that they lost and pursue massive internal reforms to the parties leadership committees. Likely an undoable task at this point.
That said, this is extremely unfortunate, as local PSL leadership here in the Midwest are among the only organizations that actually have a good understanding of what is going on and understand what is actually at stake here with the ICE raids and continued surveillance, with strong theory and organizational education standards.
However, this is clearly a repeated issue within demcent organizations, and theory needs to be developed on how to counter this in a way that does not compromise the other goals of the organizational method. It seems as though policies around abuse and democratic discussion have to be the concrete center point for such organizations to work.
It’s an issue with non DemCent organizations as well. DemCent just acts like a shibboleth in many of these conversations, it isn’t actually being applied coherently most of the time. Even when a DemCent organization is functional it can often be not particularly successful at implementing DemCent.
One of the biggest challenges is in building cadre, the people who should would be democratically making decisions. They are often underdeveloped both theoretically and practically. What this ends up meaning is that for good direction to be maintained, DemCent has to be partially abandoned to force a better decision. It happens all the time and usually relies on the good reputation and influence of leadership. But this is not sustainable. The only thing that is sustainable is the development of cadre and involving them in leadership. Orgs that grow fast are at risk of having a mass of undeveloped cadre that is unsustainable. Orgs that grow too slow because they are all about well-developed cadre (honestly I’m not sure if I’ve every seen one despite memes about e.g. Maoist reading groups) would presumably face irrelevance. It’s a tough subject to tackle given low capacity to develop cadre in the first place and part of important discussions about party building vs base building (I don’t fall strictly into either camp). I can’t give specific advice except that I believe any US-based org needs to treat cadre development as the #1 priority.
lol hey it applies to me too
According to Lenin, almost any political organization is demcent, the communists are just honest. Just a little nitpicking
I was just about to make a small edit that was going to address the, not JUST being an issue in DemCent.
All good points.
They should have done so a while ago but they dug their heels in on this issue, if they had not circled the wagons around an abuser any COINTELPRO bullshit would not have the teeth they may. This is a fundamental failure of party leadership.