Hi, I'm here to announce that everyone pushing the standard Hexbear party line on the protest movement is a loser and wrong. I already know the weak-ass arguments you're gonna make and every single one of them reveals your disconnection from any actual organizing. Let's go through them one by one. If you have another that you think Marx Failed to Consider, please bring it up and I will explain how you are wrong in that way as well.
This was funded by the Waltons
No, one Walton bought an ad in the NYT. Who fucking cares? It has no material bearing on the movement whatsoever. There's no organization money is being funneled to other than the Democratic Party and Indivisble, which is not different in any way. The on-the-ground organizers in most cities and towns are not receiving a penny from the left's George Soros conspiracy. They're just normal people (and, to the next point, lots of leftists).
The Democrats are using this to steal the leftist energy of the masses
The Democrats certainly want to do that, but on the ground reports indicate they are losing all over the country. That's because leftists (especially 
) are not leaving this space uncontested. I have spent an enormous amount of time putting in the work to earn the trust and legitimacy necessary to place a bunch of literal revolutionary communists in the leadership of the local movement. Not in some sneaky, behind the scenes way, but out in the open, succeeding specifically because we are literal revolutionary communists who never shut up about it. The Democrats, by my accounting, are losing the struggle in more places than not. If you refuse to engage because you're afraid the Dems will suck your leftist soul, you're just conceding the struggle and granting them victory. They don't co-opt by pressing a button, they co-opt because they have the resources to take leadership and then defuse. So far they have failed to do so specifically because the space is not empty and the communists are fighting harder to reach the masses (since we actually have an appealing program).
The attendees are all Kamala-loving liberals who just want to go back to brunch
If you had ever bothered to go to one of these events and talk politics to people, you'll discover a very broad array of political perspectives, including a strong trend towards explicit support for socialism. Yes, of course, the PMC bug-eating libs are there - who cares? They are by no means the only attendees. Maybe you're just Too Cool to be around someone who reminds you of your mom, but the rest of us are finding deep political discontent and activating it. When one of my comrades gets on the mic and says "we need to break from the democrats and do a literal socialist revolution", the crowd response, by and large, is incredibly positive. The retired dentists and accountants in the crowd grumble and whine, but they are a minority - and they don't leave. They stay and listen to the arguments we make. They say things like "you're right, I just don't think it's possible". They very, very rarely say "you're going too far".
This is a disorganized mess that's going to fizzle out
50501 and other decentralized spontaneous protest movements never last, but they do give an opportunity for dedicated political organizers to intervene on a stage where thousands of disaffected liberals and Democrat voters are asking "what is to be done?". If you decide not to show up and answer that question, the Democrat machine will coordinate the demobilization of this movement. If you do show up and you deliver the political argument you believe in. If you show up with the AV equipment, safety marshalls, march route, signs, and speaker list - the bare minimum for a halfway serious organizer - then you don't just hand out flyers and talk at a table but set the entire political line of the event. And in doing so, you demonstrate the leadership of the socialist movement and win a lot of those attendees to your side. If you can plug them into actual organizing work, you can bring them into permanent political motion. Does it matter if 95% of these people just go home and never bother to do anything besides another protest? If those 5% join the movement in a meaningful way, that's half a million new comrades.
Mao says: "All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail."
Stop thinking about what you want to do and achieve and start thinking about the fact that we needs tens of millions of people to support revolutionary socialism in the US in order to get anything done. They are out in the streets begging for you to explain this to them.
These are just peaceful protests that won't achieve anything because they aren't revolutionary.
Lenin says: "What grounds are there for assuming that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must employ only revolutionary methods? There are none at all. The assumption is a pure fallacy; this can be proved by purely theoretical propositions if we stick to Marxism. The experience of our revolution also shows that it is a fallacy. From the theoretical point of view—foolish things are done in time of revolution just as at any other time, said Engels, and he was right. We must try to do as few foolish things as possible, and rectify those that are done as quickly as possible, and we must, as soberly as we can, estimate which problems can be solved by revolutionary methods at any given time and which cannot."
You're doing the ultra-leftism of conflating tactics with strategy. Our tactic in this moment is to intervene in these protests to convince people of the necessity of a revolutionary socialist political organization as the only solution to our sick society. Right now, mass revolutionary socialist consciousness and organization does not exist in the USA. Therefore, it is impossible to carry out open revolutionary militancy. If the current crop of people who are in some way directly involved in revolutionary socialist organizing (certainly a lower bar than revolutionary guerrilla warfare or sabotage) turned today to armed struggle, all ~100,000 of them would lose. The broader periphery of people who semi-passively support that objective through attendance at events and monetary contribution is probably a few million. The masses who would passively support probably number in the tens of millions, but that passive support is not particularly useful. And the number of people who would simply sit by and watch it happen is probably over 100 million. Every one of those groups needs to be elevated to the next stage - observer to passive supporter, passive supporter to semi-passive periphery, semi-passive periphery to revolutionary organizer, revolutionary organizer to doing the literal revolution. Each of these layers of the movement have a symbiotic relationship with the others that strengthen the entire struggle.
Here's the key lesson: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO WIN VIOLENT STRUGGLE AND YOU NEED TO GO WHERE THE MASSES ARE TO RALLY THEM TO OUR CAUSE.
Amerikkkans will never do a revolution because they are labor aristokkkrauts
Ok, thank you for you contribution, you can resume sitting in a hole since your prescription is inactivity.
Please tell me your other weak-ass reasons why you're correct to sit on your ass.
Contesting tiny little local elections is not effective at growing the party or the movement from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. You end up spending many hours of effort by comrades on elections that neither engage large numbers of people nor win meaningful power to advance useful reforms. When our task is to grow the party, that's not effective. It's a matter of tactical timing - we are not opposed in principle to electoral campaigns, they just largely haven't been the right move for the party in most cases.
Now that the party has gotten much larger (because the tactics you see us doing are very effective at that), you'll see us take on more elections of meaningful signficance in the next few years. We hope to recreate the success of the Claudia-Karina campaign from last year, which roughly doubled the membership of the party.
There are also ways to intervene without directly running party members. In Cleveland, rather than running members, we are advocating a policy platform that can be practically implemented and utilizing it to influence insurgent City Council candidates who we've built relationships with over the last few years. That gives us electoral legitimacy and influence at the local level through alternative means. It's a new tactic so we'll have to assess its efficacy after it's played out.
Many of my own comrades disagree with me on this, but from my experience and talking with others, I see the primary utility in socialists running for office to be gaining membership and increasing organizational capacity. Regardless of whether you win, you always gain new members from the campaign. And hey, if you keep it up you'll eventually have the muscle to actually win.
It's a question of opportunity costs and who you connect with. The types of folks who pay attention to local elections outside of big city mayor and council are generally not the demographic we identify as revolutionary subjects (poor, colonized, especially Black). You can put that effort into other campaigns that, I think, will produce better outcomes for party building. But once your party is able to contest (or at least be very visible in) high profile elections, that calculus changes.
That hasn't been true in my experience, especially when people understand their local issues can many times be solved at the local level. They might not often be ready to go independently vote or participate in these campaigns but that's a different question entirely.
Running for council in big to medium sized cities seems like a good strategy to me. It's not hyper local like some town of 20k people, but it's not a quixotic presidential run.
NYC DSA, for all its faults, is propagandizing with the Zorhan mayoral run.
What if that presidential run doubles the size of your revolutionary party? The point of engaging in elections is not to win power (cool if you do though!) but to advance your platform among the people. Elections are only the best way to do that under pretty specific circumstances both internal and external to the party.
Very few people are aware of PSL's presidential campaigns and they got less than 1% of the vote. I don't begrudge them running; I voted for PSL in 2024 and 2020.
However, running a competitive council race in Philly or DC might get more national coverage and serve as a bigger propaganda platform than a presidential run.
If PSL's 2024 presidential run did this, I'd be impressed and have to reconsider what I wrote above. But to my knowledge, PSL doesn't publish its membership numbers and hasn't claimed to have doubled in size due to their 2024 presidential campaign.
I disagree, that's true about the national run but not the local runs.
PSL could win local offices to build power and then be able to get more people interested after seeing the benefits of having a PSL member who actually cares about the community in the office. Realistically, PSL (or any party) will never be ready to take power if they can't be assed to run campaigns to win. Again, this is literally what Lenin was yelling at us to do in the book you referenced in order to yell at us.
Presidential campaign results can be done with the same ad campaign without the run. It's not necessary but I'm not necessarily criticizing PSL for it either, my only major critique of PSL is the lack of power building via electoral campaigns at this point.
It's debatable if it's not effective to grow a party that way but I suppose I would agree that either way PSL was not yet ready then.
Until it starts doing that though, I really don't see a point in joining this party and continuing to meet people at protests so those people can go to other protests to meet other people in the name of the party and on and on and on for another decade, maybe just one more decade after that if the party decides it still isn't yet ready. I want to see a point but I don't. There are other avenues where people can win small, personal campaigns that radicalize them and while they don't necessarily get connected to a larger political party that seems more worthwhile to me than the new lib fest of the month.
That, by far, is the bulk of the work we do. My branch is almost a hundred people and about five of them were needed for a few weeks to prepare the last protest and twenty to run it day of. The rest were doing work in the community.
What kind of work though? And if you have that large of a base in the community, how are you not ready to run a local campaign? If you could activate everyone to do an electoral door knocking campaign, you could win something!
If we want to really take power, we need to hold any and every type of position available in the same way Democrats and Republicans do. There are no small positions, only small parties.
Have you met A person? Just because someone is in an organization it doesn't mean that they will want to do anything that's asked of them
Really good point about door knocking. 100 door knockers on a Saturday is absolutely massive. Door knocking can also be used to build relationships with sitting local politicians in reelection
And even more effective for joining members than going to a very lib protest as well.
Not to say I completely disagree with going to the protest but I still am very confused about PSL's moves.
In my experience this is generally not true. We've done a lot of door knocking and a lot of protests. That door knocking tends to get very few contacts per comrade hour, so we only utilize it carefully. We'll be using it for the people's program I mentioned above pretty extensively this summer.
And, again, we aren't going to a lib protest. We are putting on a communist protest that uses the lib branding to attract people.
Depends what you’re doing right? Door knocking is pretty effective for local political races
That's strange. Door knocking is more effective in my experience. Definitely less contacts but more effective way of building strong connections.
Point taken about the term, I don't mean it disparagingly against PSL just the people singing the US National Anthem.