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Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party
(newrepublic.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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politics
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I have a question about PSL. My organizational background is in labor mostly, though I have done some door knocking for critical elections.
How is your candidate getting however many votes (feel free to estimate) going to help the working class? Or alternatively, how does your electoral campaign help PSL? Is this ultimately a recruitment drive?
Well, PSL is a socialist party with a platform that explicitly promotes worker control over the means of production, but on a less theoretical level, they show up and provide material support to strikes and worker action.
So if it was just a recruitment drive I think it would be good because a bigger psl means more support for workers.
But I honestly don’t think it is just a recruitment drive. Psl seems to have an actual theory of power that is in opposition to the structures of power that support the democrats and republicans.
In order to build that power psl needs to show people that their government doesn’t have to be trash which doesn’t represent them or help them. Participating in electoralism does that.
Even if psl goes nowhere, a big showing would force other major parties to recognize that there is significant support and, critically now, stability to be gained by adopting the principles of a pro worker party.
So pretty much I think it’s an unalloyed good for workers.
Yeah, I'm just wondering why they're launching a national presidential campaign rather than trying to win locally first. See for example DSA's (the veil falls lol) cadre candidates like Zohran Mamdani.
It seems to me like PSL is skipping this step and going straight to national, with the net result of devoting a lot of energy that could be spent on worker organizing on a campaign that everyone knows is not going to win.
This also bears the risk of helping Trump win by siphoning off votes from Harris, and a Trump victory will have damaging effects on the NLRB, an organization which in its current state is making it a lot easier for workers to unionize.
So I'm just not seeing how any third party presidential run ties into building worker power, but maybe I am missing something.
I think if psl were just running a presidential candidate and nothing else then you’d have a good point, but especially in California (the party started there?) they run a bunch of candidates for different positions.
I think that’s different from dsa because psl purports to have party discipline whereas that was a big problem and point of contention in dsa over the past four years.
I actually think that to the extent it matters, parties like dsa and greens take away more votes from the democrats because they’re basically places for spicy or heady democrats to go respectively.
Of course, the onus falls on the political party plying their platform to pander to the populace and not the reverse, so basically if the democrats want psl, dsa or green votes it’s their responsibility to adopt those positions or enter into some coalition with those parties.
As far as the nlrb goes, the next step is the same if we end up with an extension of the Biden nlrb, a trump nlrb (or the dissolution thereof) or some third party nlrb: build and express worker power that can actually successfully demand concessions from the ruling class as opposed to subsist on crumbs allowed to fall from the table.
I don’t honestly think it would be significantly easier under Biden than trump and the rail strike is evidence. Rather than acquiesce to some pretty milquetoast demands, the Biden administration broke the strike.
If you’re involved in dsa, how’s your local?
My local is great but I don't have any others to compare to so it's a pretty vapid description. There's a PSL here too and they come to a lot of our events. It's always interesting to hear from the more radical formation.
The thing with DSA "party discipline" is that it's not a political party. It's basically a nonprofit with local chapters that all have their own agendas, some of which run candidates. So I'm interested to see what happens with a more centralized (as far as I understand it anyway) structure like PSL.
In terms of labor organizing I do think the political climate matters. The rail strike is an example of national scale union busting, but on more local levels (Starbucks, Amazon, Cemex...) that the NLRB actually matters. Here's an article about it.
https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/how-bidens-nlrb-has-boosted-bottom
I interact with a decent amount of dsa people too. In conversation we tend to disagree about some things but in the moment of a conflict they’re right there. I think the police would get a lot farther with them over a cup of coffee than with the plastic shields lol.
I think the party discipline is important in a moment of movement building because it keeps party candidates honest. It makes sense why dsa doesn’t and kinda can’t have it, but for me it’s something important.
You’re right that a pliable nlrb was important in getting some of the victories lately. I guess I have a pretty pessimistic view of the position organized labor is in now considering it’s experiencing a resurgence and we still have declining union density over that same time frame.
From my perspective an nlrb that will play nice is the least of our worries.