this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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This is the complaint I've heard the most - that they try to cannibalize other movements and take charge of events that other people organized.
But also, does my city really need six different ML parties that only sometimes work together when they aren't relitigating old personal drama? How different are our party lines really?
Taking over and combining parties is what Marx and Engels specialized in. I’m not opposed to Marxist-Leninist parties taking over less principled groups
Eventually we want one big workers party right? I don’t see how that happens without hostile takeovers and absorption. I’m not saying it should be PSL necessarily, but the Bolsheviks didn’t keep SR or Mensheviks around once they had power.
My current party is being really really nice and understanding about the fact that I have missed every single candidate class and most meetings because of my work schedule.
Honestly, it's a turn-off. Feels disorganized. I consider myself a pretty principled communist but they have no way to hold me to a party line and I feel the calling to find a group that will.
But I'm sure there's reasons why everyone needs their different party. Maybe the American Party of Labor guys have some doctrinal differences about AES, and PSL seems to have a monopoly on the electoralism thing. Worker's World Party does a newspaper with neat comics, and shows up at events. CPUSA and PCUSA accuse each other of being liberals and patsocs... and then we have the local orgs that are trying to do something new altogether... but man I would love to have just one real good principled Communist Party that we could all roll with. It's frustrating.
To be clear, when I referenced "us", our political program is not Marxist though our economics largely are.
As an outsider I've often wondered about the fragmentation. On one hand, it demonstrates one of two things: either DemCent Marxist parties in the US (and the West more broadly) have been thoroughly played by capitalist forces, splintered and turned against each other, or there is something to the idea that personal political differences are impossible to integrate around and require looser associations for the purpose of having some sort of coordination.
For me it is a moot question, because either answer gives me the same analysis of the effectiveness of ML party formations in the West, and strategic outlook is the same regardless of which answer is true.
What's your angle? Can they resolve their differences and merge to form a proletarian party with a fighting chance? Is there a One True Party with the best analysis and program? Or are they all equivalent options whereby any party that squeezes out its rivals will deserve to rule?