JDPONDON

surely this will cause these people to abandon the democratic party and begin the path to radicalization right guys

Yeah, in sure they do. But we don't have to make it easy for them.

why? unless psl is somehow hiding some crazy numbers (especially in the military) and are preparing to try stoke the flames during the next period of large civil unrest in the next few years i dont really understand the advantage of feds knowing "somewhere between 5 and 6 thousand members" and psl putting out online that they have 5k plus members.

No. That sounds like a mess.

how so? it's a forum with inherently limited membership and tied to your real identity, moderation burden should be pretty light and provides a unified platform for discussing local tactics and discussing ideas before the party line is decided upon.

maybe i misunderstood about public membership, i was using "have" to very loosely as in you are encouraged to do it if you dont think you will be under threat from local fascist elements. this is a vaguely remembered thing so maybe i am misremembering or something like that. regardless, see my most recent edit, unless this is like top secret information i find it hard to believe the feds dont have a decent estimate on membership.

as a side note, does PSL have an internal online forum like the DSA? asking cause i saw someone bring that up in that slop thread about r/dsa and it made me curious, seems like a relatively decent idea to exchange ideas between distant branches to me

edit: reread my first comment not even sure why i said "required"

i dont understand this, if most members have to be public about their membership how would the feds not have at least a rough idea of how many are in the party? this is ignoring the extremely high probability of assests they've manged to slip inside the PSL who have enough access to inner party knowledge to aquire an even more accurate estimation (not trying to say PSL is co-opted by the feds btw, but i assume they've probably had got one decently highly ranked asset in each notable org in the US).

do you know the reasoning behind PSL not publicly sharing numbers? from my understanding most of your members are required to be open about being communists, PSL cant be trying to hide the number from the state right???