To Our Comrades
shawarmarxist.substack.com
A Letter to the Members of the PSL Rhode Island Branch

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.

  • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    40·
    5 天前

    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.