What is the point of socialist parties?

[craigd89]

So can someone tell what the hell is the point of having like twenty different small ineffective leftist parties in the US?

[ZeroNowhere]

Nice place to chat.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

There isn't really a point expect to say that "we have this belief and are right."

Socialist parties are used by Marxist-Leninists to help the working class seize power,gain class consciousness,etc.

Obviously not much has really been accomplished and there needs to be a lot more unity.

[Искра]

So that every leader of party can have his own cult of personality.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Nice place to chat.

Very true,much like a socialist bar/mixer.

Good place to locate like minded intellectuals.

[u.s.red]

its the same as having twenty different small ineffective theories of marxism

[The Idler]

Because they have different aims.

[Commissar Rykov]

Different aims, different strategies, different endgame at times. There are a lot of differences and to just demand the Revolutionary Left abandon it overnight is silly there is history and sometimes even blood that separates ideologies and parties.

[socialistjustin]

To hold the workers back?

[Obs]

Very true,much like a socialist bar/mixer.

Good place to locate like minded intellectuals.

I'd rather find some like-minded workers, tbh

[AmericanCommie421]

Ideological differences between different groups of Socialists.

[citizen of industry]

So can someone tell what the hell is the point of having like twenty different small ineffective leftist parties in the US?

There is no "point." It's not like there was a concensus decision to suddenly create twenty different small inneffective leftist parties in the US. This is just what happened over the course of 100 years or so of American communism.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

To suck the lifeblood out of any legitimately revolutionary movement and become a complex institutional dinosaur with unpredictable and often self-destructive internal power struggles among the political elite.

[jake williams]

There is no "point." It's not like there was a concensus decision to suddenly create twenty different small inneffective leftist parties in the US. This is just what happened over the course of 100 years or so of American communism.
This is true. And it's not 20, it's hundreds. Most of them are totally meaningless; a very few are relevant in specific places (eg. some group will do good work, say, in the anti-war movement in some specific part of the country).

There's a variety of reasons that different groups exist, and don't really work together. Some of them are considerably better reasons than others. When parties are small and ineffective and have a limited social base, petty personal differences, incompetencies etc. are used as reasons for specific groups of people to not bother working with each other. In some cases larger groups do have significant and serious ideological differences. In a lot of situations there are substantial differences in regional politics and no serious way for small groups in different parts of the country to work together, or even know each other exists. In a lot of cases the ideology of a group as such is antagonistic to broad, mass work; in others, false pretenses of one's particular organization being singly unifying (hypocritically? ironically?) prevent coordination. And so on.

Of course, there are underlying structural reasons having to do with the historical development of American/Western-industrial class struggle - including its almost total decline over the past four decades - as to why the parties themselves, and the movement as a whole, are small and weak. That's a whole other conversation, but it doesn't have much to do with the idiosyncratic specificities of left-sectarian politics. That sort of politics is a symptom, not an underlying cause in any major way.

[Nox]

So can someone tell what the hell is the point of having like twenty different small ineffective leftist parties in the US?

This


Nice place to chat.

And in some cases, this


So that every leader of party can have his own cult of personality.