American Party of Labor, thoughts?

[RadioRaheem84]

Usually I really like their articles and news updates. They seem to be a pretty informative group. But yesterday I found this article posted on their website.

http://theredphoenixapl.org/2013/05/06/the-cult-of-the-state-what-the-kent-state-massacre-anniversary-should-teach-us/

I barely finished it before I noticed it sounded a lot like libertarian rhetoric. There was no mention of capitalism and it reeked of that private/state dichotomy the libertarians use. I clicked on the source and sure enough it was written by a very vocal libertarian of the right wing stripe.

What gives? Usually their spot on by why this article on the "cult" of the state?

[evermilion]

That's very odd. This article isn't like their usual analysis; I'm at a loss.

[RadioRaheem84]

Exactly. Very suspicious:confused:.

[Ismail]

The decision to put it up is odd. Possibly a slow day for them. That being said the other articles on that date are about Assata Shakur (from a leftist website) and an al-Jazeera thing on turmoil in Libya.

Does the APL actually do anything besides run a blog where 99% of its materials are taken from elsewhere?

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

Does the APL actually do anything besides run a blog where 99% of its materials are taken from elsewhere?

To be fair alot of their best stuff is written by themselves, alot of times there simply isn't a real need to paraphrase something to make it "original" just for the sake of originality when it'd probably present better if left unmolested.

And I admit that I haven't read the article, but alot of the US liberal left have illusions about the state being a trust worthy entity and during the early days of the Obama presidency there was an attempt to build a cult of personality around him. So although I haven't read the article I do think that it is an important point to make

[RadioRaheem84]

Yes the State in capitalist society should be criticized but the article has too much libertarian rhetoric. There is no mention of the State being a tool of the capitalists or how the State serves as the executive for capitalism, nothing. It was just presupposing a lot "Statism".

I am just wondering if the APL knows it's a libertarian article? The stuff they put out that is original is top notch analysis and 9 times out 10 right on the money. It's one of my favorite blogs that easily condenses a lot Marxist analysis into easy to understand blog posts.

Are there any APL members in here?

[Red Commissar]

I don't think I've ever seen a physical presence of them beyond seeing some of their flyers in a rally in Chicago. I can't remember if that was a May 1st deal or something concerning immigrant rights though.

It seems that this isn't so much their position as one of their contributors fishing for an article and posting that up. If you search the article's author no other posts come up on the site which would mean they just cross-posted it from another site. I don't think they carefully read the contents of it because while the theme is ok (anti-state) the way the author goes about it is rather idiotic and focuses on how the state forces people to "work" together or some weird take on what individualism entails, like these statements...


Getting it “right” means voluntary interactions that force us to serve one another at all times. Getting it “right” means compassion for all people, including tax evaders, tax collectors, heroin addicts, heroin dealers, and everyone else in society.

The website they cross-posted the article from (which they have at the bottom just under the picture (http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=39521)) seems to come off as a typical an-cap or right-wing lolbertarian site. Looking at the "about us" thing, two of the stories they choose to highlight is typical in their circles- one, a supposed case of children dying from vaccination, and another with the government classifying "property rights activists" as terrorists, so it seems to be kind of an infowars mindset there.

I think this is similar to some of the problems that I observed with the upheavals in Libya and Syria with people rushing to find posts critical of the "opposition" in those countries, especially the Islamist strands, but inadvertently post things from islamophobes in the process.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

APL is just a silly internet party that meet on Skype to talk of how high they are: though they can still make some good articles, there's no way one can take them very seriously as a party.

[Crixus]

Any publication or party claiming to be socialist that puts out nonsense from right wing free market 'libertarians' needs to have some sort of smelling salts placed under their editors nose.

[RadioRaheem84]

APL is just a silly internet party that meet on Skype to talk of how high they are: though they can still make some good articles, there's no way one can take them very seriously as a party.

As a party they may be pretty marginal but as their theory and explanations of Marx they're damn good. Some of the best stuff I've seen on the net for quick explanations of Marx for the common person.

[evermilion]

As a party they may be pretty marginal but as their theory and explanations of Marx they're damn good. Some of the best stuff I've seen on the net for quick explanations of Marx for the common person.

I don't think that invalidates Crixus's point, which is that, if you're the editor of a leftist publication, really your only job is to make sure right-wing material doesn't end up as part of your content.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

As a party they may be pretty marginal but as their theory and explanations of Marx they're damn good. Some of the best stuff I've seen on the net for quick explanations of Marx for the common person.

Maybe it's just because I haven't read the article, but a party can make a mistake without being totally worthless. Why, Lenin's conduct towards the Dutch and German Communists was appaling but that doesn't discredit him in the whole. So while it's important to critique their errors it's also equally important to take from them what has merit to take.

[Prairie Fire]

I was formerly associated with the APL; I'll try and field this in as fair a way as possible.

I think that their intentions in posting this article are not only to highlight the crimes of the American State domestically and dispel illusions, but also holding to the final analysis of Marx and Engels that the end product of Communism is necessarily stateless.

It is true that the state is means by which one class wields political power over another, and is a product of said class divisions. That is not to say that it can be abolished in one swoop, or that it isn't a necessary tool in the hands of working class emancipation( Socialism,). I think that what they meant to allude to here is the stateless end product of Communism, after the socialist stage of development has run it's course.

I also think that they may have skimmed the article, and didn't run a background check on the author. Honest mistake, that doesn't typify their journalism.

Unless they've taken a jarring shift to the right in the time since my expulsion, I don't believe that there are any rightists among them ( albeit, the General Secretary likes to use Rush Limbaugh terms like "Feminazi" to characterize feminists. They do have a blind spot on Gender that they need to work on.).

Ismail is ex-APl as well. As far as them "doing anything", without lapsing into any gratuitously spiteful jabs at their group, this was the major point of contention that I was raising with them before I was purged. I worried that the group was stagnating on the internet, and that their approach was more historically materialist than dialectically materialist.

Rarely in internal party discussions were world events post-1991 discussed; I remember that the organization was hammering out stances on the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, on Pinochet in Chile, and basically reading ML texts from the 1970's as though they were todays newspaper.

I follow the Red Phoenix from time to time. They have done much to keep their mass organ current, but they have a ways to go. It is also regrettable that they seem to have been ensnared by "Occupy" when that was at it's peak.

[RadioRaheem84]

Why were you purged?

[Ismail]

Ismail is ex-APl as well.I was one of the "founding members" until I realized I couldn't actually help out the APL in any "on-the-ground" manner (since no APL members lived remotely nearby) and the APL itself wasn't really active in that sense either, so I dropped out in mid-2010.

I think any new communist groups/parties should start out locally and build up from there. The RSDLP, after all, wasn't founded by some guys who just decided "Communism sounds cool," but instead they were representatives of already existing groups in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. Likewise the Communist Party of Albania was founded in 1941 through the unification of three existing groups. Having national pretensions when your party has like 15 members thinly spread across the country is a bit odd.

[RadioRaheem84]

But the theory and the blog and relevant news sources are still top notch, wouldn't you say? It's still helpful.

[La Guaneña]

I found out about them recentely, and this looks like an unusual mistake.

[RadioRaheem84]

I found out about them recentely, and this looks like an unusual mistake.

Yeah. I mean just skimming the article it reeks of libertarian rhetoric.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

The decision to put it up is odd. Possibly a slow day for them. That being said the other articles on that date are about Assata Shakur (from a leftist website) and an al-Jazeera thing on turmoil in Libya.

Does the APL actually do anything besides run a blog where 99% of its materials are taken from elsewhere?
Apparently they have a presence here but I've been all over this damn city for 10 years and never ever seen them.

[melvin]

Apparently they have a presence here but I've been all over this damn city for 10 years and never ever seen them.did the claim that they have an active presence in your city come from one of them?

[blake 3:17]

The author is a libertarian. I found out by googling his name. Here's his blog: http://libertariannews.policymic.com/ He seems to write on some kind of cool stuff.

You could always email the site or party or whatever it is and ask them about it. Are you actually objecting to anything the author is saying or the way it is written?

[PC LOAD LETTER]

did the claim that they have an active presence in your city come from one of them?
It used to be listed on their site, can't find it anymore.

[RadioRaheem84]

The author is a libertarian. I found out by googling his name. Here's his blog: http://libertariannews.policymic.com/ He seems to write on some kind of cool stuff.

You could always email the site or party or whatever it is and ask them about it. Are you actually objecting to anything the author is saying or the way it is written?

I pretty much read a lot of libertarian rhetoric into it. The Statism logic, the private/public dichotomy, the "voluntary" stuff and how there is force to make you do this and that, which is all fine if you're attributing the State to the capitalist system in the first place and not this abstract entity that exists to chokehold all liberty just because of it merely exists to do so.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Apparently they have a presence here but I've been all over this damn city for 10 years and never ever seen them.

Most of their member's seem to have gone silent lately. No doubt due to this lolbertarian turn - well, maybe not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[RadioRaheem84]

Good God, must those lolbertarians nestle everywhere? They own the whole damn net. :lol: