Working within liberal organizations?

[KurtFF8]

No this isn't a theoretical thread of "should we work within Liberal organizations" that's been beaten to death at RevLeft I would imagine.

This is more of a: have you ever tried to work within liberal organizations in an attempt to radicalize them?

In my experience: it's much easier to make individual members of groups more "radical" but the bigger the group, the harder it is to change their direction.

Anyone ever have any success in working with liberal groups?

Edit: This should be called "Working within liberal organizations" not "bourgeois"

[Zurdito]

the cornerstone of liberalism is private property. maybe you meant social democratic or reformist?

[KurtFF8]

Well Liberal in the sense that it's used to describe the (very) broad left in the United States. The majority of young "liberals" are social democrats for example.

[Q]

I've been a member of the Dutch Socialist Party (no, not CWI - but an ex-maoist and populist/opportunist party, quite popular actually) since early 2003. In the last few years, since I began taking Marxist conclusions, I've on and off tried to do Marxist work in it. But the democratic level in the party is near to zero and apathy among the membership extremely high. So, these days I just do independant political work (working on building an Offensief branch here) while still carrying a card of the party, so I can intervene if anything interesting happens.

[Bilan]

Changed the title per request.

[manic expression]

I tried working in the American SDS (the revival one) for a year or so, and that was sufficiently annoying as to stop me from trying any longer. I don't think it's entirely a bad thing, you might win the occasional person to a socialist perspective, but I'm certainly not patient enough to stomach such inane rhetoric.

I remember reading the statement by the national convention of SDS, getting more and more irritated at their liberal positions, when I came upon the statement, "We embrace the feminist ideal of power with instead of power over." I had to restrain myself from throwing the thing out of my window. Most liberal organizations are full of useless idiots in my opinion.

Having said that, with more and more people on the left getting disillusioned by Obama's bourgeois ways, I think there is an opportunity to win more liberals to socialism. In the coming years I will definitely be engaging liberal organizations and pointing out the futility of their ideas, they will certainly not have the luxury of opposition with which to hide their leaders' flaws.

[KurtFF8]

Interesting. I wouldn't call SDS a liberal organization, however, as it is overtly and anarchist and communist organization (both incarnations). Although it does attract many liberals, and this one seems to have a bit too much influence.

I tried starting a chapter at my university, and the majority of people active in it were indeed liberals, which became problematic and eventually lead to the failure of the chapter.

[Kassad]

Worked really hard within the Nader campaign this time around. I was able to convince a few people to broaden their horizon. From what I recall, two of them now work with me in the Party for Socialism and Liberation and one supports Socialist Party USA now. Broadly speaking, we didn't convert many people, but you have to start somewhere. Most Nader/McKinney supporters, though avidly in support of workers rights and regulation, are usually advocates of private property and using the market and profit systems to fix current issues, which is of course, just a bigger dose of the current problems.