Socialist Alternative Supports Bernie Sanders

[The Feral Underclass]

Malatesta

Just no.

Pouget, Goldman, Meschi and others.

I don't really understand how you are coming to the conclusion that these people exhibit liberalised understandings of centralism or discipline...

[blake 3:17]

Do you genuinely think the present state of the workers' movement is worse than it was after WWII?

The strike wave of 1945-1946 (also called the Great strike wave of 1946)[1] was a series of massive post-war labor strikes from 1945 to 1946 spanning numerous industries and public utilities. They were the largest strikes in American labor history.[2][3]
...
Others included strikes of railroad workers and "general strikes in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Stamford, Connecticut; Rochester, New York; and Oakland, California." In total, 4.3 million workers participated in the strikes. According to Jeremy Brecher, they were "the closest thing to a national general strike of industry in the twentieth century."[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_wave_of_1946

[KurtFF8]

What you're doing is trying to show just one side of the coin here. Fact is is that Becker, as a member of the Central Committee, pledged his "full support" within Cali. He went on to say as the PSL would probably not push for it's members to "write-in" Peta's name that the PSL would offer to support Roseanne. The extent of support only turned out to be getting people to register. This is classic Becker/Lariva/PSL, always hedging their bets. As a/the leader of the PSL why would he not abstain? Answer, because everyone at that meeting thought that Barr was going to pump MUCH money into the race and everyone was abandoning any sense of ideology and principles to be part of it. When it became very apparent that campaigning was something very real and expensive she all but gave up. Even poor old Stewart Anderson resigned in disgust.

So my argument is "one side of the coin" and yours relies on something you heard in a meeting about what the PSL was "probably" going to do? Gotcha.

I'm still waiting for something more substantial than this that demonstrates that the PSL endorsed Barr outside of the Peace and Freedom Party internal battle you're referring to here. Had the PSL actually endorsed Barr, you would think they would have at least published an article or something right? Yet something tells me you won't find said article because it was never written.

[synthesis]

Sorry it's taken me this long to get back to this thread.

The formation of privileged strata of the proletariat - of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy (I almost wrote "labour bourgeoisie" - it's early in the morning and I have another bout of insomnia). To an extent, the inexperience of West European left socialist cadres (but this was also the case in Hungary).

So by extension you are essentially arguing that the world revolution failed because of "the formation of privileged strata of the proletariat" and "the labor aristocracy," given that these are the factors that, you argue, led to the adoption of spontaneism by the German and Italian working class, and therefore the factors that caused the revolution in Western Europe to fail and the revolutions in Russia and Hungary to "degenerate."

So the problem, according to you, is that the German and Italian working classes had it too good to become real revolutionaries (i.e. to become disciplined and accept centralized leadership) - or at least enough of them were so - that their revolutions failed. This seems like a sort of bowdlerized Third-Worldism.

Alright, that is true. But if we ignore the subjective conditions, there have been numerous times when the balance of forces was on the side of the proletariat - most recently in the seventies. If we accept what you seem to be saying - that the revolution proceeds deterministically from favourable material conditions - it should have happened already.

Well, if I did apply such a fatalistic analysis, your criticism still wouldn't apply. This analysis would argue that even though "the balance of forces was on the side of the proletariat," the "favorable material conditions" obviously weren't so favorable as to enable a communist revolution, or else it would have indeed happened.

But I think you have the wrong idea about the broader differences in our analyses. I'm not arguing that subjective (i.e. idealist) factors should be ignored, I'm arguing that the subjective factors are still a result of objective material conditions, not this fantasy wherein the world revolution of the working class only hasn't succeeded because they're too undisciplined and their leadership isn't centralized enough.

[Prometeo liberado]

So my argument is "one side of the coin" and yours relies on something you heard in a meeting about what the PSL was "probably" going to do? Gotcha.

I'm still waiting for something more substantial than this that demonstrates that the PSL endorsed Barr outside of the Peace and Freedom Party internal battle you're referring to here. Had the PSL actually endorsed Barr, you would think they would have at least published an article or something right? Yet something tells me you won't find said article because it was never written.

Hmm. PM'd you an internal P&F e-mail where Peta says it. I was there when Becker voted for Roseanne AND reaffirmed what Peta said. I could go on and tell you that fire is hot and you would never believe it unless the PSL told you to believe it. As for not "publishing" it. Don't know and don't care. If the Holocaust was never published would that mean it never happened? Maybe your issue is with your party and the way it makes grand proclamations in a closed room then says nothing to it's cadres?
Sorry little buddy but them are the facts.
Shit, e-mail Becker. I'm sure your leaders are very accessible.

[KurtFF8]

As I said in the PM, nothing you said contradicts anything I've said here. I never denied that there were some internal political maneuvering within the Peace and Freedom Convention.

The PSL may well have made a sort of temporary alliance with Barr in that context but that doesn't change the fact that the PSL continued to run its own campaign in California.

[Kassad]

It's one thing watching the Socialist Alternative folks squirm to rationalize their blatant social-democracy in regards to Sawant and Sanders, all the while calling for a plethora "Occupy candidates." It's a whole different realm of hilarity when Roseanne Barr is talking about how much she loves Peta Lindsay on Twitter after they tried to make a political power play to get in on the celebrity bandwagon.

I just hope that it's made clear that the Barr situation wasn't even one of the more serious bureaucratic and reformist maneuvers the PSL have made in recent years. However, it is one of the funnier ones.

[Killer Enigma]

The Left ought to distance itself from Sanders. His influence is definitely moving a lot of workers further to the left, and it's made people consider, use, and even embrace the term "socialism," even though Sanders' brand is to the right of many social democrats. The problem is lining up behind Sanders, who voted for the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, in addition to supporting the Zionist state of Israel, is that his progressive domestic policies give cover to the opportunists in the people's movements - mostly NGO and non-profit staffers who are eager to buy out activists and push them into doing electoral/lobbying work. The most potent weapon the Left has to combat opportunism is its anti-imperialism.

Frankly though, I'm a little aghast at how sectarian some of the attacks on Sawant have been. I despise Trotskyism, and I have very little in common with SAlt, but its like some people can't recognize a cool thing that happened in Seattle that objectively gave momentum to the now-successful Fight for 15 campaign and the reform movement in the Machinists that coalesced around the Boeing contract.

To me, the jury is still out on Sawant and SAlt's strategy, but it's just needless sectarianism to slam them. Their electoral strategy is streets ahead of anything the PSL has put together. That's the more interesting comparison because while both SAlt and the PSL claim to participate in elections to raise consciousness about socialism, rather than getting elected, PSL's ridiculous strategy of running a mosaic campaign for the Presidency with legally unelectable candidates hasn't produced even a victory as small as Sawant's. Moreover, I can't think of a discernible impact the PSL made on any struggle through their electoral work. SAlt's impact on Fight for 15 and Boeing is just objective fact, even if you want to say it was slight. Anyone who was at Labor Notes 2014 can tell you that. And ironically, I probably have more in common line-wise with the PSL...

[Prometeo liberado]

As I said in the PM, nothing you said contradicts anything I've said here. I never denied that there were some internal political maneuvering within the Peace and Freedom Convention.

The PSL may well have made a sort of temporary alliance with Barr in that context but that doesn't change the fact that the PSL continued to run its own campaign in California.

So you agree there was an alliance. Now if you can PSL your way into saying that an alliance is not an endorsement well then the sky must be plaid in that world. Knock'em dead little buddy.