Happy Halloween, friends. Today is a spooky article. For the last five years, whenever there was a propaganda piece or a call to action, they usually ended with the same platitudinous phrase: “get organized.” Beyond the basic meaning of “join or create an organization”, what does this phrase really mean? What does it imply? And what can we learn from those organizations that “got organized” and then died, or worse, stuck around and became a shitty disconnected “living dead” organization? Welcome to enshittified paradise. Mwahahahaha.
My first key point here is that it’s not enough to just “get organized”. When you’re told to “get organized”, what is the intention behind the message? Is it to utilize grassroots organizations to pressure institutions like governments and corporations, thus reinforcing faith in the current system of government? Or is it to engage with people in our neighborhoods, apartment complexes, workplaces, etc., to struggle with them over their misplaced faith in institutions that have proven their disdain for them, to instill class consciousness in them? This is the distinction between a liberal, reformist organization that peddles to the most backward of our society, a never-ending errand and non-viable route for revolution, and a revolutionary organization that works on all fronts, with a strategy for each strata and class of society, to build a genuine movement for liberation.
Let’s bully the PSL for a bit. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is an organization that cannot really decide what its ideology is because that would be disadvantageous for them. At times, they claim to be Marxist-Leninists – that is, students of the ideology pioneered by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, synthesized by Stalin, and creatively applied in nations across the globe – other times, they only claim to be “Marxists”, “revolutionary Marxists”, or even just “socialists”, as in their infamous 2024 presidential campaign slogan “VOTE SOCIALIST” (but you’re not the “socialist party”… I need to have a word with their agitprop department). This is because they opportunistically benefit from shifting their political identity to the demographic they’re trying to appeal to. Want the support of communists? (Lol.) Call yourself Marxist-Leninist. Want the support of confused and disaffected youth? Call yourself “revolutionary Marxist”, that sounds cool and tepid. Want the support of uninvolved masses without challenging them politically? Just call yourself socialist. That’s really in now. Lenin talks about how revolutionary figures, including Marx himself, are whitewashed and canonized to become toothless icons:
What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). – V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917), “1. The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms”
A key aspect of the PSL’s opportunism is their seizure of culturally relevant slogans and concepts. Take, for example, general strikes. For as long as I can remember, leftists have been calling for a general strike. Now, don’t get me wrong; would I like to see American imperialism suffer a heart attack? Absolutely. That would be sick as fuck. But in a country where the Left is deeply corroded with revisionism, reformism, liberalism, corruption, opportunism, and chauvinism, where the largest organization on the Left is the DSA which peaked in 2021 at less than 100,000 members, a general strike is absolutely not viable. Sorry. That’s not to mention the state of the labor movement in the US, which has been absolutely dominated by corporate interests and toothless conservative trade unionism for nearly two centuries. TL;DR is that PSL is trying to gain from opportunism and sensationalism what it can never make up for in terms of its politics.
Speaking of the DSA – I do not have as much smoke for them as I do PSL, but I’m still not a fan. While their federative “big tent” vibe can feel powerful and even cool (yippee! I get my own caucus!), it’s not doing much on the strategic front. Again, don’t get it twisted; it is good to recognize different lines of thought in an organization and to prioritize operational unity. That’s why I fuck with democratic centralism so heavy. But what use is it if the operation you’re uniting around sucks? It’s one thing to have operational unity in a revolutionary, mass-oriented communist organization undertaking agitprop efforts, direct action, etc. It’s another thing entirely to have operational unity in a vaguely socialist organization dedicated to maybe pushing for reforms sometimes. (Not trying to undermine the reforms DSA has helped win, I think making people’s lives better is super cool, actually) Similar to PSL, DSA cannot make up in wide-reaching, unprincipled unity what it lacks in strategic orientation towards revolutionary organizing guided by scientific socialism (something something dialectical materialism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, ideology of the proletariat, and the like).
Okay, so now you’re sitting there, depressed as fuck, asking me, “So if all the organizations suck, what do I do? Make my own? How do I do that?” Well, not necessarily, but maybe that is what you have to do, yeah. You gotta scope out your area, see what you have to work with. If you’re in my neck of the woods, I fuck with the Committee for a Tropical Communist Party. But if you’re not, sorry, you gotta judge for yourself: is this organization more focused on Instagram posts and putting up meaningless demands to institutions that don’t care about them, or are they focused on embedding themselves amongst their neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family, and struggling with them to develop class consciousness? Has this organization been doing the same thing for decades, or have they shown their capability to recognize their faults and adapt their strategies? Is this organization led by a millionaire, or is it led by someone in my community? If you don’t have any viable candidates, congratulations: it’s time to throw a party!
I can’t write a whole blog post about every little thing an organization should do – not because it would be too long; I can never shut the fuck up – but because I don’t know all that. I’m still learning. In the long run, we are all pretty new at this shit. But at the very least, we know how to recognize when a strategy has failed. We are capable of trying things and then seeing if they work, and if not, changing our approach and trying again. We are capable of keeping records of what worked in what conditions, what didn’t, and why. That’s organizational memory right there – that’s all it takes. Of course it’s a daunting task – let that embolden you. As a certain Chinese guy said, “Nothing is impossible if you dare to scale the heights.” So yeah, get organized or whatever.
enshittified paradise 