PSL opposes many things… including YOU!

by Caleb Maupin

Nobody likes leftist sectarianism. Watching tiny irrelevant sects tear each other down, all claiming to be the one true Leninist vanguard party, gets boring after a while. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is certainly an irrelevant sect, and if that was all it was, it wouldn’t be worth commenting on. However, in addition to being small and irrelevant, PSL is doing a gigantic disservice to the fight against imperialism, and dissecting their 2024 Presidential Campaign can point to very important, though not obvious, truths about the current political landscape.

Weakening & “Wokening” the Palestine Movement

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, led by Brian Becker, who orchestrated the 2004 split from the Workers World Party after starting up the ANSWER coalition, stage-manages and controls the pro-Palestine protests across America. As PSL leads them, they are doing everything they can to keep these protests from resonating with the bulk of the U.S. population. Rather than putting forward the obvious message: “Why are we spending $18 million a day on Israel while our own country is falling apart?” or “Jobs and Schools for America, Not Weapons for Israel,” PSL has instead opted to theme the Palestine rallies around a message that comes across more or less as, “America is an evil, racist country full of white privileged people who deserve to be poorer… just like Israel!”

While Trump is staunchly pro-Israel, many among the rank and file of his supporters are not. Candace Owens was fired from The Daily Wire and has been saying many things in opposition to Israel. Followers of Nick Fuentes made the phrase “No War with Iran” go viral as Elon Musk featured Trump in a long conversation on his social media platform. Obviously, there is deep confusion in the Trump camp on many issues, and these fresh anti-Israel sentiments accompany a number of reactionary and xenophobic ideas we don’t want to embrace. Regardless, framing the Palestine protests in a way designed to further polarize the working class and alienate the majority is deeply wrong.

In December 2023, the Center for Political Innovation marched in the streets of Portland with a banner that said “Jobs and Schools for America, Not Weapons for Israel.” We carried an American and a Palestinian flag side by side, and the response we received was fantastic. Black workers ran out of their apartments to greet us. College students shot fist salutes to us. Trump supporters honked their horns in support.

The ground is fertile for a genuine, populist, anti-imperialist movement that brings together workers of different demographics and backgrounds to oppose the monopolies and their drive for war around the world. With millions of dollars in funding from billionaires like Roy Singham, PSL is determined to make sure this doesn’t happen.

PSL wants the message that the Palestine rallies direct toward the American people to be one of “I hate you.” PSL pushes Trump Derangement Syndrome and woke “intersectionality” politics among the Palestine protests, essentially making them subtle “Vote for Kamala Harris” events. The 2024 Presidential campaign of Claudia DeLa Cruz is a convenient effort to cover this up, and is also little more than a recruiting drive. PSL is hoping to expand the ranks of its woke counter-gang and help the “liberal” ultra-rich crush rising opposition among the American people.

Dismantling America’s Power Grid

Let’s examine the written, publicly stated PSL 2024 platform found on the campaign website. The first thing one notices when reading over the eight planks of the campaign and the few paragraphs that go with each one is that the program is divided into two types of demands. Following the script of the social-democratic reformists who led European workers into the First World War, PSL has a “minimum and maximum” program rather than a transitional program to advance the class struggle.

The program consists firstly of absurd “maximum program” components, calling for full-on revolution without even a practical explanation of what it would mean: “total reorganization of the economy in a way that guarantees that everyone in society will have their basic needs met”; “We want to turn the social order upside down and topple those who have all the money and power but do none of the work!”; “The new, socialist system of government would be based on the direct exercise of power by workers.”

All of this is mere podium-pounding and virtue-signaling of Marxist politics. It has no practical application in the real world and does not translate to any actual program for working people to vote for or organize around. If PSL’s campaign was honest about being nothing more than a recruiting drive, this might be somewhat respectable. However, in addition to the rhetorical and impractical “maximum” program, PSL accompanies it with a minimum program that amounts to embracing, in coded language, many of the worst aspects of Kamala Harris’s platform and policies Joe Biden has already tried to implement.

Take this one for example: “Fossil fuel corporations should immediately be taken over by the public and repurposed to generate renewable energy.” Immediately replacing all fossil fuel-based energy with windmills and solar panels would reduce the electrification of U.S. society by roughly 50%. This would mean genocide of rural workers. Appalachia, the bulk of the U.S. South, and big sections of the Midwest would lose their access to electricity as the output generated by “renewable” sources is far lower. PSL could perhaps call for building nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, but they’ve stated many times elsewhere that they oppose peaceful nuclear energy.

Why would any “socialist” advocate dismantling the power grid? California is already plagued by blackouts. The power grid in Texas collapsed in winter of 2021 with disastrous consequences for the population, with hundreds left dead as a result. The infrastructure of America is already in total disrepair. Stalin, Mao, Gaddafi, and the various socialist leaders of the 20th century built power plants and mobilized their populations to bring electrification to those left behind. The Sandinistas of Nicaragua boast of what their socialist government has done to electrify even the most remote regions. China boasts of having constructed the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world, against the wishes of U.S.-backed environmental activists who opposed it.

PSL advocates destroying the U.S. power grid, while Joe Biden is already doing it. The infrastructure of the country is falling apart, and BlackRock is using its power over the purse strings of the world economy to demand a reduction of energy consumption, crop outputs, etc. The so-called ‘Green New Deal’ of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez openly calls for “degrowth” and “reducing consumption.” This is all an effort to save capitalism by destroying productive forces.

Critical Race Theory is Not Marxism, It’s Not Good

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) rallies to the defense of Critical Race Theory (CRT), stating: “We want to stop the whitewashing of U.S. history under the guise of bans on ‘critical race theory’—all young people should understand the horrors of white supremacy and develop an appreciation for why racism must be eradicated from society.” Here, they pander to liberal ignorance, reinforcing the myth that CRT is simply about acknowledging the horror of slavery and segregation. In reality, CRT is an anti-communist academic school of thought, funded by figures like George Soros and organizations like the Ford Foundation, that undermines the work of Black revolutionary leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, many of whom embraced Marxism.

CRT denies that the defeat of slavery in Lincoln’s Second American Revolution was a victory for the entire working class. It dismisses the labor movement and paints all white Americans as a monolithic bloc oppressing people of color, rejecting any class analysis.

In essence, the U.S. imperialist state, like “Generals Fighting The Last War,” is trying to give itself a “woke” makeover. It hopes to get ahead of the anti-imperialist camp on race issues. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union, China, and other anti-imperialist countries supported the Black liberation movement—Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro gave asylum to Robert F. Williams, while Libya and North Korea funded the Black Panthers. Now, the U.S. imperialists seek to portray themselves as defenders of human rights and social justice, giving themselves moral authority to engage in regime change.

Yet, the U.S. ruling class, in its push for “wokification” alongside degrowth economics, does not champion figures like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or Fred Hampton. It fails to present racism as a curse hanging over U.S. society that harms all working people, with a particular impact on the Black working class. Instead of celebrating the class solidarity seen in the Underground Railroad or the Communist Party’s anti-racist policies during the labor upsurge of the 1930s, they present Black people as helpless victims suffering trauma at the hands not of the British Empire or US imperialist monopolies, but of the white working class portrayed as a mob of racist rednecks who think they are “entitled” to good paying industrial jobs.

CRT doesn’t advocate for class solidarity or anti-imperialism. Instead, it’s championed by the richest of the rich and their party—the Democrats. Unsurprisingly, PSL defends CRT rather than challenges it.

Playing Workers Against Each Other

As demographics shift in the U.S., identity politics becomes a tool for dismantling opposition to austerity. According to CRT advocates, when white workers oppose wage cuts or resist the low-wage police state, they’re simply defending their “privilege.” Rather than fighting to raise living standards for everyone, the ruling class stirs up resentment, encouraging marginalized workers to see impoverishing “privileged” strata as a form of revenge. This “whipsaw” tactic divides the working class, with different demographics demanding the government impoverish others. Ultimately, it’s all part of a plan to lower living standards for everyone while imposing fascist, degrowth economics.

The toxic idea that some can only gain at others’ expense is a betrayal of Marxist thought. Marxism seeks to unleash productive forces to eliminate poverty and scarcity. The goal is to create a society with so much wealth and abundance that the need for the state itself fades, inequality becomes irrelevant, and everyone has more than enough. Marx described this higher stage of communism in Critique of the Gotha Program, saying: “In a higher phase of communist society… when the productive forces have increased and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly, society can inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’”

Anti-communists commonly portray Marxists as envy-driven, falsely teaching that Communists want “everyone to be paid the same.” PSL unfortunately reinforces this caricature in many parts of its platform.

For instance, instead of advocating for the best healthcare for all Americans, PSL’s “woke” socialist program focuses on eliminating disparities in maternal mortality rates, suggesting that access to healthcare should be based on racial background. This language is not only problematic but divisive. Why not aim for the best maternal care for everyone? Should more white mothers die to equalize healthcare? While PSL probably doesn’t wish that, the language of scarcity and degrowth fosters this toxic thinking, which PSL consistently promotes in leftist spaces.

Distorting Sam Marcy’s Anti-Fascism

The Party of Socialism and Liberation, founded in 2004, is the biggest ideological descendant of Sam Marcy’s Global Class War Tendency, which eventually became the Workers World Party. One of Sam Marcy’s defining positions was his belief in the right of working-class people to engage in armed self-defense. Marcy put this position into practice by donating money and helping Robert F. Williams buy guns for the local NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, who were defending themselves from the Ku Klux Klan. Marcy’s followers formed Youth Against War and Fascism and engaged in physical altercations with the American Nazi Party, Young Americans for Freedom, and supporters of George Wallace. (You can read a full history of the Marcyite tendency in the second chapter of the CPI textbook “Out of the Movement, To the Masses!”)

The position of Sam Marcy, as laid out in “The Klan and the Government: Foes or Allies?” and other written works, is that violence against “fascists” is always justified as self-defense. This position is defensible when describing actual violent extremists bent on conducting acts of terrorism and hate crimes. The Marcyite position was that Black people fighting off the Ku Klux Klan and British workers shooting back at Blackshirt goons who attacked their picket lines were justified. Marcy argued that armed self-defense was a better tactical alternative than calling on the capitalist state for protection.

However, PSL has taken this Marcyite position and distorted it. While Sam Marcy used a strict Trotskyite understanding of what fascism was, seeing it as an anti-labor mobilization of violence, PSL has made clear on numerous occasions that it believes all conservatives and non-woke Americans are fascists.

If one listens to any PSL pro-abortion rally, it will be said over and over that those who oppose abortion on religious grounds are “fascists.” If one listens to a PSL anti-Trump rally, it will be said over and over that all Trump voters are “fascists.” With this deranged liberal understanding of fascism as everything that goes against the liberal order, and Marcy’s belief in violence against “fascists,” PSL is subtly and indirectly calling for exterminating the bulk of the US population. If every anti-choice or LGBT-critical religious person, every Trump voter, and everyone with culturally conservative or “non-woke” views is a “fascist,” then at least roughly 50% of the American population must be killed, if not more. This is a completely indefensible position.

Who Does PSL Advocate Killing?

Of course, they never bother to think this through. PSL obviously doesn’t want to murder the thousands of observant Muslims who attend its Palestine rallies while opposing abortion on religious grounds. PSL doesn’t want to violently suppress the Black Nationalists, Anti-Death Penalty Catholics, and others who participate in its liberal mobilizations. But it openly proclaims that anyone who strays from the latest woke talking points or sides with Trump against Harris is a “fascist” who, according to their own literature, deserves to be killed.

This ideological incoherence is not only embarrassing, but it is dangerous. Advocating violence against people simply because you disagree with them is not a defensible position. Self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan is not the same as bombing churches because they oppose abortion. But in PSL’s woke-pandering rhetoric, they are the same.

In fact, PSL members not only label social conservatives as “fascists” who, according to their ideology, deserve to be killed. They also apply this label to the Center for Political Innovation and various other socialist groups who disagree with them. They have spread the lie that CPI is somehow a “white nationalist” organization for over half a decade, knowing this is a coded message to their members and other leftists that violence against us is justified. PSL members repeated the claim that “Patriotic Socialism” was actually “White Nationalism” despite knowing full well the political background of Caleb Maupin and other CPI leaders. PSL has essentially put an anti-fa hit on CPI, hoping to incite anarchist violence against our organization or, at the very least, encourage leftists to embrace state repression of our organization. This is utterly reprehensible.

PSL is totally fine with the government coming after other anti-imperialist voices. They worked to undermine the campaign to support Uhuru 3, with the African People’s Socialist Party calling them out in official broadcasts. PSL cheers as Biden’s critics are silenced on social media. They claim the Democrats didn’t go far enough after January 6th. They labeled the “Rage Against The War Machine” rally in Washington DC as “fascist” and cooperated with Rachel Maddow’s smears of the event.

For the record, the Center for Political Innovation does NOT advocate violence against the Party for Socialism and Liberation. We will happily debate them and challenge their sophomoric liberal politics masquerading as anti-imperialism, but we believe every PSL member has the right to live, breathe, and advocate their views. If the government were to target PSL for prosecution, we would rally to their defense. We are principled anti-imperialists and advocates of free speech.

We challenge PSL to say the same thing about us. Say that despite disagreeing with us, they don’t advocate violence against us. Say that if the US government sought to silence us with repression, they would stand in solidarity with us. Say that the hundreds and hundreds of tweets and social media posts from PSL members calling us “fascists” (a coded call for assassination to those familiar with Marcyite politics) do not represent the party line.

It is doubtful PSL would ever make any statement clarifying they don’t seek to help the government repress us. As John Kerry is making statements about how the First Amendment is making it hard to govern, and Democrat Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Waltz has doubled down on wanting to outlaw “misinformation,” Hillary Clinton has bemoaned a “total loss of control” over the minds of the public, Scott Ritter’s home has been raided by the FBI, the Uhuru 3 were horrifically prosecuted in Federal Court, PSL has aligned itself with those conducting the repression. It says this repression does not go far enough. If you voted for Trump, oppose abortion or gay marriage on religious grounds, or simply don’t want to be “degrown” and have your community or living standard driven down in order to save imperialism, you are probably a “fascist” in PSL’s eyes. You should probably ask PSL if they want to kill you and see if they have a coherent answer.

A Liberal Activist Hamster Wheel

PSL probably doesn’t really want to kill you, even though this is the conclusion of their half-brained woke rage rhetoric cooked up for social media. When it gets down to it, PSL really doesn’t care about you very much at all. Many people figure this out after joining. Most PSL members stay involved for two years at most as college students and then move on, realizing the group is a dead end. The organization has no real goal of building a base among the population, and the last thing they want to hear is your ideas about how to organize or effectively promote anti-imperialist politics.

PSL members are merely worker-bees, functionaries in satisfying Brian Becker’s ego and helping him raise money by staging rallies. PSL cadre are trained to say, “We appreciate your enthusiasm,” before dismissing any suggestions the “little people” in the rank-and-file come up with.

PSL has no plan for bringing socialism to the United States or building an anti-imperialist movement with real roots among the masses. PSL is a woke liberal activist club, a college phase you are expected to grow out of and then go back to living a “normal” life amid decaying imperialism. The fact that PSL’s strategy, consisting of “stage rallies around the latest trendy liberal cause,” has gone unchanged since the group was founded in 2004 should be very telling. They are not wrangling with the big questions. They are not trying to figure out how to actually win.

Despite not being paid, PSL members are subjected to a degrading “annual review” like corporate employees, where a superior makes sure they are doing enough work and helping generate enough revenue for the bosses at the top. The leaders of the organization see the rank-and-file as “suckers” and “crazies” whom they can laugh at as they use the organization to advance themselves. PSL is a sinister scam by some very cynical people. If you are a serious anti-imperialist, you deserve better.

The Center for Political Innovation employs a completely different approach, rooted in our ideological breakthroughs called Innovationism. We view you as an asset, someone who has great potential to create and build. We seek to empower every member and help them find their own voice and creative ability to make the biggest contribution possible.

Which Side Are You On?

This all points to the fact that the Party for Socialism and Liberation is not really a party seeking to overturn imperialism and build a new society in the United States. PSL is a counter-gang for the ultra-rich. It is a group of “activists” working to help the big monopolies of Silicon Valley and the oil giants impose a degrowth on the US economy. Our disagreement with them is not a matter of sectarianism or ideological differences; it points to very serious truths about our political climate.

There is a division in the ruling class over the question of growth or degrowth. The anti-imperialist countries have broken free so they can have economic growth. China has lifted millions from poverty. Putin rescued Russia from the disaster of the fall of the USSR. Nicaragua has achieved wonders with its micro-entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation programs. Anti-imperialism is about promoting economic growth. The oppressed countries of the world want economic growth. The working families struggling to pay their bills amid inflation and a decaying US economy also want economic growth. The lower-level capitalists who rally around Trump also want economic growth. CPI has a real strategy. We seek to create a anti-monopoly coalition to break the power of the ultra-rich and restructure the US economy. We want a government of action that fights for working families. We put forward serious policy solutions and seek to train a layer of activists to promote an anti-imperialism based on optimism, growth, and solidarity.

CPI wants to build power plants; PSL wants to dismantle them. CPI wants to expand civil liberties; PSL wants to silence those who oppose Kamala Harris. CPI wants to raise living standards for all working people with a state that rationally organizes the economy to unleash productive forces. PSL wants to eliminate “disparity” by tearing down some working people and playing different demographics against each other. CPI wants a whole new America where working people of all races and backgrounds join together to unleash human potential to new heights and expand the amount of wealth and abundance. PSL wants to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden subdue American workers into accepting their low-wage police state, as long as it is decked out with Rainbow Flags and phrases condemning “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”

PSL isn’t just wrong. There’s a big division in US society and the world, and despite taking some good stances on international issues, PSL is fundamentally on the wrong side. This is why they are worth commenting on, and this is why the sincere anti-imperialists among their ranks should join the Center for Political Innovation.