Chapotraphouse

It's not a polemic, it's essentially a social media post to evaluate initial interest and agitate to comrades already aligned. There are plenty of good essays and polemics on the problems with the PSL.

All people who did excellent organizing, heading multiple formations in highly disciplined groups, adopting strategic organizing methods to achieve their aims. Take Lenin. Forming the Bolsheviks as a formal split was preceded by attempts by their faction to move the RSDLP towards a more intensely revolutionary cadre and away from broad base building or needing to "develop" the Russian Empire into something more like British capitalism first. They formed that faction (in direct contact with one another and meeting about it), agitated around their cause, organized votes and then also published various articles, including many criticisms. 1912 was a rupture from which they could form a new party because they had all of that organizing work behind them, basically already decfsctoy having a party already, cutting themselves free of the Mensheviks. But they did try to move the RSDLP first. I'm saying this not because you have to follow them exactly but because if you have a specific goal in a socialist organization you have to identify a strategy and how you will achieve it, fundamentally requiring other people to be aligned with you, to have meetings, to be in communication, to run a campaign that escalates through action and reaction.

Specifically, this does not happen by writing a very short and somewhat vague polemic on social media where it isn't even clear you are a member.

The immediate questions I had were:

• Who is your audience?
• What do you want them to do with this information?
• How does it build your campaign? What is your follow-up?

Signs that make me ask these questions:

• No call to action.
• No advertisement of an organized campaign resource of any kind.
• No RSVP (probably a bad idea at this juncturebut the default of any organized campaign).
• No "if you have experience X contact me here" to start chatting with people across branches since you lack those connections.

In fact, I would say doing those things directly with members and making cross branch connections is an obviously much better use of your time if the removal of the Beckers is your goal. The post itself may not need what I mentioned because really it probably isn't strategic to post at all if this is your goal.

I do not mean this criticism as an insult, but just a description that made me, by default, ask who was doing this, because it is missing the key elements I train people to always focus on and that I expect cadre to do out of habit alone. Instead it reminded me of imperial core horizontalist approaches to policing their own community (the inevitable anonymous call-out publications) or new DSA members making their first attempt at what they jokingly call "revolution through resolution", that you just say what should happen and then people see it and then of course they'll just vote for it, no need to have direct conversations and build your support to actually make it happen. Note that the more experienced and strategic DSA members do maintain lists of people they believe will vote with them and do direct reach-outs. So I see an incongruity between, "I am a cadre organizer in a ML party" and, "I am adopting organizing strategy dramatically inferior to a DSA electoralist and in line with horizontalist chaos methods" and wonder what's going on.

no direct horizontal relationships between branches.

Hopefully there's a lot of informal horizontal relationships between branches, because you can't really challenge leadership (in any org) without having that

If they ignored you then you have grounds to escalate your campaign.

I am surprised you don't have contacts with other branches.

shyes!