chat

Aboveground cadre shouldn't be expected to be anonymous. At the end of the day, you can't be a vanguard from the shadows. The Communist disdains to conceal their views after all. Now, there's underground cadre, but underground cadre is tasked with clandestine operations like blowing up shit and assassinating high value targets. Underground cadre is the foundation of what would eventually become a guerilla army. In this case, anonymity is needed because the state is actively trying to kill the underground instead of merely jailing them like the aboveground.

Those are the stakes at play for any serious vanguard party. You only get the privilege of anonymity if you sign up to forfeit any semblance of a normal life for the sake of the revolution.

PSL protects it's members through numbers, not anonymity. As a PSL member you're expected to be willing to put your name on your politics and be public about party affiliation.

I believe the disagreement goes all the way back to the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks - the Mensheviks wanted to allow members to the Communist Party to remain anonymous, such as a professor who might lose his position if he "came out" as a Communist. The Bolsheviks said: too bad, we all make sacrifices.

The PSL only makes two exceptions, as far as I'm aware: immigrants who are at risk of deportation may disguise their identity. And union leadership (and similar positions) are allowed to remain anonymous and this isn't too hard since those sorts of PSL members aren't really doing so much of the day-to-day work of organizing protests and other events.

I think this is a good system. It filters out people who are likely to get spooked on the job anyways. I think it's a matter of practicality. You have to give your home address to the council to speak at City and County Council meetings. You have to give your home address to run for public office (if you ever run into a petitioner for ballot access, they'll have a paper under the signature sheets that shows the home addresses of the candidates, and the legal names of their electors, and you have a right to see it if you ask). If you're registered to vote (and if you're in PSL, you're going to register to vote, and vote for the Party's candidates), literally anyone can Google your name and find your home address, because those are public records.

They do suck at cyber security, and any effort to fix it is the individual effort of chapters. They'll put your info into a big excel that every chapter in the country can access. I know because I was accidentally added to a chapter from Delaware signal months after I joined a chapter in Missouri.

Idk why you'd think it was a honeypot. The feds definitely don't need you to put your info into a form to know that you're looking at PSL's website.

It's almost certainly because they have VAN or a similar database for their electoral work and they're trying to collect data for it as well as send you emails/texts. I'm not sure I agree with the efficacy of it but it's probably just electoral brain worms.

unless you live in one of the major "terrorist left" cities, communists are few and far-between in the greater continental united states. Try organizing a party when your possible members are scattered by dozens of miles apart. Takes all kinds of people to make a party, too. If you expect every inquirer or applicator to be an expert of cyber security who owns their own ISP, only uses one-use disposable phones, and communicates exclusively through messenger pidgeons with cryptographic codes written in lemon juice requiring an enigma machine to decode, I hate to tell you you're going to only have a revolutionary party of you, yourself, and your lonesome.

you can't be an anonymous vanguardist last time i checked. and if this is just comments, it should be accessible to normies and others. is your concern that a communist org shouldn't have digital records of people who have ever talked to them? if the nazi administration is at the point of interrogating and arresting people who asked PSL a question in this manner, we have more pressing issues than this.

What about that shows you they're unserious?

They're asking for comments and for you to leave a way to reply to your query. Am I missing something otherwise?

First off, I'm not seeing any asterisks next to those fields so they might not be required. You can try to leave them blank but maybe they are required.

Second off, this sort of form is just an abuse vector for haters. Having an info@pslweb.org email is way more secure for both parties and prevents a script kiddie from just looping a POST request.

Don't let anyone gaslight you, that shit is whack. Shows how serious they are about the rising tide of fascism and the value they place on protecting their members.

This is the kind of form democrat political campaigns make so they can harvest your info and sell it along to every future campaign in the country as a mailing/fundraising list.

The one in my city uses Google Forms for this sort of stuff and calls over unencrypted channels, so be careful (and there were other organizations in the area that had much better opsec)

Aside from everything, lying on internet forms is valuable initial response, ask under first last name hifedslooking @subpoenaeddocuments,

I’m glad someone else has validated my concerns about PSL’s opsec. I tried getting more info from them about what they’re doing to protect their member’s info and iirc I essentially got zero reassuring answers.

I wanted to contact them and saw they use twitter and facebook. Lost all interest in that org. fuck em.