Anyone around here ever work with the Socialist Equality Party/SEP, particularly around the NOVA/DMV/DC area...

IWW, Socialist Alternative, International Marxist Tendency (USA)

Engels didn't attempt hide his wealth from the organization, hypocritically attack opponents claiming their purity was compromised by their class, or use his financial power to blackmail members into voting for him.

Workers World and PSL are both better and that's really saying something considering how beholden both are to liberal Idpol

Peace and Freedom Party is better than all of them but unfortunately they only really exist in California

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went out of business during the great recession. when it was still in business it was a certified womens owned enterprise.

Source? Last I checked it was owned by a "David Green" (photos prove it is North) and sold around 2015.

The only socialist org worth a shit in the DMV is Metro DC D/S-A.

Literal socdems

I used to think they were cool until I found out they supported the Libyan and Syrian "revolutions". The left should have zero tolerance for groups that spew pro imperialist rhetoric.

They're the only competent Trot party in America, and even though we banter a good bit in real life, they've been good at organizing in my area/working with other orgs (what sets them above the SWP) and I cant fault their hardline anti-intervention stance

Bump

Yeah for sure, I love their 100% "anti-bullshit" stance, like being against Bernie Sanders, that Democrat Cops of America person who just won the primary, syria, etc. I don't know if there's really any other socialist parties that are that hard-line on that shit, if so I would love to hear about them.

USA-Party of Labor is a thing and holds good stances on all that shit
Though its small as fuck and a Bunkerist reading group

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Party_of_Labor

So basically a modern day Stalinist party? Hmm

They don't support right-to-work laws. They just don't care about them much and dislike unions. Almost every union in the US is total shit, anyway, and they have generally been shit since the destruction of Patco. They compromise workers' struggles in the US, are basically under the control of the corporations they're supposed to oppose, and have zero revolutionary potential.

Hoxhaism while ML / Stalinst / Classic Leninist in most beliefs holds some different views (Belief in Maoist cultural Revolution / Stance on Krushevism / Gun ownership / etc)
Though some of those policy differences were more caused by Albanias Material conditions rather then Ideological difference

TLDR
If you want to know about all the semantics ask Ismail on /marx/ he literally helped found USA-Party of Labor when he was a Hoxhaist

Their stance on the recent Janus vs ASFCME case would suggest otherwise. I remember them calling it a "victory for the working class" or something along those lines.

I don't understand why the PATCO injunction is highlighted here, there was a far greater qualitative change with the great purge of socialists in union leadership as a result of Wagner / Taft-Hartley Act provisions. Probably because they needed an historical excuse for their abandoning of trade union support, in order to maintain their "our party line has never been wrong ever" mythology. The decline in strike activity has far more to do with the decline of profitability of U.S. based capital, not a qualitative change in the union bureaucracy (I'll admit they're usually CIA collaborating pieces of shit, but they've been like that at least since the aforementioned purge of socialists). Despite that, joining mainstream AFL/CIA unions is still miles better than letting Porky fuck you without a condom. Studies consistently show that union membership in the USA increases your take home pay an average of 20-25%. Contrast this to the WSWS line, which during NLRB elections explicitly urges workers to vote "no".

The fact that the union leadership are not giving speeches about the revolutionary historic mission of the working class does not instantly mean that trade unionism should be abandoned. The purpose of a trade union is to win immediate economic gains for its members through class struggle, not to take part in politics. The act of that class struggle will illuminate the restrictions of the capitalist system and make the need for political change self evident, regardless of whatever reactionary sods are in the leadership. This goes back to Marx, who in his day was the only socialist to support the Chartists and trade unionism despite their non-revolutionary political orientation. Lenin said the same thing: marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch06.htm.

Throwing your hands in the air and refusing to deal with any union that does not promote your party line is the road to disaster. This happened during the German revolution of 1919, where Luxemburg and the KPD failed to make any ties with revolutionary workers on the floor (the revolutionary shop stewards) because they had previously written off the top leadership of those unions as counterrevolutionary. The most influential ⛏️rotskyist lead trade union, Teamsters Local 574, would likely still be renounced by the WSWS if the ideals of its leadership were not known, because while its newspaper (The Organizer) was explicitly socialist, it was only referenced as the logical conclusion of the class struggle it was organizing. Columns were dedicated to strike organization and struggles with the national leadership and news organizations, not primers on dialectical materialism or other attempts to subordinate the union to the line of the Socialist Workers Party. If the WSWS didn't know this union was organized by ⛏️rotskyist idols like James Cannon, it would probably be denounced as "betraying the workers" with "pseudo-left" rhetoric, making "sellout deals" and having a distinct lack of "rank and file committees", like every other trade union story I've seen from them.

Most of my views on trade unionism come from this: marxists.org/archive/draper/1970/tus/1-marx-tus.htm

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They're right about trade unions. Its pretty simple the moment you have a top down bureaucracy then that becomes the moment corruption begins to seep in and also makes it easier for capitalists to co-opt any social movements by buying out labor leaders and using them to hold back class anger. Unions help workers get better wages but that's counterproductive because the goal is to abolish the wage system which can only be done through a worker revolution which union leaders try to actively discourage. Just look at how the teachers strike in the US recently was stopped by the union even though the vast majority of teachers wanted it to continue.

That simply isn't true:
wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/28/janu-j28.html
Find "victory for the working class" or even the word "victory" anywhere in that. They didn't see it as any such victory; they just didn't see it as a loss for workers.

It isn't that the purges and Taft-Hartley weren't also important, but that Patco and its destruction were the last gasp of US unionism as any sort of oppositional force toward capitalists, even in the weak form it had already been in. It also signified the displacement of late Keynesianism, with its compromises toward workers and trade unions, by early neoliberalism.

In the US, trade unions simply aren't doing so; more often, they're helping to defeat class struggle by negotiating with bosses behind the backs of workers. They don't have to be revolutionary per se, but they do have to engage or aid in some sort of class struggle to have some revolutionary potential. They have zero.

I'm not saying that trade unions inherently and historically have no potential; I am saying that they currently do not, and a critical posture is correct.

Being a cult shouldn't be good thing user.

From the perspective of an American maybe (and you would be right - they do release decent articles), but when taken to be from the perspective from someone who actually lives there, more often then not, it reeks of American

That's not even a political party proper. It's a coalition of different Left groups, most of them not even Radical.

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch06.htm

tl;dr Unions are an expression of workers' power and are the precondition for their dictatorship and as instruments of education to inundate the purpose of socialism and revolution amongst the workers. The Party is to direct the unions into revolutionary ends, and that requires participating within existing unions. To not participate is to leave the field of leadership to the bourgeoisie

And this tendency for lenin to have vanguard party is what ultimately led to the downfall of the ussr. Power cannot be held by the few because then it can be corrputed by greed. Socialism can only happen when power is shared democratically among the entire population. Unions, businesses, governance, every aspect of public and private life needs to have a Democratic component in order for socialism to actually occur.

There is a different between a class for itself and the class in itself. As Lenin said, there is difference between party and class and they shouldn't be confused. You see, there is not such thing as "The People". "The People" is divided into classes, which under capitalism, is predominantly the class of capital and the class of wage-labor. As politics is the expression of a fundamental economic movement, so too does the class struggle express itself through the political arena. "The People" is constituted politically by organs of democracy, through the establishment of what Lenin termed hegemony, that of class leadership. To Lenin, politically under capitalism, there is the class leadership of capital and the class leadership of wage-labor.

One cannot have capital without wage-labor and wage-labor without capital. There can be no proletariat as a class without first establishing capitalism.This relation of common interest itself can conceal that the relation is really that of presupposition. There can be no employees without employers and vice versa. This presupposition representing itself as that of common interest, however, can conceal the inherent antagonism contained within the relation between capital and labor, that this relation is built on exploitation. This concealment can establish the working class as subordinate politically to capital. Without a political organization of the working class, there can be no independent proletarian politics. In other words, without a party built on and by the working class, the class leadership of proletariat is rendered to that of the interests of capital.

To quote Lenin quoting Martov approvingly, "Our Party is the conscious spokesman of an unconscious process". There exists within capitalism an unfolding logic, but this logic does not go down a prewritten linear path. As Lenin said, there is a difference between fatalism, that history is inevitable, from determinism, that history is defined by a constellation of conditions/determinations. To posit the inevitability of socialism, without counterpoising the possibility of barbarism, is to conceive of yourself not as an engaged actor but a foreign observer. To reject the necessity of political organization and of a cohesive political program is ultimately to take the class position of the petty-bourgeois individualism. Without discipline, without direction, there can be no movement, all that politics would entail would be tailing behind the elemental movement, and not driving it forward, towards socialism and revolution.

As What is to Be Done? remarks, the struggle of the proletariat necessarily becomes a struggle for political power. It is this where the "anti-political" Anarchists edge closer towards the truth - because society is divided into classes, the struggle for power must not be limited within the existing political apparatus - the state musts be smashed, and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie replaced with a dictatorship of the proletariat. The most fundamental principle of Marxism is the establishment of the political independence of the working class separate from capital. As Lenin reiterates Marx and Kautsky, respectively, the liberation of the working class can only come from the working class itself, and for this to be established, there must arrive a merger of socialism with the labor movement. Any attempt to frustrate that development is counterrevolutionary. To deny the need of a political leadership of the working class is to deny the political independence of the working class itself, for this independence can only be maintained through the use of a political organization - the workers' party.

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The very "democratic component" of the soviets is precisely what lead to their very bureaucratization.
In fact, bureaucracy in the Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s was most associated without the grassroots, with local officials' obstinate refusals to follow official policies from the center, an obstinance who's history was borne with the Soviet republic itself; if the soviets had followed the Bolshevik center to the letter in October, there would have never been a revolution.
It was through popular movement, guided by the center, that the Great Purge happened to begin with - which itself was portrayed as a war against bureaucratism despite reaffirming the power of central bureaucracy, despite 9/10s of the bureaucratic center being executed and replaced by lower-level officials.

The bureacratization of the Soviet Union was a product of its own isolation and backwardness, not because of some authoritarian tendency of the Bolsheviks. In fact, repression under War Communism wasn't as bad as the Great Purge, especially given the circumstances! In fact, after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, there was a counterrevolutionary coup that was thwarted. Rather than publicly execute the leader of the rebellion, the Bolsheviks let him go. The Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies, both within and outside their borders. And who were the ones who ensured these conditions? The German Social-Democracy and the so-called German Communist "Left"; the prior being lackeys of the bourgeoisie who crushed the incipience workers' revolution, and the latter for refusing to build a workers' party. Without proper guidance, without proper cohesion, unified by the discipline of the Party apparatus, the revolutionaries, dispersed and disunified as they were, were crushed.

How so?