A dramatic resignation letter from one of the PSL’s top leaders accuses the organization of secrecy, factionalism, and bureaucratic decay. The controversy has reignited questions about the future of America’s socialist micro-parties.
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Somewhere in this country, a microparty of forty men is in the process of becoming two microparties of twenty over a question with no merit. A faction expels a faction. A city committee declares the national leadership revisionist and secedes, taking the mailing list and Twitter account with them. The overwhelming majority of such events are of no consequence to anyone.
The typical split in a microparty is not a clarification of politics. A typical split consists of a membership growing dissatisfied with its leaders—their incompetence, their cliquishness, their internal petty tyrannies combined with external powerlessness—and resolves the dissatisfaction by installing a new clique who proceed to practice the same politics that produced the dissatisfaction in the first place.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is itself the product of exactly such a split. In 2004, it broke from the Workers World Party (WWP), a micro-party with fewer than 1,000 members. The splitters included PSL’s current leadership, Brian Becker, along with Gloria La Riva, who described the reason for their split as a “degradation of WWP as a functional organization” (their incompetence), and “undemocratic centralization” (their cliquishness and petty tyranny). The basic political theory of the WWP was imported to the PSL without any fundamental changes that could actually be registered at the level of mass politics.
Twenty-two years later, it is happening again—a faction of dissatisfied members is walking out on PSL Walter Smolarek, an extremely controversial 17-year veteran PSL leader and central committee member, who claims to have written much of the PSL’s internal and external propaganda, has resigned. His resignation letter details his grievances and reasons for leaving.
The letter is long, wide-ranging, and damning. The letter is a confession as much as an indictment. Smolarek states his role as a leader in the PSL included perpetrating, covering up, or merely ignoring abuses. He describes a pseudo-democratic structure whose only purpose is to conceal an unelected Becker family clique capable of overriding every decision made by members. He documents a culture of compulsory applause and outright worship of the leadership. He alleges that bylaw changes for the organization were pushed through in secret because the leadership was afraid to face a vote. He reveals that the party’s core political documents were not the product of the combined knowledge of the organization, as members were led to believe, but were one person’s random thoughts and scribbles. He notes that they are increasingly drafted by A.I. chatbots, which he jokes has actually improved their quality.
His most detailed example concerns a base-building project in Brooklyn, New York. In Brooklyn, the branch had begun a community organizing effort, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center. Smolarek says the national leadership opposed this kind of work but, instead of arguing against it openly, tried to undermine it in secret. He says he was repeatedly asked to attack the Brooklyn project and refused, telling the leadership he agreed with what the branch was doing. When the Brooklyn organizers invited him to speak at their retreat, he says, Ben Becker called him several times to talk him out of it, and late that night the national leadership held an emergency meeting to vote to ban him from speaking.
At the retreat, Smolarek says, a group of five current and former staff staged what he is certain was a coordinated disruption organized by Ben Becker—reading aloud from the same document on their phones, with one of them storming out for effect. Days later, Brian Becker interrogated his loyalty for 3 hours because of his refusal to go along with the scheme.
Smolarek claims that members of the Brooklyn Branch have since resigned alongside him. He also warns that a similar effort to covertly undermine the organizing efforts of members is ongoing in the Denver, Colorado branch.
A particularly alarming claim in Smolarek’s letter alleges that PSL is now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to employ software developers to build an A.I.-powered secret police system with the objective of spying on members of every PSL branch in the country. Its stated purpose is to compile reports that the national leadership will use to “ensure compliance with national directives.” He says members caught reading Jacobin or taking an organizing class are treated as security breaches. According to Smolarek, this comes at a time when the organization refuses to fund political or leadership education initiatives. PSL’s wealthy funders will not pay to teach communists about communism, but it will shovel out a fortune to spy on them.
Smolarek does not stop at the incompetence and the petty tyranny of the leaders. He defines the political root—PSL’s conception of what a revolutionary organization is for and how it relates to the working class. He writes:
As capitalism inevitably produces injustices, the revolutionary party [PSL] calls or joins protests. It recruits participants in these protest movements by expressing views that participants come to see as correct. When there are not protests, the party does agitational outreach to show itself and change the minds of more people. Capitalism’s own dynamics ensure that this cycle can be relied on to continue. Eventually, the capitalist system produces a crisis acute enough to throw the system into question, and if the Party is big enough, the protests can become a revolution.
This is essentially it. The PSL dresses up this simplistic concept with the socialist consciousness thesis—the idea that unique historical conditions [in modern America] preclude any path to revolution but to widely popularize our particular definition of socialism, positioning the party for the abrupt seizure of power at the time of a revolutionary crisis.
What makes the thesis attractive to PSL is that it explains and excuses the sheer marginality of the organization—if the only road to revolution is the popularization of a given line, regardless of its resonance (or lack thereof) with mass struggle, then a group that “popularizes” is discharging its historic duty, and it does not need to analyze anything beyond assuring the presence of this line in the public.
Smolarek then rejects PSL’s delusional self-conception as a party. He writes:
PSL calls itself a party but, by concrete measures, it is an ideological tendency… A party is an organization that can credibly claim to represent a class or a section of a class… A tendency is an organization that gains ground not by organizing the working class but by gaining influence amongst radicals.
The PSL has made itself a fixture among the radical left. It is a name almost everyone knows, one of the “parties.” Ask any American radical to list the communist organizations of the country, and the PSL will be among the first three named. That is, before it is dismissed as more or less worthless, or defended with the most damning praise available: “Well, you have to join some sort of organization, and it’s better than nothing,” or “The leadership is bad, but the members are good.” People are afraid to say out loud what they suspect—that not joining any such sect may really be better than the PSL if the goal is to fight the class struggle in America today.
Who can doubt that the PSL, for all its inability to influence broader society, an inability it has assured itself is historically inevitable, has succeeded perfectly at its actual objective, the only one it pursues: gaining influence among self-styled radicals?
It uses that influence to do one thing: it persuades a generation of young radicals that revolution in America is impossible. Whatever it imagines itself to be, the PSL is one of the most effective recruiters against class struggle in the United States. Nothing is better than this.
Smolarek writes:
[PSL members] are often told that “the biggest campaign is to build the Party.” Actually, the biggest campaign must be to address the diminished position and power of the working class. Through this process, a real communist party can be born. The PSL could achieve unquestionable hegemony within the existing left and still have no prospect of affecting real social change. We cannot lose sight of the most elementary of our political convictions, proven time and time and time again, that the masses make history. The prospect of a victorious socialist revolutionary struggle is contingent upon the participation of the working class, organized as a class [my emphasis].
Why was a group of petty tyrants with no interest in organizing the American people granted the standing of a serious tendency on the left? Because the micro-party left that platformed it, recommended it, and treated it as a peer is playing the same game. It recruits from the same few thousand radicals and measures itself, like the PSL, by its reputation on the left rather than its reach among the people. As marginal as the PSL is, among the microparties, respecting the PSL as a leading rival is the only serious position.
Among these peers is Red Star Caucus, a micro-party that occupies seats on DSA’s national leadership and dominates the Growth and Development Committee. Its aim is to impose a particular political line upon DSA and build itself through making itself popular among radicals, treating DSA as a placeholder for the workers’ party that this line will one day summon into being, and which differs from PSL only in that its turf is the radical milieu inside DSA rather than outside. The American Communist Party, assembled in 2024 out of online streamers and content creators, differs from PSL only in that its turf is Republican social media users. The cutting and subdivisions of such turf is how the micro-parties with fundamentally similar “Socialist Consciousness Theory” co-exist. All three share the same idealist core: that consciousness is transmitted from above, that the organization’s growth within its chosen turf is a worthwhile measure of progress, and that the working class will eventually fall in line behind the correct slogan—a formula that, as Smolarek notes, ignores the atomization of the working class, the strength of the right, and the simple fact that the masses make history only when they are organized as a class
The micro-parties have all made peace with the same fatalistic premise the PSL built on: that the American people are not capable of organizing politically, that the correct, realistic task is simply to win as many radicals to a given “correct” line. Having cannibalized the whole of the radicals who tolerate their given line—burned through or frightened away every person this tendency had to give—it now finds it has nothing left to eat and no idea what to do. It has reached a critical mass, and its members have begun to think for themselves.
Smolarek has no intention of re-treading the same ground with the same line and re-cannibalizing the same old radical milieu, as Brian Becker and Gloria La Riva did when building PSL
He is calling for a fundamental course correction. He and his supporters recognize that the PSL is a dying effort not merely because of its decrepit leadership but because of its political orientation. Smolarek, however, was himself a chief author of that orientation, which leaves important questions: What will he keep, what will he add, and what will he abandon? To succeed, he and his people will have to do more than discard the WWP/PSL playbook; they will have to build a politics that actually constitutes the masses as a historical agent. What the letter has on offer is a critique of the PSL, but it is not yet that new politics. It is only a re-invocation of the basic Communist ideas that the PSL long ago threw away.
Smolarek and his supporters depart the PSL with substantial political goals and substantial baggage. Whether they will be able to free themselves from this baggage and reorient themselves towards the struggle for communism in America will be answered the only place such questions are: in practice, among the people the PSL had long given up on.
Predictable cliche after predictable cliche. A cultish unaccountable narcissistic society creates endless similar baby-cults.
Mr. Corbyn and Ms. Sultana: “We've got a monopoly on micro-parties' internecine feuding.”
PSL: “Hold my beer”