I appreciate everyone’s responses a lot. I also think it was good to remove the post because there was some reactionary stuff in the google doc I linked. I found it through one of the articles that Bad Mouse’s link led to, not in any of the other comments. I only looked at the “first hand accounts” links in the doc and didn’t even double check what else there was so that’s my error.
I had a feeling the take would be that there are certainly big flaws, as there are in any org, with any group of people, but PSL is still one of the few vehicles for socialist agitation that there actually exists, and by joining it we can help improve it.
I’m likely going to be moving to San Francisco when I’m back in the states in case anyone has recommendations about specific orgs in the bay that are certainly good.
Also I got to say Bad Mouse’s ultra turn also bummed me out a little. It seems like such a baby leftist thing to do to just shit on a socialist party from across an ocean and then refuse to elaborate.
The is going to be a bit of a controversial take but it’s my own and I’m willing to die on this hill:
I put BadMouse into the same category as BadEmpanada tbh. Both make/tend to make good video essays. That’s all I’m willing to engage with and give them credit for.
They are not people who I look up to as people who I should follow. I neither trust them nor respect them enough for that.
In the case of BadEmpanada, he has some unhinged behaviour on social media and he just has some garbage takes that increase in inverse proportion to the proximity to his main channel. In the case of BadMouse, he is so self-assured that I feel like the only right thing is to make up for his lack of skepticism by having enough skepticism of him for the both of us - he cycled through ideologies like a westerner window-shops for new outfits to wear and I’d argue that he’s more of a convincing speaker than he is a person who has done the reading and put in the effort to enact his politics (I can’t speak for his more recent turn away from being on YouTube to primarily being a grass-toucher but everything that is visible in his YouTube era is representative of him spending his time on creating online hot takes so…)
So I will listen to what each of them have to say, and most of the time I really appreciate what they have to say and the way they formulate their video essays. But the more they start straying out of their lane, the more I start taking them with a pinch of salt; I’m not about to start taking organising advice from BadMouse lol.
With regards to the PSL - they do not operate in my country and I am not personally familiar with them. I have definitely heard about some of the concerns with the organisation and how it deals with matters. This is based on second-hand reports and it should be taken into consideration but it should also be taken with due skepticism because it’s easy for a wrecker to concoct a story to sway sentiment against an organisation baselessly (not saying that this is the case here but we should always have a healthy skepticism about these claims against organisations and comrades unless we have good cause to believe it.)
As the PSL matters are internal and they are contended, I am happy to sit this one out - it’s not my place, it’s not my organisation, it’s not my struggle.
If I were considering the PSL personally, I would observe the organisation for a while and read their statements etc. while engaging with the local branch and its members as a fellow traveller. Very often with large or national organisations, the people on leadership are not reflective of the people in your branch and there are questions about organising and strategy that people need to hash out with themselves like whether they think the org itself is good enough on sufficient matters that you can deal with disagreements etc., whether you want to be part of driving a cultural change within the organisation, if you are satisfied with how the organisation resolves conflict and how the leadership addresses their own flaws and fuck ups etc. etc.
Ultimately, this is my position: I am not perfect, organisations are not perfect, and whatever party I’m in or associated with is not perfect either.
I have a hierarchy of things that are most important to me and I seek alignment with enough of the most important issues. With the lower priority matters, I’m interested in seeing if or how the organisation’s line has developed on that and how/if it has managed to develop on other issues where it has had a bad line; an organisation that is willing to change and admit past errors is more important to me than perfect ideological alignment because I see that as a crucial sign of a healthy org.
Idk where I’m going with this ramble but it’s just some of my thoughts.
There’s an opportunist streak about BadEmpanada, especially how he treated BayArea, and honestly, he’s still a sexpat until proven otherwise just like all Anglo male immigrants in Global South countries.
And as for Bad Mouse, I just don’t trust some dude who constantly changes ideology. It’s one thing to do so when you’ve just been exposed to leftist thought, but at this point in the game, he has heard the arguments and talking points of all the major tendencies. There’s absolutely no way he would have experienced consecutive life-shattering events that would cause him to reevaluate his core beliefs over and over again, which makes me think he was never sincere in the first place.
Agreed on both fronts.
There are people like Socialism For All who call out people on the left but it’s not about drama at all.
I’m sure there are people who engage in drama farming for clout in a principled way (idk any examples because I honestly do not care for it).
But then there’s BE who really seem to relish in drama farming and use it to chase clout for its own sake and I have a strong distaste for all that.
I went a bit easy on BM above because I don’t want to stir up drama here but there are a few archetypes of characters you see that end up following particular paths and tbh he’s the kind of person that I could absolutely imagine taking a “How I left the left” arc sometime in the future. Not saying that it’s guaranteed or that I’m accusing him of being a rank opportunist but I’ve seen people who bounce between ideologies or who rapidly cycle through them and it’s not unusual for them to settle on a position that makes outsiders go “Huh??” while jaded people like me go “Yeah, they were never truly grounded in radical theory/principles in a deep way so I’m really not surprised to see this new development…”
For me, I was an anarchist for basically all of my adult life until fairly recently and, if I’m being completely honest, it pains me to talk about it because I still grieve for the loss of my old politics (and it really was pretty life-shattering, like you said) and so I look at people who cycle the way that BM has and I simply cannot fathom doing that myself. If I was going to put an analogy to it, I’d say that I approach my politics like it’s a marriage whereas people like BM seem to approach politics like it’s a hookup app.
IMO, he’ll eventually become a Trot (because that’s the last major tendency he hasn’t been yet) before then turning right.