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They are a low energy group which claims you can implement socialism by reforming the Democrats
A Socialist Alternative councillor of Seattle city council became part of the leadership group of the CHOP/CHAZ protests and they directed the protesters to go home and vote Sleepy Joe
You're right and even if diagnosing them as Trots seems harsh it's not wrong.
I'm reading 'What Is To Be Done' for the first time & came across this passage (one of many) that highlights the problem quite plainly:
"However, the Bernsteinian and “critical” trend, to which the majority of the legal Marxists turned, deprived the socialists of this opportunity and demoralised the socialist consciousness by vulgarising Marxism, by advocating the theory of the blunting of social contradictions, by declaring the idea of the social revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be absurd, by reducing the working-class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade-unionism and to a “realistic” struggle for petty, gradual reforms. This was synonymous with bourgeois democracy’s denial of socialism’s right to independence and, consequently, of its right to existence; in practice it meant a striving to convert the nascent working-class movement into an appendage of the liberals."
trotskyites be like:
trotsky envisioned the abolishment of the NEP first and stalin stole his economic policy
and
muh opressive bureaucratic dictatorship
at the same time
SAlt are so fucking cringe. How can any org be taken seriously when it decides to pick up on online fights?
This has big vibes of PCUSA making statements about leftbook or the anarchists I've met in-person who've come up to us and asking, "are you the tankie party?"
Maybe they're doing good work irl? I presume you live in the US? What have you heard about SAlt beyond them just being trots?
Besides towing the state department line like Trots usually do, they don't seem to do much. Granted they had a pretty good campaign in getting Sawant into the Seattle city council, but that seems to be their biggest claim. I don't really see them doing much in my city or hear about them nationwide. I know of a few other parties other than mine that have galvanized around both the pandemic and BLM, but SAlt is kinda absent.
This particular org (SAlt Australia) is the dominant university student socialist org. Their paper, red flag, has some good articles on current events sometimes. Where they fall apart is in their organising structure and praxis. The party funnels large sums of money from its members into preserving the positions of a select few central members who operate as an isolated self governing clique internally and externally in student politics. They do not seek to make strategic alliances with other left wing groups and do not adapt their org's objectives to the attitude of the masses.
This leads to SAlt doing self destructive things like turning up uninvited to indigenous-led rallies to sell newspapers despite organisers asking them not to. It leads them to get their white members to organise black lives matter protests, then put the onus on indigenous & black people to go through them to have a say on the day. And of course, it causes them to waste time on unproductive endeavours like organising mass events basically to troll Marxist Leninists.
They're definitely active and politically engaged, but they are a shining example of the dangers of ignoring democratic centralism and the mass line
