Intro to the Party Issue

Dec 1, 2017

Enough Parties, let’s party!

The United States of Amerikkka has historically and is today home to no less than a dozen revolutionary socialist political parties. Communist Party USA, Socialist Party USA, Socialist Workers Party, Communist Workers Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Revolutionary Communist Party, Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Alternative Party, Socialist Labor Party, the list goes on (and on). Really only two ever even attained relevance, let alone power, those first two, CPUSA and SPUSA, and those waves of relevance were both in the first half of the 20th Century and long gone now. Today they’re all irrelevant. But each of them with their few dozen, few hundred, or at most two thousand members nationwide are still chugging away, selling newspapers, recruiting starry-eyed college undergrads, having “national conferences” in people’s living rooms, fielding presidential candidates who consistently get less votes in every election than Mickey Mouse and Chuck Norris.

It should be obvious that this is not going to work. Sure plenty of these parties had to deal with serious state repression and fascist violence in the past, but many of them have been organizing unharmed for over fifty years and have nothing to show for it. The Party form is inherently flawed. It takes real energy and rage and passion and funnels it all into the cold, chrome, sterile world of government and officialdom, where it dies of boredom and despair.

There’s another way. Let’s bypass the mediation and onion-like layers of bureaucracy and representation. Let’s make change ourselves, and have fun doing it. Let’s block oil trains with impromptu dance parties right on the tracks. Let’s throw eggs at the platoons of riot cops and toilet paper over the homes of prosecutors. Let’s send photocopies of our butts to the university administrators in protest of their new bullshit restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly (be careful though, you can accidentally break that glass scanner and get a broken shard up the ass!) Let’s sneak in and squat in buildings so we can live and gather together without paying rent to some landlord. Let’s assail cop cars and police stations with water balloons filled with paint.

The resistance should not be boring. When it’s not absolutely terrifying, it should be fun!