They give me a pretty good impression but I would like to know how others feel about them.
Mostly elderly people coming from a good place, doing very little actual organizing outside of scarcely attended protests. Nice folks to bring into public events your org might be working on but I wouldn’t join them
Interesting, do you want to speculate on why this is the case? And why the other response mentions them being bad at vetting and giving people responsibilities without warning?
I think your second question answers the first
Then you should think different.
Poor cadre development and a lack of strategic thinking (the second question) is why they are bad organizers (the first question).
And the party is old people coded because all the young people are joining the new party?
Local branch was about half old people, half younger than me. Every person I interacted with outside the local was old.
Basically, yeah. Nobody is really joining WWP anymore, so it’s all people who’ve been in the party for decades.
To be honest, almost every volunteer labor run org I’ve been involved with is bad at vetting and so desperate for new labor that anyone relatively competent will be given responsibilities as quickly as they will take it.
Usually the leadership is on the edge of burn out. For a group like WWP, fading into relatively obscurity even within the left, I imagine they would be as susceptible to this trend as any.
Again, the folks I met were nice and all but, in my experience, US orgs run by old heads are not getting much young membership. At best it is a revolving door of baby leftists joining as a first openly leftist org and then leaving within a year or two once their level of political development exceeds that of the boomer leaders.
I used to meet with my local branch. They are a lovely bunch of comrades. Their newspaper is pretty decent. As far as being a party though… idk. I had a scheduling conflict with their candidacy class, so they wanted to just shortcut me into full membership without any real vetting. I was also repeatedly asked if I could leave the country for overseas events, with like no notice.
Every member I have met is a cool communist, but as an organization I found them really lacking.
I see, very interesting.
I’ve primarily interacted with Sara Flounders. I like and respect her and her work. I have no professional or private ill will towards them. Nominally speaking they come off as astute academics but seem to particularly lack any material presence in the world of labor but tend to make a small showing of support with their limited membership to protest events. (At least as I am aware of from public and personal sources)
That’s the party that PSL split from, but they seem to have the same politics, so it’s always puzzling why the split happened.
My understanding is that the group who formed PSL thought the WWP had no solid strategy and was unable and unwilling to commit to a process of cadre development. That and WWP still clung to a lot of their Trotskyist roots. PSL wanted to be a more traditional ML demcent party and I’d say it’s paying off. As far as splits go it was pretty amicable, my PSL branch is very friendly with the two old ladies who are the local WWP.
I’d say PSL is more like the successor party to WWP who completed the transition Marcy began of leaving Trotskyism in order to build a multinational, anti-imperialist ML party and reconnect with the deeper roots of the org in the good old days of the CPUSA (through the SWP). WWP exists today only as a rump leftover that has been entirely supplanted by
tl;dr just join PSL
Without knowing more, perhaps the reasons Babs mentioned?
They’re Marcyites like PSL, so they are somewhat similar to Trotskyists but have much better international politics. Compared to PSL they seem older, more academic, and they maybe have stronger international connections. IMO the Workers World paper/site is one of the best ones out there, much better than Liberation News, but WWP really hasn’t adapted to new media. They’re also much smaller than PSL now and have much less of a presence at protests. Both parties also use basically identical signs lol.
- is not Trotskyist
Apologies, I meant it in the sense that both they and WWP derive from Trotskyist organizations whose influence continues to play a role in their conduct. Both organizations take positions that are distinct from most Trotskyists especially on international topics. Edited my initial comment to better communicate that.
And the funny thing is, neither is Worker’s World, both are ML.
My first interview with the WWP, we mostly nerded out about how rad China is and how Papa Joe shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin.
