PSL hurts our movement
(midwest.social)
thelastaxolotl [he/him]
Slop.Say NO, to Pumpkin Spice Latte
Even if you were extremely generous and conceded that all these baseless, vague accusations were true, they'd be significant improvements over the current government.
Like oh no a political party that supports state violence, supports authoritarian regimes, has cult-like behaviours, platforms fascists, has opaque funding and suppresses protests, unlike the current parties which uh.. well, uh.. all that, but way worse, and way more intensely, and more, extremely evil things, such as constantly doing fucking genocide.
why does this look steven universe
Graphic design is my passion
This method of attacking PSL is the same method the CIA uses to attack foreign states. They're building up a giant list to bomb people with "reasons x country is bad so you should support bombing it", big enough so that it requires several hundred pages to refute. Gish gallop in propaganda form is their preferred method.
Many people won't even remember the claims, they'll just remember "PSL bad" and that's that.
I'll say a few things:
- Nobody knows where Tigray is. Useless point. Xinjiang is easily refutable at this point and most people are listening to it.
- Coverups and internal drama never happens in the democrats obviously.
- Only idiots will buy that a bunch of queer communists have ever supported fascists.
- Nobody knows who Roy Singham is, including me lmao.
- "De-mobilises protests" oh really? Which ones? Palestine? Anti-ICE? Nah.
Come on feds this is some of your weakest ever work, it can be shut down in less text than exists on the propaganda, do better.
Come on feds this is some of your weakest ever work, it can be shut down in less text than exists on the propaganda, do better.
I actually watched this in action in a group chat I'm in (national chat so I know basically nobody in it).
-
new person expresses positive opinion of PSL re: protests
-
dude links red flags document (I actually checked this at the time and was like hell no I'm not clicking on a google document link)
-
Gets dogpiled by clique of people (like 4-5 in a big chat)
-
they start accusing the new person of trolling every time they chime in to any conversation
-
eventually gets kicked for refusing to take them seriously
for being very concerned about "high control groups" they were being highly controlling
This only works in chat groups if the owner of the chat group is anti-psl. If the owners of the group are not, then the members of the group are free to defend it with full energy and they get dogpiled.
In the chats owned by someone who's anti-PSL in the first place, this is much much harder.
On top of that you have the situations where a chat owner is anti-tankie but does not consider PSL to be tankies because only bad people can be tankies and they've actually met good people involved with PSL or know of PSL organised events, this makes a sorta brainwormed soup mess but also benefits PSL.
Come on feds this is some of your weakest ever work, it can be shut down in less text than exists on the propaganda, do better.
When was this made? Syria and Venezuela are basically out of date talking points especially since Assad and Maduro are not even in their respective countries anymore. There's also a weird emphasis on Ethiopia/Tigray. You would think they would put Iran under the "authoritarian regime" instead of Ethiopia. No mention of Palestine, not even with a "PSL co-opts Palestinian protests" talking point.
Nobody knows who Roy Singham is, including me lmao.
AFAIK the intended part of this bit is for people to google him, see he's a pro-China billionaire who gave PSL and their front orgs $40m, and think that's bad.
Isn't a plurality of Americans pro China at this point. Libs that might fall for this don't necessarily hate billionaires, they like Mark Cuban for instance. And most of them are saying "I trust China with my data more than the USA" when it comes to the TikTok sale.
When Lenin said the last capitalist would sell us the rope to hang them, I don't think he envisioned this lmao. Maybe we can keep this one billionaire, as a treat
There have always been class traitors. Like Engels, for instance.
Syria
I thought radlibs uphold the Syrian "revolution"
They mean supporting Syria when Assad was still around. They were opposed to HTS being given free reign to kill everyone
The Venezuela is also untimely after Maduro got kidnapped. How old is this?
It seems to be from Nov 18, 2024 https://www.instagram.com/p/DChTU4XRq7R/
This "antidotezine" post credits it to the above instagram person: https://spore.social/@antidotezine/113635056855774418
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Gotta be pretty old, cause PSL hasn't even mentioned Ethiopia in years as far as I can tell, and when they did it was mostly just about how US intervention is wrong (which it always is) and not really anything else? Not in the US or the PSL myself, I was just looking at liberation news to see what they were talking about lol.
Oh damn, is PSL actually big enough that they're on people's radar for counter propaganda now?
They were apparently instrumental in the success of the 1/23 Minneapolis general strike, and led a lot of the efforts behind last Friday's (1/30) national shutdown. At the rate they are growing in membership and influence they are becoming a significant enough political force that it is worth fighting back with some cheapo dogshit instagram and twitter posts.
Number 4 is the only one that isn't numbered. It's a small thing, but it bothers me.
This hurts my eye holes
Yeah, my twin passions are revolutionary socialism and graphic design.
Onion-molotov next to point 5: is he saying that PSL does too much peace-policing and that randos should throw artisanally manufactured incendiary b*mbs from the crowd during a protest?
Maybe we oughta hear them out on this one
Do not hold on, do not let bro cook. No way that doesn't end up spilling all over the friendlies, and that is before any accounting for how security forces would react.
"incendiary devices at a protest are extremely irresponsible and could accidentally kill a comrade or give them horrific injuries."
Look at this Peace-Policing. ACAB!!
A whimsical cartoon that can go viral on Instagram stories? Guess it must be true
This is a bit off-topic, but may I offer a bit of challenge to your usage of "schizophrenic" when insulting this poorly made infographic? I'm an educator, and I frequently work with people who have schizotypal personality disorder. They're lovely people who are deeply misunderstood, and often quite radical in their beliefs and their desire for a better society. They should not be considered a shorthand for insulting. I only ask that you consider not punching down when you're looking to, in fact, punch upward at the liberal status quo andits upholders, the people actually responsible for creating this awful image.
Yeah, schizophrenic here, I don't like this use of the term.
Its just Corporate Memphis (corporate consultant art style) with a Steven Universe twist. Plus it's being produced by impudent political children, so can't expect much better.
But seriously -- large, well funded, liberal-progressive orgs are making moves in my state to stifle and demobilize the left. Its nothing new, except the struggle is so fucking acute, more people than ever lives are directly at risk because of ice and police violence, meanwhile protests and organizing is bringing more people into the struggle than ever.
To me, looks like that Soros/Ford foundation money is making its way into direct counter organizing of our movements. Stay vigilant!
Who is this for?
It's to target people who think they're left but have not yet really made the jump left yet. People who don't know what a vanguard is, people who don't know what marxism-leninism is, people that like the word "socialism" but couldn't really explain it very well, people who will see "socialism and liberation" and be positive rather than negative.
For real, this looks aimed at 2015 "Tumblr SJW" stereotypes
It also begs the question of how seriously you're taking your own message: you're really putting "genocide denialism" in the same style you would use to remind kids that veggies are fun?
Hitting David Duke with the "yikes" millennial stare and a thumbs down after he says he thinks the Holocaust isn't real but wishes it was.
The target audience is Instagram "activists"
I agree. The style and tone offends me more than the content.
You can just tell the characters on the poster are just screaming "UNPAINT ME! UNPAINT ME!"
5 ways fiber softens our movements
Damn liberals are stealing our meme word counts now
Oh yes, I'm sure the lib who made this completely supports the Maoist resistance of the Tigray People's Liberation Front
I mean the CIA has certainly shown support for the TPLF in the past decade, so that filters down into domestic lib support. But you're right in that it's liberals claiming support for things they barely know about. Like I could probably get the average lib to announce support for the Tamil Tigers or the Shining Path if I say PSL has also been critical of them.
Lol none of the actual reasons why PSL isn't effective
Literally let your different locals openly exchange information if you don't already have the infrastructure to comprehensively synthesize lessons from all your different locals and distribute them, holy shit.
Whose "movements"?
My bowel movements
Everything about this is deeply off putting. I do not have solidarity with Steven Universe feds, if the PSL is hurting their movement, good
uses rallies to recruit
Oh god no, turning protests into a productive, larger, organized movement! Don’t these tankies know that the point of protests is to show up, wave your clever sign, and just hope that spontaneously causes the downfall of the bourgeois state?
"Defends authoritarian regimes" - list of good guys lmao
Yesterday I went to get cigarettes and cash for the bus after work. Guy at the register was struggling with a $10 bill in the counterfeit reader and grumbling about hating technology sometimes.
Of course I could not help myself so I said, yeah ne too and asked him if he knew about the luddites.
One thing leads to another and I basically ended up having the kind of talk we have here all the time.
Quick Stop gas station kid if you're on here yep, we hate the word authoritarianism too.
TLDR the kids might be alright, he was way ahead of where I was at his age.
Guy at the register was struggling with a $10 bill in the counterfeit reader
It’s these little snippets that non USAians just happen to come across and go wtf
This feels like a Kelly comic with all the labels
Opaque Funding
I have never heard of the PSL being pro-Ethiopia/anti-Tigray. Backing a neoliberal nobel-peace prize winner who proceeds to do genocide isn't what I'd expect of the PSL.
https://liberationnews.org/ethiopian-and-eritrean-communities-lead-nomore-global-protests-vs-u-s-intervention/
That's a fucking shameful article from the PSL.
The only recent article they have is from 2024, and it just talks about Ethiopia making a deal with Somaliland for Red Sea access. They have no articles about Somaliland itself (and the foreign interests that prop it up), nor do they ever have an article about the events in Ethiopia. Just a couple mentions of anti-intervention protests in the US
That 2021 article straight up does genocide denial in support of a UAE backed neoliberal. Hopefully their silence since then means they learned how horribly wrong they were.
You could probably find a statement about it at liberation news which is the PSL paper. In recent memory PSL has good positions on geopolitics (pro Venezuela and pro Cuba, against the Ukraine war, against intervention in Iran, to name a few)
It was part of the PSL platform in like 2012 and this was specifically when the US was trying to destabilize Ethiopia, so the PSL had a pro-Ethiopian government platform. I vaguely remember Eugene Puryear making a statement about it.
But like this was over a decade ago and has virtually nothing to do with PSL now
In 2012 the TPLF would've been in charge of Ethiopia. So that would mean the PSL is pro Tigray/TPLF and they somehow reverse that position, which I doubt. Now I actually have to read the citation in the image to know wtf they're talking about.
During the war, in fact, these groups covered up the genocide, parroted Abiy’s talking points. Under the guise of US non-interventionism, at protests of State Department sanctions, they played surrogates for Ethiopia at a time of mass bloodletting. Leaders spoke of the pro-American designs of TPLF “terrorists,” at panels convened by the #NoMore campaign, led by Hermela Aregawi. (Aregawi is an Ethiopian-American journalist and fitful “anti-imperialist,” who went on, after the war, to become a US Congressional employee.) In outlets like BreakThrough News, Liberation News, and Black Agenda Report, they cheered for Abiy and Isaias’ victory over “TPLF” (Tigray); ignored or downplayed civilian death tolls; implied that genocide claims were concocted by the CIA/State Department; trotted out romantic, often contradictory tropes of Ethiopia’s anti-imperial history, and that of its Eritrean partner, while ignoring their own fraught history together.
So that's claiming that the PSL has called the TPLF terrorists during the genocide. They do mention the 2012 report:
In August 2012, Eugene Puryear, a Central Committee member of the PSL, published an opinion piece in the Party organ, Liberation News, where he explains the revolutionary importance of the Derg, and denounces the imperial aims of its opponents (”The Legacy of Meles Zenawi: Good for Imperialism, Bad for Ethiopia ”).
...
Then, as now, Puryear laid the blame on TPLF for Ethiopia’s sorrows since ’74.
So now PSL (allegedly) has always been strictly anti-TPLF. Reading the linked article confirms it.
Throughout his career, Zenawi’s political enterprises always lined up neatly with the interests of Western imperialism. None of his political facelifts furthered the good of the Ethiopian people.
I'd have to find Puryear's exact modern statements on the TPLF, but if he was saying they're western stooges while some neoliberal nobel peace prize winner genocides them then he's got massive brainworms.
Yeah you're getting at why I'm confused too. The PSL has been against the TPLF, or at least certain members have criticized them and Zenawi, but I don't see how that connects to denying the Tigray genocide of the 2020s. The article summarizes Puryear's statements like this:
Gliding past all this background, Puryear insinuates that TPLF arose, not from decades of Tigrayan struggle, or from a decade-plus of theorization, by Ethiopians, of their own country’s characteristics; but as a recent and erroneous byproduct of the ‘pro-socialist’ revolution of ’74, led by blameless army officials. This way, he can make a few idealistic students, naive enough to take Lenin serious about self-determination, into the sole efficient cause of a nationwide movement. Not the people themselves — the wrong-headed leadership.
I have no idea how wrong or right that is since I'm not very knowledgeable about Ethiopian history but I didn't see anything in the Anarchist Library article that denies or supports Tigray genocide. Just that Eugene Puryear doubts the efficacy and intentions of the TPLF. Furthermore Puryear said this in 2012, whereas the Tigray genocide is regarded as occurring years later, starting in 2020. It seems like such a stretch to go from criticizing a party to denying genocide.
Not like that's ever stopped anti-communists from lying before
I actually went to the article mentioned in the infographic. The author has examples of people that had (or still have?) bad opinions about Tigray. I think it's basically from historical commie infighting.The author goes into a lot of detail, but isn't at all convincing that the party supported the ethiopian government.
Also, they include the trope of "If you protest about Palestine so much, why aren't you protesting THIS?! huh?" So fuck that article.
I read into that article and the 2012 article from Puryear that they linked. Puryear was always anti-TPLF to trostskyite levels.
"PSL is a high control group with an ineffective strategy"
Good thing you put it in quotes to indicate that someone said it; as we all know, that which has been said is true.
From the links, it's from an anonymous writer at a two-year-old DSA substack.
On an unrelated note, choosing the Other Mother from Coraline as your pfp sure screams "trustworthy"
Can't a man have hobbies? Can't a man have mommy issues on main?
Truly disturbing
These are all good points to join psl
denies genocide -> "Xinjiang"
Deeply unserious
I too hate the Playstation 50
for the most part
but I have to say the Steven Universe render of Fred from Scooby Doo with a Molotov cocktail seems like it has good emoji potential:
That’s my boy onion
I know I am going to look like that tanky I am but critical support of current socialist movements is important. (key word critical, not just gulping all their shit as law)
We do need to be critical of our organizations, but that's not what this is. This is using radlib bufoonery to scare would-be comrades away. There is also the difference between internal criticism within the framework of democratic centralism and external criticism literally saying "this organization is bad for the movement." PSL is not "bad for the movement" (quite the opposite) and none of these are even reasons why it would be. This "infographic" is something a .world lib would make to try to keep their flock from visiting the scary tankie instances.
This isn’t directed at you personally, your comment just animated some thoughts in me.
I think the phrase critical support has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any in the English language. The problem is it wrongly centers ideology instead of the material obstacles to the worker’s revolution.
What was originally meant by critical support is that the essential question is whether an action or policy materially advances the revolution. And since we live in reality, the subjects enacting those advances will be imperfect; they will be fraught with contradictions. The critical part means to critically consider the whole dynamic before deciding on a policy. But the western liberal, habitually adopting the colonizer’s penchant to correct “primitive” cultures, jumps at the opportunity to publicly criticize, in an ultraleftist manner, the ideology of those who they (now reluctantly) support.
The point isn’t to criticize while supporting, but to criticize internally as a means of evaluating policies.
Critical support can mean supporting e.g. social-democratic organizations if, after careful analysis of the entire situation, they further the revolution.
For much of the global south, the primary contradiction is not the wage relation. The primary contradiction is imperialism. Hence many socialist revolutions say little about capital, and much more about national sovereignty. But if one appraises those movements on the basis of Capital Volume 1, one might conclude that they are too conciliatory toward capital and too nationalistic. That would be a wrong application of critical support.
This is pure graphic design, unhampered by human desires or centuries of knowledge
nice post fedboy
let me be clear it's directed at the person who made this slop
Thank you, I'm putting in the work and hopefully I'll get promoted to Senior Spook
ah, fascist agitprop targeted at anarkiddies and other western chauvinist "leftists," my favorite.
stay mad, losers
maybe after you organize your shoe rack you can start to organize the working class
Why are the AI generated rebecca sugar characters mad at the PSL?
AI generated rebecca sugar characters
They’re not real and they can’t hurt me
Lol the only good protests I've ever attended were organized by PSL
they always co-opt the ones they organize
It's just busywork debunking this nonsense.
I checked out the linktree link on there and it had some docs about how PSL supports AES and another actually pretty high effort critique from an anonymous substack. That one was actually a good read and had some points about the party not getting very good results for the amount of funding it has, not implementing DemCent correctly, and a few other things. I don't think their criticisms are fully accurate (they say that PSL has been ineffective with its protests and election campaigns, but they are the biggest cadre org in the US which is itself useful) but it's worth reading.
Its basically a bingo board of low effort pendantic Western propoganda, "red-brown alliance" had me rolling my eyes.
Authoritarianism is when no vote blue no matter who
I can't remember ever being being so sure of a (or someone completely influenced by their propaganda ig is possible but the spooky vibes are off the chart imo)
I'm sorry but Onion from SU holding a fucking molotov goes so hard.
We should seriously steal that
Gotta love the corporate art style for your "leftist" left-bashing, whoever made the original
Actually Its steven universe artstyle
PSL co-opting a protest (actually organizing the protest) is bad but this poece of shit co-opting Steven Universe characters for outdated hello fellow kids state department propaganda is actually cool
I liked steven universe tho
Same but it is like a decade old at this point, my bad
More than that. I remember a (very gay) kid in middle school being obsessed with it, and I graduated high school a decade ago.
Edit: okay it may have been freshman year of highschool. And I graduated like 9 years ago. Still.
same :(
Ah, I see
The Tigray thing feels like such a bizarre pull.
I'm no expert on the nuances of Ethiopian politics, but my understanding is that it's less that Ethiopia is genocidimg the Tigray people, but that the legacies of the Ethiopian monarchy, and a botched Socialist experiment has left the country a prisonhouse of nations, that's Perpetually on the brink of balkanizing itself.
Any Ethiopia experts wanna chime in?
idk, all I know about it is whatever Timnit Gebru posts. I don't think I would have heard about it otherwise.
co-opts and demobilizes protests
if the grains of stopping traffic from running over your disorganized liberal mob by some alchemy demobilizes it, i don't think it was a very formidible heap to begin with
The grains of you saying "grains" and "heaps" has become an insurmountable posting heap.
Woop woop
It's the sound of da police
Why does Steven look like Gene from Bob's Burgers?
