Socialist Action's Fund Raising Appeal

Reproduced from Socialist Action, December 31, 2018

My friends over at Socialist Action (SA) are very coy about their membership, and so I grab at any opportunity to learn something about them. Fortunately for me a recently posted fund-raising appeal included this informative photo. It's not a random sample, but it will have to do.

The demographics are much younger than I expected. Surely a similar pic from the Socialist Workers Party would feature baby boomers. SA, at least, can collect enough millennials together in one place to make a group portrait. That is an achievement--though I suppose with rising socialist stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps it shouldn't be all that surprising.

The group's agenda is nothing if not ambitious: they want to cool the planet, free Mumia, liberate women, organize hotel workers, and tear down the walls at America's southern border.

Not to mention:

Simultaneously, we have deepened our participation in the campaign to build an international party along revolutionary Leninist lines, collaborating in the Platform for a Revolutionary International with our comrades abroad. Together with our European co-thinkers, Socialist Action delegates spoke on behalf of the Platform at the 17th World Congress of the Fourth International.

The banner tells us nothing about any of those efforts--instead it strikes me as ultraleft. Back in the day when I was a Trotskyist we avoided public slogans that made us seem out of touch with reality. Apparently these young comrades are not as familiar with the Transitional Program as we supposedly were. This is the kind of banner that the Workers League or the Progressive Labor Party might have unfurled.

But back to demographics--the picture includes six men and three women. All are white but for one of the women, who looks to me like she might be South Asian. This pretty much is the way I remember the old YSA--male by a ratio of 2 to 1. And white (disproportionately Jewish) with a few "people of color" mixed in.

Something else hasn't changed, either: these comrades are dressed just as shabbily as we were back in the 1970s. While I think our hair was longer, and perhaps there were more beads, I don't think there'd be much to distinguish us versus them in a photograph. I'm embarrassed to think about it now. I'd have been so much more successful in life if I'd paid just a little bit of attention to my appearance.

It appears that only the lady on the left has any self-esteem at all. The two gentlemen on the right look like losers. The remainder mostly hide behind the banner, but they don't seem any more fashionable than the others--though perhaps the man in the middle, with the careful coiffure, is an exception.

Poor grooming doesn't make you look proletarian. No--it just makes you look incompetent. Compare our comrades with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is nothing if not fashionable. Whose party would you rather join?

Socialist Action, like all socialists, expounds at great length about how badly off the working class is. We're under constant attack, our standard of living is going down, the ruling class is perpetually trying to find way to make us poorer, the environment is dirtier than ever, and we're beset with myriad capitalist ills such as racism, war, and transphobia.

So no wonder they chose a desolate bit of commercial landscape for the photo-op: cracked pavement in a parking lot, bare trees, and is that snow in the background? In the distance I spy what might be a church--that very symbol of false consciousness. The store behind them looks like a supermarket--a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables from around the world available to average people in a working-class neighborhood at cheap prices--which to socialists is nothing more than evidence of environmental destruction.

Sadly, the careful framing includes one little detail that betrays the constant litany of doom and gloom. You can see it clearly--it says "24 Hours." Why those conniving capitalists! In their efforts to impoverish us all, they can't help but keep their store open 24/7. Just so that comrades--after an arduous branch meeting--can drop by and pick up some snacks or a six-pack on their way home.

In Cuba and Venezuela they've done away with such extravagances--there stores are open for twelve hours per week, assuming they have anything to sell. And if they really do have something in stock the line outside goes around the block. Now that's the revolutionary spirit our comrades think is good for us all.

I think my friends have told us more about themselves than they intended.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect on "Radical Professors"
• Faction Fight!
• 63rd & Halsted