Comments by Sam King

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is now the strongest revolutionary Marxist organisation in the United States. It began growing rapidly in 2016 in wake of Bernie Sander’s popular but failed bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination as a socialist candidate – a campaign the PSL astutely related to, giving both critical support to Sanders and running their own Presidential campaign.

Now, in the wake of the party’s much higher profile recent presidential campaign – Claudia-Karina 2024 – the party has received over 15,000 online membership applications in just 5 months and registered a significant growth in the number of new party members. The PSL, broadly speaking, models itself on the Leninist conception of revolutionary party organising, which includes a relatively strict criteria for who can and cannot join.

The party was founded in 2004 by a small group of long term socialist leaders. In the interview re-published above, Becker numbers the founding core of the party as “less than ten” people. For the first decade of its existence the PSL was much more isolated than today, with just a few hundred members – not thousands. However, Becker outlines how that period was critical. The higher profile and larger scale of the party today would not have been possible without the serious and determined, if sometimes less than glamorous, work carried out in the early years to lay sturdy foundations. PSL members favour the metaphor, “build the ship before the storm.”    

Becker explains the thinking behind the PSL project in its initial stages. While the core group of leaders was small, they were a hardened and experienced cadre – veterans and leaders of key social movements and campaigns over several decades. Becker himself was a 1960s young socialist. In the early 2000s, prior to the PSL’s founding in 2004, the US left had to contend with a sharp turn to the right in US bourgeois politics which, during the George W Bush presidency, first invaded Afghanistan (2001) and then Iraq (2003). That so-called “War on Terror” also involved severe attacks on civil liberties and free speech in the United States, especially against Muslims, South Asians and others. There are obviously strong parallels to today where severe attacks on dissent inside the US buttress Trump and Netanyahu’s escalation of genocidal attacks on the Palestinians.

Becker and his co-thinkers assessed that the US left – as it then existed – was not capable of responding to that round of escalation in a manner that would be at all adequate. They did not launch a new, tiny, weak, cashless, revolutionary party for love of isolation or love of overwork, but on the basis of a sobering assessment objective and subjective political situation and their own determination to take seriously their revolutionary duties.

PSL leaders, including Becker became key organisers of the important fightback against Bush’s “War on Terror”. Becker tells the story of how the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) was able to organise some huge demonstrations – first against the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Today the party plays a crucial leadership role in the Palestine Solidarity struggle. This is in sharp contrast to the current situation in Australia where no revolutionary party is providing the leadership necessary for the Australian section of the global Palestine solidarity campaign to start to fulfill our responsibilities – to apply serious pressure on the Australian government to break ties with Israel.

Becker argues that taking a principled anti-imperialist stance in the 2000s allowed the PSL to begin moving beyond the confines of the then existing left. While he and other historical leaders are old, the people they have been recruiting are overwhelmingly young, and also multiracial. 

The rapid growth of the PSL has occurred alongside the rapid decline of the tendency which, until quite recently, was the largest single current on the US far left. The US International Socialist Organisation (ISO) took a conference decision to dissolve itself amid an internal crisis in 2019. Before its implosion, the ISO was the closest international co-thinker of the Australian group Socialist Alternative. Both originate from the same international tendency and shared key political positions such as hostility or indifference to Global South revolutions like Cuba or Venezuela. The ISO was even earlier than Socialist Alternative in declaring China to be an “imperialist” country. They did so even in the context of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” and the accelerating US war drive against China. In the heyday of the ISO the US far left scene had some strong parallels to Australia today.

For these reasons, the remarkable turn-around and the PSL’s increasing profile and strength represents a fundamental change in the political landscape in the US. For the first time in decades the US far left is now led by a political formation with anti-imperialist positions in the Leninist sense.

This is a profoundly positive development. The US is the centre of world imperialism and world capitalism. As Becker points out there can be no socialist future without revolution in the US. In the interview, he warns against the dangers of putting too much hope in geo-political developments such as emerging multi-polarity or the role of the BRICS nations’ foreign or trade policies. There is no getting around it: the US working class must be organised to take power if humanity is to have a future. That is the burden of historical responsibility that the PSL is facing head on. Their hard fought successes among the US working class, though still very modest, are beginning to demonstrate, once again, the revolutionary potential of that gigantic and powerful class.

Yet the US working class will not win unless there is a rising tide of popular and anti-imperialist struggles elsewhere similar to historical examples such as the victorious struggle of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism and the Venezuelan masses achievement in defeating the state power of their own bourgeoisie in 2002. In Australia, just as we can take inspiration from advances in the US, we will also need to make our own advances in order to help boost the morale and confidence of the left and popular struggles in the US and to prepare the way for revolution here. The US comrades also need to be shown they are not alone.

US political trends are of profound importance in Australia. But socialists here can’t just cheer from the sidelines or hope that our besieged North American comrades might deliver. Of course we need to begin to emulate the PSL’s successes – though Becker warns against putting any group on a pedestal.

We also need to be prepared to energetically respond if the PSL is repressed – something very possible in the current climate.

In Red Spark’s view Australian socialists need to give active solidarity to the US movement. The central role of US imperialism and the US working class to global politics means its struggles are critical. Even many important gains or losses for the global movement outside the US will be decided by fights inside it. In 2023 Red Spark (then still under the name Red Ant) argued at the second Red Ant conference:

The growth and strengthening of the Left in the US is crucial for us all. We in Australia must seek to develop the closest possible relations with the Left in the US that is fighting its own ruling class’s imperialist activities.

This is just as true today. We need to link with US comrades in Palestine solidarity organising, in opposing the imperialist war drive on China and to forge close relations and close bonds among fellow revolutionary socialists as we all respond to the challenges thrown at us by the fragile and decaying world capitalist system.

This wide ranging interview with Brian Becker was originally published on Rev Left Radio,  March 19, 2025 as, The Current Political Moment, U.S. Imperial Decline, and Organizing a Revolutionary Vanguard Party.

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https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/psl

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Rz6a5TBj8CaljlmOefxbh