I thought it would be fun to go a bit into the genealogy of another of the Marxist parties in the list I mentioned the other day and decided to go into one I'd never heard of before but which got the most votes of any such parties in 2016, the "Party for Socialism and Liberation" which is listed as an overtly communist party. Saying it might be fun but not especially important and being fully confident that ONLY an insider, true-believer in such a play-left-play-party would produce a Wikipedia article about it, I decided to treat articles there as self-reporting.
The article for the Party for Socialism and Liberation starts with its founding.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist party in the United States established in 2004 after a split in the Workers World Party (WWP).
The PSL is running Gloria La Riva and Leonard Peltier in the 2020 election.
My guess is that the reason that they got what is for such a party, enormous vote of 74,392 or (0.05%) of total votes cast in 2016 was due to Peltier being on the ticket, such "parties" will latch onto a celebrity or hero of the left for that purpose, which they might get. The achievement of getting 0.05% of the votes cast in an election counting as an accomplishment in such play-politics. Especially if they get one who is as romantic a figure as Peltier is.
I'll forego looking at the brief history of the party, such as it is, since I'm here concentrating on the genealogical history of it. So I'll go to the Workers World Party from which the PSL broke off from (no doubt bitterly) and which I also had never heard of before doing this exercise. But before making that jump, I'll note that the PSL party article gives the reason for its founding as:
The PSL was formed when the San Francisco branch and several other members left the Workers World Party in June 2004, announcing that "the Workers World Party leadership is no longer capable of fulfilling [the] mission" of building socialism.
Given what I'm about to go into, the idea that it was "no longer capable of fulfilling [the] mission" of "building socialism" rather hilariously takes it as a given that they ever were capable of such a goal and, implying that they, the mighty PSL has taken up the torch that the torch was never much more than a kiddies' party lite-stick that faded out a long time ago, they don't notice. But they do seem to like to play let's pretend in the play left, even outside of the Bay Area. If you think that last analogy was too mean.
Well, they have built a website.
It might be the most important thing here to note exactly what the "socialism" that such play-lefties want to build consists of. The best way to do that is to look at what "socialism" they support being built (or, rather, imposed) in other places.
Its wiki article at the link to the Workers World Party starts out by noting it is a splinter of the party Bernie Sanders' will be slammed as having supported if he is the Democratic nominee, the one I went into here the other day, the Socialist Workers' Party.
The Workers World Party (WWP) is a revolutionary Marxist–Leninist political party in the United States founded in 1959 by a group led by Sam Marcy of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Marcy and his followers split from the SWP in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them their support for Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948, the positive view they held of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong and their defense of the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, all of which the SWP opposed.
The WWP describes itself as a party that has since its founding "supported the struggles of all oppressed peoples".
Well, so long as those "oppressed peoples" weren't in China, the Soviet Union or Hungary (for a start), noting that in just numbers of those murdered by the governments that the Workers World Party, the body count dwarfs that of Hitler and perhaps of all of the Axis power combined - though even if it were a tenth of that total, it would certainly not mark them as places of non-oppression.
It is one of the original sins of the play-left that mass murders, suppression of workers rights, literally the total suppression of all of the Freedoms enumerated in the American Bill of Rights, including those the play-lefties insist are theirs, here in the hell-hole of imperfect American democracy are entirely OK by them if they are done by those who wear one of the labels of Marxism, or communism or, most relevant to my present purposes, socialism. And as long as they aren't the ones having to live under what they advocate those living under Mao or Khrushchev or under the Soviet occupation of Hungary and under its installed puppet government had to live under. The American play-left who whine and cry about the suppression of their First Amendment and other rights while supporting some of the most brutal dictators of the modern period are uniformly hypocritical assholes. But I don't want to get into that in terms that upset the romantic myths* of those dear old commies as seen in the movies right now.*
There is certainly nothing more hypocritical than their alleged support of independent unions in the United States while supporting "socialist" regimes which were uniform in their suppression of real unions that were chosen by and representative of workers.
Oh, yeah, they've got a website, too and in the election of 2016 their candidate got 4,314 votes which rounds up to 0% in the total insignificance of their play-party in which Monica Moorehead was their presidential candidate. Her wiki post starts out by saying it all.
Monica Gail Moorehead (born 1952) is an American retired teacher, activist, and perennial candidate for the presidential nomination of the Workers World Party (WWP).
She is, actually, more relevant to my purpose because of what it shows about the quality of Bernie Sanders' biggest name celebrity endorser.
In an open letter (entitled "Blame Monica!"), posted on his website shortly after the U.S. presidential election of 2000, filmmaker and activist Michael Moore sarcastically argued that Moorehead, not supporters of Ralph Nader like himself, were responsible for the election of George W. Bush.
Which leads me to say, again, that Michael Moore is someone I don't need to hear another word from for so long as both of us have life in us. The guy is a loudmouth asshole and an idiot.
I will leave it with this short version of things because, as I said, to trace these "third parties" fully is inevitably an incredibly futile listing of dozens and scores of such "third parties" and factions (just about every faction generating a party or ending one) leading back well into the 19th century and apart from the old Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, they are characterized by one thing more than just their complete hypocrisy and treacherousness,
THEY HAVE NEVER WON ELECTIONS OR HAD OFFICE HOLDERS.**
I'd say in that, The People have spoken. They have rejected their leadership, they have rejected their platforms, they don't want to join their imaginary revolutions.
* The history of the Progressive Party and its various contributing progenitors and descendants is interesting too, but this is already longer than I'd intended when I started the exercise. I'm not sure that the communist support Henry Wallace got was exactly welcomed by him, it certainly didn't get the progressives anywhere.
** One exception to that is the American Labor Party which I believe was overtly not Marxist, though I'd have to fact check that. It was formed in a fracturing of the pathetic remnant of the Debs Socialists in a period when they were overtaken by Marxists though that history, too, was baroque and opaque and would fill a large number of posts of this length, too.
Needless to say, the best the old Socialists could do after the Communists split it and its officeholders lost office or died was things like acting as spoilers to throw elections to Republicans, they were trying to do that well into the FDR period. I would love to ask those who hold to that strategy for the "left" what they imagine the world would have been like if FDR had lost in 1936 or Truman had in 1948. These people have always been a bunch of friggin' assholes. Don't believe their PR without fact checking it. NEVER BELIEVE THE HOLLYWOOD VERSION OF IT, the movies are a lie factory.
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