>>728638This isn't necessarily true. An org that's just a drinking club does about the same as shitposting on the internet, and an org that's basically a cult has
negative value. Doing nothing is not common sense, but doing stupid things which do not work is common foolishness.
>>728752I would carve the DSA off from most other orgs. The DSA have done plenty - not really to advance communism, sure, but they're a functioning organization adjacent to the Democratic party. You don't have to praise that in the sense of thinking it's good, but if you're looking at "is this org totally pointless" you have to be fair and go: no, it just has a point that I don't like.
The one good thing about electoralism is that it imposes an external standard by which an org can be judged:
can you actually get someone elected, or at least put in a good enough showing that the people running for office have to pay attention? One can then analyze organizational effectiveness by comparing aims and results. The DSA has a handful of people and has a reason to exist, the Communist Party of Britain on the other hand underperforms joke parties, regional microparties, individual schizophrenics wasting £500 on a parliamentary run, etc, etc…
(You may say "the proletariat has no need for bourgeois electoralism!", that may even be true, but the proletariat has even less need of orgs that can't even
do electoralism when they try, and which take no serious account of their failure when they fail. The RSDLP, after all,
could get people elected when it wanted to.)