The most important thing to know about the PSL is that there’s a ton of misinformation and disinformation online from various kinds of sources. Find out for yourself what they believe and how they work by reading their websites and meeting them in real life. You can never trust what you hear online about communists.
I’m not Russian and don’t see a need to love or hate someone like Putin. It’s only important to have a material analysis of his decisions and the world situations he’s relevant to. Of course he has made made good decisions and bad decisions, and I think he’s kind of interesting because the social conditions of Russia are globally a bit unique right now, but that’s pretty much as far as my feelings on him as a person go.
This is often an issue of how you communicate, and learning to communicate effectively with the working class is an important skill to develop (and can be difficult). Saying things that are so far ahead of where they are that they can’t understand is ineffective. Starting from points of unity and building trust are two of the most important things you can do, and persuading them to completely change their position happens over several conversations, not one. People don’t change their minds because you can prove you’re more right than they are; they change their minds because their lived experience of capitalist contradictions pushed them to look for alternative explanations, and you need to be a trusted person ready to guide them to the next step when they’re ready.
I have! It’s not extensive, but it’s a good overview of foundational educational concepts all Marxist-Leninists should know that you can build from. It’s pretty short and accessible. It definitely shouldn’t be the only thing you read on the topic, but I do recommend it.
I also find it really useful for guiding me in teaching these concepts to other organizers.
I think this just happens when they see problems with the current system (a natural consequence of living in capitalist society) but still dogmatically support it. Anarchism and “non-communist leftism” and “progressive” liberalism are useful to the capitalist state because they allow people to question and oppose what’s happening in our society but still come to the conclusion that almost nothing can be done. It’s not a big leap for people to say that imperialism is bad or that people’s basic needs should be met, but it takes a lot for masses of people to turn against ruling class ideology, so it’s expected that these kinds of leftist/liberal identities would be common in a capitalist society.
When I hear his name, I think about how his influence turned my friend from an actual communist into a vaguely left anarchist (an “anarcho-syndicalist” like Chomsky, which in my opinion is a functionally meaningless term in our social context) who believes state department propaganda and opposes any successful model for socialism to the point that they just support liberalism. Intellectuals like him that support the status quo (even if Chomsky might believe he doesn’t) divert potentially revolutionary energy away from effective action and teach people seeking information and hope after finding class consciousness that individual action is the best they can do.
Ultra-leftism can take different forms. Ultra-leftists don’t correctly analyze and understand social conditions, so they criticize socialist countries for not already having progressed further toward communism (and often actively oppose them for this reason), and they criticize socialists for speaking to the people in the context of their own social conditions instead of pretending the people are ahead of where they are. They’ll say things like that you’re not a real socialist if you’re not physically fighting agents of the capitalist state or only speaking about core issues like class (instead of what the people care about). They’re often fixated on particular revolutionary leaders or particular kinds of direct action instead of real-life organizing based a serious and informed analysis of current social conditions.
Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder by Lenin is great but may take some extra time and effort and additional resources to understand if you’re new to studying topics like this or unfamiliar with Lenin’s history. “Infantile” isn’t an insult here but a clear statement about how such ideas are based in undeveloped thinking.