I’m going to start this with the heads up that I am a Marxist. I’ve seen a lot of sectarian complaints about FRSO on the internet but those always fall so flat to me.

I’m looking to hear other organizers experiences with FRSO in their city. I don’t mean anything against them on a national scale but in my local city they are ruining the organizing scene and I’ve heard they’re doing similar things across my state. So I was curious if they operate in the same way other places.

From my experience with them, as an org, they don’t value decolonization and think that will happen after the proletariat revolution. But what this causes is a lot of white faces that speak over marginalized peoples to ignore their plights and turn to class reductionism. This has pushed a lot of BIPOC people away from organizers at all as FRSO is one of the loudest orgs in our region.

They’ve also had members join all local grassroots groups to either co-opt or if they were unable to co-opt they create a parallel org. For example they sent members to our tenant union meetings, when they learned it was non hierarchical they made a separate “socialists for tenants rights” group that did a lot of the same advocacy we’ve been doing for years, just louder and wrong on a lot of information about rights.

They also have issues with any action they put together being a 3-4 hour rally of speeches all of which feel like lecturing the people about problems they know they’re facing. Which they then put marginalized speakers at the end of their rallies so the marginalized people have to wait until the end to show solidarity to their people.

Idk, I’m ranting but I could go on for a long time. They do a lot of work in my city to reduce revolutionary momentum (whether on purpose or by accident doesn’t matter) and I’m just curious if that’s just the local chapters messing up or if they just are bad for the movement as a whole organization. And what has worked in your cities to kind of prevent their takeover?

Here’s a good essay about some of their failures.

https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2025-01-03-the-settler-j-sykes-and-the-frso/