SAlt are so fucking cringe. How can any org be taken seriously when it decides to pick up on online fights?
This has big vibes of PCUSA making statements about leftbook or the anarchists I've met in-person who've come up to us and asking, "are you the tankie party?"
Besides towing the state department line like Trots usually do, they don't seem to do much. Granted they had a pretty good campaign in getting Sawant into the Seattle city council, but that seems to be their biggest claim. I don't really see them doing much in my city or hear about them nationwide. I know of a few other parties other than mine that have galvanized around both the pandemic and BLM, but SAlt is kinda absent.
This particular org (SAlt Australia) is the dominant university student socialist org. Their paper, red flag, has some good articles on current events sometimes. Where they fall apart is in their organising structure and praxis. The party funnels large sums of money from its members into preserving the positions of a select few central members who operate as an isolated self governing clique internally and externally in student politics. They do not seek to make strategic alliances with other left wing groups and do not adapt their org's objectives to the attitude of the masses.
This leads to SAlt doing self destructive things like turning up uninvited to indigenous-led rallies to sell newspapers despite organisers asking them not to. It leads them to get their white members to organise black lives matter protests, then put the onus on indigenous & black people to go through them to have a say on the day. And of course, it causes them to waste time on unproductive endeavours like organising mass events basically to troll Marxist Leninists.
They're definitely active and politically engaged, but they are a shining example of the dangers of ignoring democratic centralism and the mass line