You envision a party as a massive coalition akin to the Bolshevisks in 1915.

You do realize that it started decades before then with a handful of people meeting in someone’s basement, local library, or a park, and discussing ways as to how they could support their local community while building socialist awareness and class consciousness, right? In a country so hopeless that Lenin himself stated that he never even considered a revolution being possible.

Get your hands out from under your butt and do something, anything, instead of whining about how horrible and pointless doing anything is.

I’m sure the homeless man you give a bowl of food to won’t think the actions you take with a local party were useless. I’m sure the poor tenet who you showed up to defend from eviction wouldn’t think the same as you now.

Join the PSL preferably, but if they don’t exist near you, join literally any group near you dedicated to bringing positive social change from a Marxist perspective.

If not, then start your own branch of a party, or set up a club to do community projects with. Even if the only people who bothered to show up were you, an old man, and two skater anarchists. Because I promise you that if you keep building, and avoiding doomer mindsets. Then your group won’t stay that small for long.

Every little bit helps.

The Party will not emerge fully formed from some Great Man's mind on day one. The Party must be built, and by all of us.

No. You should join a party even if they are imperfect.

There are a couple persistent internal problems that communist parties face in the US.

One is that people are in the habit of fragmenting over minor differences in ideology; meanwhile, the two main capitalist parties are giant tents, not tethered to any specific political position, evolving but always drawing support from capitalists and effortlessly maintaining a funding base and a dominance in democratic organs.

Another is that after a century of existing alongside state intelligence, it's fairly clear that the intelligence services have been running wide circles around the communist parties, and at this point the communist parties have settled in to a form of being that is benign to the American system. This may be through ranks being infiltrated and leadership being compromised, or through hegemonic liberal ideology that partisans accept to the point where their main activities are peaceful^TM^ protests and electoral campaigns.

Without any desire to sound particularly sectarian, I would say that there is a strong cult vibe to American communist parties. They are largely opaque and insular, and tend to sound dogmatic more often than not.

It could be that all of these problems are closely linked. In any case, for any successful proletarian movement in this country, there needs to be a deep change in strategy that is able to compose diverse political forces, maintain a strong working-class appeal by embedding itself into relevant and winnable struggles, and frustrate all attempts by state and reactionary forces to decapitate or pacify it.

Just join the PSL

No. This amounts to throwing your hands in the air and giving up. Work needs to be put in to build something of value. And not all of them are revisionist or whatever. PSL and FRSO are both good options.

No. Join a party wherever you can, as long as they are communists or have large-ish socialist caucuses on them. Connect with communists even if they are not your type for the sake of making connections and seeing the status of the movement for yourself.