Victims testimony in the link. Left the Party a few months ago but refrained from posting about it out of “discipline/not wanting to hurt the movement” on hexbear dot net but this shit is simply beyond the pale. anyone thinking about joining a socialist org deserves to know about this horrific garbage.
Obviously there’s no quick fix to patriarchy orremoved culture but the rotten, misogynistic, apologist, opportunist Becker clique has got to go if this org is going to be anything more than a hotbed of abuse and exploitation. I genuinely loved and respected my rank and file comrades, this shit makes my blood boil.
I absolutely don’t see it as a cult, and my experience locally does not match that comparison. Certain levels of leadership do tend to hammer you into compliance, but it’s absolutely not universal. I’d say these tendencies are fighting with tendencies of a healthier democratic centralist perspective, it’s just that the healthier side normally is on the back-foot. I absolutely hope for the sake of the future of the USian left and its ability to help tear down the empire that the better tendency wins out given the obvious self-destructive effects this has
I honestly do see the comparison of the party as a cult as a weak dismissal of what it really is and what it really can be, which is far more complicated in reality. I think calling it a cult is just an easy way to dismiss the potential that exists with a tired anti-communist comparison
Edit: Also with my experience of the party being dismissed as a cult, it also means that being able to separate the genuine errors from the fictional appearance that this label creates just hurts the people who’re actually abused. Painting it as a cult just paints every member as an abuser or stupid from the get go, which I can not explain enough how wrong that is. Then, when somebody is actually abused, they’re already disowned by those who simply see it as a cult. It’s an ultra-left failure to see it as such, whereas a right wing failure would be seeing the party as infallible. Well meaning cadre who have their trust and safety abused are stuck in the middle, with neither ideological side being correct.
I’m willing to give PSL a fair shot of clearing the cult allegations. For that to happen though they should be way more professional than what is described in this article.
Are there any ways to report misconduct from other members to a responsible safety officer of any kind within the organization?
Are there currently any ways to hold the PSL leadership accountable for this transgression and for potential future transgressions?
Is Eugene and those who covered this up actually going to be punished for this or are members expected to move on?
A well designed structure works for exactly this - the National Disciplanary Council. The victim of the headline SA played a part in designing it and comrades I know were personally involved and/or observed cases she adjudicated successfully through it. But it looks like that system is a) obscured by lower level leaders who don’t want it messing with their personal objectives, based on what @CutieBootieTootie@hexbear.net shared and b) too personally interwoven with the Central Committee to effectively police them. On paper, it has the total power to do so and anyone has a direct link to them to go around whatever leadership might want to stop them. In practice, it often doesn’t work that way. The NDC could fix this entire thing right now by simply removing all the involved members of the Central Committee, who must submit to its orders. But they are friends who work together every day.
Really depends who you ask. If the Party doesn’t resolve this well, with the necessary removals, disciplinary action, leadership changes, and structural adjustments, it’s going to bleed members rapidly. There’s going to be an internal struggle. Which fucking SUCKS! We have real valuable work to do all day every day.
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I’m not in the PSL or even an org, so definitely take my input with a grain of salt, but the post linked in the OP makes it sound like the NDC is not set up to handle these situations well besides PR.
This is at odds with the work I’ve seen it do, including by Marissa herself. I have seen detailed reports in the last day of cases she adjudicated as part of the NDC that, by all accounts, were handled thoughtfully, caring for the victim and removing the perpetrator. But I have no sense of the frequency of those cases, how often it got brought in, etc. What I’m saying was effective is the structure as designed. But, like any structure, it’s subject to the political and personal objectives of the people who wield formal and informal influence over it. The NDC is a good start and should be built upon. But its members should not be part of the Central Committee, which they all or mostly are.
Now, I can’t repudiate Marissa’s own repudiation of the NDC. But to my eyes, given the information I’ve seen, these are failures of the NDC being composed of people who have personal reasons not to rule meaningfully against the Central Committee. My branch is advancing a set of reforms to the NDC (among many other things) in response to this issue. Either way, we come back to what @Chana@hexbear.net correctly raised: TPOASIWID. At certain times in certain cases, the NDC’s purpose was to protect victims and punish victimizers. At others, it was to keep things quiet and moving smoothly as planned.
All of this is a manifestation of the biggest weakness of democratic centralism, which is the tendency towards self-serving bureaucratization and leadership ossification. Sometimes you gotta do like Mao.
i’ll admit i’m not currently optimistic about reforming PSL from within (which is why i quit), but i will say that barring CC members from being on the NDC would be a good start. i hope your branch’s proposal is given the attention it deserves, comrade.
I’m curious - if some big meaningful reforms and leadership changes happened, would you rejoin?
i’d be open to it, yeah (and i’ll note that i was/am pretty small fry, so not sure if my personal two cents matters that much, but i’ll answer for whatever it’s worth). I think I’d need to see and also have assurances from trusted comrades/friends i’m still in touch with about:
long
-A complete shake up of upper leadership. Everyone involved in this SA case should
at the very leastbecompletely stripped of leadership positions, if notexpelled/pressured to step down from the Party, PSL needs to completely move past the entirely toxic Beckers and any longtime orbiters who came up with them.-An expansion of the NDC and reforms to ensure operational autonomy of this body and reforms to remove conflicts of interest (which you and your comrades seem to be pushing in your proposal, that’s great).
-Expanded political education on SV and misogyny and expanded processes for interventions at varying levels of grievance leveled against members and for varying levels of harms done. Creation of these interventions should be spearheaded by comrades from identities most susceptible to these forms of oppression/harm and should be undertaken without upper leadership bodies breathing down these members’ necks. (Re: political education, a required candidacy class on r*pe culture could be a good start, but political education should be active and ongoing).
After the big fracture around the split, I’d heard about a few instances of harmful behavior in my own branch which didn’t rise to the severity of what Eugene did, but deserved some measure of formalized discipline & victim care, and (if possible) a process of restoration/repair/penance/education (and failing that, expulsion of the members in question who committed the behavior). But instead - if rumors are to be believed - these smaller instances of harm were basically handled with minimization, victim blaming, and ass covering (with occasional “trust us, bro” hand waves that the behavior of the comrades in question were improving).
It didn’t really feel like we had a process for this kind of harm at all (telling new comrades about the NDC certainly wasn’t a standard part of onboarding from what I could tell). At most some comrades were told that personal romantic relationships were kinda sorta discouraged but kinda sorta not really formally discouraged between comrades and that was the extent of it (and the tacit conflating of consensual relationships with SV is problematic in itself, but that’s another kettle of fish).
Outside the very serious problem of the Party’s handling of SV, I’d also just need to see expansions of genuine internal democracy across the board. The “vigorous internal debate/disagreement” portion of demcent just isn’t really there, at least not in the branch I left. Hours and hours of ground work rank-and-file had done and community connections rank-and-file had made were regularly swept away by Party priorities handed down by a completely obscured central leadership very regularly (initiatives and community connections that had already been approved by the appropriate local leadership bodies).
And these weren’t 10/7 level geopolitical crises we were forced to pivot around, it was shit like building a fundraising list or taking a two day bus trip that most comrades couldn’t even realistically commit to in order to march on a NATO meeting barely anyone knew was happening. that’s what i meant about feeling like a low-value employee (but that’s getting a bit more into the critiques that arose from the Walter Smolarek thing, and i don’t want to distract from the extremely severe matter on hand).
I definitely don’t want to stay out of the struggle forever, but if I felt out joining again I’d take the process slowly. I don’t really know where else I would go at the current historical juncture, anyway, since DSA and PSL are the only US socialist orgs I think have anything resembling real momentum. i’ve come around to believing there’s real/important work to do in the former, but i don’t think i have the temperament to do any kind of labor to get democrats elected.
I’d lie if I didn’t admit that hearing my national liaison be called a lower level leader is gratifying at least
Incredibly objectives based guy, there was a lot to respect about him and he helped me really get my swing in as valuable cadre for the first time in my life, but he still didn’t really care about how these things affected me, I guess. At the last congress-not-congress party wide meeting this year my branch was lauded as having developed extremely rapidly, so, whatever. He’s kind of just been rewarded.
Well maybe that’s exactly the problem, then. By what I can see (WHICH I AM CERTAIN IS A LIMITED PERSPECTIVE), the NDC has done good work and handled cases like this effectively between rank-and-file cadre when they’re brought in. But they start to think about ‘protecting the party’ the closer it gets to them.
My national liaison did tell me that this course of action was chosen after talking with his higher level representative (I still don’t really know how it works inside the NOD). Out of respect for that comrade on the off chance my liaison gave them poor information and decided to follow through with a poor result I won’t name them on this very public and visible forum, but if it somehow becomes relevant to the internal grassroots efforts that you’ve said are happening internally as a result of this, you can DM me and we can exchange Signal contacts. Given my prior membership on the national council we may already have each other’s contacts.
For context, I don’t know what’s happening internally as I’m on an LoA for all the circumstances I’ve described. I’ve also been incredibly vocal with the current new batch of leadership about the issues I faced and where I think those tendencies arose from and how they need to be challenged or we need to find a new way forward, so I’m not exactly privy to all the goings on internally even though I remain good friends with many, many members
Honestly, I can’t answer that, but I think now is the make-or-break moment where that’s found whether to be true or not. This will either be a case of the cadre who have their shit together, being able to wrestle control of the party from this clique and institute these exact necessary protocols to ensure that things like this absolutely do not ever occur again, or those valuable cadre will instead leave and either exit organizing altogether (bad) or form their own fractures (better) which hopefully are able to federate and reform into an actually serious party (best case).
If that simply doesn’t happen, then the party’s probably dead in the water with, I think, normal people probably just absolutely horrified and no excuse really being able to be made. This will probably destroy all kinds of coalitions even if it’s able to be managed, and the only people left behind will be the quote-unquote true believers. Which would probably make it genuinely what one would call a cult, yeah. Like the RCA.
That’s my view, as of right now. Now is the make or break moment, the PSL split from the WWP because leadership was the barrier, and now is either the time to reform the PSL or initiate a new movement
Well I wish you luck, comrade.