The Eye is Blind That Will Not See
theyeisblind.substack.com
By Marissa Sanchez

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.

  • Sleepless One@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    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.

    The PSL learned in 2020, both from my case and another sexual assault allegation, that it needed better protections, not real protections against assault, but PR defenses for the organization. That was when the PSL established the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC). I was asked to be part of its creation, just two months after my assault, when I was actively spiraling.

    From the beginning, the NDC was a performance. It was guided by Ben, with three women of color there to legitimize it with our identities and our experiences with sexual violence.

    The NDC was sufficient as long as it existed conceptually enough to be pointed to. No process was ever concretely developed or implemented. Certainly there was no clear process ever distributed to the membership or local leaders, no process that members know to follow. I truly challenge any member to cite evidence otherwise. In reality, allegations of misconduct continued to be dealt with through loose processes, typically handled by women who would call themselves members of the nonexistent “NDC,” operating as intermediaries for Ben or Brian.

    I looked back and found the draft document we developed, in January 2021, which never became a real thing. What it outlines is far from a set of trauma-informed practices. It’s a set of protocols for damage control. It’s irrelevant anyway. Real processes for the NDC were never actually researched or developed beyond the one draft document. The point was that there was a document that carried the names of three women, including mine, which allowed the Party to say, “Women built our process, women who themselves experienced sexual violence, women of color. Question that and you question them.”

    • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • PowerLurker [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        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.

          • PowerLurker [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
            5·
            1 day ago

            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 least be completely stripped of leadership positions, if not expelled/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.