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.
Extremely disappointing to see, and the test of the party will be its ability to handle such a situation effectively. SA is unacceptable.
Every instinct of PSL just being a cult is being vindicated rn. Rules basically saying “dont air out grievances in public or you are a traitor” are catnip to predators. There must be clearly written exceptions to this.
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 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?
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?
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.
Is Eugene and those who covered this up actually going to be punished for this or are members expected to move on?
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.
obscured by lower level leaders who don’t want it messing with their personal objectives, based on what @CutieBootieTootie@hexbear.net shared
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
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.”
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.
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.
That’s basically the rules of democratic centralism, though, and allowing too many exceptions to this leads to the common wrecker behavior we see in other orgs, or division sowed by the feds. Den cent is a proven strategy to work with the Bolsheviks, and the idea is related to the critical support ethos we have on hexbear for places like Iran or Russia. Provide an outward front of unity, deal with problems inside.
On the one hand, it led to horrible things like the Bauman affair, but it also led to them winning socialism for the USSR. It’s a careful line to walk is all I’m saying.
Agreed
Edit: but to be clear, SA and crimes committed against other members needs to be dealt with. Else it becomes rumors that turn into “the secret truth of the PSL”. Part of dealing with things internally is nipping problems in the bud like sexual predators, not sweeping things under the rug.
the cult comparison is fair, in my time there i’d say it more so reproduces the oppression of exploitative/abusive workplaces, but that was from a very rank-and-file vantage (and it’s not an original point that cults and wage labor have more than a few resemblances, e.g. as explored in the tv show Severance).
the closer you get to the central clique, the more cult-like it does seem to become.
It’s not that the org in any broad sense tried to cover it up - it’s that there was a tiny group of maybe 5 people at the very top who knew and hid it from everybody, even most of the Central Committee.
I’ve experienced this on a more local level with the same kind of response to our own Baumann affair from a member of the NOD assigned to my branch. The same tendencies persist outside of this specific circumstances
Did those issues go to the NDC? I’m trying to get an understanding of how they operate at different levels because I have comrades with direct positive experiences with the NDC local-level cases.
I didn’t know the name for it, and I specifically asked for them to intervene, and I was told that they would not. My NOD representative made it very clear that he could decide what he wanted, and I didn’t want to break democratic centralism by reaching out to anyone else. I requested on a call, crying, multiple times for some kind of external oversight and or investigation and told no
Jesus christ, comrade, I’m sorry. You never should’ve had to deal with that and the whole point of the NDC is that it’s supposed to be able to go over literally ANY leadership body and any comrade can directly reach out. Absolute disaster.
Thank you, it means a lot to hear you say that. At the time myself and the other leader were the only ones seen as capable for the job at our level of executive leadership for the branch, and he wanted us to work together. I tried and did so for a month, but finally I had to cancel one day because I truly could not get up. I’d be bed bound until about 4pm normally, moving my computer setup around my bed so I’d be able to get enough work out the door to not lose my job, but one day it was 7pm and I was underlining an event at 8 I hadn’t planned for. I called, sobbing, and said I had to step down. I couldn’t do it anymore. I thought I was weak and stupid, simply not able to better separate our personal and comradely relationship. It was a cudgel this member of the NOD kept wielding over me. It hurt, a lot.
It’s only by stepping away and out of that situation that I was able to rebuild my life, and eventually I came back to handle many logistical matters I’d helped to create and were important for the branch, but after misogynistic attitudes towards me by a member of the new local leadership that stepped up after I said I was stepping down for health reasons, and overhearing him say how slow I worked and while I was literally working in the next room over while he didn’t realize; I was kind of done.
Notably in my experience as well, we had one of our first members of the branch be found to be sexually harassing not just one, but many comrades. I’d found out our NOD person had essentially played the same playbook of cauterizing every man who he’d sexually harassed to the point where none of them realized anybody else had experienced it as well, it was only when I found out and I severely pushed the matter that it went to, not the NDC as far as I could tell, but instead my NOD liaison and members of the NOD who were certainly not women. I don’t recall the specifics of that conversation, but there was a lot of talk about “definitions” (which is important, but it felt ridiculous coming from these guys) until I finally just kept butting in and saying that if we did nothing the local branch wouldn’t survive and also I would not remain. When I needed someone like me, I had nobody who could advocate for me. It’s not because my comrades aren’t wonderful, they are, but I told my NOD Liaison first out of a respect for hierarchy and I was cauterized too.
“The purpose of a thing is what it does” applies to organizational actions as well. While the specifics you say are true, if it’s not the organization then this long-term leadership clique will be removed via organizational revolt in short order. If not, one must accept that actually it is the organization that is doing it.
you are not wrong
it’s the Becker leadership clique who hold outsized undemocratic power in the organization. yes, a more accurate headline would have been “and leadership tried to cover it up” but I was hastily posting something deeply upsetting but also deeply important to spread awareness of in socialist spaces.
for as long as this cabal of corrupt, opportunistic perverts holds the amount of power they do - and until PSL takes seriously building actual structures of internal democracy and accountability around harm - this is the nature of the org, sadly. that’s why my first prescription for fixing it is ousting these people; a necessary though not sufficient precondition.
this isn’t just me shouting from the sidelines of the shitposting mines, either. i quit PSL a few months ago after 2.5 years as a member over something much less severe (but still fucking shitty!) that showed these fundamental failings and contradictions, and some of my dearest friends are still in the Party. its rank-and-file as well as the broader working class deserve better from the orgs that are supposed to be fighting for them and with them.
“Communists must be ready at all times to stand up for the truth, because truth is in the interests of the people; Communists must be ready at all times to correct their mistakes, because mistakes are against the interests of the people.” (Chairman Mao, On Coalition Government)
Baumann affair all over again…
I was just trying to remember what this reminded me of.
He told me that the only people he had told were [Ben’s brother] Brian, Ben’s father, and Karina, Ben’s wife.
Still reading through the blog, and this stood out. I don’t think it’s healthy at all to have some family be the head of the org. Why is Ben’s father and wife privy to private party matters?
Also, what is up with PSL NYC being as shitty as DSA NYC apparently? Did the feds saw that the NYC branch of the BPP was the best branch and decided to run a COIN operation to make sure that every NYC branch of subsequent socialist orgs would be the shittiest branch?
NYC was deliberately chosen as the center for organizing the party, like the party capital. It’s less of a center among many and more like central, its actions tend to reflect national direction.
NYPD has sooo many COIN operations going on i imagine
This cover-up didn’t serve to protect the PSL it only served to protect a perpetrator of sexual violence within the PSL.
honestly everyone responsible should be fucking shot as a traitor and dumped in the nearest forest for the carrion. if we won’t even protect our own from our own what’s the fucking point
I think the PSL has potential (which is why I’m a member), but an org isn’t grown up until it can hold high ranking officials accountable for their behavior. I don’t know anything first-hand about the situation described in this post, but I support holding the guilty parties accountable for their behavior and removing them from positions of influence. The Party has supposedly done a lot of work in recent years to be better at accountability, but considering that the organization includes many American men its going to be a long process. Especially if there’s an American man up there that’s trying to convince himself that he’s a good person because he’s fighting for something important.
I still think building organizations is harder than fixing them tho so I’m gonna keep trying.
Building organizations is usually easier than fixing them if the things that need fixing are deep power structures and there’s no impetus from within them to overhaul. You could spend your entire life trying to reform an organization “from within” and fail simply because those structures would rather maintain themselves than do anything else. The methods and reformability of an organization are what actually happens, not what they say they are. For example, from members of a different org, I learned they would get routinely harassed as individuals for all of their personal decisions and social media posts, by leadership, based on sweeping false declarations by leadership about how Maoist political criticism works and is beneficial. Rather than reform, that org kept all of its same leadership and bad practices because everyone who recognized the issue left rather than spend their time trying to organize against the leading and founding clique in their organization. Time that was already taking up more headspace, energy, and discussion time than actually doing any org programming. Org programming that was itself not particularly deliberated, let alone criticized, as it was introduced by that head clique and criticizing it meant facing personal rebuke in public.
The only thing that isn’t easier when building organizations is actually doing it very well, as it means accounting for a thousand different things. This is why the best builders were already members of orgs that were most of the way there but needed changes. The practices are ingrained and can be reproduced with good modifications.
There’s nuance to it of course!
Agreed, I don’t see Ben and Brian to be indespensible to the work. There are certainly many more qualified comrades that can serve in their same roles.
Its wild that an org as big and structured as PSL still has structural issues that boil down to a lot of the shit from The Tyranny of Structurelessness. (The parts of elite formation and such especially.)
Feels like it’d have to have been intentional at this point, but maybe not. Regardless its a very bad look, disgusting behavior from these men and everyone complicit in the coverup. Sorry, you have to do the hard thing, remove the abusers from positions of power, take the PR hit, but gain in trust overall.
Having someone who signed onto the public statements on the last major PSL scandal now coming out with her own allegations is just above and beyond. Ialready had no huge love or trust for my local chapter but this puts it down in the dumps with national DSA
We know these people insinuate themsves into any organization of any sort. So its no surprise. The question for a political organization is how they treat it.
The link in the post is hardly at all about the initial assault. Its mostly about the subsequent manipulations. The betrayal of the physical act by 1 person vs the betrayal of the organizational act by several people. Its in the context of what came before and after.
In PSL, which is known for insisting members not air disagreements in public, what is the process for this stuff? Knowing as we do that it will certainly occur.
And that agents of the state use SA and IPV to diminish women. Class treachery one way or the other.
“but he does so much! What would we do without him?”
How to decide
- How to save him?
- Is he worth it?
Not every guy who “does a lot” is worth the drama and pain he charges as a fee.
Eventually, I was asked to move to New York City to help plan the 2019 Congress. Once there, I spent every day with Ben and his family. We organized out of his apartment. We cooked and I helped care for his young child. In those years, I was one of only two party staffers.
Well that is weird.
Organizations need offices. You shouldn’t be doing stuff out of someone’s house unless you’re actively on the lam. PSL is big enough to rent some space, or share a union hall.
Its easy for you to say that, but as jack said, it was a long road of development and we did have to start somewhere. We’d used whatever public spaces we could scrounge up for meetings and public events, but sometimes things like equipment and rapid meetings had to be in someone’s home.
I’m aware, I’m just getting the feeling that with this current context there may have been something else at play. My local DSA and PSL almost never met at homes and usually met at a sympathetic business or the IBEW hall.
Maybe in that context, but organizing out of someone’s home is very normal when there’s barely resources to go around and at the start. Their level, though, was national which is kind of ridiculous to still be organizing out of one’s homeTheir level, though, was national which is kind of ridiculous to still be organizing out of one’s home
This is why I’m not giving them much grace (especially since we already know sex pest behavior is a thing with these 3 guys).
If a local can keep things professional, national shouldn’t have a problem. They aren’t literally fighting a guerilla war. They have the ability to acquire a space to organize out of. If it is at someone’s home, the other organizers shouldn’t be doing housework for you either. That just reeks of abuse of power.
Also not trying to wreck or anything, we had to deal with something similar when I was still part of my DSA local during COVID. One of the local chairmen was outed as an abuser and some others helped cover it up for a while. They also wanted to have people (mostly women) in their home. Luckily there was the IBEW hall and a co-op bookstore that hosted most meetings (same ones also hosted PSL and SRA meetings lol).
The party has many offices and spaces these days, but it was a lot smaller and less resourced in 2019.
In 2019 my local PSL met at a Kava bar. This was in a small town in NC. I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t like a bookstore, union hall, or small business that they could organize out of.
Given what we know now this reeks of her being taken advantage of.
Eh, Idk. We meet at people’s houses all the time for small group meetings all the time. There just isn’t enough spaces that are open when the work or meeting is being done, with room, and chairs, and wifi, and close to everyone who wants to meet, and private enough to discuss things. We usually try other places first, but when no place works out, we’ve been lucky enough that someone is nice enough to volunteer their home.
Never move to the compound
something really nightmarish about being told that you cant tell people that someone sexually assaulted you because it would damage the party and harm building socialism
pretty fucking ridiculous take too. if thats how youre going to build it, whats the fucking point? this is a woman that helped take care of your own fucking kid once!
the reality is parties must cleanse themselves of bad actors (whether on purpose, criminal, or negligent) regularly, its just how it works. if they dont do this theyre just a club and not a serious organization
idk about regularly, but having the ability to purge corrupt elements is crucial for any healthy organizations’ long term health. serious organizations can be corrupt for a long time before getting their shit together. look at how much crime and exploitation happened under the CCP before Xi’s faction got control of the situation and started doing their purges and getting a handle on crime and the market economy.
This is why I think any healthy organization does frequent purges/reshuffling or else you get horrid shit like this
Call me a lib, but maybe term limits are good.
, mostly jokingCapital doesn’t have term limits, why should we? It would be an unnecessary concession to remove from power an effective leader that is not causing problems.
Like a lot of lib governance ideas – FOIA comes to mind, as another example – it may be mediocre to bad as applied, but that doesn’t mean it would be a bad idea under different circumstances.
One other reason for term limits is to try and get your leadership to cultivate the next generation. This makes sense even if you have a good leader who you hope to have around for a while.
honestly these periodic breaches are way worse for the movement than making abusers do penance.
our government is choking cuba to death while our biggest left parties are covering pr for predatory leadership its embarassing
That’s Americans for ya. I don’t have high expectations for you lot tbh
the working class is not dumb and will not trust an organization who lies to its own members to lead a revolution
accuses Puryear of the assault and Ben Becker of covering it up.Not another one. Between this and DSA’s endorsement of Platner, it has not been great for the US left recently.
EDIT: As someone in the belly of the beast, what the hell am I supposed to do? Leave and join some other tiny, splitter faction? Go back to DSA? This sucks.
I didn’t think DSA endorsed Platmer?
they “recommended” you vote for him, but they didn’t fully endorse him due to all the…mercenary babykiller stuff
oh well that’s fine i guess lol
well it’s the standard “blue no matter who” stuff
i think there are legitimate “we don’t like this person enough to formally endorse but if you’re going to vote they’re the least bad one” situations but that’s for well-meaning liberals in a situation where there is no radical candidate, not mercenaries
i don’t disagree
I regret to inform you that there’s a movement within DSA to endorse AOC for president.
The DSA has always been “big tent”. Most locals start off as reading groups and lefty hangouts until someone comes in and tries to organize for something.
It’s not a surprise that all the disenfranchised Dem staffers gravitated to DSA locals.
Just want to share a tid bit about Brian Becker. My first introduction to him was on Sputnik Radio’s Loud and Clear podcast, where he co-hosted with John Kiraikou… The former CIA officer, who in 2007 seems to have just blurted out in an interview that the CIA was waterboarding people during the Bush administration… He left the CIA in 2004, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because of the torture. Gina Haspel was directing the program at the time, and so she was implicated, she was later Appointed deputy director under Trump 1, and director under Biden. Kiraikou served 2 years in prison for that interview. The thing is, in the podcast he always portrayed himself a having been a whistle blower, and that he was trying to take down Haspel like he was some kind of hero. I’m not clear on the details of the case though.
At any rate, he gets this co-host gig with Brian Becker on a explicitly socialist podcast produced under the umbrella of “Russian State Media” Sputnik Radio. Brian Becker is an old head activist, I’ve heard him many times talk about protests he participated in back in the 80s or so.
Both of them offered pretty principled takes as far as I could tell at the time, but it’s been years since they cancelled the show and parted ways.
But what the fuck is a founder of a revolutionary ML party doing, chumming it up with an “former” CIA officer? It’s weird imo.
While I’m in no way saying that the PSL has any particular claim to being “the real communists”, it feels a bit weird to immediately try and retroactively discredit them as leftists in the wake of this. Yes, real leftist orgs can absolutely have predators hiding among their ranks, just like any other organization can, and instead of implying that this sort of thing could never happen to us true leftists, we should remain alert to this possibility.
implying that this sort of thing could never happen to us true leftists
I’ve heard words to those effect spoken in at least one leftist org.
delusional
I don’t think we need to reach for “CIA assets” as an explanation for PSL’s limitations. Its far more simply explained by: “demcent organization has ossified leadership clique”. Tale as old as american communism.
While true, it is still super weird that a higher up in a communist party is pals with a “former” CIA officer.
Its not weird if Becker is more focused on building his independent media personality. Its not like sputnik news is a bastion of communist sympathy either. Dude sounds like Glen Greenwald mixed with Lyndon LaRouche.
Or Russian communism.
