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 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.