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.
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.
Tiny group of five people who founded the organization and has been at its head for decades and have run for president on the party’s ticket. Either they need to be removed or you’re going to see the party split like the ISO.
Better check who legally owns Break Through News and all those other assets.
“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
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.
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.