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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I 100% agree.
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.
Also, “cult” is not a binary. It’s a spectrum of social and economic control.
My local (anarchist, for the record) organizing scene had a proto-cult that was emerging within it a few years ago, centered around 1 person who would triangulate and adulate and do information control and targeted callouts until they had a loyal following. It took us several months to reflect on what was going on, and expelling this person caused a schism locally, where maybe about 10-20 of the people closest to them broke off.
If cults can organically emerge outside of formal hierarchies, you’d better believe they can emerge within them.