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.
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.