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.
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.