The Eye is Blind That Will Not See
theyeisblind.substack.com
By Marissa Sanchez

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.

  • Sleepless One@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    4 hours ago

    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.

    The PSL learned in 2020, both from my case and another sexual assault allegation, that it needed better protections, not real protections against assault, but PR defenses for the organization. That was when the PSL established the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC). I was asked to be part of its creation, just two months after my assault, when I was actively spiraling.

    From the beginning, the NDC was a performance. It was guided by Ben, with three women of color there to legitimize it with our identities and our experiences with sexual violence.

    The NDC was sufficient as long as it existed conceptually enough to be pointed to. No process was ever concretely developed or implemented. Certainly there was no clear process ever distributed to the membership or local leaders, no process that members know to follow. I truly challenge any member to cite evidence otherwise. In reality, allegations of misconduct continued to be dealt with through loose processes, typically handled by women who would call themselves members of the nonexistent “NDC,” operating as intermediaries for Ben or Brian.

    I looked back and found the draft document we developed, in January 2021, which never became a real thing. What it outlines is far from a set of trauma-informed practices. It’s a set of protocols for damage control. It’s irrelevant anyway. Real processes for the NDC were never actually researched or developed beyond the one draft document. The point was that there was a document that carried the names of three women, including mine, which allowed the Party to say, “Women built our process, women who themselves experienced sexual violence, women of color. Question that and you question them.”

    • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      4 hours ago

      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.