Hello, it’s me again
This is another article that’s been going around. I talked to some comrades up in Rhode Island and apparently the author of this kind of has some eh stuff going on and was actually kind of a jerk but still here’s more kind of evidence of what’s going on.
Notably one thing is that they say that the PSL Miami branch is dissolved. I don’t know like anything about this.
It kind of feels like live archaeology at this point, just trying to archive and document the kind of discussions that have been going on. I honestly really have incredibly little faith in the party to continue to survive and end up being the party that we need. I think a new party is clearly going to need to form.
If you have any thoughts or additional points of information that can be used to, like, bring together the understanding of what went wrong and what’s been going wrong, please put it below.
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Shut the fuck up, if you can only fedjacket me then I think you’ve got nothing else. This is already public, and the PSL leadership has decided to do the work of the state by digging in and doubling down despite the immense works and infrastructure party members have built over time. I put years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars down for the party.
Honestly, this is all incredibly destabilizing, and I don’t see anything about it online, which is part of what’s motivating me to make this post. The PSL is the largest cadre-based socialist organization in the United States, and I don’t see anything about this in the news, obviously, I guess, but like, even here. It’s been such an important thing for me for so long and to see that the issues that I faced weren’t just like bad people but instead like systemic issues, it’s very disappointing. I almost don’t want to let the topic go out of honestly just recognizing that this is real, that I’m not nuts. This like fucking sucks, but it’s not my fucking fault. This is the fault of leadership. Go fedjacket the Beckers or some shit if you want to be accurate about who caused all this
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Dude. There’s not been any fucking mechanism internally to talk about this shit. When the party leaves no internal mechanism, all we can do is utilize other mechanisms to do so. If you really think that simply talking about our fucking experiences in a niche online leftist forum is doing the work of the federal agents, then I’m sorry, you have completely drunk the Kool-Aid. Which feels absolutely fucking wild to say, but, I can’t think of any other way to see it. If criticism and discussions like this aren’t allowed internally to the party, then like, what the fuck? Do we just shut up? No! This isn’t a fucking game, dude. We have, like, an actual world to win.
The United States is funding this genocide in Gaza, let alone all of the other horrifying imperial machinery that it has enacting across the globe. We need an actual party that’s able to handle this shit. If you’re just seeing a ton of ex-members talking about this shit, like, that’s not an organized smear campaign, I’m sorry. Even if it is, dog, maybe it should be, because a new party genuinely needs to arise with the same political program if this is all the party can do. This is all bad. And my experiences have shown me that I really don’t think things are going to reform, especially with the recent statement from the Central Committee, like, are you kidding me?
A huge part of open discussion and debate within democratic centralist organizations is to be able to collect data points for a better direction to be decided. If you think that discussing these data points that so far have really not been allowed to be discussed at all internally with, trust me, huge barriers and punishments for doing so, then like, you are just straight up miseducated.
So don’t talk to me like I’m some misguided liberal or fooled anarchist doing the work of the state. I’m not an ultra-leftist demanding perfection; I just don’t think this shit is viable to continue as it is and we need to massively rethink our approach to matters thus far
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This would be the first beginning steps. For the wide benefit of our movement, the PSL has fostered an environment where many disciplined cadre were able to emerge. I think if we’re not honest now, try and wrangle together this built together large wells of cadre to start building something with a good understanding of the pros and cons we faced prior; then we’re wasting this moment and the movement will be even worsely impacted.
Just to remind you, instead of engaging in self-development and introspection, the Central Committee decided to double down. They are the ones squandering this moment and making it so much worse.
Building formations and angling at a merge (with each other and maybe eventually with PSL) would be the most principled and productive thing to do. But I would say that I think 90% of the people writing these letters are either burned out or have some personal liberalism that means they won’t do it, not right away. To be clear I think most of the examples I’ve seen are the people who are burned out. But luckily bring burned out with comrades tends to lead to being not burned out so a long as people stay in touch and do some level of work, formations are possible.
Burnout is an underemphasized criticism of organizing, particularly in the US. A lot of organizational capacity is wasted on alienation and frustration that does not need to happen and could be avoided with structure and principled cadre. I’ve seen many cases where entire programs are built around squeezing labor out of new, young organizers to serve specific campaigns or strategies rather than trying to sustainably build something larger. Several labor unions in the US adopt this strategies with paid organizers, in fact. It’s for the young who should not expect work-life balance or sufficient pay, so the logic goes, and if they threaten to themselves unionize, the union adopts the union-busting playbook! Obviously this is a petty bourgeois tendency, part of the important contradictions of non-revolutionary labor organizing, and doesn’t purely apply to socialist organizations, but there are some common threads and mechanisms that must be understood and thwarted.
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It certainly didn’t happen when the ISO voted to dissolve after a very similar scandal in 2019.
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PSL has a history of protecting abusers and is run ar the top by the whole baker family clique. I wanted to think the last couple times this could be cointelpro shit like you say but the more I’ve looked into them the more it is lear the core leadership is rotten and instead of addressing the very serious fact they protect abusers in their click and repeatedly dig in their heels over shit like this is too much to excuse. They compromised themselves, no need for the feds to do it for them.
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Yes. There were a bunch of successor orgs after the ISO collapsed but all the momentum of the early Trump years was lost. I strongly recommend that PSL members look into how the ISO failed and what they can learn from the hasty vote to dissolve.
https://socialistworker.org/2019/04/02/the-isos-vote-to-dissolve-and-what-comes-next has a contemporary overview, and since the ISO was Trotskyist and newspaper-oriented it’s easy to find long articles with contrasting views on what happened and the aftermath.
The ISO was notorious for being personally abusive to members, particularly young women. I’ve never, never heard someone describe their own membership there as a positive thing.
My version of the story:
The ISO had a leadership clique that had been in charge for decades but they based branches on college campuses and prioritized recruiting students. Students come and go, some of them are initiated into the leadership clique, but the old guard on the steering committee stayed the same. During the first Trump term the organization saw rapid growth and everyone wanted new blood in the leadership. The 2019 convention saw the victory of the Renewal Slate which pushed out the old guard.
But then a letter was published about how one of the newly elected Steering Committee members, a Renewal guy, had committed SA and it was covered up by the old guard. Every other scandal, including the ones that had ended with the expulsion of the perpetrators, was relitigated. New accusations came to the forefront. People started having serious doubts about democratic centralism and Leninism’s ability to handle these scandals effectively. 70% of the organization (or at least of the 400-something who voted, from a membership base of 1000 or so before everything came out) voted to dissolve the ISO.
Since then a bunch of people joined DSA, a bunch more people stopped organizing, and some folk reverted to reading groups. PSL might have some ISO veterans who can weigh in on the similarities and differences between these scandals but as bad as both of them are the similarities are really bizarre. Either the U.S. left has learned nothing from how to protect comrades from SA instead of protecting the abusers, or we’ve learned nothing about how to constructively respond to such a scandal in a way that doesn’t involve giving up on years of organizational work and losing all momentum.
if it’s a CIA op then the op is smartly leveraging genuine discontent from fundamental organizational failings that desperately need to be fixed. certain segments of the piece veer a little too interpersonal gossip IMO but the consistent themes across most of these recent documents of obscured centralized leadership demanding blind faith, zero real internal democracy, and a feeling of a corporatized internal culture where rank and file cadre are treated as dutiful little employees all ring extremely true.
if the cia is exploiting a contradiction then they should address the contradiction so the cia cant exploit it
theres been repeating criticisms of this organization for over a decade
yup, agreed 💯 % re: addressing the contradiction. refusal to even acknowledge there might possibly be a problem from leadership is why i and many others in my branch quit.
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Didn’t PSL national leadership basically call Walter’s resignation letter an attempt to turn a faction into a split in Brooklyn? Isn’t that basically accusing him of doing what you say he should be doing if he’s not a CIA wrecker?
I think we should be realistic about the poor level of organization in the US, generally. There isn’t an automatic other org to join and these folks actually aren’t organizing a national-level split, they’re just leaving the party and doing whatever thing seems best to them.
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the psl central leadership being totally useless and riddled with abuse is more suspicious to me
It’s just a fairly typical settler nation party crisis. Systemic incompetency. The timing is a critical mass of frustrations building up and being seen as valid to air once they see they aren’t alone.
Fundamentally this is the party’s fault, whether it’s directly through the cases of malfeasance in leadership or in doing a poor job in developing new members and building discipline through cadre. But most examples I’m aware of are real long-term members leaving over very serious issues that could not be resolved internally despite their best efforts. And there is plenty left unsaid.
If that’s CIA shit then you’re basically saying the PSL is CIA.
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Even if you’re right, you’re going to lose like this.
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Youre missing the point. If the feds are attacking your party through its lack of internal democracy then the solution is to build internal democracy not pretend it doesn’t exist.
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What exactly is “building internal democracy” when the steering committee violates its own constitution? Beg the Becker twins to intervene directly?
How can you “build internal democracy” when the core leadership is acting to stonewall any such efforts? This is their own fault not the fault of the people abused jesus fucking christ.
You are not Fred Hampton
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Interesting how much is happening lately, especially with the timing of the splitting faction and the indictments of PSL and their sister orgs happening recently, as well as the bills that were passed recently about condemning socialism, plus heading into the midterms.
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Honestly, the most likely explanation is that feds have moles in PSL and every other progressive org keeping tabs on weaknesses within the org that they can exploit. For PSL, they probably kept tabs on cases of sexual misconduct and waited until there’s enough disgruntled ex-members who left the party because of SA before sinking the party by accusing its leadership of covering up sex predators.
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