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Why does the PSL have a bunch of sex pests in charge
Whether or not you’re justified in this conclusion, I really don’t feel like it would be productive to get into that here. I just wish we could mind the historical significance of the moment we’re in; the U.S. is the middle of a historically unpopular war, economic conditions and class consciousness are at the sharpest they’ve been in decades, awareness of U.S. imperialism is at an all-time high, NSPM-7 and the U.S. state department trying to kick off the next red scare, I could go on; and acknowledge that it’s not the time nor place to be shitting on marxist-leninist organizations that are actively gaining momentum in the belly of the beast.
The PSL is training up organizers and materially improving socialist consciousness on the ground, across the nation, and that mission is not exclusive or zero-sum. If you have a better means to accomplish that task, promotion and development of that means would go a lot further than comments like this.
Considering this isn’t a liberal space I can’t think of a better place to get into it
The very real accusations against the leadership for tolerating sex pests are not going away. And the feds are going to make sure that people are going to hear about those very real accusations whenever PSL is mentioned. You can say that people highlighting this weakness of the party is just “doing fed work,” but at this point, I question the judgment of the CC beyond their abyssal handling of SA.
What do all those real and alleged spliters have in common? They all point to the Becker clique as harmful towards the party. So one way of clipping the wings of all those real and alleged spliters is to simply expel the Becker clique from the party and extend an olive branch of reconciliation to all spliters. Those genuine about building socialism would rejoin the party since the people they have spend 90% complaining about is now gone while the spliters will out themselves as wreckers for not rejoining the party.
It’s not like the brilliant leadership of the Becker clique has done any real good to the party (gestures at their abyssal handling of SA). Their refusal to fall on their swords for the sake of the party means they largely see the party as an instrument of self-aggrandizement. Instead of actually maintaining momentum, even at the expense of themselves, they would rather have the party slowly rot so that they can continue to larp as Lenin.
I really don’t feel like it would be productive to get into that here.
In an ideal world, sex pests would be shot. I think it’s always relevant. It’s sad that the PSL is the only party with ground game and that they treat young women in the org like meat. Women are the more advanced group politically in America and the party will be useless until they address these problems properly. I don’t want a new party, I want a purge of the shitheels.
I’m sorry, I just don’t see any potential for honest engagement with this comment.
Cool, fuck off then and never speak on the PSL again.
As far as I could tell, protecting those sex pests included violations of Democratic Centralism, so I’m not sure we can rely on them as a revolutionary vanguard without a purge of the Central Committee.
Edit to correct initial phrasing: Not intending to brush aside the fact they’re protecting sex pests. They are protecting a violent abuser. Both charges I feel nullify the standing CC to work as a vanguard.
In that case you don’t even have to purge them on the basis of sexual assault, which is rather hard to prove anyway. You simply have to point out the party wouldn’t be organized around ML principles anymore.
Democratic Centralism might as well be the most important ingredient of any Marxist organization.
As a complete non-American, I wish there was a middle ground between not dismissing sexual assault claims and acknowledging that PSL is THE Marxist organization in the US regardless, but as it stands, especially with how marginal the PSL is at the end of the day, I guess you kind of have to choose.
i think the situation on the ground is different locally everywhere. in many places, the marxists will be in DSA or FRSO or another org. the US left is far too fractured to say one national organization or another is the only marxist group. so i would argue that whether they keep their sexual assault clique in charge or manage to purge them is probably the most important issue at the moment.
I don’t think it’s fair at all to say that PSL leadership has dismissed claims of sexual assault. Their response to the situation was and is highly imperfect and open to critique - unacceptably so, I would and have argued - there was no reason to have Eugene continue to be a face of the party after what they all agreed he did. At no point, though, did they dismiss what happened or what Marissa went through. Eugene stepped down, at Marissa’s request, before her article was ever published.
My honest critique is that there may have been more tactful ways to point out the coincidental timing with Walter’s resignation and the cynical ways this situation serves his demonstrated intentions of splitting off PSL membership, and in hindsight more should have been done to avoid this route of attack in the first place. Beyond that, though, not everything is public information, and the party doesn’t operate at the appeasement of its most vocal online critics. It’s easy to make sweeping calls and claims online without knowing anything about how the organization is operating and changing internally as it grows.
I don’t think it’s fair at all to say that PSL leadership has dismissed claims of sexual assault
They did. And in a deeply unprofessional letter to boot. You’re running interference for abusers.
It would be nice if you provided anything to back that up
Go read the damn letter yourself, are you incapable of reading?
https://hexbear.net/post/9516234/7451054
A corporate lawyer could write a better response than this.
Removed by mod
Eugene stepped down, at Marissa’s request, before her article was ever published
This is simply wrong. He stepped down after she left the party, that much was clear from her article
Beyond that, though, not everything is public information, and the party doesn’t operate at the appeasement of its most vocal online critics. It’s easy to make sweeping calls and claims online without knowing anything about how the organization is operating and changing internally as it grows.
I haven’t been in the party for nearly two months at this point. I was expelled for trying to engage on a local discussion on it. This isn’t a theoretical or simply limited to the abuse of women; it indicates and exposes a pervasive problem in the party of a lack of democratic centralism. There genuinely is not democratic centralism at the national level of the party for membership; and further my branch took on these tendencies from national and it led us into a state of paralysis because matters brought up by members were always dismissed; leading to a lack of motivation and capacity across the board. This isn’t online, it affects the entire party
He stepped down after she left the party, that much was clear from her article
Yes. That doesn’t conflict with what I said.
I cant speak to your local context. I can only speak to mine, and I don’t share this experience. Nonetheless I’m sorry that happened to you and your branch comrade.
Marissa hadn’t requested it, that’s the conflict. Further, your entire comment history here reeks of chauvanism in order to defend the party line. Getting in flame wars on Hexbear.net to defend the PSL is embarrassing; and not for you, but because these are the only ways you can “uphold the party line” when you’re not only talking to people inside the party. Its done, its cooked. You have no ability to change the party; which is the entire problem. You can either continue to attach yourself to it and be forced down these chauvanistic dialogues or start to help build something new.
Marissa hadn’t requested it
Again, it would be nice if you provided anything to back this up.no, youre right. I had the order of events wrong. She resigned, Eugene offered to resign as he had offered to back in 2020, and this time around she accepted it.On the rest, your experience is valid and it’s your right to have that opinion. My opinion hasn’t changed.
I was more commenting on how the PSL is typically discussed online. I’m not very familiar with how the PSL is handling the sexual assault claims in question nor how they reflect on it in public.
I just know the sexual assault claims are dominating the discourse and that I fucking hate it.
Yeah, it’s certainly a sensitive subject. Too many people have experience with it, and too many people struggle to navigate that conversation without demonstrating the chauvinist qualities programmed into us by capitalist society. That’s a societal issue, not an organizational one, that takes learning and practice to overcome. That’s why it’s that much more disgusting to me that this situation has been used in the way it has, it brings out so much ugliness in us and digs into assault survivors’ open wounds just so that it can put the blame in all the wrong places.
I simply don’t have the inside knowledge to agree with your assessment. If it’s all bullshit, then it’s bullshit, but if it’s not I want it dealt with on the highest level.
In any case, the US needs a viable Marxist party and the discourse around PSL is not helping regardless of whether it’s true.
Fuck me if this is how much you have to write to mental gymnastics yourself around your party protecting sex pests then you might as well stop lying to yourself and sign up for the Democrats lmao.
Lenin wasnt aremoved.
The propaganda value of victories in bourgeois elections can’t be overstated. It proves alternatives are possible, that bourgeois politics isn’t everything.
It can be overstated, it is overstated. If bourgeois politics isn’t everything, then why is it so deeply meaningful to win at bourgeois politics?
I’m not following how conforming to electoralism proves that alternatives are possible. Proving an alternative would be doing something other than electoralism and having that move the needle.
I think there is some value in the effort, but it’s just part of a spectrum of work to be done
You’re right, I should have put more emphasis on a consistent presence rather than “victories” in electoral politics. My bad.
Maybe I don’t have enough background to appreciate everything about using elections to promote communism. But I think elections in the USA are so incredibly sketchy and corrupt that any decision to be associated with them is a net loss.
One either participates in them and tacitly approves such a corrupt process; or tries to make them fairer, and thus reinforces the idea fair elections can work.
Socialism can only work when elections are seen as what they are, then bypassed and ignored.
Civil rights in the 1960s did not have a major strategy of trying to run better candidates in elections.
One either participates in them and tacitly approves such a corrupt process;
This is what actual purity politics is. You don’t need to endorse bourgeois democracy to use the elections as a platform to talk about the necessity of doing away with bourgeois democracy.
or
The things you mention are not mutually exclusive
or tries to make them fairer, and thus reinforces the idea fair elections can work.
Actually fair elections can work, and are in fact are necessary. Of course, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie cannot allow fair elections (and thus there must be revolution), but fighting for them can do many things: educate the masses on their existing unfairness, restrain the power of reactionaries to the limited extent that you can succeed, and demonstrate the malignancy of existing political bodies when they refuse reform.
Civil rights in the 1960s did not have a major strategy of trying to run better candidates in elections.
Electoral politics was a major factor in some of the civil rights gains. Obviously the '68 Civil Rights Act was from the riots threatening the state and that shouldn’t be discounted, but before that point there was a diverse array of approaches that worked together to produce improvements.
Also, this would at best be theological reasoning in the absence of identifying why this specific movement must be an exclusive 1:1 model for modern methodology. If that is not your contention, then it doesn’t seem like anything about the statement is really meaningful, because pointing to the riots (etc.) as getting things done does not preclude other things also helping, so it just isn’t clearly relevant. Does that make sense? Your initial argument is “participating in elections is useless and bad” and then you say “the Civil rights movement did not participate in electoral politics as a major strategy and got things done”. Ignoring the hedge and the sliding frame, you are trying to prove a negative (no good reason to do elections) using a positive (some good things happened without election) that is not mutually exclusive to what you are trying to disprove (why can’t both electoral and non-electoral methods be used?)
If you’re interested, Marx has written multiple defenses of electoral participation and extracting concession from liberals, and Lenin also wrote quite a lot against leftist factions arguing for withdrawal from participating in various kinds of legal activities (elections and others, but any legal activity fundamentally involves dealing with the frameworks of bourgeois permissibility because that is what legality is in bourgeois society).
How does one participate in elections in the USA in a healthy/productive way? Does massive cheating change any approach?
Do you mean as in run for office? I don’t have any particular secrets for you, my belief is simply that socialists should run under a socialist banner advocating for socialist policy, demonstrate the common corruption of their opposition, and try to focus on “ground game” and community involvement (including working with whatever available leftist organizations are around).
Cheating only changes the approach insofar as you can prove it. Simply believing in them cheating and it being true that they cheat are not enough, and such claims would then only really discredit you to the broader audience. So try to get evidence if that’s applicable (the evidence depends on the cheating), but otherwise you kind of need to take the L as far as I can tell. Your popularity with the masses is what really matters, with doing relatively better in the election but still being far from winning mainly being a took for that popularity, because the real goal is feeding into the socialist movement and not getting elected in a situation where you getting elected would never be allowed (though if you can get office, that’s of course also great unless some chud murders you for your accomplishment).
As I tried to say before but perhaps failed to be clear on, I think this sort of thing is very unlikely to move the needle a massive amount as things are right now, but I think that it’s healthy to have a diversity of approaches and to try to bring socialism everywhere in public life, and the specific benefits that I mentioned before are all things that I think can be understood as outcomes of running a campaign without any particular secret techniques involved (though if you figure any out, by all means).
I don’t really have more I can say except that even if I was much more learned here, a lot of how you should approach things as a socialist would still depend on investigating the specific issues in your area and the specific social circumstances, which may require novel policies but more often will just tell you what you need to emphasize the most and perhaps how to communicate it.
You don’t need to endorse bourgeois democracy to use the elections as a platform to talk about the necessity of doing away with bourgeois democracy.
maybe. but talk about it to whom? turnout in US elections is abysmal. the best-attended election in currently-alive US history was still only 2/3 of the population. it’s also incredibly class-stratified. income, of course, isn’t 1:1 with class. but looking at the numbers, high income is a great predictor of whether one will vote (also). what this means, in practical terms, is that standing in elections is platforming yourself to the labor aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and the haute bourgeoisie. how much money does it cost? how much time?
when the workers stand ahead of the “vanguard party”, i do think that, to some extent, it constitutes a tacit approval of bourgeois processes for the vanguard to continue to participate. maybe not a particularly impactful or loud one, but still. i would imagine you either think, “why is this party that i deeply respect asking me to participate in bourgeois elections?” or “here’s yet another asshole coming to ask me to vote.” given the trust the average worker has in liberal democracy, what else could they say? not a rhetorical question btw, i genuinely am asking what else the 40-60% of americans who do not vote could think about PSL electoral participation. do they even know about it?
…Marx has written multiple defenses of electoral participation and extracting concession from liberals, and Lenin also wrote quite a lot against leftist factions arguing for withdrawal from participating…
yeah, but that doesn’t mean those conclusions apply today. lenin in particular cautioned workers’ parties against boycotting elections because the workers still believed in them. as mentioned above, that isn’t true in the USA today. i’ve been posting this article a lot recently, but we cannot afford to mechanically graft lenin’s particular strategy onto ours.
Weird how the tone changes from all the PSL people when they’re running for elections, but when Mamdani or whoever in DSA runs it’s extremely critical of “Electoralism.” Not that they’re wrong, but weird how the think their candidates are different without having any material evidence otherwise.
Because the DSA is not a ML org, but are shills for Democrats? That is like saying that it is weird how people change when a black person beats up a KKK member, than when a KKK member beats a black person. Obviously, I will be happy seeing a brother beat up a klan members, and I will be pissed of the opposite.
Of all the reasons, the best they can come up with is “we will defeat capitalism in the marketplace of ideas 🤓☝️” come on lmao.
