askchapo

Anyone who has been involved with leftist political organizing knows you occasionally get that one white dude who gets power in the organization and then uses that power to exploit some younger, vulnerable member. I think most of us know of an instance where this happened...in DSA, SA, PSL, FRSO...any of them. And I have seen firsthand that once in a while when this happens the victims claims are not taken seriously enough and it often leads to big problems. It's a huge issue in organizing spaces across the board.

So has some member of some PSL group at some point not taken some victims claims of sexual violence as seriously as they should have? I can almost guarantee it.

But.

This has very little to do with PSL or any of the others as organizations. I almost guarantee you PSL leadership is not trying to cover up widespread or even localized instances of SA. This is just unfortunately what happens once in a while in these kinds of groups. It's wrong and it should not happen and the senior leadership should work hard to stop it from happening and remove people if it does, and I'm sure they have policies in place to do that, but local groups can often hide under the radar with stuff like this.

And it's not limited to leftist political organizations. It's not limited to political organizations. It's a symptom of a much wider systemic problem...one that PSL absolutely is aware of and wants to work towards solutions to.

If there is any legitimate criticism of PSL or if any similar leftist orgs around this topic it would be that they should do better at vetting and training their local leaders to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen. But to me claims of some widespread SA cover up in PSL sets off all my "this is propaganda" alarm bells.

All that said, not an expert on it specifically so if someone does have genuine information around it I'd be curious to know.

it's very unsurprising to me that this is the case (heard accounts like this from most national left wing orgs I've ever heard of). as I said in the other thread I urge people to reckon with the truth instead of hand waving. dismissing something as serious as this as a "smear" especially is really fucking gross.

I personally have organized with multiple people from different chapters of PSL who were abused for being trans or brought complaints about being preyed on by people in their chapter and in each instance they were essentially pushed out of the org and the person they were abused by remained. Over two dozen members of the chapter I used to be affiliated with locally left over an issue like this happening to someone and then finding out that they are not a dem cent org and there is no internal mechanisms for solving these issues.

If PSL is all that you have available, I'd still say go for it, and just be aware of these problems and try to be a good communist in combating liberalism and defending comrades from harm.

3 perma s so far in this thread and the lemmygrad thread for misogyny and downplaying SA and I'll fuckin do it again

Every single organisation of any size crosses this problem. You don't constantly hear about the Dems covering up or playing down SA allegations, even though they certainly do. Either because people know an organisation of that size is certainly going to have them or because it's always going to dismissed as "not the organisations fault". People will also always dismiss the organisation playing down these things as a personal issue between members because that's what organisations do, protect themselves, snd in the case of someone abusing power, that's just quietly dealt with eventually when it comes to it and again played down.

The highlighting of it in leftist orgs while clearly not caring about it in capitalist orgs should be viewed as equal to the highlighting of issues that socialist countries have faced while ignoring the same issues in capitalist countries.

If anything it is because leftists take these issues more seriously than liberals that it is used as a frequent method of attacking leftist orgs.

All orgs have SA issues, I think there is probably some truth to cover ups regarding external facing aspects of it, my local PSL chapter sometimes won't even give me inane details to make coordinating with them easier. The question is whether there is internal cover ups.

I'm willing to bet there are because of the way PSL structures communications keeps locals isolated from eachother, and I get the sense of paranoia/siege mentality probably making folks more inclined to avoid spreading stuff that could be damaging to the org.

However the org also allows the escalating of SA stuff past local leadership which is an exception to their command structure.

I think criticism of PSL should probably be more concerned with their lack of democratic centralism (40 percent of delegates can be appointed by the central committee), their structure not really resembling successful pre-revolutionary structures because they are a Cadre org, not a cadre org within a wider democratic organization of socialists/anticolonialists, and they waste a lot of time with the presidential campaign.

Before people say "the presidential campaign is mostly to just have a pretext to talk to people" I've seen the literature for this year, and a lot of it is solely oriented around getting your vote and not convincing you of the correctness of their positions or analysis. I've also had 1 on 1s with psl organizers and been at their educational events. They claim it is about having conversations but they treat it like the goal is to get votes. While I like talking theory with PSL comrades, they seem really underdeveloped as actual organizers and popular educators.

I don't recall this being about sexual abuse, but you can google "On Alienation" which was written by a former member in my city.

I do think it's true that all American orgs of a certain size have SA problems. However, that is a terrible indictment of the current state of the American left and not a statement that it's OK. These problems are more than just bad apples. I suspect there's something about cadre orgs that enables abuse of members. A substantial reason I left Socialist Alternative was their unserious response to multiple sexual assault scandals (one of which was highly publicized and resulted in an international split), which was hampered by their highly centralized leadership. I hope this criticism shows that I'm not a PSL specific wrecker.

I've only ever heard people bring it up in vague terms, never specific names or incidents, which makes it hard to verify the truth or lack thereof to the claims.