Is there any veracity to the claim that “the PSL covered up SA allegations”? I hear it from people a lot. I wanna know if this is a valid concern.
(Originally posted on Ask Lemmygrad)
3 perma s so far in this thread and the lemmygrad thread for misogyny and downplaying SA and I’ll fuckin do it again
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.
I also heard complaints about PSL not being dem centered org. Can you explain what the looks like ? Does everything go to 1 person to decide ? The brief organizating I did with them didn’t seem siloed, but I never got in the weeds.
Edit: Nevermind someone explained further
From what I was explained by former cadre, there is an established leadership and an appointed majority who control things which average cadre are not really involved with and do not vote for, and who’s strategies have not really changed for a very long time. When these average cadre see similar issues, they end up asking similar questions, which becomes pushing for similar answers and being rebuffed in similar ways. Whether it is asking about how to change organizational structure to properly hold abusers accountable because of actual cases of abuses, asking about why pursuing an electoral strategy has been absorbing so many resources of the org and there are virtually no mass programs nor interaction with “the masses” outside of going to protests (arguably not the masses), or even pushing to do specific types of organizational work that cadre see as valuable and missing and are willing to put work into , these things aren’t up for discussion openly among the cadre even behind closed doors.
I was happy to see PSL did update their electoral strategy with new candidates who seem great and their media arm has been doing well, hopefully they keep improving.
Thanks for that. I heard similar complaints but coming from DSA, where we had sooo much bureaucracy, I couldn’t see the issue. Well I feel less bad about not following up more frequently and only going to their talk events/protest. If that’s all there is then I’ll keep it up.
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.
Even the Panthers had pest issues; it can happen anywhere an individual can be insufficiently disciplined as far as i’m concerned
As Awoo said, the reason you see so much focusing on these types of scandals in left organizations is because the liberals know that we are more serious about these issues than they are so it makes a good angle of attack.
It’s such a cynical route that it could only really be the work of liberals honestly. We go out of our way to make our spaces safe for the marginalized and chronically-abused; and that’s how the liberal mind opts to attack the concept…
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.
