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Editor’s Note: In the continued flood of members leaving the Party for Socialism and Liberation many have been earnest in their desire to ensure the movement can learn from this organization’s impending collapse. This week we are publishing five new letters outlining various struggles within the organization and its utter inability to solve any internal contradiction.
The first letter conveys the collective frustrations and justified disgust of a NYC District Committee elected by membership to advance base-building, and undermined at every turn by a “duplicitous” central leadership. The next perspective (as well as the last) outlines not only years long struggles between the Salt Lake branch of PSL and national leadership, but the utter lack of any kind of institutional structures to help local leadership through internal or external struggles. Rather than play a guiding hand, national liaisons actively undermined criticism and struggle in favor of putting personal and political differences under the rug—hoping that through liberal interpersonal kindness contradictions would cease and the branch would wholly submit itself to the whims of Brian and Ben Becker (read more here). A majority of the letter writers have spent a significant portion of their lives in dedication to this opportunistic and parasitic organization. Rather than making the most use of these dedicated comrades, national leadership and national liaisons found every way by which they could miss-place this revolutionary energy into work that will never bring about the authors’ revolutionary aims.
Despite the betrayal by this so-called party, some of these letters still express hope that the PSL is capable of change, and that the members within have the means to change it. This could not be further from the truth. The PSL is an opportunist organization of the highest order which fundamentally cannot be saved. As more and more information is brought to light on the undemocratic behaviors of the organization’s central leadership, cover-ups of abuse, refusals to engage in criticism or collective struggle, and the strict enforcement of settler lines on colonial and anti-imperalist questions—there can no longer be any doubt that the PSL exists solely as a mechanism to de-fang the revolutionary movement by misleading earnest radicals into a counter-revolutionary machine. If you are a member you must leave, if you’re a group of disgruntled members leave together and contact the All-Empire Worker’s League. It is time to bring an end to this bloated carcass of a so-called party, to leave it festering will only bring further rot to our revolutionary movement.
The letters have been reproduced nearly exactly as they were received. Minor corrections were made to formatting, citations where added for some quoted text, and names of local members have been redacted. Regarding the redacted names, abbreviated letters have taken their place and our editors have attempted their best to maintain consistency with the references to named individuals. There are a handful of exceptions, with important targets of criticism (Ben/Brian), as well as public figures within or formerly within the organization being fully named. Walter Smolarek’s letter, which is frequently mentioned in the following documents, was published last week by our Editorial Board.
To all those who have been harmed by the PSL’s actions, and its further in-actions, we give our love.
In Solidarity,
Editorial Board of Unity Struggle Unity
NYC District 1 District Committee Letter:
Dear comrades,
We are writing to submit our resignation as the District Committee (DC) of District 1 (Brooklyn and Staten Island) of the New York City Branch and as members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Each of us entered this organization with the intention of dedicating the rest of our lives to it because we genuinely saw it as the most viable vehicle for the advancement of socialism in the United States. We were thrilled to have been elected by our members on the specific, openly stated mandate of advancing base building in our district. We are resigning because we have come to know with full clarity that it is impossible to carry out that mandate from within the PSL.
We have known for some time that there is an opposition to base building that goes to the top leadership of the PSL, and that the democratic space to put forth our ideas on their political merit is intentionally and underhandedly shut down, both of which we have each experienced individually and collectively. As leaders within the New York City branch, we work in constant close proximity to a clique of national leaders (they call themselves “the center”), headed by Ben and Brian Becker, who have their office here. Publicly and with general membership, they agitate about the need for the working class to get organized. Privately, they are generally hostile to deep organizing work in favor of an agitation-only approach: constant mobilizations, forums, tabling, and flyering. When the PSL creates new organizations, they are primarily as fronts for PSL agitation, rather than means of raising the organizational level of the working class as a whole. Because of the proximity of the NYC branch to this clique of national leaders, we do not functionally have a Steering Committee (SC) that is empowered to draw its ideas and analysis from its membership’s practical organizing or a concrete analysis of our local conditions. We are not provided the practical skills or orientation to durably organize the working class of New York City. Any promising attempts at this kind of organizing are intentionally undermined. This has led to the deep political underdevelopment of our branch.
Those of us who believed that there was any democratic space in our branch were thoroughly disabused of that notion by the NYC Branch Conference held this past March, the first ever such gathering in the history of the PSL. Its stated role was as follows:
- To directly address the stated challenges and harness the immense potential of our growing branch, we take inspiration from the Party Congress and propose the establishment of an annually occurring Branch Conference. This conference will serve as a dedicated forum for strategic alignment, democratic deliberation, and collective leadership development.
- The Branch Conference will be constituted by a broad representation of the branch’s membership and activity, representative of the branch’s on-the-ground realities and diverse experience.
Despite the above, which the membership voted to ratify at the Branch internal, previously the nominally highest body of the branch, the Branch Conference was a farce of democracy. None of the base building experience that had accumulated in our district, by far the largest of the 3 districts in the branch, was included in the topics of discussion. In response to the document one of our members submitted on the base building work in his unit, a member of the Central Committee (CC) privately characterized it as a sign of the “anarchistic” tendency in Brooklyn toward mutual aid in a remark to a member of the former D1 District Committee. The document was not taken up for discussion at the conference. During the conference, when our members contributed their views on why the branch should take up base building, another member of the Central Committee openly stated, “The PSL is not a base building organization.”
In sum, we learned that a separate, unelected body had decided on the entirety of the conference agenda, which they organized to favor lengthy presentations by members of the center led by Ben Becker, followed by relatively short periods of discussion. They also decided that we, as elected delegates to the Branch Conference, would vote on a series of resolutions in the final half-hour of the two-day conference, resolutions that reflected the presentations of the center and were crafted by the aforementioned unelected body. When delegates motioned to request clarification on, amend, or table these resolutions, Ben Becker angrily hovered over the mic, eventually castigating the delegate who motioned to table a resolution that mandated the NYC Branch to commit to funding “a new center” as a top priority, declaiming that he didn’t understand why any member wouldn’t immediately understand its necessity. Most delegates had just heard of “the center” for the first time that day, when it was mentioned during a fundraising presentation that preceded the vote on resolutions. When a delegate asked for some definition, another member of the Central Committee dramatically hushed the crowd. We were all left without any clarity on where the center ended and the leadership of the NYC Branch began. Although the delegates voted to put the resolution to a vote by the incoming Branch Committee, the resolution was never raised in that body and it was subtly alluded to at a Branch Internal to appear as if we had voted in favor.
Despite all this, we had believed that it was possible to protect the space within our district for deep, neighborhood-specific organizing work to continue and struggle for a political realignment of the organization based on comrades practical exposure and assessment of its value. However, as the results of this work and comrade’s confidence in it has grown, we have only faced increasing and more direct pressure to squander it from the Steering Committee, and members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee. Often this was done under the guise of directing us to cancel any local activities or otherwise divert the necessary forces from it for the sake of clumsy agitational initiatives, attending recorded webinars, or ensuring maximum member attendance at mobilizations that do not draw from the working class in neighborhoods we organize in. This was done by design, even as the number of members in our branch exceed 280. Other times this was said directly. In a private conversation with one DC member, Ben Becker derided mass organizing for “tethering us to the lowest common denominator of our class.” His disgust for our work and our class is truly appalling.
The open, undemocratic attempts this past week by the top leadership of the PSL to crush our work has pushed us to the breaking point.
Last week, we circulated a strategy document for our district, which was a normal act for an incoming leadership body whereby we undertook an assessment of the previous period that reflected the work of our members, in deep conversation with them, and produced a strategic orientation and an accompanying set of tactics by which they could concretely measure their work going forward. We simultaneously shared the document with our Steering Committee liaison. Instead of receiving our ideas as a valuable contribution to the organization, one of us was called into a meeting with our liaison to be definitively told that our district’s strategic orientation to base building represented a “departure” from the strategy of the New York City Branch, and the national strategy of the PSL. When asked for clarity on what that strategy was, our liaison described it as (limited to) intervening in spontaneous mass movements and agitating for socialism.
In our strategy document, we defined base building as “a historically communist, long-term strategy of increasing the relative organization and strength of our class through working alongside it, winning its credibility, and building our influence. Practically, this is accomplished by committing to particular local areas, weaving ourselves into the fabric of their struggles, earning the leadership of our class, and positioning ourselves to lead the uprisings to come.” We see base building as the only way to durably build the level of working class organization needed to eventually wage revolutionary struggle, and the only way to durably build mass socialist consciousness. Alongside communist cadre, our class must go through its own practical experience by which it comes to see the correctness of our ideas. Simply relaying those ideas is not enough. That is to say, we see base building as the only viable long-term means of achieving the PSL’s stated political program.
In the week following the distribution of our strategy document, the Steering Committee, which contains members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee, coordinated inactive rank-and-file members of the District to discredit the elected leadership of the district by disrupting the planned unit meeting discussions of the document, and further by sending this same group of members, which includes a current Steering Committee member, to disrupt our planned district retreat where we presented and facilitated discussion on the strategy document. After the retreat, we learned from multiple other comrades that this group had all been reading their talking points from a shared, pre-prepared document, and were text-coordinating throughout the meeting. These members have been entirely absent from any of the local, neighborhood work that the district has carried out the past year. For some of them, it was their first time attending any sort of internal Brooklyn meeting in years. The points they raised on both occasions were not based on the political merit of our ideas or the work of active district members, but instead relied on personal attacks against us and pulling rank based on seniority. At the retreat, when we presented a new mass organizing project that we are undertaking, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, for the first time to the whole district, this group sought to sour the broad member support for the project by launching pre-prepared attacks that accused us of wasting Party resources and “gaslighting” our members. Not only were these bad-faith criticisms based on distortions of our position, they were blatantly disrespectful to seven non-DC comrades who presented on the Freedom Center and to the others who had been leading this organizing and thoughtfully discussing and assessing this work for months. We were disgusted by this display of disrespect for our members and our class. It further cemented our certainty of the deep unseriousness of the leaders of this organization.
In addition to these open attacks, behind closed doors we have been undermined by the highest body of the entire national organization. We had invited (now former) Central Committee member Walter Smolarek to speak at our retreat, to which he accepted. We had cited his Liberation School article, “Dual Power and Serving the People in the U.S. Revolutionary Movement,” and experiences building the Philadelphia Branch in our strategy document and were excited for our members to hear remarks from a long-time national leader on why communists should care about the organizational level of our class, and for Walter to learn more about the base building projects in our district. Late into the night before our retreat, Ben Becker convened the Standing Committee of the PSL to vote to block Walter from speaking. We were not provided any explanation.
We were pushed over the edge by our experience at the Branch Committee meeting this week. Four of us are elected members of the Branch Committee and the remaining two are observers. At the meeting, we explicitly asked for clarification on whether the view of the Steering Committee is that our strategic orientation to base building is incompatible with the strategy of the branch and the party. While we had already accepted this, we owed it to our membership to raise this question with the highest body available to us. We also asked for an explanation of the attempt by the SC to undermine the democratic processes of the preceding unit meetings and district retreat, and for the author(s) of the shared talking points document to be identified, because rank-and-file comrades had raised this as a major concern. SC members lied to our faces about the coordinated nature of the attacks and avoided our question about the document entirely. Instead of providing clarity, the Central Committee members who participated in the discussion (with the exception of Walter) concealed their true views on base building, offering confused assertions that they were open to the deep organizing that has gained momentum in Brooklyn, but simply have concerns rooted in their political experience that base building doesn’t work. They concluded the discussion by asserting that it would continue within a smaller body, a future meeting between the SC and DC. The next day, Ben submitted a document to the Branch Committee that opens, “I’m all for neighborhood organizing.” We know this is another lie.
Following the BC meeting, Walter reached out to us. He shared his disgust at the duplicitous conduct at the meeting and informed us that many of the branch and national leaders present had been secretly strategizing for months to crush our neighborhood organizing and other PSL mass organizing efforts across the country. They have counter-organized members of the district to oppose this work. The recent Conference on Organization was designed with this purpose.
Further, Walter shared his resignation letter with us and plan to submit it. His experiences affirm so many of our own. One of us who is employed at the national office that houses some party staff, including members of the national leadership clique, has been repeatedly summoned to a Steering Committee member’s office to defend and explain decisions made by the DC and unit leads to prioritize their neighborhood organizing work. She has been reprimanded, told that these decisions are “unacceptable,” and pried for information. A number of us were previously members of other branches that have have historically had more autonomy, given their distance from these national leaders, and were shocked by the political underdevelopment of the NYC branch when we transferred. One of us has experience as a member of the SC of another branch, where he was directly told by Brian Becker that the branch had to cease its base building work in favor of an agitational flyering initiative.
We were outraged and horrified to learn that the national leadership has been conspiring behind our backs for months to put a stop to our district’s deep organizing work, and to crush the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, which our members have been building with great effort and political seriousness. We don’t see any point in continuing to engage in a farcical process to “resolve” our political disagreements with a leadership this duplicitous.
Our commitment to the members of our district, whether you choose to leave or stay, remains just as strong and sincere as it ever was. For a long time, we believed it was not only the best approach but our responsibility to shield you from the rot at the heart of this organization and the hostility of national leadership to your work. We wanted to protect the space for you to carry out the work you had seen was correct from your own practical experience undaunted by the serious deficiencies in the organization. We have reached the point where that is no longer possible. We have done our best to guide you through this period on the strength of your own practical experience and have reached the end of that runway. Now we must speak plainly. We do not see this organization as able to be reformed nor do we see the fundamental contradiction between base building and an agitation-only approach to be resolvable within it. We have taken the decision to resign with the utmost seriousness and consideration, not only for its implications for our lives, but that of our members, and our class, to whom we hold the highest fidelity.
We are so proud of the ways you have grown as leaders and organizers alongside us. The past several months of training ourselves to become cadre, organizers capable of helping our class to realize its power, and the beautiful, real work of building durable relationships with the organic leaders of our neighborhoods have forever fortified us with a living accountability to our class that far supersedes our commitment to the PSL. We understand why an undemocratic leadership who relies on our warm bodies to unquestioningly carry out their ideas would go so far to keep us from this work. The sober reality is that the ultraleftist rigidity they engender systematically underdevelops the organization and renders it incapable of becoming a serious political force in this country with a mass base. This deeply saddens us. And we agree with Walter that it would be irresponsible for us to continue building this organization.
Given the magnitude of our political difference with national leadership, the lack of democratic mechanisms to continue our work, and our real opportunity to start something new, we have decided to leave the organization with Walter.
We are setting out to continue our work and to build the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, an example of what we see as a definitive example of the next phase of our organizing: a mass organization that formally fuses cadre with the working class by way of base building. We have a proposed interim structure that will allow this work to continue, along with the base building work in Sunset Park, and for us to retain our community partners from across Brooklyn.
We hold great confidence in our ability to continue this work without the PSL. We have largely built it with our members and with our class without branch support in the form of connections, material infrastructure, ideological guidance, or practical skills, and with a great deal of constant undermining. We are excited about what we can build with full organizational focus and capacity.
In terms of what broader organizational form comes next, we second the point in Walter’s resignation letter about it being too early to announce a full political program, but we are committed to building a project on a national scale. We know this will be difficult, but as communists we are committed to doing the difficult, necessary thing, rather than remaining in an organization that we do not believe in and whose national leadership is conspiring to crush the strategic approach and work that we wholeheartedly believe to be politically and historically correct. We invite you to leave with us and we also invite you to continue working with us in good faith as members of the PSL if you see fit.
It has truly been the honor of our lives to serve as your District Committee.
With unshakeable conviction and revolutionary love,
Your D1 District Committee: D. K., E. C., J. R., J. M., M. T., and R. H.
L.M’s Letter:
Dear comrades,
I am writing to submit my resignation to the party.
I write to you with both regret and excitement. As a portion of my total life I have dedicated more of my life to the building of this branch than any other member in the organization. With the leave of absence of Comrade Q I have spent more time in the party than any active member. I was 19 years old when I joined the party eight years ago. I was arrogant and didn’t know anything about organizing besides my limited experience with Planned Parenthood. I was honored to be elected to our first Steering Committee despite being one of our youngest members. The party provided me a political home, tempered my dogmatic and idiosyncratic understanding of theory and provided me a structure. I have dedicated my life to the party and more importantly to the class struggle. When faced with the choice of going to college to further my career prospects or to continue my work leading the branch I chose the party. I simply don’t know what it means to operate as an adult outside of the party organization.
This is why I am filled with a great sense of regret. I wish the party were the organization I thought it was. I wish that we were engaged in the work promised to us when we were recruited. I joined as a part of the first wave of socialist revival in the late 2010’s. Since then the movement and in turn the party have grown considerably and I have become increasingly aware of the limitations of the party to grow into the organization our class deserves and so desperately needs. I will return to these limitations but I must relate to comrades that I have experienced periods of extreme demoralization, not at the state of struggle in the US or of the supposed “backwardness” of our class, but at the state of our party. I’m sure many in our branch have had similar feelings in recent years.
Attached to this document you will find two letters. In the first of which you will find the resignation of Comrade Walter Smolarek. A comrade who joined when I was in 4th grade learning basic algebra. You may know him as the longtime editor of Liberation News and the occasional host of The Socialist program. Smolarek lays out many of the political as well as democratic issues with the PSL. This is why my writing today also carries a great deal of excitement. When I read Smolarek’s letter I felt a deep sense of joy because he was expressing many of the same criticism’s of our party I harbored. I have always made it a point to read every critique of the party I can so I could make a sober assessment of them. I have always found them to be unfounded and based in liberal and anarchistic ideals, until now. Prior to reading Smolarek’s letter I had already been considering whether to break with the party for some time. There is understandably little literature on when and how to split with an existing party. Lacking historical reference I created a set of criteria as to when a split is not only the right of a member but their responsibility:
- The party is organizationally or politically heading in a direction contrary to goal of revolution.
- The party is functionally not capable of reform through ordinary means.
- The member(s) splitting are capable of effectuating a split which has real potential to serve the goal of revolution.
The first two conditions are dependent on one another. If an organization is moving away from its revolutionary goals but does present the realistic possibility of reform towards such ends it is the responsibility of members to struggle towards that end. Let me not be accused of ultra-democracy because I believe if an organization is moving towards revolution even if it cannot be realistically reformed it would be wrong to effectuate a split because in this case the reformers would be those trying to turn away from revolution. However let it be said that inability to reform can itself be a hindrance towards the goal of revolution, especially when that horizon is not close at hand. The final condition has less to do with whether a split should be pursued and more with when. For a while I have been convinced that the first two conditions were met by the PSL. It was only with Walter’s letter that I became convinced that the third condition was met. I could have attempted to form a split months ago but I hesitated at the possibility of any new organization being isolated and suffocated due to its lack of support. This is what I told myself but it would be disingenuous not to recognize some cowardice in being afraid to take the dedicated cadre to do the hard work of building a new organization.
There may be some of you who think that splitting is inherently wrong as it weakens socialist organizations. To this my only response is that the party would not exist without the split performed initially by Sam Marcy from the Socialist Workers Party followed by the split of our founders from the Workers World Party. So the question cannot be reduced to splitters or non- splitters and must be taken on the basis of ideology and organization.
The second letter is something I wrote almost two years ago addressed to the Steering Committee outlining what I saw as the limitations of democracy within our branch. Although the letter was unsent at the time because I determined that our leadership was already struggling against growing factionalism within our branch I have shared it with multiple SC members in the years since. The purpose of its inclusion is to show that independent from Smolarek comrades across the nation, comrades you know, have been coming to similar conclusions. That letter to the Steering Committee was limited by the fact that at the time I thought the party could be reformed and that I limited my criticisms to the branch rather than the organization as a whole. In this letter I will attempt to address these limitations.
The PSL tries to critique American liberal democracy for its emphasis on the form of democracy without its actuality. We critique the idea that democracy is an event recurring every 2-4 years when we vote for leaders. However in function we accept a level of democracy which acts exactly like this. There is no effective recourse to hold elected leadership to account. In the first place our constitution has certain provisions which allow existing leadership an insurmountable level of control over the democratic processes. This is not simply democracy under centralized guidance but a hollowing out of democracy as a meaningful force in our party. The provision in the constitution which allows the central committee to appoint up to 40% of the voting members of congress allows existing leaders to hold a strong(if not insurmountable) plurality. Theoretically this plurality can be overcome but it is practically immovable. In effect it means that those who wish to change the composition of leadership or oppose the CC’s position must work to convince more than 4.5 times as many delegates as the CC does.
This is not to say that the CC should not be able to appoint voting delegates. In the years that I worked on the National Fund Drive Central Committee(NFDCC) I could have been the most diligent and politically apt comrade imaginable but since this work would not have been done at the branch level it would not be factored into members choice on whether to select me as a the branch level it would not be factored into members choice on whether to select me as a delegate. So in this manner there is a real need for the CC to have some discretion on delegates but 2 out of 5 delegates is an absurdity. The basic argument surrounding such a provision is that it creates a level of continuity. We should not throw away the concept of continuity but we must ask to what degree should it be prioritized over our ability to grow our working class democracy alongside the movement?
Secondly although the CC does not control a majority through the appointments they are also benefited by other extra-constitutional undemocratic practices. Chiefly a lack of transparency in the workings of leadership. Lenin was consistent in critiquing both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadet parties for their lack of transparency. It was a point of pride for Lenin that all the problems inside the RSDLP were being laid bare so that workers could make up their own minds about the leaders and misleaders in their movement. In my letter to the SC two years ago I predicted that without transparency the SC as a whole would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of members since they could not see if it was a specific member or group of members behind a wrong headed tactic. This is also true of our national organization. We are able to see the reports from congress but without an ability to see the debates behind the choices we are unable to hold specific leaders to account. If our delegate voted contrary to our revolutionary values how would we know? How would we hold them accountable when elections came around for the next congress?
This is not a hypothetical question. Few rank and file members are aware that at our last congress some members attempted in good faith to disagree with the position put forward by the CC on the question of how to position ourselves relative to artificial intelligence. If we thought the CC was incorrect or that they mishandled the disagreement how would we democratically attempt to change the direction of the party on this vital question facing our class? As Parenti once said, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input.”
It seems as though such accountability and debate are anathema to those who currently run our organization. In pre-congress docs for years we have been told about the goal to massify the party. It is my belief that it is impossible to massify the party if we do not have a means by which to absorb and resolve the debates which will naturally emerge amongst our class. People can accept defeat in a debate on a specific proposal but they cannot be expected to take part in building an organization which doesn’t have any means by which to have such debate.
Many members have made arguments about transparency in recent months. Many of them have been in good faith. However there are members who have raised the banner of transparency from the SC only when it could serve their careerist ends. When they were in leadership they took advantage of this obscurity to misrepresent their fellow leaders to members. However as soon as they found themself in the minority transparency was an ideal to be fought for? No I doubt they will follow us because the cause of democracy and debate was a means towards their egoistical ends.
It is in light of these and other facts that I make the choice to forge a new path outside of the party. It is a difficult step, it is a scary step and there is no guarantees about the future. But I feel I owe it to my class to take it. I have seen too many hard working and genuine comrades become burnt out and turning away from organizing entirely due to struggling against the sins of our party. This is why a wrongheaded party is not just a mistake but something to be fought against as it siphons limited energy from our class that can be harnessed toward revolutionary ends. I have seen many leaders resign quietly. I respect this choice but I think it makes it ends. I have seen many leaders resign quietly. I respect this choice but I think it makes it difficult for the movement to learn any lessons for the future. In leaving the party I think it is vital that we do the work to reflect on the failures and limitations of the PSL as well as its strengths. Dialectics requires that we see the necessity for the party at a specific juncture in history and absorb its strengths while leaving behind as many of its issues as we can.
I have witnessed resignations before and know I may be slandered for many things by the party. I know many of you are dedicated fighters for socialism even when we have disagreed we have fought side by side. My hopes are that even if we have disagreed in the past you will remember that I have always been open and honest about where I stand. I hope that this letter will help those of you who are dedicated to the class struggle to see the limits of the PSL. I invite you to embark with us on a new path to build the kind of organization we were promised when we were recruited.
In Solidarity,
L.M
D.W’s Letter:
Comrades I have chosen to submit to this branch as a whole my resignation, I have done this in violation of the constitution and by-laws because I agree with you all that our branch is in need of transparency to tackle the political disagreements that have paralyzed us for so long, and I believe comrades deserve to understand the type of organization that they are in. I know that this will be characterized in many ways, it may be described as uncomradely, it may be described as disagreement with the possibility of socialist revolution, it may also be characterized as an unwillingness to submit myself to democratic centralism or the will of the collective by accepting the outcome of the SC elections. I want to assure you none of these things are true. I declined nomination because I knew I couldn’t complete the term.
I joined the party 6 years ago because I believe that socialist revolution is not only possible, but that as a mother I have a life long duty to the struggle for socialism. It is not a matter of sentimentality but of practical necessity, it is in it’s actualization that my own children’s future becomes secure. In those 6 years I have spent 5 of them in various appointed and elected leadership roles the last 2 as a member of the Salt Lake Steering Committee. I have worked tirelessly to build our branch and the movement for socialism. I was the State Chair of the Vote Socialist Campaign, at my own expense I have attended international delegations, answered the call for out of state deployments, and earned the confidence of our comrades being elected as a delegate to the 6th Party Congress. I have not made this decision lightly, but I hope that by explaining how I came to it, each of you can make an informed decision as to where to direct your energy without false pretenses.
I am leaving the PSL because I no longer believe that it is capable of carrying out the tasks required of any party that hopes to call itself the vanguard, despite it’s ability to raise its profile and increase its ranks well beyond its current numbers. In my time in the branch there have been recurrent struggles over our approach to mass work and the actual practice of democracy within the party. Having to struggle through differing ideas about a question or practice isn’t inherently a problem. However I have seen how a lack of internal structures and an unwillingness of the National Party leadership to assert authority where necessary has allowed flagrant violations of our constitution and bylaws to occur on a regular basis with no accountability. I have seen over and over the tendency to smooth over disagreements and debates with rhetorical unity, obfuscating all manner of political differences. I have seen first hand how one on one conversations are used to prevent the emergence of disagreement, which almost always relegates the disagreement to the realm of the interpersonal. The consequences have been felt by everyone in our branch even though many of you lacked the information to understand what was happening. I will fully acknowledge that as a member of the Steering Committee I have participated in withholding information that I thought comrades deserved to have to make informed decisions, my only defense is that I did so inline with Party discipline and inline with the directives of the National Party leaders.
Many comrades trace the problems in our branch to the retreat after the Palestine movement began to fade. The issue of democratic participation in discussion and debate, and the responsibility of comrades to carry out the resulting work according to the principles of democratic centralism has long been a flash point. It was the final iteration of housing unit work building the Tenants Union of Salt Lake that offered us the first real test of party structures from my experience. This period in our branch was marked by lively debate in our units and a high level of engagement from rank and file members, members in the units had a high degree of input on how work was unfolding within the confines of building out the tenants union. As a member of the Extended Steering Committee and a lead of the housing unit I attempted to resolve a question about our strategy towards developing TUSL between my unit and SC members in the unit. We had diverging positions and ideas about the appropriate way to move forward so I attempted to resolve the disagreement through all of the channels available, using our constitution and by-laws to guide me.
After having several questions taken to a vote in our unit with the SC members in the minority, our unit attempted to carry out our collective decision, members of the SC used their influence to formally and informally encourage comrades to carry out the work in the way the minority voted. When this was raised to the full Steering Committee in an Extended Steering Committee meeting, it was decided that I would develop a proposal laying out the concrete path we would take to build TUSL, and the SC and Extended SC would vote on it to end the debate. The proposal that I put forward was adopted by the full Steering Committee and immediately SC members in the unit started advising the unit to carry out work in contradiction to the adopted proposal. In response I planned to call a branch meeting on the basis that the branch meeting is the highest body of the branch where I planned to call for a branch vote on the strategy of TUSL. Up to this point the Steering Committee members in the housing unit had pushed for disagreements between comrades to be resolved through informal one on one or small group discussion until they reached consensus instead of encouraging the debate and differences to be clearly discussed in the unit meeting for all members to understand. My position was that if a disagreement existed among the leadership body of the branch and the membership we should be open with the branch about what those disagreements were. Not only so that we could gain the input of the branch but so comrades could adequately assess the decisions of the leadership body and the individual members elected and appointed to it.
Through out this time I was engaging in debate and struggling openly about the direction that we went, however my genuine political disagreement was treated first as irritation, then as an interpersonal clash, and eventually as full blown insubordination and subversion of Party norms. interpersonal clash, and eventually as full blown insubordination and subversion of Party norms. While leadership was understandably frustrated that the branch was bogged down in internal conflict, the position I was putting forward was that in a democratic centralist organization we are expected to have intense debates and disagreements and when consensus cannot be reached we should vote and all be held accountable to carrying out the decision reached by the majority. Given that I had seen members of the SC refuse to accept the decisions of the majority in their unit, gossip about comrades, and move to overturn a decision they didn’t personally agree with, I lacked trust that leaders in our Party are actually accountable to the principles of democratic centralism in practice.
My insistence on bringing this disagreement to the full branch would also mark my first experience with members of the National Organization Department coming to SLC to resolve internal dysfunction. During that visit our liaisons met with the extended steering committee and asked why we were pushing for our proposal to go to a branch vote, I told them I believed I was following the method laid out in the constitution for resolving disagreements like this, I was told that the language of the “branch being the highest body” does make it my right as a member to bring any decision before the branch to vote on, but that isn’t how we handle things in reality. I agreed not to bring the proposal to the branch and our national liaisons helped us come up with a plan for moving TUSL forward which I took up enthusiastically, shortly after their visit the Steering Committee removed me from my role as deputy of the housing unit and removed Liz as the lead. Along with other long time members of the housing unit who had sided with my position in the debate, we were removed from housing work all together. There was never a reason given other than the Steering Committee had decided to do a branch reorganization and that is what the needs of the branch called for.
I must admit that my removal from housing work was a deep blow it was an area of work I’d done since before joining the party, I wrestled with feeling wronged and lied to and I questioned if the Party actually operated the way leaders said it did. I reflected and decided I could look at my removal from housing work as a personal attack, or I could see it as an opportunity to show the members of leadership that viewed me as combative that I was serious about party discipline. I put my all into developing the first iteration of an organized comms team in the branch right before the Palestine struggle would start picking up momentum. The uptick seemed to settle tensions in the branch for a while, we got into a regular work flow but as the movement endured for months we were faced with the question of developing a strategy for our work in the Palestine movement. This was something that the SC said they did not have the capacity to develop and said that it would have the unit take up. Myself and another leader developed a proposal that the unit voted in favor of. This strategy was then challenged by members not in the unit at the behest of SC members in the unit who disagreed with the strategy and found it too confusing for people to understand. This led to the strategy being put up for a vote in a special meeting where anyone from the branch was able to attend. Before this strategy was able to be adopted we had the 2024 SC elections where 3 long time SC members left the Steering Committee. With the election of a new steering committee the contradictions left unresolved from disagreements over the correct approach to mass work and base building and the correct approach to developing political strategy again came to a head immediately.
The period following the election of the 2024 Steering Committee was marked with an extreme amount of disunity internally because it was grappling with it’s members D and K breaking party discipline and sharing internal SC deliberations with a former SC member X and her partner N. This led to a campaign to create a faction in the branch where D and her partner N. This led to a campaign to create a faction in the branch where D and X were hosting secret strategy retreats with student comrades without the knowledge of the elected steering committee. Simultaneously N and X were actively calling decisions made by the new SC into question before the full branch, and used their informal relationships to gossip and disparage the new SC to emerging student leaders. The refusal of a highly respected former SC member to accept the legitimacy of the newly elected SC, represented the first time the authority of an elected Steering Committee as a body would be challenged in the branch. We would later learn in early 2026 that these strategy calls with N and X, never stopped, but I’ll write more on that later.
Following the departure of X, K, and N from the branch D remained on the SC, without K on the SC and finding himself frequently in the minority, he continued to meet with student comrades attempting to counter organize against the decisions of the SC that he personally disagreed with. While Devin was not solely responsible for the hardened positions within the SC, his repeated violations of the constitution and by-laws represented the primary contradiction preventing our branch from being able to become unified around a shared path. This culminated in irrefutable proof that he had knowingly encouraged comrades in Mecha to call a counter event to one he knew the SC had just voted on calling. The SC and our liaison worked at length to consolidate the student comrades being influenced by these actions and open the door for any questions about what they had heard from D and others, our mistake was in not being absolutely clear about what was happening and providing our perspective so that comrades could decide for themselves what to believe. At the time talking about the specific violations comrades had been carrying out was seen as a threat to the unity of the branch and our ability to win over those student comrades, who through no fault of their own had been mislead by leaders of the branch that they trusted.
The lull in the Palestine movement in the summer of 2024 and the final stretch of the Vote Socialist Campaign would follow a familiar pattern, D, L, and, I found ourselves faced with similar questions, and similar diverging understandings of what it meant practically to apply the party line on mass organizing and how we prioritize the interests of base building with the interests of flexibility to respond to the surges of the protest movement or other national campaigns like Vote Socialist 2024. This was also when the branch formally started approaching CU. As I mentioned above D was not alone in hardening the positions in the SC, during this time he did have moments of explosive rage directed at him in SC meetings by L. Instead of being called out directly in those moments, L was privately talked to later about the need to engage with D constructively. Unfortunately the mediation with members of National that was meant to finally resolve the underlying diverging ideas on the correct path for our branch was not scheduled by them. D’s position was that the best tool to build a relationship with CU was TUSL, L and I advocated for us to build an organizational relationship with CU as PSL, our suggested first attempt was in the final weeks of the VS24 campaign, the SC had decided to launch a branch wide push directing all activities to tie back to promoting the campaign. D agreed to talk with B and feel out how she felt about us doing outreach for Salt Lake Immigrant People’s Agenda and sharing materials about the campaign too where it made sense, he also got approval from the SC to bring a handful of comrades to participate. After several outings and no discussion about the Vote Socialist Campaign going on between PSL and CU leadership, Liz and I pushed for us to pause trying to build the relationship with CU until after the election. This was met with resistance from D and meetings with the SC grew increasingly tense. Around this time the SC found out that Devin was hosting a private Black August event with student comrades to do an independent study on the National Question despite members of the NOD actively trying to discuss those questions and provide clarity on them from National. This was the final straw for the SC in which we demanded the NOD take some sort of corrective action towards the factionalizing being carried out by an active SC member.
As a consequence D was asked to stop attending SC meetings and informed by the NOD that he would need to participate in party work with CU accompanied by a comrade who could report back what happened to the SC. Following the election in November the branch launched into interest meetings and in January of 2025 began preparing for the Jan 20th inaugural We Fight Back rally. We approached CU to collaborate and partner with us on the event which they agreed to, after a challenging start and misunderstanding about the social media announcement we pulled off a successful rally. Comrades expressed excitement about the success of those attempts, and the SC hoped to build on that. We attempted to launch an emergency response network that would be developed through organizing meetings held at the LC. Failing to establish any partners or real involvement from CU, we determined we lacked the man power to effectively create these networks with so many people in different areas. We stopped hosting the organizing meetings and attempted to determine a more comprehensive approach to the We Fight Back days of action as the No Kings movement was starting to develop. This would lead to a pivot away from CU and us looking for other opportunities to engage with immigration defense. Devin disagreed with this approach but was no longer in SC meetings, so he used committee meetings and unit meetings to raise what he saw as failures of the elected SC to secure the relationship with CU. Comrades not in the faction were seeing SC members give contradicting directives and were confused by the constant tension. As the end of the term was drawing to a close Liz and I informed our National Liaison that we planned to refuse to accept nomination and threatened to demotivate at the election if Devin was allowed to run without answering to the branch about his misconduct.
Agreeing that some sort of disciplinary action was warranted but unable to approve anything more within the NOD, our liaison told D he could not accept nomination for the 2025 term and that failure to change his conduct would result in expulsion. The plan after elections was to take up the question of immigration work, develop a strategic outlook for the branch, and plug D into work that he enjoyed. It was deeply important to the incoming SC to show him that we saw his contributions as a comrade and that we weren’t going to spend the term trying to punish him or get revenge.
After the SC retreat in April there was a flurry of activity we moved quickly to implement a structure that would allow for comrades to participate in the decisions about carrying out our work, but would centralize the relationship building and strategy development in the SC. It wasn’t perfect and the SC attempted to build a second tier of leaders through one on one asks and opportunities working closely with a handful of comrades. The limits of this were felt immediately, without the explicit role and responsibility of being an appointed leader in the branch comrades we hoped to raise up didn’t have the clarity about what we were expecting of them. Without a regular division of labor and regular meetings comrades were incentivized to pick only the meetings and events that interested them.
Another variable arising out of the SC retreat was the break up between A and L which created a dynamic where often L would verbally attack A and Dodge if they asked clarifying questions or suggested that there was disagreement with her positions. There were many meetings where we were unable to finish our agenda because L would storm out or shut the conversations down. For a lot of this period I attempted to play a mediating role where I was trying to translate the legitimate issues L had to the rest of the body, but also act as a support so that L didn’t feel attacked by the legitimate questions being raised by other SC members. This was an error because it reproduced the dynamic in which SC members and liaisons had one on one conversations to attempt to indirectly deal with the problem which only created the conditions for suspicion.
After an intensely scary experience at an immigration rally that A was the tactical lead for, police appeared to be kettling protestors and Liz in the lead truck got caught between them. She developed a deep distrust of other SC members acting in a tactical role. Only exacerbating this distrust were the tragic events at the No Kings rally in June. L and I had been the tactical and security leads, but after getting to the front of the march that had missed the end point at Wallace Federal, L and I were separated from the rest of the contingent. We had just brought the runaway crowd back around the corner, and were a few yards ahead of the Sky apartments when we heard the shots. We tried to get back to the comrades behind us and turned around not knowing where they had come from and saw Z. The next period was chaotic but at almost every turn we took to get back to the contingent police were charging towards us. Unable to find our way back we called A and told him to lead comrades out of there. Afterwards L experienced severe PTSD which she later expressed not feeling supported in by the SC.
All of these factors had the effect of creating explosive meetings that left every member of the SC stressed out about our weekly meeting. After coming back from Congress, M was assigned as our National Liaison because she would be able to provide the close consultation that the SC needed so that we could finally get work moving in our branch. After several attempts to talk to L and the SC together and individually, she asked L to take a leave of absence for a few months so that the rest of the SC could have some space. L refused and the NOD put her on an LOA from the SC but they did not want us to tell the branch in an effort to protect L’s privacy and to keep the peace. Complicating matters was a convergence of interests of L and D both wanting to engage in immigration work with Bailfund and CU. Liz then knowingly pushed bailfund in chats and directed her partners to lobby for bailfund in other committees against the directive of our liaison. In an unprecedented move in December the NOD formally suspended L for 6 months for uncomradely conduct and failure to abide by democratic centralism. This was the opportunity for the National Leadership to reassert norms and expectations in our branch that even elected members of the the SC are accountable to the constitution and by-laws. Unfortunately P left the party and we were faced with reality that we were starting completely over with a new liaison H.
The approach that H wanted us to take saw the issues in the branch as mostly rooted in the realm of the interpersonal. He spent more time communicating with D than he did asking the SC how things had developed in the branch. When presented with irrefutable proof that X and N had just told comrades to call for new SC elections because they had concerns about the disciplinary action taken against L, H asked if we’d ever talked to X and asked her to stop interfering in the branch, when we said we had and so had our former Liaison, he assured us that he would talk to her and tell her how serious what she was doing was and that she needed to stop. Then he told us the next step was a convo between A and D to determine if it was possible for them to move forward that was mediated by C. D and A reported extremely positive feelings about their discussion. However at the May branch meeting D would then ask A and O to motivate for U’s return and insinuated that to not do so would be undemocratic. Following that meeting he went out with student comrades and shared his disagreement with the SC’s approach to branch work.
Despite no evidence of real resolution, H provided the SC, D, J, R, and E with 4 points to serve as a basis for unity and turning the page in the branch. This is supposed to clarify the problems and help us understand what we need to do to move forward, yet it opens with a point about not litigating the past despite acknowledging we have differing interpretations of what happened over the last “few months”. When I asked how the NOD intended to ensure that the next SC put the agreement into practice and what they planned to change to provide the level of support that a brand new SC would need given the experience of the last two years where the needs of the party often meant that our branch was waiting for National to respond on disciplinary matters long after they needed to be addressed. H assured me they’d be in close consultation and available to support facilitating conversations about branch strategy including about CU with the branch, and that if a comrade were to violate the agreement they would be talked to because they shouldn’t be here. When I clarified, great so you’re saying the NOD is committing to expelling any member that violates this agreement, he said no, he couldn’t commit to that in the abstract.
Another example of the disconnect between the practice of our party and the way that it is defined in our constitution and by-laws was demonstrated when H came to SLC last week ahead of our nominations, the question of L’s suspension ending was looming. As a member of our central committee, he did not know what the suspension was for or how long it was. He told us it would probably be easier for her to meet with members of the SC and as long as she agreed to the agreement then she would also be able to come back. This was shocking to me, why doesn’t the party have some sort of standard practice for handling disciplinary measures? Why is there no record of the discussions or decisions of other liaisons to ensure continuity and fairness for members dealing with such things?
So far I’ve attempted to detail the understanding that I had as an SC member of the problems in our branch. These problems are not comrades, they are structural. L.M’s letter explains some of the possibility of effectuating change through the Congress. I however want to share my experience of how the Party Leadership handles debate and discussion when a controversy is raised. I have witnessed first hand a fellow congress delegate brought to tears on the congress floor for raising a passionate demand for a thorough analysis and debate on a party line. She was told that she was harming the unity of the party and that she needed to speak in favor of their proposal for ending the session on the AI question. They then asked other attendees to also speak in favor of it, without those comrades reading it ahead of time. All of this would have been concealed from the delegates if not for Kei Pritsker formerly of Break Through News, sharing those details with the whole congress on the basis that it was not the right way to engage in democratic debate and delegates deserved to know. Both of those comrades have since left the party.
I waited until today to send this so that I could hear the response from our National Leaders to Walters’s letter, I wanted to ask them what general lessons can leaders take from this to ensure the unity of our branches and I wanted to know what the Executive Committee sees as it’s biggest area of growth. I am a firm believer to fix a problem, you have to admit you have it first, I don’t believe that the Party is willing to acknowledge to it’s rank and file members the real truth about the way the party functions and the calculations that are being made in how their branch is engaged with. It’s obscured from us, and often under the pretense that we are missing context or can’t understand the complex background which made up a certain period.
However the Party also is raising up many cadre who will be capable of winning, because the rank and file members that join this party do so on the basis that they are really building what we say we are. I cannot stay in this party because if I did I would have to lie to my comrades about where I stand. I refuse to accept that we must keep making the same mistakes, or to cover up the mistakes and mishandling of our branch on the basis of false unity.
For those comrades that read this and have questions, I will be honest with you. For those that want to stay, I’m rooting for us to see revolution in our lifetimes. For any comrades that read this and feel like me that you cannot go on this way any longer, rest assured you are not alone and we welcome you in charting a new path.
With Revolutionary Optimism,
D.W
Logistical Question
There is an inherent complexity in this break that due to our longstanding position within the party we have been entrusted with the control of the 501c4 which holds the financial resources of the branch. It is our belief that in any meaningful split with the party there is cause for a just division of resources as we just as much as you have build those resources and intent to use them for revolutionary ends. However the party has historically held the position that anyone who leaves the party due to political disagreements is counter revolutionary and persona non grata. Therefore we make the offer that we sit down for negotiations as to a reasonable division of resources. For legal reasons the 501c4 cannot simply give a large portion of funds to an individual. Therefore we offer to put down several months rent and continue to pay for the existing subscriptions the branch has(canva, comcast, zoom etc.) until such a time when the branch can set up its own 501c4 which can legally receive its share of the funds. Once said organization has legal standing we can begin the process of the aforementioned negotiations to find a means by which to perform such a division.
L.M’s Letter to The SC:
Comrades of the steering committee,
I have long had questions about the real practice of democracy within the branch. I have at different points voiced aspects of these questions but I must reflect upon my own unwillingness or inability to formulate them in any systematic manner. The fullest exposition of these doubts was raised after the SC changed its policy regarding observation of their meetings, which happened in the last few months after I had attended a few such meetings. Comrade A was kind enough to have a call with me to try and explain the reasoning for the change and to hear me out for well over an hour about my concerns. It was my hope that such concerns would be brought to the SC but so as to return his kindness I would like to formulate these concerns so that he doesn’t have to represent a comrade in their absence. I also would take this opportunity to flesh out my arguments—with the benefit of time to research—and respond to some of his initial counter points. In a sentence my concern could be put that unity requires the light of open debate to build. I intend to show that this isn’t just an ideal of “freedom of criticism” but a result derived from the experience of the socialist struggle. I hope that the good faith extended to my initial doubts raised with comrade A will continue in the reception of this piece and that anywhere in which I err I will receive a similarly good faithed critique.
Our current SC has inherited certain issues which have pre-existed its election and I do not envy your task in trying to handle these historic weights on your back. I think the previous SC(that prior to the election of D.W) identified an aversion to disagreement whether that be in professional or interpersonal spaces. I think in general our culture encourages us to look for some higher structure to resolve debates whether that be the boss, HR or the police. Further I think the culture within Utah makes such open disagreements extra uncomfortable. That SC assigned readings which dealt with disagreement and has proposed a mediation process both of which were oriented toward the productive resolution of primarily interpersonal squabbles. I think these are good steps but I think they fail to address that unless we can have productive, democratic and professional debates we will never become a party of a class; a party which can absorb thousands, hundreds of thousands of members. As we grow so too will the contradictions and divergent opinions within our party. Our strength will be in our ability to maintain these contradictions while still being able to act decisively.
One of my long-time concerns is the lack of awareness within the rank and file membership of the real debates and divergent tendencies of our branch. I think this has been caused in the first place by the aforementioned aversion to open critique but also by the tendency for debates to be held in one on one conversation or in conversation between rank and file members and leadership. I will make reference to debates within our TUSL and pre-TUSL work which I think are both emblematic of the issues and were where many members first realized these challenges within the branch regardless of their divergent interpretation of events. The first example will reveal that I do not see myself as above the critiques I level at our branch.
Early in the debates around our housing work, comrade L and I thought there were certain tendencies which revealed a lack of understanding about party principles and the practice of democratic centralism. Specifically around our openly identifying as socialist and putting forward a concrete party program. While we had done some work to make these critiques in our meetings around specific tactics we were employing she and I also went to comrade A to voice our critiques. I believe in a healthier environment and with greater experience we would have made these critiques plain within the bounds of those housing meetings. Over time we did not feel that these concerns were properly addressed within the body and it became clear that there were differing tendencies within our work. These tendencies began to solidify as they tend to into blocs however these blocs and their positions were hardly clear to newer members both of the branch and the committee. Especially when the LC committee was dissolved and absorbed into TUSL the history of the debates was not clear to members. Many of these disagreements over tactics took place between formal and informal leadership in private chats. When you enter a committee and you witness what had at that point become a heated debate without the context it is easy for what were at their core political struggles to appear as interpersonal or petty squabbles. This appearance would inevitably become reality as the increasingly solid blocs had no real method by which to settle their differences. These issues were only exacerbated by problems which have been recognized by subsequent steering committees of the inconsistent reporting of committee work to the SC by its members. Comrades who had legitimate political lines, regardless of their veracity, were viewed as obstinate. The question of their continued membership within the party was even raised. We speak of resolving interpersonal issues but we have had little discussion of how it was a failure of branch structure that they became interpersonal in the first place!
I apologize for the digression into branch history but I feel that it will be helpful in understanding my concerns and why until recently I have had fear to raise them. I appreciate that we are in a less tenuous position as a branch and I believe the work of this and the previous SC have gone a long way in making me feel able to raise real concerns without being viewed as the branch “reply guy” or as contrarian. However as stated I feel we need to continue our work in order to become a party which can claim for itself the place of vanguard. Namely I think while the debates have somewhat simmered down we have not addressed the lack of political openness necessary to have real legitimacy.
In my call with comrade Q I raised my concern that we as a branch do not know what the SC is discussing nor do we know the results of the discussion. I gave the analogy to if the public were unaware of who voted for a specific bill in the houses of the senate. How would we know which senators to condemn and to protest? Which to vote for or against? We would view such lack of openness as a severe lack of accountability and a testament to a lack of democracy. This is the reality within our branch. Comrade A raised a counterpoint that he did not see it as a fair comparison as there is a large qualitative difference between a bourgeois congress and a revolutionary party. I would ask what are these differences? First that they hold state power and secondly that they are viewed by the general populace as more legitimate than our party. The first of which is the goal of all parties which have ever existed and thus I do not think should be relevant to our discussion on democracy. The second I believe only proves my point. They are viewed with greater legitimacy than our party and if they hid their deliberations as we do to our members they’d lose legitimacy as a whole rather than of this or that part of their body. This or that leader.
Much has been made about projecting unity from the SC for fear of exacerbating the fractures within our branch. I ask, does hiding your disagreements build real unity? Or does it lend to the discrediting of the whole membership of the steering committee? When three of you make a bad call and we, the rank and file membership, are ignorant as to the two dissenters, how are we to hold you accountable at the next election? How are we not to condemn the whole of the SC for its errors? Despite pedagogy becoming a buzz word within our branch we have shown little interest in the education of our membership about the tendencies within our own branch.
Let it not be said that this is just my opinion. As I raised in my call with Comrade Murphy the RSDLP was the only party within Russia to go to such lengths as to publish the minutes of its congresses. In his work, “But Who Are The Judges” Lenin went so far as to critique the liberal party, the Cadets, for their lack of openness:
“The liberals sneer at the struggle within social democracy in order to cover up their own systematic deception of the public in regard to the cadet party…There are no records of the proceedings of the cadet congresses. The liberals issue no figures of their party membership either as a whole or by organizations. The tendency of different committees is unknown. Nothing but darkness…Lawyers and professors, who make their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and praise open activity by parties while actually flouting the democratic principle of publicly and concealing from the public the different political tendencies within their own party.” (bolding is my own)1
Let it be remembered that the RSDLP was an illegal party! Which we are not! Yet we feel so unconfident in our disagreements that we hold ourselves to a lower standard. Not just for the public but for our own members? In gleaning lessons from historical examples it is necessary to move beyond the simple question of what was done but to the political purpose for which it was done. Toward this end Lenin’s critique of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is more exemplary:
“[D]uring the period of the greatest liberties, the period of most direct influence upon the masses, they concealed from the public the existence of two different tendencies within the party. The differences of opinion were as great as those within the Social-Democratic ranks, but the Social-Democrats tried to clarify them, whereas the Socialist- Revolutionaries tried diplomatically to conceal them…’Not to wash one’s dirty linen in public’ is a thing the S.R.’s are adept at. The trouble is they have nothing to show in public but dirty linen. They could not tell the whole truth about their relations with the Popular Socialists in 1905, 1906, or 1907…Our Party’s serious illness is the growing pains of a mass party. For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organizations of the Party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built, and we are building it. We have succeeded in putting the views of our two currents truthfully, clearly, and distinctly before everyone. Personal bitterness, factional squabbles and strife, scandals, and splits—all these are trivial in comparison with the fact that the experience of two tactics is actually teaching a lesson to the proletarian masses, is actually teaching a lesson to everyone who is capable of taking an intelligent interest in politics.”2
The RSDLP made its disagreements public but we as a branch can’t even acknowledge them to our members!? The purpose of open debate as revealed by this quote was to instruct and build the competency of the class in understanding its leaders, misleaders, and the real political lines they represented. If there are fractures within our branch as Comrade Murphy put it we are doing all of these class fighters a disservice by hiding them under diplomatic language! We are treating those who are the most committed to the struggle with kid’s gloves. When we ought to be educating them as to the real sources of division. Is the cause a fear that they won’t understand these divisions? Or is it that we ourselves do not? And thus cannot claim any right as educators. If it is the former I say you are casting doubt on our members and their ability to understand politics intelligently. If it is the latter then it is your responsibility as leaders to stop pussy-footing around issues and get to the heart of matters.
As a more modern reference to support my position let us look at the wikileaks of the DNC in its attempts to obstruct the primary election of Bernie Sanders. When these leaks were revealed a great mass of his supporters saw what Marx and Lenin had said countless times: when the working class wins by the rules the ruling class will do everything in their power to subvert the rules. As such the democrats lost a great deal of legitimacy. While I don’t think we would go to such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not open, in this most open of times for organizing, we risk losing legitimacy if the ruling class should ever reveal the lack of unity amongst our leaders.
If the lack of transparency should be doubted I will make reference to one of the few real debates I was witness to. Before the policy of SC observation was changed I was at a meeting where you voted on the proposal raised by comrade Hovermale in regards to our masking policy. After an intense debate, which left some comrades visibly on the verge of tears, a vote was taken to settle the matter. Three comrades voted in favor and two against. I must admit I was grateful a vote was even taken. However since this vote I have not witnessed, and I may be wrong, any announcement as to this new policy?
This leads into my concerns about the policy about SC observation. Whereas the previous policy allowed one to attend any SC meeting save the portions regarding matters of membership and security now members are expected to provide a concrete reasoning behind their observation. How is one ever expected to do so in this reality in which we actually live when the questions being discussed by the SC are not published? When the ongoing position of the SC is to not reveal the debates going on in its halls? Whether intended or not this policy makes observation of your actions almost exclusively by invitation.
I want to be abundantly clear that I do not advocate for any form of ultra-democracy by which every choice is debated by the full membership. Rather I call simply for real mechanisms by which that membership, which elected you, can hold you accountable. To quote Michael Parenti, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure,open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry,”3 or in this case members.
When I brought up the importance of publicizing the minutes of their congress to comrade A he raised a good question about whether the RSDLP had a similar policy for their local bodies. While I still would like to better understand how they were organized locally I think this misses the historical trees for the forest. As we repeat often there is no one mode of organizing which is eternally correct. My point thus far has been about the Leninist principled commitment to educating the masses as to the different shades of opinion within the party. It must be repeated that the RSDLP existed as an illegal party and we do not. Even within the context of intense political repression of the RSDLP their newspapers did publish their disagreements within the St. Petersburg branch. Our party does not have such localized newspapers as modern communication technology has allowed for a greater degree of centralization through the apparatus of Liberation News.
The last point I will address regarding comrade A’s reply to my initial concerns was that he said comrades in national said they felt we had allowed too much debate to occur without a unified response from leadership leading to fractures within our branch. While he would not share specifics which might be relevant to my reply, on first glance I cannot accept this position.
As stated earlier it was our lack of openness in regards to debate which led to fracturing and the development of petty squabbles. Had leadership issued a unified response during the intense period of debate within TUSL it would have been based on largely unreliable reports from the SC and would only have led to resentment not to real unity. Perhaps if the SC at the time had a real unity based on accurate reporting of the events such an assessment would be correct but as I’ve said in previous meetings: one can declare unity between a hair brush and the kingdom of mammals but this does nothing to give the brush mammary glands. Unity is to be won, not declared.
In conclusion, I don’t have a perfect solution to building unity within our branch which must be built by concrete struggle over our real disagreements but we only do ourselves a disservice by glossing over these disagreements with diplomatic language. I have raised the need before to have real meeting procedures for debate and resolution and I feel I was viewed as being overly formalistic but it is through such procedures that the ruling class has learned to maintain its hegemony regardless of their personal disagreements. If we are to build a truly mass party which can maintain the disagreements which will inevitably become more intense I think we ought to learn from them.
If I did not view the SC and our party with a certain level of legitimacy and hope for our ability to overcome such struggles I would have already left to organize somewhere else. My real hope is that we can shine a light on our disagreements so they can be resolved, not in an anarchistic fashion of perfect consensus but through us being able to disagree and submit to the will of the majority. I hope for no more than something accepted by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the whole of European social-democracy in the 20th century: democratic centralism.
In Solidarity,
Comrade L.M.
Anonymous Letter:
Hi all, I am writing this letter to express my resignation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Growing this organization has been the major focus of my life for the past 7 years, and I do not make this decision lightly. However, through my experiences with national leadership, especially after moving to NYC 2 years ago and operating in close proximity to the Center, I no longer believe this organization to be capable of bringing about broader, meaningful change for the working class in this country. While in NYC, I have been involved in trying to base build with my class, a strategic orientation that is so diametrically opposed to the PSL’s strategy of agitation and protest that the highest levels of PSL leadership have worked to undermine and sabotage base building work in Brooklyn. My belief in the need for socialism and working class organization is as firm as ever, which is why I believe it my responsibility to take the best possible road to build working class power, which is outside the PSL. I joined the PSL in Pittsburgh shortly after graduating college, but I met the party in Boston as a student at MIT. My first exposure to the PSL was a few weeks after Trump was elected in 2016. My initial enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders turned into a deep disillusionment with the electoral system when the DNC systematically sabotaged his candidacy, and this led to a search for new ways to fight for change outside the electoral system. My first ever protest was the night after Trump’s election. I began getting involved with some student organizing and attending more protests regularly around Boston. My decision to join the PSL came as PSL members built the MIT graduate union from the ground up. I saw how involvement in the union built power to fight for meaningful change for people I knew, and how being a part of a union changed people’s outlook from cynical to hopeful and empowered. I wanted to learn to organize from the people capable of building something as impactful as the MIT graduate union. I was the 5th member in the Pittsburgh branch at the time I joined in March 2019. My time there was mostly consumed by attending protests throughout multiple mass upswings, from the 2020 BLM uprisings to the Roe v Wade decision getting overturned to the Palestine movement. I became well-versed in the rinse-and-repeat cycle of tactics I later learned was the essence of PSL life: protest, flyer, forum, protest, flyer, forum. I knew it was insufficient. I knew we needed to go deeper. I experimented with new ways of organizing around widely felt issues, but attributed any lack of success to my relative inexperience as an organizer.
In summer 2024, I got a new job and moved to Brooklyn. I was excited to learn from new mentors and develop my ability to organize from those in the leading branch initiatives that included writing software for a member management system, creating an education portal for socialist political education, advising PSL members across the country on legal rights when being charged for free speech activity, and more. I was asked by Brian Becker to leave my software job to go to law school, then a few months later asked by Brian again to make staying up-to-date with AI development my main political focus, Brian seemingly having lost interest in encouraging a contingent of comrades to attend law school. I felt the effects of whiplash at the changing speed and urgency for an extremely wide array of national priorities, almost none of them having anything to do with organizing our class. I eventually dropped involvement in the majority of these responsibilities to focus on neighborhood organizing in Brooklyn.
In summer 2025, I was asked to attend the 6th Party Congress as an observer. When a debate around AI was sparked, I was asked to be involved in the resolution as a professional machine learning engineer. I took part in “secret” meetings which consisted of numerous meetings with a small group of about 8 people, including the person who raised criticisms of the party’s AI position. At the same time, the person who raised criticisms privately expressed concerns to me about the nature of the Congress and the lack of comradely debate. At the time, I didn’t understand her concerns and tried to use my role to keep the peace. When asked by national leadership to get on the mic in open discussion about AI to share specific talking points while establishing my authority on the subject of AI, I complied. However, this experience left a bad taste in my mouth and the comrade who raised the debate in the first place shortly thereafter left the organization.
Shortly before the Congress, the PSL made the “Sick of ICE” sick outs in solidarity with immigrants a primary focus of political activity. As a liaison with two branches, I was tasked with ensuring those branches carried out this national priority. In an internal meeting, I raised that the steering committee of one of those branches received broad pushback around the initiative and the branch was not enthusiastic about participating. These criticisms were on the grounds that a general strike could not happen by raising a call on social media and that this looked immature. A central leader of the PSL, instead of being open to criticism, instructed me to intervene more forcefully in instructing the branch to carry out the directive, insinuating that they simply misunderstood the task. A few months later, the central directive of the PSL became the general strike orientation. In a national leadership meeting, Brian Becker motivated for the need to agitate around a general strike and that the task at hand was to raise the working class’s consciousness around the need for a general strike. I was disturbed by his orientation. It contained a number of completely ahistorical interpretations of the Russian Revolution, and completely ignored that a general strike can only be possible through a very high level of organization of the working class. After this, I became increasingly embarrassed by PSL national directives with which I increasingly disagreed, especially including a polemic against the leaders of the Minnesota Model, a statewide coalition of unions, community organizations, and other progressive groups aimed at building working class power who had also raised the call for the January 23 Day of Truth and Freedom in response to Renee Good’s murder. I had already considered the Minnesota Model a template to aspire to, and became incredibly frustrated when PSL leaders openly denigrated the leaders in Minnesota and took credit for the success of January 23. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of the undemocratic nature of both the New York city branch and the overall national organization of the PSL. I have witnessed both Ben and Brian Becker ridicule comrades I deeply respect, both in private settings and in open meetings such as the NYC Branch Conference. I have witnessed coordinated efforts by national leadership to stifle political debates around base building to reaffirm agitating for socialist consciousness as a higher strategic objective. I see base building as a common sense focus on organization of the working class instead of the PSL’s obsession with endless agitation. The fact that base building is such a major threat to the PSL that a debate around it cannot even be allowed leaves me with little hope in the future of the organization.
Through these experiences and many others, I have come to the decision over the course of the past year that I must continue building working class power outside of the PSL. This is an organization that is deeply politically flawed and whose leadership naively believes that agitation and mobilization alone can bring about revolution. If this weren’t bad enough, any democratic pathway to change this orientation is stifled or shut down before a debate can even occur. I believe that in order to win, socialists must organize the working class. I look forward to continuing to fight to make this vision a reality.
E.’s Letter:
Hello comrades,
I wanted to let you know that after careful and thoughtful consideration, I’ve decided to end my candidacy and stop pursuing membership in the PSL. This is a multifaceted decision that was not made easily or taken lightly. I have a few reasons, but before I get into that, I just want to make it clear that I am not interested in taking a break and coming back later; this decision is final for me and there is not room for negotiation, even if my concerns are addressed. I am sending this letter to our Ogden unit because I feel connected to each of you and care about everyone a lot, and I wanted to be as open and honest with y’all as I can.
First, it is important to clarify that I made this decision independently from D’s and L’s resignations. I have taken approximately a month long break and was not aware of their exit until Monday evening. I made this decision two weeks ago and have been trying to find my words since. I do find the things shared in their letters as well as Walter Smolarek’s letter alarming. It has definitely given me further confirmation that now is the correct time for me to exit.
I would be remiss if I didn’t address a few concerns I have had. In particular I have questioned the actual practical application of the constitution and bylaws for some time now, and I found myself returning to them and finding contradictions with what is written and what is practiced. On several different occasions, whether in readings, lectures, or communications, I have felt the familiar tinge of coercion that I know so well from being a member of the LDS church for 23 years. I have difficulty with the NFD, and as someone who is facing financial hardships, something about it has never sat right with me. Dues are something I can understand, but I have felt like I’ve been asked for money by National A LOT over the last year and it has made me uncomfortable. Especially when I don’t see the PSL doing anything that concretely improves the material conditions of anyone with those funds.
These concerns also coincide with the personal experiences of my best friend who was a candidate in another branch in another state. This branch knew of a city council candidate who was predatory and frequently sexually harassed queer youth in the community. My best friend informed their branch leadership and was promised the PSL would not endorse nor affiliate with that candidate anymore. This did not happen and the branch continued to affiliate with and support him despite the evidence. I tried telling myself “it’s just a bad branch” and realized how much that sounded like the oft repeated mantra I had while a member of the church, “it’s just a bad ward.” I know that what other branches do is their own business and not related to the Salt Lake City branch. However, for me it calls into question the integrity of National if things like this are able to happen on a local level.
When I consider also the things that Walter Smolarek wrote about in his letter, it brings many more questions to light about the actions and motivations of National. I have come to find that I no longer trust them, and so I can no longer pursue membership in this organization. I want to end by saying that the last year I have spent organizing with y’all has been life changing and I have learned so much. It has simply become clear that this is not the path that is right for me to take. Thank you for your time, and for everything this branch has taught me about organizing. I will carry this time and these experiences close to my heart always.
Thank you,
E.
Citations
- Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “But Who Are the Judges?” Proletary, No. 19., Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/05b.htm ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Parenti, Michael. 2004. Superpatriotism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 81. ↩︎
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