Editorial Note: Below are two separate pieces, a leak and a republication, respectively: the leak is another internal message from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the republication is a follow-up from ex-PSL member Marissa Sanchez to her last piece on leadership’s cover-up of Eugene Puryear’s assault of the author in 2020. Marissa’s piece can be found here.

As concerns rise within PSL over the systematic cover-up of sexual assault among the organizations leading figures the Central Committee has responded through a call for complete suppression of dissent across all clubs in the country.

Claiming to be a democratic organization that cares for the oppressed, the Leadership of PSL continues to make every attempt to cover up its long history of internal abuse through fedjacketing the rising number of members coming forward with their experiences, claiming that this flood of information is the result of fractions and the state department working to crush this party fighting for the people. Meanwhile tokenizing the few women who hold higher positions of leadership to claim that former members such as Marissa Sanchez have no right to speak out on the violent processes of “accountability” they were forced through as it met the party standards of the time—to argue that it was wrong is to break “party line.”

This is the behavior of a cult, not an organization working towards revolutionary struggle. Dissent and contradictions must be struggled through, not sidelined, erased, and further suppressed by those who’ve done wrong. The Central Committee of PSL claims that such violent tactics used against survivors is “Democratic Centralism” when in reality it is merely an attempt at ensuring abusers stay in power and while revolutionary energy goes nowhere.

Moving Forward

Message from the Central Committee to Local Leadership Bodies

Approved unanimously by the CC on September 15, 2026

Dear comrades,

We have heard from SCs in many areas that they have now had significant internal discussions on Marissa Sanchez’s letter, the NDC statement, the CC report, as well as the ongoing factional operation aimed at dismantling the Party. This has been discussed in units, branch committees and other expanded leadership bodies, internals, in one-on-one meetings, and other settings. The overwhelming majority of leaders and members nationwide are standing strong in defense of the Party that we have all collectively built together, and are eager to move forward with our important political work. This document offers you some guidance on how to do that. It is not for mass distribution to the membership.

Under democratic centralism, there is thorough internal discussion followed by decisions taken at the appropriate bodies, which have been elected democratically, and those decisions then become binding and executable.

NDC and Central Committee decisions

The all-woman National Disciplinary Committee been vested by the Party Congress with final authority on all disciplinary matters related to sexual misconduct, binding on all other leadership bodies and on all members. In 2026, the NDC thoroughly reviewed the 2020 disciplinary case involving former members Eugene Puryear and Marissa Sanchez. The incident took place prior to the NDC’s existence, when the Party, its depth of leadership, its staff and its institutions were much smaller.

The NDC review affirmed:

• That the disciplinary and accountability process in 2020 conformed with the Party principles and disciplinary protocols then operational. That if such an incident took place today, it would go instead to its all-women’s panel, and would follow the more thorough and elaborated processes related to sexual misconduct that the NDC currently uses.
• That people have the right to change their opinion on an incident, and on a disciplinary process they have been involved in. Marissa Sanchez, however, despite being involved in the creation of the NDC from its conception in 2021, for the next five years did not raise that she had changed her opinion, nor did she ask for the NDC to reopen the case.

The NDC’s review of that matter is now closed

The PSL Central Committee is the Party’s highest elected body between congresses. Its political and organizational decisions constitute the line of the PSL, and are binding on all PSL members as a principle of democratic centralism, and as a requirement of membership. The Central Committee, after thorough discussion, unanimously responded to the factional operation’s distortions in June. It also unanimously approved the “Comprehensive Report on the Marissa Sanchez letter” after a thorough discussion, laying out in far greater detail the support provided to her, how and why her relationship to the Party leadership changed, and how she intersected and coordinated with the factional operation. This report has been circulated to the entire Party membership and branches have had a week to adsorb its meaning and content. This report constitutes the CC’s definitive position on the matter.

Democratic centralism and defense of the Party

Under the Party By-Laws, “All members, including those who disagree, are duty bound to publicly defend and carry out these decisions.” That means anyone who cannot publicly defend the Party, its decisions, and the elected leadership bodies carrying them out, is in violation of the most fundamental tenets of Party membership, and must resign or be subject to expulsion.

The duty to defend the Party does not require each member to speak to each aspect of every decision ever committed in other people’s accountability processes from years ago. It means disputing the false narrative that the Party tolerates sexism in its ranks, and affirming that the Party has a strong record and strong processes that have empowered and developed women leaders at every level. It means disputing the narrative that the leadership is corrupt and undemocratic. It means standing by the legitimacy of the all-women’s National Disciplinary Committee, and the legitimacy of the elected Central Committee, which have comprehensively reviewed these matters and made their decisions, as they are authorized to do.

This duty to defend the Party does not stop our permanent task to improve the Party’s internal life and institutions. All conversations and proposals to improve the Party are welcome, if they are done in the spirit of making the Party a better instrument for our class, and premised on comrades’ own experiences with organizational life — not on the distorted “facts” or arguments of those who want to destroy the Party.

Individuals who cannot in good conscience carry out the duties of membership can still leave on friendly terms with the Party — but they cannot be members. If a member engages with these operations to destroy and dismantle the Party, joins in the effort to discredit or undermine the legitimacy of our elected leadership and institutions, or takes the side of the Party’s enemies over its entire elected leadership, they should not remain PSL Members.

Understanding the ongoing Attacks

Finally, we want to emphasize why defending the Party has assumed a particularly critical role in this stage of the class struggle. At a moment when the PSL is providing vital leadership on many fronts, NSPM-7 has reorganized billions of dollars in federal law enforcement resources to “dismantle and destroy” organizations it calls “domestic terrorists” based on their viewpoints and activism. COINTELPRO and other campaigns of state repression in US history primaily focused on covert attacks, to “foster factionalism” and “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” a targeted organization. The main three targets in such operations historically were an organization’s 1) reputation, 2) leaders and 3) finances.

The targeting of the PSL by right-wing media, politicians, members of Congress, and the Department of Justice is real, although we may not know the full scope of it for years. According to media reports, a federal grand jury has been convened in the Southern District of New York, targeting left-wing organizations in New York City, and this also includes The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, ANSWER and others. Grand juries operate in secret, compelling testimony from anyone they subpoena in environments without lawyers and where remaining silent leads to jail. According to media reports, the PSL was named by a senior Department of Justice official Harmeet Dhillon as a target to be “dismantled.” We have faced a broad and escalating range of state, legal, law enforcement and Congressional attacks in the last 9 months, with a new one almost every week.

There is also a previously secret factional operation, still ongoing after many months, composed of former PSL leaders and members, focused on trying to dismantle the PSL from within. The anti-Party grouping announced themselves to the world in June as if they were just committed to mass organizing, but appear entirely focused on recruiting people from our Party, and trying to destroy the PSL, rather than organizing towards their own vision. They have conspired to encourage small groupings elsewhere to conceal political differences and then resign. In one recent example, a factional member originally from New York used a false name to rejoin the Party in a new branch to help organize the resignation of members. Every day we receive new reports of these anti-Party forces probing current members, especially to uncover weak spots, gather grievances, identify salacious stories, and dig up details of past internal disciplinary proceedings. They want to find anything to drive a wedge between PSL members, to convince members they can’t trust their own experiences in the organization, and then combine all such stories into one singular narrative that the PSL leadership is nefarious and untrustworthy.

We are not asserting that these two operations to dismantle the PSL are necessarily connected. But either way, it is the most elementary duty of every Leninist to defend their Party in the face of any new attacks to destroy it. So long as these operations exist, and so long as the Party is a growing and formidable force, we can’t avoid that we will face different types of attacks. The Party would be weakened for the struggles ahead if it were to retain members who are not prepared to defend it.

The work of local leadership bodies

We have heard from all branches at this point. The developments of this week have understandably caused shock and distress. But our sense is that SCs everywhere are now determined to return to their work of strengthening the Party and organizing the working class. They are talking with whatever members locally they need to talk to, in order to make that happen. We recognize that some areas still have meetings planned around this matter, and these should proceed so that all members have an opportunity to understand the Party’s decisions, have their questions answered, and move forward in defense of the Party and our tasks ahead. Based on reports from around the country, we think this matter can be brought to a close in the next week. Those who want to dismantle the PSL have studied history, and know how organizations can simply become exhausted by internal issues and scandals. We will not permit that to happen, and have to return to the principles of democratic centralism to move forward.

We ask that your SC discuss this letter and reply in the next 24 hours to the National Organizational Department at pslnationalstaff@pm.me on the status of your area and next steps over the next week. We also encourage you to share your report with your national liaison. Please let us know if you need further clarification or assistance.

Who Gets to Write the “True Narrative”

Content note: Please note that this essay discusses sexual assault, rape, suicidal ideation, and organizational misconduct.

At the end of my original essay, I wrote about what I expected the PSL’s response to be. I expected them to defend their leadership and insist that the harm I experienced had been handled appropriately because I had agreed to the “process” at the time. I expected them to invoke the later creation of the National Disciplinary Commission (NDC) as proof of their understanding of sexual trauma.

In many ways, that is exactly the response they gave. And yet, I was surprised to realize that there was still some small part of me that hoped I would be wrong. That once faced publicly with the harm their decisions caused me, the Party might acknowledge that even if they believed they were acting correctly at the time, there were things they should have done differently.

That small part of me is sad and disappointed, but the larger feeling I am experiencing is anger.

Which tracks because, as those who know me well know, anger is much more comfortable for me than sorrow as an immediate emotional reaction. In November 2020, being assaulted by comrade Eugene Puryear overwhelmed even that instinct; I was not angry yet, only frightened, disoriented, and trying to survive what had just happened.

In some ways, I am relieved to feel that anger. It tells me that I am better positioned than I was then. That I have the capacity to confront their response rather than simply survive it. That I have built a life sturdy enough to hold me while I speak plainly about what happened and withstand the consequences of doing so.

I am specifically angry at things in their response I know to be outright lies. I am angry at their careful choice of language which diminishes my role and credibility while emphasizing Eugene’s stature, contributions, and humanity. I am angry watching years of my private messages, relationships, and behavior after my assault assembled into an argument about whether I am now entitled to understand what happened to me in the way that I do. I am especially angry that they would assert that my motivations are for some kind of personal or political gain. Or, worst of all, their insinuation that I may be an agent of our real enemies.

Some of their narrative affected me more viscerally than I expected. Their description of me “tearfully hugging” Eugene in the meeting led by Ben made my skin crawl. I remembered that moment, that room, and the person I was in it. I remember sobbing and telling them that Eugene mattered more. That he was a more important member than me. A more visible leader, a Black leader, a historian. I remember saying that if I couldn’t handle being around Eugene, that if one of us had to go, it should be me. I remember the sacrifice I was ready to make for projects I believed were bigger and more important than I was.

Apart from being angry, I am also somewhat nervous about writing another piece so quickly. My first essay took me a long time to write and even longer to decide to publish. I had years to think about what happened before I finally put those thoughts into words. Now, only a week later, I find myself responding in real time to an official Central Committee document about my own assault and its aftermath.

There is a large part of me that would rather not respond at all. But my original essay has over 36,000 views, and I know many people are trying to make sense not only of what happened to me, but of the competing account the Party has offered. I want to ask those readers to keep thinking.

I am not going to litigate every text message from six years of my life or respond line by line to every accusation about my motives and relationships. There are factual claims I will correct and choices in their narrative that deserve close examination. But I do not want their response to drag us away from the questions that matter most.

Because underneath more than one hundred lines of defense, accusation, private correspondence, factional intrigue, Fox News, and speculation about the state, the fundamental facts are not disputed: Eugene sexually assaulted me. I reported it immediately to Ben. Party leadership, specifically Ben and Brian, handled the response. The incident was kept confidential, even from other Party leaders. Eugene quickly returned to both public facing and internal positions of leadership.

These are not allegations. They are the Party’s facts too. The disagreement is now over what those facts mean.

The questions to be asked based on these facts are: Was the process that followed just? Was it actually survivor-centered? What does meaningful choice look like when someone is experiencing acute trauma? What responsibility does an organization have that cannot simply be handed to the person who was harmed? And what does the Party’s response tell us about how it understands accountability today?

The Central Committee calls its account the “true narrative.” I think we should look closely at how that narrative is being constructed.

The Decision I Never Should Have Been Asked to Make

On the one hand, the Party accuses me of distorting the PSL’s long history of taking sexual violence seriously and diminishing the important work done by the NDC. On the other hand, their own account acknowledges that when Eugene assaulted me, there was no NDC. They say there had “never been a charge against someone in the top leadership itself,” and that because I did not want Eugene to resign, “another accountability process would be devised in discussions with” me.

Their ultimate defense, in other words, is that I agreed to what happened after my assault.

In my original essay, I clearly stated that I said I wasn’t sure I wanted Eugene to resign. I wrote about participating in a meeting led by Ben and about additional conversations with Ben about me being assaulted. But what I understand now, and what I wish the Party would grapple with, is that I never should have been placed in the position of “deciding” what should happen with Eugene. That there is an important difference between giving a survivor agency and transferring organizational responsibility onto her.

Furthermore, Ben did not really ask me if Eugene should resign. The morning after being assaulted Ben told me Eugene might want to resign, and I responded that I wasn’t sure that is what I wanted to happen.

Most importantly, I was not considering that question from some neutral position. I was struggling to understand how someone I trusted and admired could have treated me so carelessly. I desperately wanted what had happened not to be real and for my life to return to normal.

I was also deeply embedded into the organization. I had built my entire life around the PSL. And in the days that followed reporting my assault to him, Ben was telling me in each conversation to consider how my choices could impact other comrades, projects and the Party’s political relationships.

I am not arguing that trauma rendered me incapable of making any decision for myself. Nor am I arguing that there was only one acceptable punishment the Party could have imposed. My point is narrower: my wishes in the immediate aftermath of being sexually assaulted should never have been treated as sufficient evidence that the Party’s response was just. Survivor agency does not mean making the survivor responsible for determining the future of the person who harmed her.

There is a reason for this. Victims of sexual assault are often very close to the person who harmed them. Even when a victim knows that what happened was wrong, they may still have complicated feelings about the person who assaulted them. They should not be placed in the position of carrying the responsibility for what happens to that person as a result of the assault.

Taking that decision out of the victim’s hands helps create a more impartial process and, just as importantly, removes an enormous burden from the victim. Who should be allowed to focus on their own safety, healing, and what they need rather than feeling responsible for the consequences their perpetrator may face.

The extent to which I was being placed in a position to “determine” what should happen to Eugene was in itself traumatizing. It created guilt, pressure, and additional emotional harm; especially because I was then asked for years to carry on having a relationship with him as if nothing had happened. To work with him. To be in space after space with him.

A trauma-informed and survivor-centered process would have recognized this dynamic, recognized I was having an acute trauma response, and not placed the burden of determining my perpetrator’s consequences onto me as the person who was assaulted.

The Party’s response repeatedly tells us: Marissa wanted this. Marissa did not want Eugene to resign. Marissa did not want him expelled. Marissa participated in determining the consequences. These claims are presented as evidence that the Party’s process was appropriate.

But those facts do not answer my criticism. They are my criticism.

If the Party truly had a long-established political understanding of how seriously sexual violence must be treated, and how it impacts people who have experienced it, then that understanding should have guided its response precisely when the person accused was one of its most important leaders.

Whether Eugene remained fit to exercise political leadership after sexually assaulting another member was a question the PSL had to answer for itself.

The truth the Party does not want to face is that there was no real process taken up to answer that question. And that given the immense social, economic, and emotional pressures I was facing, that the decision to keep Eugene in the Party, in prominent leadership, and in a public-facing role was truly and ultimately the decision of two Party leaders, Ben and Brian Becker.

How a Survivor is Supposed to Behave

A significant portion of the Party’s response is devoted to proving that, in the months and years after my assault, I behaved like someone who believed “she had been supported”. They point to my continued Party membership and leadership, my relationships with Party leaders, and messages in which I sometimes spoke to or thanked Ben warmly.

They also make a very specific accounting of the people who they say knew about my assault. Their response has forced me to reconstruct those disclosures more carefully than I had wanted to when writing my original essay. I can identify four people who I remember knowing, under very different circumstances, that I had been assaulted while being on staff for the Party in New York. The Party appears to describe five. I do not know who the fifth person is, and I will not invent a memory to resolve that discrepancy.

Originally when drafting this response, I wrote a description of each of these four partial disclosures. I say partial, because in only one of them did I even name Eugene, but after some reflection, I do not feel the need to expose myself further in response to the Party’s own invasion of my privacy.

The point I need to make is that knowing I had been assaulted in New York is not the same thing as being someone I confided in about how the Party handled my assault. None of these partial disclosures were with comrades with whom I was freely processing what happened. In fact, there were multiple times I asked Ben about if I could speak to specific people, for example Kei Pritsker, and was told NO.

The Party nevertheless uses the idea that anyone knew I had experienced assault to construct an image of me as someone who freely confided in multiple trusted comrades and repeatedly expressed satisfaction with how my assault was handled. That is the account I do not recognize and which I am calling out as a blatant lie.

The contemporaneous text they reproduce, in which I say my meeting with Eugene “went good,” I assume was to Chris Banks. The “friend” I wrote about in my original essay who Ben said he, “Rather I hadn’t told.” I do not dispute writing it. I believed it when I wrote it.

(An aside: One of the most painful parts of looking back on my experience is that when I confided in Chris, despite the fact that he was the person who recruited me to the PSL, a friend who knew my family, as well as, my history of sexual violence and someone who I had tirelessly defended, Chris did not stand up for me or question Ben about how my assault was being handled.

In fact, while I was spinning out, suicidal, calling him crying, Chris “comforted” me by telling me about how he resented the consequences he was given for his own sexual misconduct and womanizing. He commended the Party and me for not putting Eugene through the same “pain” of being suspended and isolated like he was in San Francisco.

At some of the lowest moments in my life, when I was frightened and confused the person I confided in was telling me about the lasting costs of punishment.

I also have to state how upsetting it is to know from reading their response that the Party leadership is actively relying so heavily on Chris in their response to account for my mental state after being assaulted. That they are asking him to look through our private messages for things that can be used to smear me. Especially because Chris is himself a “former member”, but who has been quietly moved by the Party to Atlanta, after again having sexually inappropriate conduct. I wonder where the sexually explicit text messages describing how he would like to sleep with different Party members in San Antonio are? How is it that the PSL leadership is still working with him in such a trusted way if he is both “not a member” and has shown repeatedly through his own personal conduct over years his failure to understand the role his actions play in the lives of women?)

There is a difference between saying I thought I was doing okay and actually being okay; between saying a meeting “went good” and concluding the Party’s process was just; and between telling someone I was assaulted and telling them the Party handled my assault well.

The same problem appears in their use of my relationship with Ben. Even after being assaulted, I had continued to consider him one of the most important mentors in my life and to care about his family. Those things are true. They are not the same thing as saying he and the Party handled my sexual assault appropriately.

They even go so far as to describe me as going through an “intense break-up” during this period. I wasn’t. I was in fact caught up in a painful and unhealthy situationship. I was not in a committed relationship. It sounds like a small distinction, but the Party uses Ben’s supposed knowledge of my personal life as evidence of how closely he was caring for me. Instead, the error made me realize how poorly he was tracking what was happening with me even when I was right in front of him.

This is the larger problem with their “evidence”. I could have seen Ben as a leader and friend, while still feeling confused and upset by his actions. I could have remained committed to the Party while struggling with something that happened inside it.

Most troublingly, they write: “This is not the behavior and words of someone who was shunned or grievously wronged.” What, exactly, is someone who has been grievously wronged supposed to look like?

Was I supposed to leave immediately? Stop loving people I had loved for years? Stop participating in political work that structured my life? Was I supposed to understand my trauma instantly and perform that understanding consistently enough that, six years later, there would be no contradictory text message for the Party to find?

Too many women already know how dangerous this logic is. We know women in our families, our communities, and our own lives who were raped or abused by husbands and boyfriends and did not immediately leave. Some stayed for weeks. Some for months. Some for years. Some continued to love the person who harmed them, defended them, slept beside them, depended on them, or tried desperately to make the relationship work. None of that means the violence did not happen. None of it means they were not “grievously wronged.”

We know better than to ask a woman, “If he really harmed you, why did you stay?” We should know better than to ask me the institutional version of the same question.

My continued attachment to the Party is not evidence that the Party did not harm me. I loved the comrades. All of my closest relationships were inside the PSL. My livelihood was at times tied to it. I had spent years building the Party and believed deeply in the political project it represented. If we understand that a survivor’s continued attachment to a person who harmed her does not negate that harm, we should be capable of understanding that continued attachment to an organization does not either.

This is why I do not see the Party’s response as evidence that it has developed a deeper understanding of sexual harm in the years since my assault. I see evidence of the opposite. Six years later, they are still evaluating my account through how well my behavior conformed to what they apparently expect from someone who was harmed: Did I stay? Did I hug him? Did I ever thank Ben? Did I continue leading? Was there ever a moment that I said I was okay? This is not simply a misunderstanding of trauma. It reproduces a deeply gendered and, I would argue, misogynistic way of evaluating women who experience sexual violence: searching their behavior after the harm for evidence that the harm, or their later understanding of it, should be taken less seriously.

“Former Member Marissa” and “Long-Time Party Leader Eugene”

Language matters. Political organizations, perhaps more than anyone, should understand that.

The Party introduces me as “former PSL member Marissa.” In the same sentence, Eugene is “a long-time Party leader.”

Neither description is false, but neither is neutral. Wasn’t I also a long-time Party leader? I joined in 2015, spent a decade organizing with the PSL, worked full-time for the Party, helped build branches, recruited and trained members, served in various national leadership roles, and was twice elected to the Central Committee. Not to mention, Eugene is also a former PSL member, so to position us using these terms begs the question: Why am I defined by my departure while he is defined by his importance?

This is not because leadership status determines credibility. It doesn’t. I raise it because the Party chose these descriptors, and that framing continues throughout the response. My history is largely presented as evidence to be examined: my relationships, private messages, changing relationship to the Party, and behavior after the assault. Eugene’s history, meanwhile, is presented through his political value: his recruiting, mentoring, work in the Black freedom movement, skill as a communicator, and knowledge as a historian. None of his accomplishments tell us whether the process following my assault was just. Yet readers are repeatedly reminded of his value to the organization. Concern for his health is even raised.

That is one way a “true narrative” gets constructed: not only through which facts are included, but through whose authority is emphasized, whose is diminished, and how readers are implicitly taught to understand each person involved.

I Am Not Part of a Faction

I want to be unequivocal: I am not part of a faction of former PSL members organizing to destroy, dismantle, or split the Party. My essay was not written or published as part of a coordinated factional campaign.

Am I in contact with people who have left the PSL? Of course I am. I spent ten years there. Many people I knew, loved, worked alongside, and organized with have since left too. And yes, some of us talk about the PSL. We also talk about art, our work, our families, and how terrifyingly hot it has been outside.

Talking with former PSL members has helped me process an emotionally difficult and disorienting experience. We compare memories, talk about relationships we lost, and support one another as people making sense of our time inside a closed political organization.

But I am not building another organization with these people, recruiting PSL members, or organizing a campaign against the Party. I have organizing work of my own that is based in my immediate community. “Decapitating” the PSL is not it.

However, that does not mean I condemn former members who have chosen to build other political projects. I don’t. I am still a communist and a Marxist. I want communists organizing, experimenting, building organizations, and finding ways to make revolutionary politics meaningful to more people. If people who have left the PSL build organizations that contribute something valuable to the movement for socialism, I hope they succeed. That does not make me a member of those organizations.

More fundamentally, I reject the premise that the success of revolutionary politics must mean the success of one particular organization. People leaving one communist organization to organize elsewhere should not automatically transform them into enemies, wreckers, or agents of the state. If our politics are actually about building a movement capable of transforming society, then there must be room for different organizations to exist, experiment, disagree, and still find ways to struggle together.

The Party’s vehement condemnation of any member who decides to leave and continue to organize in any capacity outside of the PSL is to me proof of how deeply sectarian and competitive their attitudes actually are.

My Essay Was Mine

There is another irony in their response. The women Central Committee members accuse me of portraying them as “pawns or pieces to be moved by some small cabal of men” and as “extensions of the desires of our male comrades.” I have never said that.

I find that characterization itself belittling to those women. I knew and worked alongside them for years. I considered them my friends. They are intelligent, experienced political leaders with agency of their own.

That is precisely why I hold them each accountable for putting their names on the Party’s response. The same way I hold myself accountable for signing other such Party responses when I was on the Central Committee and NDC.

What is striking is that while accusing me of denying these women’s agency, the Party constructs a narrative that denies mine. In their telling, I did not independently spend years reconsidering my experience or arrive at a different understanding after gaining distance from it. I did not decide for myself that I wanted to write publicly. Instead, I appear as someone drawn into a faction and incorporated into a coordinated campaign against the Party.

I reject both frameworks. Women in the PSL’s leadership are political actors responsible for their decisions. I am also a political actor responsible for mine.

My essay was mine. I wrote it, decided what belonged in it, decided when I was ready to publish it, and I take responsibility for every argument I made in it. The suggestion that someone else told me what to say or how to understand my own experience is an insult added to injury.

There is something circular about the Party’s argument. Former members describe harmful experiences and talk to one another about them. Their talking to one another is then offered as evidence that their accounts constitute a “coordinated attack”. If people leave separately and remain isolated, their experiences can be dismissed as individual grievances. If they compare experiences and discover commonalities, their agreement becomes evidence of “factional coordination”. When is anyone leaving the PSL ever going to be seen by PSL leadership as leaving with genuine grievances?

From Criticism to Conspiracy

The factional accusation does not exist in isolation. It’s the bridge to the most extraordinary part of the Party’s response.

Follow the progression of their argument: They begin by acknowledging that Eugene sexually assaulted me. They then dispute my understanding of how Party leadership handled that assault. From there, they question my motivations and connect me to a supposed faction of former members. Then come right-wing activists and Fox News. Finally, the response zooms out to discuss state repression, NSPM-7, infiltration, disruption, and the history of COINTELPRO.

By the end, a story about how the Party handled the sexual assault of one of its women leaders by one of its male leaders has been placed inside a narrative about threats to the revolutionary movement and the repressive apparatus of the state.

None of this answers the questions I raised. It instead creates an environment of mistrust and paranoia that serves to distract people from the reality of what happened, and in doing so is serving to make people complicit in harm that was done.

I am a communist. I do not need to be convinced that the capitalist state surveils, infiltrates, disrupts, and represses revolutionary movements. Nor do I need to be convinced that reactionaries will seize on real contradictions within left organizations and exploit them for their own purposes. They will.

But the exploitation of a contradiction does not make the contradiction false.

If former members of the PSL, or leftists long critical of the PSL; share my essay, that does not determine whether what I wrote is true. If Fox News finds my story politically useful, that does not determine whether what I wrote is true. Even if some agents of the state were delighted by internal conflict within a revolutionary organization, that would tell us nothing about whether the criticism at the center of that conflict is true.

And there is something painfully familiar about this framing.

In 2020, in the immediate aftermath of being sexually assaulted, I was asked to think about what accountability for Eugene might mean for the Party and the political projects he was responsible for. My trauma was placed beside the needs of the organization.

All these years later, after I finally decided to speak publicly, the Party is doing something remarkably similar. This time, people are being asked to consider what my disclosure might mean for the Party: who might exploit it, what political forces might benefit from it, and how it might intersect with broader attacks on the left.

What is “good” for the PSL is once again being placed beside and weight against the harm I experienced.

That should trouble anyone serious about building revolutionary organizations capable of self-criticism. If an allegation becomes politically suspect whenever an enemy can exploit it, what criticism of a revolutionary organization could ever be safe to make?

Our enemies will always exploit our failures. That is an argument for confronting those failures more rigorously, not for treating the people who expose them as possible instruments of those enemies. An organization protects itself from political attack not by refusing to examine its contradictions, but by developing the capacity to confront and transform them.

What Accountability Could Have Looked Like

I want to be clear about what I am arguing, because at several points the Party’s response frames the dispute around whether the consequences imposed on Eugene were sufficient.

That is not my argument.

I do not think that there could have been one perfect consequence that would have made what happened just. Accountability is not simply a question of how severely we punish someone. Accountability is not the same thing as consequence.

So what might a different process actually have looked like?

For starters, comrades who did not have a conflict of interest based on their relationships with Eugene and I could have been tasked with handling the process. I could have had someone independent of Eugene’s political relationships whose primary responsibility was supporting me. I could have been given time before being asked to weigh in on permanent consequences.

Most importantly, the Party could have had clear standards for what committing sexual assault meant for someone’s fitness to exercise leadership at the highest level.

Additionally, someone could have continued checking in with me after the immediate crisis had passed, when I had enough distance to understand what had happened more clearly.

Confidentiality could have been structured around protecting my privacy, rather than containing knowledge of what happened. This distinction matters. Especially, because in their response, the Party repeatedly points to concern for “my privacy” as a rationale for keeping knowledge of me being assaulted by Eugene so limited. Which is ironic considering that they then also proceed to share my private messages and make false assumptions about my personal life.

There is a difference between confidentiality that gives a survivor control over her own story and secrecy that gives a Party control over who is allowed to know about its failures. A trauma-informed process should have protected my right to privacy. It should not have made me responsible for keeping what Eugene did institutionally contained.

A principled trauma-informed response from the PSL would not have then violated my privacy further.

The Real Role of The PSL’s National Disciplinary Commission

The Party points repeatedly to the later creation of the NDC as evidence of its serious approach to sexual violence. I do not. As I described in my original essay, my experience serving on that body did not convince me that the Party had developed an independent, trauma-informed process.

Reading the NDC’s publicly leaked protocols as part of the Party’s response to my original essay only reinforced that criticism. Rather than demonstrating that the Commission is structured primarily around the needs of people who have experienced sexual harm, the protocols reinforce my concern that the NDC’s main function is to protect the Party from criticism and contain information that could damage it.

The protocols give three reasons for the Party’s highly confidential approach to cases involving sexual harm: protecting the privacy of the impacted person, protecting the privacy of the accused, and protecting the Party from “misinformation campaigns and machinations of the repressive state apparatus, and other anti-Party forces.” They further state that members who violate “the confidentiality of the proceedings” will face disciplinary action.

Protecting a survivor’s privacy and protecting an organization from its political enemies are not the same objective. When both are presented as reasons for confidentiality in a process dealing with sexual violence, we have to ask whose confidentiality is actually being protected, who controls it, and what happens when a survivor’s need to speak conflicts with the Party’s desire to contain information?

The protocols also leave unresolved how the NDC prevents someone who has experienced sexual harm from being made to carry the weight of the Party’s own responsibilities. They state that the “reporting party” should be offered the opportunity to participate in determining the “accountability process and consequence.” Survivor participation can be an essential part of a trauma-informed process. But the protocols never explain where giving a survivor meaningful agency ends and making her responsible for determining the consequences for the person who harmed her begins.

Nor do the protocols describe what care or support is offered to the harmed person throughout this process. They do not explain how the Commission accounts for the fact that someone experiencing an acute trauma response may not be prepared to make consequential decisions about accountability, or how asking her to do so too early could itself compound the harm she is experiencing.

More broadly, the protocols provide little indication of how the Commission understands the complicated ways trauma can shape a person’s behavior after sexual violence. These are not peripheral questions for a trauma-informed process. They should be at the center of one.

Instead, the publicly leaked NDC protocols tell us a great deal about the Commission’s disciplinary authority. They tell us which cases it investigates, who must submit to its decisions, what consequences it can impose, and that it consists of “long-time women cadres.” They tell us nothing about what qualifies those cadres to respond to trauma or how the process is designed around the needs of someone who has experienced sexual harm.

Being a woman does not by itself confer expertise in trauma. Being a survivor does not either. And placing women in charge of responding to sexual violence does not automatically make that response survivor-centered. Representation is not accountability. Women are also not the only people who experience sexual violence. And making women comrades disproportionately responsible for the difficult work of responding to sexual harm is itself a questionable and deeply gendered division of labor.

Creating a disciplinary body is not the same thing as creating a culture capable of accountability, nor is it the same thing as creating a trauma-informed process.

The existence of the NDC therefore does not resolve the questions I am asking. Institutionalizing a disciplinary procedure is not the same as institutionalizing an understanding of trauma, much less developing a serious political understanding of how sexual violence operates within our organizations and our class.

The questions I want our movement spaces to take up are these: What structures, practices, and political culture would actually allow an organization to respond to sexual violence without transferring its responsibilities onto the survivor or subordinating the survivor’s needs to those of the organization? What internal culture, training, and political development would be necessary so that women comrades are not disproportionately burdened with accountability work?

I do not see how the PSL’s National Disciplinary Commission, as described in its own protocols, answers either of these critically important questions.

Moving Forward

The Party is right about something. Something I tried to make clear in my own writing, which is that my understanding of what happened to me and how it was handled did change.

Time has given me distance and language I did not have then. Experiences outside the PSL have given me something against which to measure what happened inside it. Space has allowed me to reconsider relationships I once trusted and ask questions I did not know how to ask while I was living through their consequences.

I did not rewrite what happened. I did change what I understood my experiences to mean.

The Party says I am entitled to “change [my] feelings and opinions over time,” but then treats that change as something requiring explanation: Who influenced me? Which former members did I speak to? What faction did I supposedly join?

The simplest explanation is the one their narrative seems unable to accommodate: I changed because I learned, I reflected, I grew.

Revolutionary organizations must be capable of doing the same. We must be capable of giving survivors agency without making them responsible for deciding what justice requires; of protecting a survivor’s privacy without turning that privacy into institutional secrecy; of confronting harm without reducing people to monsters; of examining ourselves without treating criticism as attack; and of admitting that even when we believed we were acting correctly, we caused harm.

This is not separate from the work of defending our organizations and confronting our real enemies. It is a necessary part of it. We cannot build organizations strong enough to withstand repression, infiltration, and reaction if we are too afraid of our enemies to confront the contradictions within our own ranks.

Finally, I want to thank the many people who have reached out to me since I published my original essay. Some of you I have known for years; some I have never met. Some have shared with me their own experiences of harm within the PSL, and expressed how reading my story helped them better understand what happened to them. I am thankful for every kind message, every supportive comment, and to all who have told me that they hope I am surrounded by people who love and support me. I am. And I want you to know how much your care has meant to me.

I also want you to know that, despite how painful all of this has been, I am still hopeful. I am not an online person, I do not have social media accounts, and so watching the conversations and debates my essay has sparked online has been overwhelming at times. Getting to discuss the political meaning of these experiences with my own family, friends and comrades has honestly been healing.

I am proud to know that by telling this story more people are talking about trauma, sexual violence, accountability, organizational culture, and what we owe one another in the movements we build. My greatest hope when deciding to share my story was that by doing so I could help push exactly these kinds of conversations forward. If what happened to me can contribute in some small way to people learning, reflecting, asking harder questions, and building better practices for the future, then that matters deeply to me.

The Party may choose to respond to me again. They will likely continue to lie about my character. To invade my privacy. To call me ego driven, a wrecker, a state agent. I do not intend to enter into an endless back-and-forth in which every response demands another response, every private message another explanation, and every explanation another defense. I have said what I needed to say about their “true narrative”.

But I am not done writing about the questions it raises. I would like to write more about sexual violence, trauma, harm, accountability, and how we can build survivor-centered processes into our organizing spaces.

These conversations are larger than my experience, and they are larger than the PSL. They are conversations we need to have if we want to build organizations capable not only of surviving our enemies, but of becoming worthy of the world we say we are fighting for.

Editor’s Note: Below are two statements, both written and distributed internally within the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), as a form of damage control for the revealing testimony of former-PSL member, Marissa Sanchez, republished by USU here. What follows is an insidious effort to commit a character assassination of the very individual PSL’s procedures betrayed. Two things are admitted to, by both the National Disciplinary Committee and Central Committee: Eugene Puryear did assault Marissa and the procedure for remediation was determined by what Marissa supposedly wanted. These facts alone discredit PSL.

Their ‘victim-centered’ approach claims to be acting in the interest of the survivor, but in reality crushes them beneath social pressure. You can with one, formal, hand offer them the “choice” to expel someone, while with another, hidden, fist threaten them with the many “unfortunate consequences” that real accountability may cause. Which is exactly what Ben Becker did. The paper trail and consensus testimony for the “caring hand” can be brought out if ever needed to demonstrate leadership’s principles, while the existence of the fist can be doubted by smearing the victim as a manipulative liar. Which is exactly what these Committees have done here.

Internal National Disciplinary Committee Statement

The following statement was prepared by the National Disciplinary Committee to give our members an accurate account of the investigative and disciplinary process around an incident involving Eugene P. in 2020.

Marissa S., a former member of the PSL, posted a Substack article about this incident on September 7. The letter’s contents are understandably distressing. However, the letter seriously mischaracterizes the party’s actions and procedures. The article itself not only mischaracterizes the accountability process and events following the incident in 2020, but also attacks the central Party leadership and the NDC and undermines the PSL’s history in dealing with incidents of sexual misconduct, which are taken very seriously. It is important for members of the PSL to understand the context. The Party leadership is aware that Marissa has been communicating and working with the leaders of the recent faction, and former members are sharing the article online and sending it to current members across the country. The following document is not a comprehensive response to all the mischaracterizations in her article but rather an account of the investigative and disciplinary process related to the incident raised.

We also would like to make clear, for the sake of people having a full understanding of what happened, Marissa was an active participant in the entire process. She repeatedly expressed to multiple people, both in the immediate aftermath of the incident and in the years following it, that she felt supported by the Party and that she supported the process.

2020 Incident & Accountability

On March 29, 2026, the Standing Committee became aware that Marissa, a former Central Committee member considered a disciplinary incident involving Eugene in 2020 to have been mishandled, the accountability not severe enough, and the support for her to be inadequate.

The incident took place at a house party in November 2020. Marissa brought the incident to the attention of members of the Executive Committee at the time, which prompted an immediate investigation and disciplinary action. We do not share details of incidents widely, primarily out of respect for the comrades most affected by it. In the Party, the norms of our practices regarding disciplinary matters goes as follows: An investigation is conducted by the appropriate body, timeline is collected from all parties involved, disciplinary action is proposed. The proposed disciplinary action is typically brought to the victim before it is carried out. If any disagreements arise, we work through those disagreements with a path forward. Once a decision is made and the disciplinary action is carried out, it is not customarily re-litigated.

During the initial investigation, Eugene claimed he had been too intoxicated to recall the incident, but he did not contest it, and said he would comply with any accountability measure. He offered to resign from the Party. Marissa was involved in each decision made about Eugene’s punishment, and helped craft the decision that Eugene would be suspended from Party activity and leadership for six months. Eugene apologized to Marissa in a meeting she agreed to and facilitated by a leading Party member. Marissa made it clear she did not want Eugene to resign.

In the over five years, from the disciplinary action in 2020-21 to right before she resigned in 2026, Marissa never made the Party leadership aware that she had become dissatisfied about the disciplinary action taken. While she had been part of the accountability process at each step in 2020 and 2021, we only learned in March of 2026, six years after the incident, that Marissa now considered it insufficient and handled wrongly. Every victim, including Marissa, has the right to assert this and to look back on things differently with time. After Party leadership was made aware, the leadership reached out to discuss the matter. Marissa chose not to discuss this further and resigned from the Party. Following her resignation, the National Disciplinary Committee reached out again during the review period. She declined to participate.

As soon as Eugene heard that Marissa felt dissatisfied with the 2020 outcome, Eugene offered to resign from the Party. The Standing Committee accepted the resignation that same day.

Strengthening and Affirming the National Disciplinary Committee

At the time of the 2020 incident, the Party process in place to adjudicate misconduct was for a higher body to handle the charge. There had not previously been charges within the top leadership, and it was handled inside the top leadership as an uncontested charge.

In 2021, the Party initiated an independent National Disciplinary Committe, which was ratified by the Party Congress in 2022 with independent authority. Marissa was one of the founding members of this Committee and helped draft its protocols and processes based on the Party’s history in dealing with these matters. These norms have been used by other Party bodies to deal with new cases.

Following Marissa’s resignation, the NDC initiated a thorough review of the 2020 incident. The incident occurred before the NDC’s existence. The NDC reviewed notes and interviewed comrades involved to the extent possible. In its review, the committee found no evidence that the processes following the 2020 incident had been mishandled. It was particularly important that the accountability process had been swift. Marissa had been engaged at each step. Multiple people who were close to her at the time have independently confirmed that she expressed support for the disciplinary outcome, did not seek a different outcome and expressed she was being supported by the Party.

The NDC has, since its initial formation, been strengthened as a necessary step as the Party continues to grow. It is now institutionalized as a permanent standing and empowered body, composed of long-time women cadres. It has independent authority vested by the Party Congress. Any issues related to sexual assault go to it, bypassing all other leadership bodies, and all comrades must submit to its rulings. The NDC has the right to review all cases of sexual misconduct.

To emphasize, while we do share summaries and decisions of the NDC with the appropriate leadership bodies and occasionally members of the body most impacted, the NDC does not share details of its work or investigations with the wider membership. The primary reasons are to protect the privacy of the victims and to protect the Party from the machinations of the repressive state apparatus. Serious violations and egregious misconduct, which are not common in our party, are expediently investigated and lead to swift disciplinary action up to termination of membership. More often, the charges require time to conduct an investigation and understand the impact of any incident on those involved and on the work of the Party. Fundamental to our approach to these incidents is our understanding as Marxists that people can and do change. Comrades who violate Party norms, but remain in the organization, are punished appropriately and held accountable to ensure that they are meeting set expectations or terms of conduct. The victim(s) of those actions is(are) offered the ability to be involved in the determination of that punishment and the path forward.

Comprehensive Report from the Central Committee
in Response to Marissa Sanchez’s Post

This document was approved unanimously by the Central Committee on Sept. 10. It represents the most comprehensive report we can provide to members.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation has never taken the issues of sexual assault and misconduct lightly. The entirety of our politics is grounded in a well-developed understanding of the nature of oppression and exploitation in capitalist society. Sexual violence affects all people, but it does not affect all people equally. Women are, because of the system’s reliance on patriarchy, subjected to the most horrific forms of sexual violence to keep them dehumanized, isolated from society and the struggles of our class, and highly exploited within the political and economic system. Addressing the manifestations of oppression and the sexual violence that occurs is a requirement of the highest order. We have a proud 22-year history of confronting, rooting out and appropriately addressing these issues. 

On Sept. 7, a lengthy article was published on Substack by-lined by former PSL member Marissa which relates a 2020 incident involving Eugene Puryear, a long-time Party leader who resigned in March of this year. That a woman worker who experienced violence as a young person, and then experienced a violation from a trusted leading comrade, is disturbing, and hard to read for all of us — including those of us who were aware of the incident and did not speak of it widely out of respect for confidentiality of the victim. The Party leadership has maintained, from the moment it took place to now, that this was an absolute violation, which required a swift response, and that Marissa should be supported.

At the same time, the narrative that she now develops, six years later, about what took place after the incident, is false. The history is rewritten to erase the actual care that was provided, to erase the accountability that took place, and to erase what Marissa communicated then and her feelings expressed for years afterwards of feeling supported by the Party leadership. The agreed upon norms of confidentiality in this and other accountability processes — which she helped devise — she now falsely portrays as a cover up.

As written, it appears as an unrelated exposé independently confirming the allegations of the faction that the Party’s elected leaders are nefarious, undemocratic individuals who cannot be trusted. In fact, it was released in a coordinated plan with the same factional operation that goes back as far back as March — which we document at the end. 

We respect the right of all people to change their feelings and opinions over time about such traumatic incidents in their lives. But there are significant factual inaccuracies in what she has related about the accountability process that followed, the level of support she received and about the internal institutions of the Party. These must be corrected, and more information must be provided for accuracy. Due to the high-profile nature of this case, and the fact that we are currently under the highest form of state scrutiny and attack, letting a false narrative like this stand would only serve to sow greater confusion and provide a basis for the opportunistic larger attacks working to disrupt the Party and members’ work at this critical time. 

Under our norms, the details of disciplinary matters and outcomes are kept confidential — especially out of respect to the privacy of someone subjected to sexual misconduct. But given that she has published an article, it is clear that at this time, six years later, we have no choice but to respond. 

The incident and immediate aftermath

There has never been any effort to deny or question what happened to Marissa in November 2020. Eugene sexually groped Marissa at a holiday party. She was believed and not disputed. The Party leaders were shocked and angered that this could take place. Eugene, having been heavily intoxicated, said he did not remember the assault, but did not contest what Marissa said. He accepted responsibility and offered to resign immediately. Marissa said she did not want his resignation, and so another accountability process would be devised in discussions with her. Marissa was at no point challenged or questioned about the incident, as so often otherwise happens in society when women bring serious allegations against men in leadership. There was no foot-dragging or bureaucratic process. We moved swiftly and decisively in support of her and for accountability. The quickness of moving towards a resolution was not a form of pressure, but rather ensured real and immediate accountability from Eugene, and support to her. It was not an option to delay. He was immediately suspended and removed from the situation. 

Before leaving the building, they had a brief meeting where he accepted responsibility, and said he would do whatever he could to remedy the harm; she told him why his actions were hurtful and disappointing, especially as a leader that she had looked up to previously, and with whom she worked so closely almost every day. She wanted to be able to work with him in the future, but it would take time and he would need to get professional help and work on himself. At the end, they tearfully embraced.

Screenshots of her messages to a confidant that day read, “The meeting went good. I said what I needed to say and feel that I got a very genuine apology. He is suspended. No clear time when he will be back.” 

When such acts of sexual misconduct take place, there is no perfect process to repair the harm. Engaging the victim in the accountability process is important to restorative justice. In this case, the resolution, worked out with Marissa in the days that followed, was not that Eugene would “not chair CC meetings for a while,” as she says now. Eugene was suspended from all Party activities for six months — public meetings, internal branch meetings, all bodies of the leadership he sat on, all protests, etc. He was mandated to go into therapy, to try to get to the root of how this happened, and told to give up alcohol for the duration of the suspension, and not go to social activities where Party members would be present. This was developed in discussions with Marissa as an appropriate punishment and response for an offense of this type. She was adamant that Eugene not be expelled, as she told both Ben and the people she confided in at the time. The idea that Ben proposed to just “move on” and never speak of it again is totally untrue. 

After taking some time off after the incident, Marissa insisted on returning to her work. Eugene returned to his office for his professional work, five weeks later, but remained under suspension from all Party work. 

Eugene complied with the terms of the suspension. During this period, he forwarded on all speaking invitations he received, refusing all but one, which Marissa authorized in advance. He signed up for therapy and showed documentation of his visits. He swore off alcohol for the duration. In a series of private conversations, including in the debrief at the end of his suspension, he demonstrated genuine remorse and understanding of the harm he had committed, volunteered to do whatever else was needed, and affirmed that such heavy drinking was unacceptable. The Party leadership had confidence such a violation would not recur and was not a threat to the safety of others — and there have been no charges against Eugene in the years since.

After six months out of Party leadership and all Party activity, Eugene was reintegrated into Party life and resumed the many responsibilities he had been elected to perform. Under the practices and principles of our Party, leadership is not an “elevated status” but an embrace of more responsibilities — chief among them the development of more leaders. In the years after he returned, Eugene played a key role in recruiting, mentoring and training many new cadres, and Black cadres in particular, bringing them into the spaces of the Black freedom movement where he was already the Party’s most well-known figure. From that position of leadership, as a popular communicator and first rate historian of Black history, American history and global politics in the Marxist tradition, he resumed to make a significant contribution to the movement for socialism. Long-term demotions take place in the Party only when the assessment is that the person has a pattern of bad judgment or untrustworthy behavior, or has not adequately learned from their mistakes. In general, after an accountability process is completed, the Party puts members back to work to serve wherever they can best advance the struggle. For people who remain in the organization, there are no forever punishments. 

At this time, there was no National Disciplinary Committee. The National Disciplinary Commission (NDC) was formed in 2021 and ratified by the 5th Party Congress in 2022 to institutionalize the accountability and disciplinary practices the PSL has engaged in since its founding to address any issues of sexual misconduct. If such an incident were to take place today, it would go directly to the all-women National Disciplinary Committee, which has independent authority vested by the Congress, and which all members, including Central Committee members, are subject to. Its decisions are final, and can only be overturned by the Party Congress itself.

Prior to the formation of the NDC, when any charges came up, the existing process over the preceding 15 years was for a higher body to handle the charge. There had never been a charge against someone in the top leadership itself. Marissa at this time was one of three observers to the five-person national leadership, which Eugene was a part of and which met remotely. The only other full-time national leaders in NYC were Ben and Marissa, which is why Marissa came to Ben and he responded to the situation the same day. To give a sense of the scale of the organization at that time, the two of them had been working out of Ben’s apartment in the years before COVID as the “national staff.”

At the time, two elected members of that leadership on the West Coast were told over the phone that Eugene had been suspended for six months due to misconduct at a party while heavily inebriated, without divulging the name of the victim, and he should not be contacted. The observer members of the leadership were told that he was being put into mandatory therapy including for alcohol abuse, and so would not be in the meetings for six months and was not to be contacted so he could focus on that. Marissa had input in what would be told to others, and what would not be shared. 

Marissa’s letter includes supposed quotes from a conversation with Gloria La Riva shortly after her resignation in 2026. Gloria has replied, “The quotes Marissa provided are totally untrue and the description of the conversation is an outrageous distortion. While I knew Eugene had been suspended in 2020, I had not known it involved Marissa in particular. I did not say Ben and Brian mishandled disciplinary cases – leaders who I have total confidence in. The call turned to something I now realize had a deeper purpose on her part. In my conversation she began to say, ‘Everyone knows you and Richard were pushed out from the leadership.’ I said, ‘who says that?’ I was incredulous. When she insisted that was the case, without naming anyone, I told her that he and I are in California, and are in the Central Committee, and the Executive Committee is based in New York, as it should be. Even if I didn’t have a leadership post, I told her I have plenty of work in the party, and I am very satisfied with what I do. It was clear to me she was trying to turn me against the party, by appealing to what she assumed would be unhappiness on my part. I realized what she was doing. But what I didn’t know was the extent she was in ongoing communication with a group intending to rip apart the party. That became clear in the following weeks and I deeply resent her trying to use me against the Party leadership.”

To go back to the events of 2020: under Party norms, confidentiality is a central part of accountability proceedings, especially in sensitive issues. There was nothing unusual about that, then or now, and this did not constitute a “cover up.” She did not object to this norm. As someone who directed many disciplinary processes herself in the years before and after this incident, she always insisted on the same for others in her situation. Marissa helped write those very disciplinary norms into the Party By-laws, and into the National Disciplinary Committee protocols. In some cases, but not all, depending on the wishes of the impacted person, an apology and resolution may be communicated to a wider group of members. We make exceptions to confidentiality where we believe someone poses an ongoing threat to others’ safety, in which case they are expelled and other members, and others in the movement, are notified. When that is not the assessment, as in this case with Eugene, our process is informed by restorative accountability. Unlike the traditional retributive justice system—which relies on public record, public shaming, and punishment—restorative accountability relies upon confidentiality: for the privacy of the wronged party, for repairing harm, for creating space for honest self-reflection, and for successfully reintegrating the individual into work after they have sufficiently complied with the accountability process. An additional dimension in radical political work is that any and all sensitive information can and will be utilized by anti-Party forces, and state agents, to inflame internal contradictions or defame an organization publicly.

With that said, when Marissa expressed that she would like to confide in some more people, she then did so without any reprisal whatsoever. First she told two of the comrades she most trusted about what had happened, and her boyfriend at the time already knew. To the three of them, she said she felt supported by the Party leadership, and supported by Ben in particular, saying she had been treated with great sensitivity. She told a third leading member the same thing about suffering an assault and being well-supported by the Party leadership, without naming Eugene. She apparently told a fourth leader, also a close friend in the Party leadership, shortly after the suspension was over, naming Eugene. None of these confidants of hers were coached in any respect. When she expressed that the Party had supported her, these appear to be her genuine feelings at the time, confirmed by multiple people, including her then-boyfriend and closest confidants. Three of the comrades she brought into her confidence about this incident remained close with her for years afterwards; while she continued to confide in them about any range of personal things troubling her, no one has any recollection of the 2020 incident as one of them. All this was independently verified by the NDC in a 2026 review of the case. The NDC did not exist in 2020.

The following months and years: care and support in NYC and Los Angeles 

In January and February 2021, Marissa went through a difficult and intense break-up in her relationship with her boyfriend. She confided in Ben repeatedly during this period, including coming to his house to talk about her relationship and personal struggles. During this emotionally challenging period, she received extensive care, attention and support – and expressed no dissatisfaction about the handling of the incident with Eugene. Her boyfriend, now ex, was also a co-worker in the same building. She had been doing intense Party work for a few years, which is a common cutoff time period for a staffperson. All this was impacting her work and happiness, and she expressed that it was time for a new chapter. Over time, she expressed the conclusion that perhaps leaving NYC would be preferable. The Party leadership thought of Los Angeles as a place she could make a big impact. 

Contrary to her narrative, she was supported throughout this process. A comrade was assigned to drive her around full-time to see if she would like the city. When she did, she was given the apartment of a comrade in Los Angeles, money for rent and to buy a car — since in L.A. she would need one, and it is difficult to save enough as a staff person to buy a car. This was a sign of care and appreciation – and we have similarly provided relocation expenses for other former staff people after years of service to the Party. It is outrageous to now twist this into “hush money.” In Los Angeles, she was immediately integrated into the branch leadership, and her presence was celebrated as a newly arrived national leader. 

Of course, with a new teaching job, and later grad school, while living thousands of miles away, the frequency of her communications with the party leadership in NYC changed. But it remained very warm, personal and caring. Below are just some of the exchanges. In 2022, while waiting to start back up at her job, she reached out for financial help from Ben, and he loaned her his own personal money. In 2023, after a tragedy in her family, she reached out to Ben for comfort: “I know we don’t talk as often as we used to, but you’ve always been in my corner so I wanted to reach out about this tough situation.” He immediately responded.

In 2023, after Ben helped her resolve a series of issues she was having in the Los Angeles branch, she wrote to express her gratitude: “I know you’re super busy, but it means the world to me that we have leaders like you that always make time for people.” When she heard Ben and his family were coming to Los Angeles that year, she invited them over for the holidays, and to meet her new partner.

All of this was in the years after the 2020 incident, at Marissa’s own initiative. This is not the behavior and words of someone who was shunned or grievously wronged. Although less frequent than when she was in New York, she still called Ben about major life decisions, and questions she was struggling with personally and organizationally. She did not bring up the 2020 incident in any of these discussions. If she had, there is nothing to indicate she would not have received the same sensitivity and attention she received in every other area of her life where she asked for support. 

Marissa remained active in the National Disciplinary Committee throughout this period, and did not at any point ask to reopen or revise the remedies she sought from Eugene or the Party, nor did she advocate to revisit any of the Party’s disciplinary norms or procedures. It is not true that Ben and Brian directed the NDC’s work, nor did they overrule its findings and the targeted demonization of both in the letter is without factual foundation. It is also insulting to the members of the NDC who are strong and principled women comrades. The NDC, including Marissa, handled several complex cases during this period with great sensitivity and principle, providing a sense of justice and accountability to people seeking redress, while also upholding due process and Party norms. The NDC, founded in 2021, only was in session in the event of a serious case of misconduct, and none of the cases it has handled have brought disrepute to the Party.

So something changed to cause this presentation after 5-6 years about both the NDC and the support she received. Marissa had remained in the Central Committee, and was re-elected to it in 2022, having been motivated by other national leaders at the Congress. But afterwards in Los Angeles, other local leaders began to find her less responsive to the needs of leadership, and hard to work with when she did show up. With interpersonal tensions rising, which had nothing to do with anyone in New York, she left the Los Angeles Steering Committee and became much less active in the Party, focusing on her work and family life. After a while, in December 2024, she requested to be re-integrated into national work, and was immediately added back in. She reported to a confidant that her meeting with Brian “went good!” “I feel proud of doing what I had to do [in her personal life] and am deeply thankful I can integrate back in.”

At that point, she understood she was not going to be re-elected by her branch to the Party Congress, and would therefore not be eligible to be in the Central Committee anymore. She made an appeal to Ben to have the Central Committee directly elect her to the 2025 Congress. The National Organization Department discussed this and decided that this would not be appropriate because such positions are reserved for people who had been primarily active in national areas of work, which she hadn’t been over the preceding period. Ben communicated this to Marissa, but explained if she were now able to be more active in other areas of national work, there were many projects she could contribute to for the next few years. She said then that she accepted this, and was excited to rebuild her level of activity. In retrospect, she later told multiple people, she felt not being specially elected by the Central Committee to the Congress as a voting-delegate was a breaking point in her feelings towards the leadership. 

According to Marissa’s own narrative, in 2025 before the Congress, her feelings about the Party as a whole started to change, and now she looked back on the 2020 incident with Eugene totally differently.

But this feeling was still unknown to the leadership. In January 2026, Ben wrote to Marissa to wish her a happy new year, and that all the anti-war activity around Venezuela reminded him of her, and how we are still fighting the same battle all these years later. She wrote back “Man unfortunately yes. It makes me think of being in NYC with you all [and your daughter], but she was so little! Miss everyone. Hope you and the family are well .” 

How we learned of Marissa’s changed position, and our response

In March 2026, we received a call from one of Marissa’s closest friends that she had privately told him a factional operation was being prepared to break away multiple branches across the country. She had just met secretly with a Party leader who was covertly working with others to break away branches and members, who have since left to do precisely that. In this context of considering an effort to split the Party, she stated for the first time in over five years that she felt the 2020 accountability process was insufficient, and no longer believed it should have been kept so private. He alerted the party of the factional operation, but also mentioned her remarks about 2020. The Party leadership began to investigate the factional operation as this was the first time it learned there was a potential plot to break the Party apart. Marissa’s friend told her that he had reported back their conversation about the factional plot for the good of the organization, which upset her very much. Ben, still hoping that he and Marissa had a close bond and that the factional plot was untrue, sent her a message offering to come talk to her in person in Los Angeles if she did not want to talk on the phone. She did not respond. Then a few days later, she replied that she did not want to talk, had been harmed in 2020, and left all Party chats, resigning. 

Marissa’s recounting of how this happened, and her subsequent resignation, leaves out the factional plot entirely. 

As soon as this happened, the Party leadership informed Eugene that Marissa had told others she was no longer satisfied with the 2020 resolution, although had not indicated what other remedies would be. He again offered his resignation on the spot, and this time it was accepted. As in 2020, the Party leadership moved swiftly and decisively out of principle, again based on what we believed Marissa wanted. This too has been twisted into its opposite.

About a month before the leadership became aware of Marissa’s changed position, Eugene received an advanced, potentially life-threatening health diagnosis, which he is still dealing with, and which can be exacerbated by intense stress. He had already stopped coming into the office. We hoped that this ultimate political decision — leaving the organization he helped build his whole adult life — would demonstrate to Marissa his sincere contrition, and show that her concerns, even as they changed, were taken seriously. The NDC reached out to Marissa again to talk after the resignation, but she did not reply. 

What we did hear from other friends of hers is that she expressed that more leaders should know the story. Knowing that, the Central Committee was informed about the incident that had occurred in 2020. We recognized that all victims have a right to change their opinions and feelings about past wrongs, and she should not be judged  for that. We did not disclose to any comrades the reports of a factional operation, which we were still attempting to verify and unravel. We did not speak badly about Marissa at all, and continued to respect her confidentiality and request for space. All Central Committee members were under discipline, if asked, to not break the confidentiality of a situation that Marissa had not yet widely disclosed. Therefore, they were only authorized to disclose that Eugene has a severe health situation. We have had no contact with Marissa since.

Marissa continues to say she never wanted Eugene’s expulsion or punishment, nor does she want it to “define the rest of his life.” If that were the case, this is not how she would have gone about things. 

Women’s leadership

The letter appears designed to direct the shock about the awful incident in 2020 into distrust of two members of its current elected leadership, Ben and Brian, and to completely deny the reality of the PSL’s collective leadership. This can only be achieved by repeating the factional operation’s narrative that erases the role of women in building, maintaining and developing the practices and policies of our party. That is now a common theme in all the attacks. 

In addition to co-drafting this statement, the women members of the Central Committee want to speak separately in their own name on this point, “We are not pawns or pieces to be moved by some small cabal of men who supposedly predetermine our actions, but revolutionary socialists in our own right. Very few women in the party and in society do not have some experience of sexist violation. We are committed to building a world free from the exploitation and violence and abuse that we ourselves have suffered. Yet in a post that claims to seek a better world, those who are named are described as only extensions of the desires of our male comrades. Any serious leftist should think twice about this. We too lead the party. We make up the National Disciplinary Committee. We have spent hours on investigations and interviews and in discussions to ensure our party treats sexual misconduct with care, empathy and on principled views of what it means to transform our class and our society. We strategize the struggles in our workplaces and in our schools and in our communities. We play a visible and necessary role in the struggle and in the Party. It is unconscionable that we are repeatedly denied the right to visibility in attacks that claim to speak against the very violence that women are subjected to in society.”  

For 22 years, the PSL has built a foundation we can be proud of. We have had significant growth over the few years as the popularity of socialism rises among millions, and contributed massively to a range of movements for justice. We have built institutions and processes internally along the way to strengthen the Party, and we remain fully committed to always improving on what exists. We have proven this in practice. Through every stage and phase of the Party’s development, the Party has nurtured a culture inside our organization to not tolerate bourgeois-capitalist attitudes and behaviors of patriarchal violence, misogyny and sexism. The Party has a democratically developed Constitution and Bylaws that empower our members and give legitimacy to our institutions and elected leaders to defend these norms.

This is core to realizing our shared goal of building a genuine socialist party that can, standing with our class, build the movement for a socialist reconstruction in the United States.

Connection to the factional operation

Marissa has the right to change her feelings about a traumatic incident in her life. But why distort and misrepresent what did take place in the accountability process, the care provided and the reasons she either lost or stepped down from her leadership positions in the Party – which had no connection to the incident with Eugene? 

That the letter’s broadside attack on the PSL leadership and institutions coincides with the narratives that are already circulating online against the Party leadership is not just coincidence; it is by design and coordinated. 

In June, a faction of PSL members who had become dedicated to the destruction of the Party announced their resignations and characterized the PSL as a moribund organization arguing that they would commit themselves to “mass organizing” of the working class, and not Party-building or spreading socialist consciousness. Since resigning, the anti-PSL grouping has carried out a coordinated attempt to split members from the Party where they believe they find weaknesses. It seems instead of trying to organize and recruit among the 150 million unorganized workers, their only recruitment targets are existing PSL members. After leaving, they conspired to encourage a grouping in a new city to conceal their political differences and then resign; a battle over control of Party dues and offices ensued. In another city, a factional member used a false name to rejoin the Party in a new branch, and then helped organize the resignation of members. They claimed they would not stoop to personal intrigue and scandal to build their organization, but that is now demonstrably untrue. Factional leader Walter Smolarek was reported as “giddy” about Marissa’s letter, and started calling around to identify weak spots, and has been talking with current PSL members to uncover their most salacious stories, personal intrigue, old traumas and is seeking details in past internal disciplinary proceedings, presumably to prepare another round of attacks. It’s clear that the grouping has adopted a method to drive a wedge in the PSL, encourage resignations and to break trust with Party leaders using shocking “tell-all” innuendo. 

In the last few days we have confirmed more about the connections to the factional conspiracy:

• Summer 2025: Leaders of the future faction began quietly spreading gossip about the 2020 disciplinary incident involving Eugene and Marissa to grow their secret grouping. This was the same time that Marissa says her trust in the national leadership changed and is when she was not specially elected to the Congress.
• March 2026: When Marissa’s apparent dissatisfaction about 2020 first came out, via a trusted friend, it was after she had just met with a leader of the future faction, where they were discussing how to best break apart the PSL. Marissa resigned shortly after this was reported back.
• March-April 2026: Marissa told friends in the PSL, people she was trying to win over, that she had agreed to publish in “six months” to let the factional leaders in the CC “get their projects out of the Party first.” This roughly corresponds to the eventual publication date. 
• In the Brooklyn faction’s internal documents, they instructed their group not to “mention EP” while “consolidating” PSL members to the faction— and other faction leaders told people they did not want their larger organizational-political attack to be immediately overshadowed by a case of sexual misconduct. Proverbially speaking, they wanted to keep this bullet in the chamber for a few months later.
• In the week before Marissa’s letter, factional leaders suddenly restarted communications with current PSL organizers who they had once been close friends with, “just to catch up” — a coordinated probing operation.
• On Sept. 7, the date Marissa released her letter, these same ex-members from around the country had a national in-person gathering. Several of them immediately began firing off messages to current PSL members and leaders encouraging their resignation and to not trust the NDC or the CC to protect women. Another faction adherent immediately posted on X screenshots of the Party’s membership figures from the last Party Congress, emphasizing how many are new recruits, and thus potentially vulnerable to not trusting the Party leadership. 

Final thoughts: NSPM-7

Right now, at a moment of intensifying repression, the PSL is playing a leading role in so many vital struggles. Some comrades have asked whether we believe any of this involves the state. It is not possible to know this with certainty at this stage. What we know for certain is that A) there is a multi-billion dollar law enforcement operation to “destroy and dismantle” the “far left” under NSPM-7 (COINTELPRO 2.0), a document operationalized by a Department of Justice memo to use the full range of tools and methods at their disposal. B) According to media reports, the PSL was specifically named by senior Department of Justice official Harmeet Dhillon as a target to be “dismantled,” a federal grand jury has been convened in the Southern District of New York, and we have faced an unprecedented range of state and Congressional attacks in the last 9 months. C) There is a multi-layered ongoing factional operation underway, that has been rolled out over many months and across many cities, focused on trying to dismantle the PSL from within — rather than focus on organizing towards their own vision. 

Predictably, a right-wing media activist, who funnels stories to FoxNews and the Department of Justice, was the first to post Marissa’s letter. We believe the hidden hand of where state forces are operating will be inevitably revealed in due time. We know from history that COINTELPRO’s favored methods are not overt repression but covert acts to “foster factionalism and cause confusion within the targeted organization,” specifically aiming to discredit its leaders. That requires identifying and manipulating any existing or potential contradictions or grievances, and then hitting relentlessly so that a sensation develops of “where there’s smoke, there must be fire.” The history of COINTELPRO shows that many activists were manipulated by bad actors without any knowledge this was happening – that was in fact the most common form of sabotage. Members and former members have informed Party leadership that the anti-PSL grouping has approached them sowing discontent, searching for potential inflammatory or negative information, and trying to recruit them to the project of taking down the Party. 

When a radical organization is facing a multi-layered operation to discredit it, there is nothing it can do or say to stop the attacks from coming. That is because the operation has a mission — not to improve the PSL or make it stronger, but to make it weaker and collapse the bonds of trust that hold it together. We know the state and far-right want nothing more than to tear apart the largest Marxist party that is playing a critical role in the fight-back against massive right-wing attacks. Building a mass movement against genocide in Gaza, against ICE terror directed at immigrant families, and in defense of democratic rights is the PSL’s real fight, and we aren’t going to back down from it, even in the face of a discrediting, disruption campaign. 

Across the country, comrades are collectively and individually grappling with the shocking news that Marissa publicized on Monday. It is distressing to read, as we are sure parts of this document have been too. But it is critical we not concede to a false narrative intended to decapitate the Party and undermine our ability to continue contributing to the struggle. The true narrative presented here will take time to process. We encourage comrades to read this multiple times and to engage in discussion with the leaders in your branch and city. 

This most recent scandal again demonstrates the inseparability of the structures of organizing we have criticized in the past from the perpetuation of chauvinism and abuse. As we have written about in the USU Prospectus, it is the top-down structure of major organizations like the CPUSA, PSL, RCI, and FRSO that engender the sort of anti-democratization and stagnant leadership that permit abuses like this to evade accountability to membership. We will offer criticism of that particular structure, and our feedback for what principled communists within and outside FRSO can do to prevent it. 

Following the exposure of a large Marxist organization for systematic permittance, compliance, and covering up of abuses, there is always a sense of hopelessness among conscious members and supporters of the exposed org. Many equate loss of trust in a particular organization with loss of hope in the movement for communism itself. To understand this, we must understand the reasons people overwhelmingly seek out larger organizations to subordinate themselves to, rather than forming their own groups from the ground up. These reasons are:

1. Political Underdevelopment: An individual new to Marxism assumes that an insufficient understanding of core principles and history will make any attempts at group formation, primarily through their own direction, careless or ineffectual.
2. Social Isolation: An individual who feels too socially isolated to begin the formation of a group — they do not have, or are not aware of, proximate access to other unorganized Marxists, and/or do not know where to begin to draw in the revolutionary masses. 
3. Fear of Redundancy: An individual who feels that to start from scratch in organization-building is wasted effort when a suitable organization of principled Marxists already exists within accessible distance. 

Political Underdevelopment

It is precisely the organized pursuit of Marxist understanding that laid the foundation for the emergence of nearly every successful socialist revolution throughout the world (Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, to name only a few). Therefore, if the underdeveloped comrade finds themselves unsure of where to begin, we cannot stress the importance of the study group enough. To study while the world burns is not to waste time, it is the only way to ensure we successfully douse the flames. 

To quote the USU handbook The Study Group:

Therefore, it is no idle fancy that we suggest the study group — the reading circle — as the focus of local work. The study group has historically been the way in which socialists educate themselves and each other. This is the methodology of early socialist development. We must consider ourselves to be in such a phase. We do not suggest the study group because it is simple or because it is the topic which we chose from a hat, but because it is a foundational type of primary Communist organization.

In fact, it is the overemphasis on “action,” before and above theory that will ensure precious time and energy be wasted, yet again. We often see the argument that, “Well, since the dialectic is practice-theory-practice, a group and its members must engage in practice first every single time, then study the results and modify next actions.” But this confuses our place within history; we wander the cramped halls of a library of failures, shelves stocked to burst with recorded practice.¹ What is the history of the Marxist movement in North America, if not the history of wheels spinning in place? This is not to suggest that there has never been progress, but those that did advance the struggle did so as far as they were able and willing to scientifically understand the conditions their actions existed within. 

Social Isolation

For the Marxist that is hesitant to undertake the building of a new Marxist organization due to isolation from other like-minded people in their community, we recommend the following (summarized from the relevant portions of the aforementioned Study Group handbook). First, investigate local conditions to determine demographics and needs. This will inform what the study group will initially set out to study and who in the local area will be most likely to be interested in revolutionary work. After this initial investigation, identify if there are any trustworthy individual Marxists nearby to assist in the formation of an Organizing Committee to adopt basic rules for the emerging organization and plan the first steps in putting it into motion. Whether an Organizing Committee is successfully assembled or the individual Marxist still finds themself operating on their own, they can proceed to the next step which is spreading the word of the study group through fliering or other outreach. We have seen the most success when the fliering advertises a specific text that will be read at a specific time and place, and that there is no expectation of having been familiar with it before the scheduled date.

If, however, the individual Marxist is not able to identify trustworthy individual Marxists nearby, nor engage in much of the on-the-ground investigation and spreading the word that the recommended tactics advise, we recommend getting involved in whatever local organizing is available for the purpose of identifying potential comrades to organize with separately in the creation of the study group. The individual should be wary of the ideological underpinnings of most local organizing, and keep in mind that the most vital work any individual Marxist can engage in is identifying others suitable for the creation of Marxist organizations. It is not the subordination of Marxists to local activism.

Fear of Redundancy

Fear of redundancy when considering building a new organization is, on its own, a valid concern. However, in understanding that it is valid, we must then ask, is the concern well-founded, is it sound? Let us assume, first, that it is. It is true that if you have a principled group of organized Marxists down the street, around the block, within a short bus trip or a bike ride away, then to attempt to build from scratch a new organization of Marxists to address the same community’s needs, to study the revolutionary science, or to otherwise advance the struggle, may be entirely redundant. Even in the cases of an existing organization formed to address a particular purpose (e.g. Red Aid, group study, community defense, etc.) that do not address a particular need an individual would like to organize around, it is in most cases best for that individual or group of individuals to make contact with the local organization and discuss the possibility of joining and forming a branch or committee to the organization that addresses the issue. This has the benefit of additional funding through dues, a preexisting and tested bylaws structure, and the input and labor of more people.

The alternative, more common case, is that through social media or word of mouth, the individual locates an organization of self-proclaimed Marxists, who identify with the same general tendency of the individual, Marxism-Leninism. The individual decides to contact the organization, which seems more than ready to receive and induct them into membership. The individual takes to the work with a sincere drive and passion. Likely, they become regarded by their fellow members as reliable and trustworthy. Principled. 

Then, weeks, months, years later, it happens. Maybe it happens all at once: the individual witnesses, or discovers, or experiences intra-org abuse. Maybe, at first, it’s a subtler, gnawing doubt: a confusing newsletter from leadership that vaguely gestures at some sort of conflict the membership must not allow themselves to be swayed by; the removal of a district organizer with no explanation due to “concerns of privacy”; a series of dead links to organizing cells that no longer exist, discussion of its members heavily discouraged. The more openly the individual confronts these moments of disconnect, these organizational hauntings, the more the individual realizes the organization has begun to shift and squirm around them. The individual’s reputation as trustworthy spoils, now other members seem nervous talking to them; their reputation as principled is outright questioned — “You’re behaving like a wrecker.” The secondary realization will not come easy, that the abuse is not some isolated tumor, but every muscle fiber and bone of the organization. It’s a nightmare, to push for a new life for everyone, only to find you’ve become embedded in a corpse. 

This is the reality of organizations like FRSO, RCI, and PSL. The members satisfied with working in a faux-radical reformist group stay, follow the rules (regardless of how these change based on leadership’s whims), and, understanding that their satisfaction with gradual change and improved conditions for the labor aristocracy is mirrored in the organization, remain unquestioningly loyal to it. Why wouldn’t they? As patriotic settlers and flag-worshipping elites show us, people become fiercely defensive of the structure serving their interests. For this loyalty, they are rewarded with advancement, leadership, maybe even the highest honor of all: full-time employment as a revisionist, maybe even with a corner office. The FRSO whistleblowers say this plainly (emphasis ours):

Each time leadership protects an alleged abuser, those who see the problem clearly either leave or leadership pushes them out, while those who can rationalize the decision remain. Over successive incidents, the organization becomes composed of people who have demonstrated willingness to defend leadership’s protection of alleged abusers. Leadership advances from this filtered pool.

Chrisley Carpio² and Michela Martinazzi³ were present for the Tampa and Gainesville incidents, and defended Dustin⁴ both times. Jared Hamil⁵ was the Tampa District Organizer in 2014. Fern⁶ was the DO of Gainesville in 2013 and Jacksonville in 2016. Sol Marquez⁷ defended Dustin in Tampa. They’ve all since been promoted to national leadership positions in FRSO.

Meanwhile, the members who are most desperate for real sweeping change, no matter how bitter the struggle, the most ready to be revolutionary, are resigned to the rank-and-file. These dedicated comrades are usually the most committed, initially, to the communicated “cause” of the organization. Usually nationally oppressed, disabled, queer, and/or trans, these members give their blood to the organization. It is useful to emphasize the ways in which the “multi-national working class” line that organizations like FRSO hold, and that we have criticized, helps to facilitate an opportunist position not just externally, but internally as well, as we now see clearly. It is by this line that opportunists can lecture members about how it is the advocacy against chauvinism and abuse which disrupts the “solidarity” and “stability” of this supposed multi-national working class. Real determining factors such as settler-colonialism and imperial superwages are flattened for the sake of a model that prizes false unity and not shaking the boat. Sometimes, in spite of being surrounded by this rhetoric, members try to struggle within the organization, like they were told to again and again, only to be stonewalled, silenced, disciplined, and gaslit. The system serves its purpose and crushes all attempts at real revolutionary struggle. Afterwards, these comrades are isolated entirely, betrayed, and often left too burnt out to pick the banner up again. Both leadership and the capitalist state are satisfied by this outcome. Leadership gets to continue its maintenance of a structure purged of genuine communists who may threaten business as usual, and the state eagerly pats them on the back for demobilizing these radicals. Is it any wonder these organizations have persisted in their current form for so many decades?

These organizations always set themselves up as the true inheritors of the future, in contradistinction to the tiny microsect or local study group.  This is how they market themselves — it is the only way they can justify their own drawn out existence. They say, “Well, what else are you going to do? Start a tiny group of three people that claims it represents the masses?” the same way  the Democratic Party defends its position saying “What are you going to do? Run as an independent?”. It is the same logic painted red and yellow. The rhetoric of the reformist clouds the horizon. This is repeated ad nauseum within these organizations and then repeated by members to people outside the group. Even when the principled communists flee these sinking ships in disgust still ready and willing to organize, too often does this toxic idea stick to them, signaling the sequel: the communist goes looking for another “big” org. 

It is crucial we do everything in our power to ensure this doesn’t happen. The choice is not between languishing in bloated reformist NGOs or isolated in some puny microsect for all time. This is a false binary. The true path forward is what has worked for most socialist revolutions around the world. The party of the people is not born from some downtown office that directs the formation of new cells like a chain restaurant establishing franchises. Rather, it is precisely the tiny, local group of principled communists that shifts history, step by step, until a leap and bound, to the party of the people. To summarize the portion on this in the USU Prospectus⁸: the correct path begins with the formation of the local organization, uniquely adapted to local conditions and able to establish roots among the local masses in a way these franchise organizations are incapable of. The local organization then reaches out to other primary groups of principled communists regionally and then around the country in order to collaborate, coordinate, and struggle in a process that eventually enables the establishment of real organizational unity. 

These local organizations are not subordinated to a tiny sect filtered through several vetting processes to remove any trace of real revolutionary consciousness. They democratically determine their own representatives to the second-order organizations they form to coordinate and reproduce their unity. It is through this initially, vitally horizontal process that a greater set of bylaws are written and ratified, a set of practices and standards. Through a series of conferences these local organizations eventually form the party-to-be. 

This is how the vanguard party emerges, not in the backwards manner that the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO have undertaken. This top-down schematic followed by the chauvinist organizations is the correct blueprint only if your design is a weapon wielded against the people. We, however, wish to help the revolutionary masses build a great cannon to obliterate chauvinistic violence forever. The All-Empire Worker’s League has begun this process. 

Looking Forward

We commend the efforts of our comrades to lay out a plan for agitation and exodus of members from FRSO. As challenging as it may be, it is often far more important that the most principled communists, with the capacity to do so without risking burnout, remain within the exposed organization. Not for anything so foolhardy as to “change the system from within” (you cannot negotiate with the snake from the pit of its stomach), but to agitate and heighten the struggle to a fever pitch from within. As they do this, these communists must seek out sympathetic comrades within who take these abuses seriously but remain unsure for the reasons above. Each rallying cry for justice will peel back the rotting mask of democracy from the revisionist’s face; the skull of reaction will be grinning, sharp, and naked. 

The strategy of agitating around an attempt to seize the structure and body of the organization from its center may be useful in winning over the sympathetic comrades mentioned above, still in the grip of the apparent hopelessness of organizing outside the vast structure FRSO operates. But just as the authors of the exposé recognize, this goal will never be achieved. It is like a radical program that “demands” the United States government liquidate its military. This is a goal of the radical movement, but it is not something that will ever be given, only seized. However, just as part of that recognition is seeing that the settler-bourgeois state machinery will be smashed and replaced with a new structure to defend the revolution of the oppressed, the agitators in FRSO must see the structure of FRSO not as something to be taken and used, but something to be left in the dustbin of history. It is not an organizational system useful to those of us who demand revolution, it is a multi-level-marketing scheme with a beret. 

It is the people you will find while raising hell that will be invaluable to you. You must link arms with the most solid, passionate comrades you can find and only jump ship when you have enough hands to commandeer the lifeboats. Treat the chaos of this scandal as a proving ground for the most trustworthy and audacious communists. When you find your people, we have some resources to help you get started. Just as we were honored to offer our feedback and labor to the reporters of this abuse, we eagerly await your input, curiosity, and fire; not just as members of Unity–Struggle–Unity, but as part of the All-Empire Worker’s League. Meet us, organized and principled, and be treated as you are, as you’ve proven yourself to be: comrades.

Contact the USU Editorial Board here.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League here.

Footnotes

1. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852. ︎
2.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO, leader of the FRSO Student Commission, and president of National Students for a Democratic Society.” (Copied from source.) ︎
3.  “Member of the Central Committee, current District Organizer of FRSO New York.” Ibid. ︎
4.  “FRSO member who was accused of sexual assault in Gainesville, Tampa, and Jacksonville and protected by FRSO leadership. Left FRSO in 2018.” Ibid. ︎
5.  “Leader of Labor Commission” Ibid. ︎
6.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO. DO of Gainesville when FRSO protected Dustin Ponder in 2013. DO of Jacksonville in 2016.” Ibid. ︎
7.  “Leadership of Legalization 4 All and FRSO Chicano/Latino Commission.” Ibid. ︎
8.  Worth highlighting is the subsection of our Prospectus on FRSO specifically. Written years ago, before our criticisms of them for settler chauvinism and these most recent revelations, and thus offering them more good faith than it turns out they deserved, the section still holds up in diagnosing the issue of structure that produces FRSO’s moribund theory and practice: “FRSO recognizes in theory that primary organizations must be built. However, despite claiming that they are a pre-party formation and not a party, they operate like a party-in-miniature, with congresses, a Central Committee, and central decision-making. The efforts of local FRSO organizers are directed at creating primary organizations — the local is being directed by the center. This reverses the necessary stages of growth of the Party.” ︎