Editor’s Note: This is a republication from a piece by Marissa Sanchez on Substack. The original can be found here. We agree with the author’s analysis, that PSL stifles dissent and operates as a parody of democratic centralism. To hide abuse is the symptom of a structure that must operate anti-democratically by design. The careerist, opportunist tendency displayed by PSL’s leadership, by their org’s guiding strategy, is one which must shield abusers and isolate survivors to sustain itself. To do otherwise is to invite self-reflection and accountability, which will implode their organization like a breach in the hull.

This is not a issue that is unique to PSL, it emerges from all of the top-down, franchise models of the fake “parties.” We called it out in FRSO, and the same structures of anti-democracy perpetuate themselves in virtually all structures of settler socialism. Though it is contained in all of the larger opportunist sects, it is not limited to the big groups, nor does it emerge spontaneously from all organizing at scale. The complicity is an outcome of the logic of the way these orgs are built, from the cell to the body. There are even some local organizations that are in the early stages of reproducing exactly this dynamic under a cult of leadership. This is the churn and burn model at play, that disregards reproductive labor and the safety of membership.

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

Introductory note: In recent months, divisions in DSA and PSL have triggered debates over when it is justified or unjustified to leave an organization, to call for others to leave an organization, or to air problems in an organization. My vantage point has been of someone who quietly left the PSL many months ago based on a private experience with the organization’s systemic problems. In many people’s view, I dealt with my issues with PSL “the right way.”

The way I left did not create any damage to the left. It also denied the left the opportunity to grapple with some very real problems. I am seeing the issue with this as I watch the PSL color themselves as victims and readily labeling people who were formerly their trusted comrades as misogynists and racists and wreckers, without any real interrogation of their claims, and as the protest, fundraising and recruitment machine of PSL continues on uninterrupted.

I, like most serious leftists, do not believe in carelessly tearing apart our own organizations. I also don’t believe good organizations are built by evading accountability. My own experience with the PSL shows the stakes of long-term evasion, the damage it can cause to the movement, to organizations, and to the real people in them.

I also believe that no one can make an informed decision about joining or remaining in an organization if they are deliberately shielded from the actual character of its leadership and structures.

My assault within PSL and its mishandling

Reporting

I called Ben the morning after I was assaulted. I hadn’t slept. I’d spent the night crying, shaking, staring at the ceiling and feeling like the entire room was spinning. By the time I sat on the couch and made the call, I was numb. Through tears, I told Ben what had happened the night before at the holiday celebration we had both been at with comrades. He said he was so sorry. And then, almost in the same breath, Ben said, “Eugene might just want to resign.”

I remember pausing, the words landing somewhere far away from me. It felt strange to be thinking about what would happen to him while I was still trying to understand what had just been done to me.

At that moment, the morning after being violated by someone I thought I could trust completely, someone I considered a comrade and a friend, I said, “I’m not sure that’s what I want to happen.”

I knew instantly that was the right answer. I was commended for being so measured.

After that, the days blurred together. Conversations with Ben about responsibility. About protecting the Party, the projects, the work. About ensuring that nothing would “roll downhill” onto others.

In a meeting led by Ben, I sat down across from Eugene. It had only been a few days since he had put his hand on the most private part of my body without my consent. Eugene said he had been too drunk at the celebration to remember sending me texts asking about how I was getting home before putting his hands on me. He read from a letter he had written, saying he wished he hadn’t hurt me.

The three of us had that conversation in a room at The People’s Forum. The same space we had all been working in together for months. I was sobbing. Self consciously, I reminded Ben and Eugene I wasn’t unraveling just because of what Eugene had done. I reminded them that I have a history of experiences with sexual violence from before Eugene, that in the past I had been violently raped. That I had lived the experience of begging someone to stop. I tried to explain that, while I knew this wasn’t the same as before, to my body the violations felt connected, and that I could feel myself spinning out.

Ben helped suggest a plan. Eugene would apologize. He would spend a month in Baltimore “for health reasons.” He would not chair Central Committee meetings for a while. We would all move on. I agreed.

Over the next few weeks, I spent more time outside my body than in it. I felt panic, my body’s primal response to being harmed in a place I had believed was safe, and an overwhelming sadness. But woven through both was something else; an excruciating sense of responsibility.

It was that feeling of responsibility, more than anything, that felt familiar to me. That I realize now is why I was so quick to agree to Ben’s plan.

It is a feeling I have returned to after every experience of sexual violence. The instinct to search for the point where you went wrong. To locate the cause for harm within ourselves. As if assigning ourselves blame might restore some sense of control or safety.

To be honest about it, people seeking to take on the responsibility of our own harm is not just internal. It is reinforced from the outside. We all know the type of questions that are asked of women who have been sexually violated. “What was she wearing?”, “Was she drinking?”, “Was she flirting?”

In left spaces and organizations, locating responsibility becomes entangled with a different kind of pressure. The pressure of responsibility to the collective. The question shifts almost immediately from what was done to you to what should be done about it? And if there aren’t trauma-informed practices already in place to be followed, that question is then handed back to the violated person to answer. What do you want us to do? As if the burden of response belongs to them, the person who was harmed.

I did not cause harm. Yet I was expected not only to manage my own pain, but its implications for the PSL.

And of course, I did want to move on. To forget. To go back to feeling safe. To think that the PSL was still what I had believed it was when I joined.

Joining

My go-to line was always, “I didn’t join the Party for Socialism and Liberation to be part of a cool-kid clique. I joined because I hate capitalism, and I want to destroy it.” That was my personal maxim. The line I lived by. Because long before I joined the PSL, I had already lived a life that made something unmistakably clear to me. Capitalism is killing our families, and socialism is the only real alternative.

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a working-class family with a single mom, two brothers, and a grandmother helping raise us. My mom worked constantly. She did everything she was supposed to do. She worked hard, showed up, and took care of her kids. Like millions of other parents, it still wasn’t enough to build anything beyond survival.

We had food. We had places to stay. Most importantly, we had each other. But there was no safety net, no savings account, no sense that the future was something we could plan for. And despite my mom’s best efforts when we were small, there were generational traumas that haunted us. Mental illness, religious abuse, domestic violence, sexual trauma. These weren’t abstractions. They shaped our lives in immediate ways.

By the time I was 15, I made a decision that felt like the most stable option available to me. I left home. I decided to take full responsibility for myself because staying felt more chaotic than leaving. My mom was experiencing a mental health spiral, and I believed I could create more stability on my own than I could within that environment.

So I did. I got a job. I dropped out of traditional school and found an alternative high school program that would accept my pay stubs as class credits. From then on, I worked full-time. In fast food, retail, hotels. I depended on every dollar I earned and I spent too damn much of what little I made just to keep a roof over our heads. Mine. My brother’s. My various girlfriends and boyfriends, and just plain friends.

For years, I was hyper-focused on our survival.

I hustled hard all through my teenage years. But the truth is, hard work never scared me, and I don’t often mourn how quickly I grew up because that work did create a lot of stability. I’m proud of the home I built from very little.

But living that life, watching my mom work herself to exhaustion, then doing the same myself, left me with questions that never went away. Why is it that no matter how hard people work, some of us are always just barely scraping by?

When I found Marxism at age 16, it didn’t feel abstract. It felt like recognition. Like someone had finally put language to what I had already lived and understood. Marxism gave me a framework for something I had known all along. We weren’t struggling because we didn’t work hard enough or didn’t know how to “get ahead.” We weren’t traumatized because our family was simply made up of broken people.

So when I joined the PSL in 2015, at 22 years old, I wasn’t new to political thinking. I had already been working for nearly a decade. I had been a Marxist for years. I already identified as a communist. I had gone deep into studying Marxist theory long before it became trendy or visible online.

I joined the PSL because I believed I was joining something historically necessary, because at my core, I believed the highest calling of a working-class girl was to organize for the overthrow of capitalism. That belief shaped everything I gave to the PSL over the next decade.

Organizing

From the moment I joined, I jumped in deep. I organized my whole life around the Party. By 2017, I was asked to come on Party staff and help to build up branches amidst the post-Bernie surge in interest in socialism. I was paid a small stipend each month to organize full time. I drove around the country in my car, surfing on comrades’ couches going city to city, helping branches get their start. I organized protests, mentored new comrades, taught candidacy classes, joined countless meetings, spoke at demonstrations, represented the Party in coalition spaces, and recruited dozens upon dozens of other people to join.

I was soon an invited observer to the Central Committee, then elected to the Central Committee for two terms. I served at points as an observing member of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee, at the time that that body was a real thing.

Eventually, I was asked to move to New York City to help plan the 2019 Congress. Once there, I spent every day with Ben and his family. We organized out of his apartment. We cooked and I helped care for his young child. In those years, I was one of only two party staffers. I did everything from liaising pre-branches around the country, to organizing Congress logistics, to mediating interpersonal issues. My life was building the PSL. There was no one more loyal than me.

All of those years worth of experiences is why being assaulted by a trusted Party leader and friend at a holiday celebration in a comrade’s apartment in November 2020 was so wildly disorienting. And why the way it was handled by Ben and Brian Becker was so hard to reconcile.

After the assault, I was told repeatedly by Ben not to tell anyone. Ben warned me that if I told anyone we might lose connections and projects. He told me that the only people he had told were Brian, Ben’s father, and Karina, Ben’s wife. But neither of them once spoke directly to me about it.

This also meant that out of the five-person Executive Committee, one person, Eugene, had assaulted me. And that two other members, Ben in consultation with Brian, were handling the response. The other elected members were left in the dark, including the one female member, Gloria La Riva. (An aside, I spoke to Gloria after resigning from the PSL in March of this year, and she confirmed that she had never known about the assault until I told her, six years later. Terrifyingly, Gloria also told me on that call that she knew Ben and Brian had mishandled other cases of sexual assault in the past, and that in her opinion they could “destroy the Party” due to their neglect and that she planned to confront them. However, I have since been made aware that Gloria was dispatched to speak with and reassure the few comrades who became aware of my experience after I left.)

The remainder of the Central Committee was also not informed.

Ben explicitly told me that this level of silence was necessary, because if not maintained we could lose the growing relationship with The People’s Forum. We could lose the budding project that was BreakThrough News. That my friends, the comrades I was in a small COVID pod with could lose their jobs. And so, out of an intense sense of loyalty to the projects I had already spent years building, that I had organized my life in service of, I didn’t say anything to anyone.

Except, one person. I had immediately told another member of the Party, my recruiter and mentor, my then best friend, Chris Banks.

When I told Ben that I’d already told Chris, he responded with disappointment. “I wish you hadn’t.” Ben told me he worried that Chris would now be upset because Chris himself had once been suspended for over a year over much less severe allegations, whereas Eugene was getting a much lighter response for a full-on assault.

I explained to Ben that I told Chris because I needed someone to know what had happened. I needed support. I wasn’t okay. Ben recommended that, if I needed someone to talk to, I speak with Nathalie, another woman on the Central Committee. He called her first to explain the situation, then I was allowed to call her.

I remember crying over the phone, telling her how badly I was spiraling, and asking whether she thought all of this was okay. She told me to trust Ben. In every conversation we had afterward, I was encouraged to accept Ben’s plan for how my assault should be handled. I had hoped she would help me make sense of what had happened and advocate for my wellbeing. Instead, our conversations consistently led back to why I should trust Ben’s judgment and move forward with the plan he had already laid out. Looking back, I don’t think I was being connected with a source of support. I was being directed to someone who reinforced Ben’s approach.

A few short weeks later, Eugene was back at work. Comrades working with us, having no reason to suspect that his absence was for any reason sinister, celebrated his return. I told Ben again that I wasn’t alright. That I felt terrible.

The day Eugene came back to work, I threw up in one of the office bathrooms.

And at the lowest part of what I now know was a months-long mental health spiral, caused by being sexually assaulted and receiving no trauma informed support in the aftermath, in February of 2021, I called Chris, the friend Ben said he’d rather I hadn’t told, because I was prepared to take my own life.

I wept and told Chris that my life felt valueless and too painful

Fight, flight, or freeze – I rolled flight

After Eugene came back to work, I asked to be moved. To be re-assigned away from New York City. I was willing to go anywhere. I couldn’t keep seeing Eugene every day. I couldn’t keep pretending I was alright. That was when Brian asked me if I’d like to go to Los Angeles. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But I was willing to try anything.

Three months after being assaulted, on March 8th, International Women’s Day, 2021, I landed in LA.

Shortly after moving to LA, Brian had $8,000 dollars sent to me to buy a car. I felt an unspoken message with that check: that I was lucky, that I had nothing to complain about, and that I should stick to the plan, keep quiet and move on.

In LA, I tried to keep up. To get back to normal. To keep being a “good comrade”. Of course, I was also internally just trying to hold myself together, which no one else knew.

Once in LA, I asked to be taken off Party staff. At the time, I couldn’t fully explain why. Looking back, I’m grateful my brain was protecting me. My subconscious knew I needed distance from the people who had manipulated me into silence, even if I couldn’t yet name what had happened. It took another year, but by 2022 I was finally off the Party payroll.

Even though I needed a break, I never stopped organizing. In LA I was elected to the Steering Committee, and was re-elected to the Central Committee at the 2022 Congress.

However, when it came to my relationship with Ben and Brian, I stopped feeling like a respected comrade and started feeling like a problem to be managed. When I would talk with them, I felt them caught between two impulses: keep me happy, and keep me at arm’s length. The warmth I had felt in the past had disappeared, or it seemed to come in artificial, strategic spurts. When I sought their advice they were quick to dismiss any of my concerns, place blame onto me in conflicts, and called me “competitive”. Which was stunning to me, because I knew competition with comrades was never a motive of mine. They stopped seeking me out for assignments.

At one point, I called Nathalie to seek her advice about how I was feeling. I described to her my struggle to get along with leaders who had a different approach than me in Los Angeles, and how I was now struggling to gain access to consistent areas of work nationally. I told her I couldn’t help but wonder if things had shifted so dramatically because of what had happened with Eugene. She told me she didn’t think that was the case, but offered no other explanation.

At the same time that I was fighting, seemingly now by myself, to move forward inside the organization, I was also starting to build a relationship with myself that I had never had before.

Growing up as fast as I did, my identity had been shaped by survival, caring for others, and then by the Party. For years, who I was, what I valued, how I made decisions, it was all filtered through what the PSL needed, what was disciplined, what served the work.

But as I moved closer to being in my thirties, that began to change.

I started to pay attention to myself in a different way. To my limits, my emotions, the quiet signals in my body that I had spent years overriding. That the experience of rape will suppress in anyone, because in order to protect yourself, you shut off feeling your own body and emotions, and then that survival mechanism can echo for years.

Underneath the California sun, I started, for the first time, to develop a sense that I deserved care. Not just as a comrade, not just as a worker, but as a woman, as a person.

And that shift made something else happen. It made my experience harder and harder to explain away. To keep taking responsibility for. The more I respected myself, the harder it became to reconcile what had happened with the story I kept telling myself about Ben and Brian. I wanted to believe they cared about me. That they were mentors who had made mistakes but ultimately wanted what was best for me and for the Party.

But believing that required me to distort my own experience.

It required me to ignore the fact that when I was at my most vulnerable: crying, disoriented, asking for help, I had been managed and silenced, not supported. That what was actually obvious, be it painful to admit, was that their decisions had not been made based on care for me or our shared project. That what happened was totally lacking in transparency, accountability, or even the basic recognition that what had happened was truly wrong and not something that could simply be explained away by “too much alcohol.”

Looking back now, I don’t think what I actually needed then was particularly mysterious. I needed time with people who loved me. Time away from organizing without worrying that I was letting anyone down. I needed the comrades I worked beside every day to know enough to understand why I was struggling, so that I was surrounded by support instead of silence.

I think this kind of paradigm shift is something nearly all women experience as they move from their twenties into their thirties. There is a process of reflection, of looking back at the relationships, the institutions, the organizations, the choices that shaped us and asking, sometimes for the first time: Was that okay? Was I treated with care? Did I deserve better? Was I just numb the first time around?

As my identity became more defined, more grounded in my own sense of self rather than in what was expected of me, I couldn’t bring the developing version of myself into alignment with what I had lived through.

Something had to give. And eventually, it wasn’t my growing sense of self respect.

I started to look in a new way at the organization I had committed my whole adult life to building, and allowed myself for the first time to actually question it.

Disillusionment

My disillusionment with the PSL didn’t come all at once, but a big piece clicked for me in 2025 with the 6th Party Congress.

Before the Congress, knowing I would again spend days in the same room as Eugene, Ben, and Brian, I realized I needed to talk to someone. Not Ben, not Nathalie, but someone I could trust cared about me. Even if it meant I was breaking discipline. I called a comrade in Albuquerque who is like a sister to me. I told her what had happened, what I was feeling. This time, I wasn’t assured it was okay. She didn’t say, “trust the comrades”. She was outraged. She cried. She was disgusted.

That conversation helped confirm for me that I wasn’t crazy, or weak, or responsible for what had happened to me. I had been wronged.

At the Congress, watching Eugene and Ben and Brian speak in session after session, I felt sick and trapped. On the third night of the Congress, I broke discipline again. I asked another woman on the Central Committee, someone who I had helped to recruit years before and who had been in very similar positions in the organization as me, if we could talk. We sat down on a curb in the dark and I told her everything. Again, it wasn’t assured away. She recognized in what I told her the patterns of the organization. She understood intimately how this could have happened. We reeled together at the reality of the organization we served. I asked her not to tell anyone and she didn’t.

While at the Congress, another situation unfolded that left me reeling. I watched leadership attack another woman comrade who I had known for years; who had also dedicated her life to building the Party.

During a session on artificial intelligence, this woman leader, an engineer with deep expertise, raised political concerns about the highly positive orientation on AI that was being presented. She had already submitted thoughtful written criticisms through the official pre-Congress process. It didn’t matter. Later that day, Brian pulled her aside and loudly berated her in view of people walking by.

Immediately afterward, leadership introduced an AI resolution and manufactured a “debate”. Comrades were pulled aside and instructed to speak in support of the AI resolution without being given access to read it before the session. Consensus was manufactured in real time. Kei Pritsker spoke out against this maneuvering and manipulation from the Congress floor. (Kei and the woman engineer have since resigned from the PSL)

Watching this unfold confirmed a fear I had resisted for years. Inside the PSL, genuine, thoughtful, political disagreement is treated as a threat rather than part of collective development. Even when it’s coming from trusted comrades who have proven their loyalty to the project from years of dedication.

Ultimately, it was at the Congress that I finally saw the organization from a perspective I could no longer deny. I was no longer looking at it as someone eager to prove herself or willing to explain away its contradictions. I was looking at it as someone who had given it everything, been harmed by a trusted leader, been left to navigate that harm alone, and yet still desperately wanted to believe the organization was capable of political honesty and growth.

What I saw instead was a leadership clique around Eugene, Ben and Brian that had consolidated its authority and would not tolerate meaningful criticism, even in the very spaces where criticism was supposedly being invited. And given my experiences with these specific men, I could no longer believe that the immense authority they commanded was justified by respect they had earned within the Party. I knew too much about how they exercised that authority behind closed doors.

After the Congress I talked a couple of times in the year since with the woman comrade I had confided in there, and I told her I was debating leaving the organization. I told the woman comrade from Albuquerque who I first confided in the same. Out of a sense of loyalty to our friendship, I also decided to tell Chris, who at that point had been quietly moved to a different state after becoming involved in another sexual misconduct scandal himself.

Chris went to Ben behind my back and told him about our conversations.

Ben began messaging me, expressing concern that I was unhappy with how my assault had been handled. He told me he would fly out to see me.

I couldn’t imagine having to sit in a room with Ben to discuss my assault again. I couldn’t imagine being asked what I wanted to make this all go away. I didn’t want to participate in figuring out damage control again, six years later. I knew the Party still had no processes in place to give me the care I needed then, let alone now. So I decided it was time for me to leave. I texted Ben back that his offers to fly out and see me didn’t address the harm that was done. Then I left the dozens of PSL chats I was in, and that was it. I was out.

I was soon called and texted by another leader, this time a woman. She informed me that Eugene had offered his resignation and the Party had accepted, as they found my feelings that my assault had been mishandled as “legitimate”. I was told the Party was taking this very seriously and was “reconstituting” and “systematizing” the Party’s processes through the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC), so this would never happen again. I had to laugh, because the comrade texting me and I both knew the truth about the NDC.

The lesson PSL refuses to learn

The PSL learned in 2020, both from my case and another sexual assault allegation, that it needed better protections, not real protections against assault, but PR defenses for the organization. That was when the PSL established the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC). I was asked to be part of its creation, just two months after my assault, when I was actively spiraling.

From the beginning, the NDC was a performance. It was guided by Ben, with three women of color there to legitimize it with our identities and our experiences with sexual violence.

The NDC was sufficient as long as it existed conceptually enough to be pointed to. No process was ever concretely developed or implemented. Certainly there was no clear process ever distributed to the membership or local leaders, no process that members know to follow. I truly challenge any member to cite evidence otherwise. In reality, allegations of misconduct continued to be dealt with through loose processes, typically handled by women who would call themselves members of the nonexistent “NDC,” operating as intermediaries for Ben or Brian.

I looked back and found the draft document we developed, in January 2021, which never became a real thing. What it outlines is far from a set of trauma-informed practices. It’s a set of protocols for damage control. It’s irrelevant anyway. Real processes for the NDC were never actually researched or developed beyond the one draft document. The point was that there was a document that carried the names of three women, including mine, which allowed the Party to say, “Women built our process, women who themselves experienced sexual violence, women of color. Question that and you question them.”

When in March of this year, Dolores Huerta and so many brave women came forward about César Chávez, PSL members in many of the branches that I liaised asked questions about our processes. In response to such questions from members, an internal orientation pointed to the NDC as proof of the safety and accountability for women in the PSL. It was just a few weeks later that I finally quit, and was told that the NDC would be “reconstituted” and “systematized:” an open admission that it had not actually been active, even though it had literally just been pointed to in response to concerns about Chávez that the PSL takes SA seriously.

To this day, nothing about how this was handled reflected care for me or concern for accountability. I didn’t ask for Eugene’s resignation. If what happened truly was a terrible drunken mistake, I do not believe it has to define the rest of his life. I never wanted punishment. I always wanted care.

When I was assaulted, I needed to be allowed to simply be the person who had been harmed. Instead, I immediately was handed the full burden of protecting both Eugene and the Party’s reputation. There needed to be a process that allowed me space and protection, allowed both of us to confront what happened honestly, and define a way to move forward collectively.

At the same time, their lack of process, and transparency means we still do not know whether I am the only person he has harmed. I carry the fear that there are other women who could say, “Me too.” And that for years, while I tried to be a “good comrade,” my silence may have betrayed not only myself, but them as well.

And that is what makes watching this unfold so painful. Once again, Eugene quietly leaves Party chats under the explanation of “health reasons,” while unsuspecting comrades send him heart emojis and well wishes. The pattern has not changed. The leadership remains committed to protecting its own reputation rather than confronting harm with accountability, and it still does not reckon seriously with what sexual violence does to the people who endure it.

Eugene’s resignation six years after the fact is nothing but a sacrificial offering to protect Ben, Brian, and the organization’s reputation. It’s a strategy. I anticipated from the moment I decided to leave that the Party would panic and want to put on record actions that can be referred to if they ever had to own up publicly to their mismanagement.

What their response has proven to me is that, despite every opportunity to learn their lesson, nothing fundamental has changed. Still the only thing that determines the process is the insulation of the organization. Not me, not what I want, not what will allow for reconciliation and healing, not what best protects women in the organization, not what corrects problems in the organization, but what protects Ben and Brian and the PSL from facing scrutiny.

What now?

I know what the response to this account will be: that Marissa never expressed any dissatisfaction with the “process”, that we did the best we could, and we’re learning now.

As a longtime organizer in a young and evolving organization, I have ample sympathy for the growing pains and inevitable shortcomings of an organization striving to do a lot with a little. But is this a good excuse?

It’s true, at the time of my assault, the PSL had no formal standards for handling such matters. The organization had also existed for 16 years. Numerous situations requiring navigating allegations of sexual misconduct had already come up. Ample resources on best practices existed to support the development of clear, trauma-informed processes in any organization. The PSL just did not use them. It instead opted for whatever informal secret resolution best served minimization in each case. And the truth is, if I sat down with Ben earlier this year when he offered to fly out and see me, I would have only experienced more of the same.

Unfortunately, my expectation is also that I will be more vehemently condemned by PSL leadership for my choice to share my experience than Eugene will be for assaulting me, or Ben and Brian will be for how they handled the situation.

This reality gets at the heart of something fundamental. What does it mean when someone who has been harmed is held to a higher expectation of perfection and discipline than the men who harmed her? Why are her choices considered more harmful to the movement than theirs?

An organization that cannot meaningfully hold its own leadership accountable, that must protect one or a handful of central figures at all costs, is not going to last.

If its members can substantially change it, great. For me, I no longer believe staying in the PSL is the principled choice. Nor do I believe the PSL can lead the kind of change our class needs. I don’t say that out of bitterness, but after eleven years of trying to build the PSL and watching it fail to correct itself at every opportunity.

Our class doesn’t need perfection. But it does need better leadership than this. It needs honesty. It needs accountability. It needs structures that can face harm without collapsing into denial or control. It needs organizations whose principles apply to their own leadership as much as anyone else.

It’s not good enough to keep telling us that we have a responsibility to a bad organization just because organizations must exist.

I still believe in fighting for a socialist future, but I believe we must do this with eyes wide open. I hope my story will help others to open their eyes and see.

In Harlem, New York, on January 2nd, 2025, a man attacked a woman, with words and fists, and paid the price. 

Jaia Cruz, a 24 yr old woman, who is transgender and Latina, was standing in line at a deli. An argument started with Ray Hodges, a 36 yr old Black cis man, over who was next in line. This escalated rapidly. Hodges called Cruz slurs, and attacked  her. She told him to stop, and he continued to attack. She said she would kill him if he continued, and he pushed her against a refrigerator. She drew her knife, and he died en route to the hospital. 

The outrage machine has spun up shockingly fast, even for this time of escalating terror against trans women. She was described as “towering” and “giant” by Yahoo! in a classic monsterization of trans women (her height is the fourth search result on google). The New York Post published an article whose title called her “Pure evil” and “A disgusting excuse for a human being.” While he attacked her, Hodges called her a “faggot” and a “tranny”.  During her sentencing, Hodges’ family chanted and jeered “It’s a boy!” and “Fucking boy!” at her. She has been deadnamed, misgendered, verbally and socially abused in the reaction-economy, accused of being on drugs, a slut, aggressive; and people gleefully fantasize over what hideous violences await her in, as anonymous people are giddy to point out, “men’s prison.” Ms. Cruz is sadly no stranger to either violence nor public spectacle. Her image and dignity having been thrown to the rabid dogs of social media earlier last summer when videos circulated of her being viciously beaten in public by two men. 

Make no mistake, people know what they are calling for when celebrating her incarceration, when lying about her gender, and gleefully hoping she is sent to men’s prison. Trans women are subjected to a regime of sexual violence and torture in men’s prison. We are placed into disgusting circumstances by people who fucking hate us, who desire nothing more than our violent debasement. One aspect of this debasement is known as “V-Coding”, a system in which we are “given” to inmates to be violated, raped, and abused. 

Would this have gone differently if Jaia did back down? Certainly! Another woman’s life may well have been extinguished, gone unremarked upon, another abject, another victim, and Hodges may well have gone free in the city whose police brutally murdered Marsha P. Johnson and threw her body in the Hudson River. Trans women are a precious resource in patriarchy and racism and our lives are extinguished frequently in the pursuit of its violent maintenance. Cruz did only what was necessary, backed up against a literal wall, unable to trust anyone except herself. She does not deserve to be the new face of this hyperviolence, nor the recipient of targeting by the unleashed dogs of a reactionary, blood-thirsted public. She deserves a long life, surrounded by loved ones, outside of public mockery, out of prison, and free from the clutches of the fascist rape-reich. 

Transmisogynoir, the hyperviolent intersection of anti-Blackness, misogyny, transphobia, misogynoir, and transmisogyny, sits as a fulcrum, a break-glass-in-emergencies tactic, to be wielded even by other oppressed groups. It allows the violence being suffered at the hands of the state to be redirected against abjected minorities. Trans women’s lives are fertile soil for the flowering of love, care, community, beauty and liberation, yet we are made dirt to the vast majority of the wider populace, ground for growing and training violence, prejudice, and resentment. 

The resistance against this tightening is already sprouting as well! Rodney Hinton Jr.’s heroic retaliation against police that brutally murdered his son was treated with the same spectacle and the same theater.

“Your favorite song… Nicola, Bart – immigrants, wrongly executed… But their deaths served as a message to others: that ours is a society that murders the innocent. Do you, too, believe that your sacrifice will change the world?”

Skull Face

Make no mistake. This occurred during the allegedly “most pro-worker”, “pro-trans” Biden Regime. The Democrats have been no friends to trans people. When prompted, Kamala Harris refused to even say that trans women deserved rights and healthcare. Gavin Newsom has pushed transphobic rhetoric, actively exhorting the fascist ranks of their evil party to abandon trans people altogether.  There has been nothing but escalating violence, genocidal rhetoric, and an unceasing hitlerian regime of legislation being introduced, un-fucking-challenged in both red and blue states, designed to cut trans people out of all walks of life, especially trans women.

Two trans women were attacked in broad daylight in a train station in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a self-declared trans sanctuary state! Sam Nordquist, a Black trans man, was tortured to death over the course of a whole month earlier this year in New York! In May of 2025, the suicide of a trans girl was turned into a spectacle to jeering hordes on twitter who mocked her relentlessly and turned her despair into celebration. 

The amount of violence has hardly escalated. We have always been hideously subjected to violence, including rape, murder, beatings, homelessness, and exploitation. What has changed has been the rhetoric and spectacle surrounding our deaths. From Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live saying of Brandon Teena’s rape and murder, “Now, this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die,” in 1993, to now where we can look forward to outright celebration, heroizing of our killers, beaters, rapists and attackers.

Transmisogyny flourishes in the client states of the U.S. Empire as well. On April 4th, 2025, Sara Millerey González, a trans woman from Colombia, was raped, beaten, and mutilated by having all her limbs broken, before being thrown into a stream in a ravine to drown to death. She later died in the hospital. Again, people prioritized filming the spectacle instead of stepping in to stop it. 

What will we do then? So much structured, dedicated, motivated violence is arrayed at the innocents, who the Empire has decided to grind into a pulp as it thrashes.This will not resolve with simple reforms. Just like Pavlov and his dogs, the reactionary elements have been primed, conditioned, and rewarded for their worst impulses, encouraged and trained to salivate when they smell fresh meat. 

Jaia Cruz’s actions in her own defense will serve as a warning to those who would terrorize us. We will not be passive or pacific. We will no longer ask timidly for respect of our pronouns. We will instead demand our safety, knowing that it will only blossom from the barrel of a gun. Let her serve as a rallying call to all transfeminine people to organize for our self defense. Let us be unafraid, disciplined, and swift. 

We cannot trust so-called “allies” any longer. You are with us, or you are against us. You will fight and bleed and die alongside us, or you sentence us to abject horror in prisons, allowing and committing our murders alongside the cops and fascists and bigots. It has been too long that queerness and transness have primarily been a vehicle for otherwise neutral parties to feel good about their own pathetic, capitulationist lives. That ends now. End your own complicity. Buy us weapons, food, housing, hormones, and stay the fuck out of our way.

Some queer people may react to this essay with timidity, and to that I say, I am not sorry. We are not at a point where you can opt out of the violence because it will find you. There is not an off ramp, there is not a reformist track anymore. Brianna Wu and Buck Angel are not going to fucking save you, and begging the Democrats will give you nothing. Get with the program.

Unrelenting, unmitigated, unapologetic terror against the enemies of trans women’s dignity and safety is the only answer. Trans women will never be respected until every aspiring woman-beater, self-indulgent rapist, and whinging, sniveling, coward who hides behind a screen to mock our deaths, is afraid for their miserable, worthless lives, afraid to look us in the eye for fear of being the last thing they ever see, afraid to be cut down in righteous self- and community- defense. 

“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Cruz said to investigators:

“I told him, ‘You come to me and I’ll kill you.’”

“No motherfuckers are going to put their hands on me no more.”

“He tried to mess with me because I’m trans, and I poked him up.”

“I hope he’s maggot food.”

Good for her! Well that she is still here. This is only what is deserved by people who would hurt vulnerable women. 

“I killed him laughing. Oh, well. I’ll piss on his grave.”

The settler state and its police refuse to search for the bodies of these women. The cracker government gives various excuses — all inadequate — for its inaction, such as the three years it would take to search the landfills, the expense of up to $184 million, the possibility of exposure to toxic chemicals, and the sheer gruesome nature of what may be discovered. One excuse not invoked by the state: the potential to uncover many more corpses than those of the four aforementioned women, which would be a scandal for the police and government.  Meanwhile, Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson bloviates about building a memorial, and about “feasibility studies.”

All of the above is reminiscent of a previous prominent Canadian serial killer, Robert Pickton. Pickton claimed to have murdered 49 women, of whom 26 were confirmed, but he was only found guilty and sentenced for killing six. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police originally only searched Pickton’s pig farm in order to score easy money by ticketing unregistered firearms. They dragged themselves to investigate further when they found two missing womens’ blood and property. It took five years and cost $70 million to unearth the remains of the 26 women on Pickton’s farm. After his conviction, the Canadian Supreme Court found no further reason to continue trying Pickton, as there was no higher punishment possible for him. It will be much the same for Skibicki, who is already charged with first degree murder. He will be quietly put away and the government will claim justice has been served. But the conditions that allowed him and Pickton to commit their crimes, to murder Indigenous women under the settler state’s radar, will remain for as long as the Canadian state persists. For example, Robert Pickton’s brother David Pickton, who was previously convicted for groping and threatening to rape and cut a woman into pieces, walks free today. His freedom only required his claim ignorance of his brother’s crimes, despite having worked on the farm where they took place.

None of this is accidental. Whenever Canada looks into its past, it always unearths more Indigenous bodies than it bargained for. In 2021, a search uncovered a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. More schools across Canada and the U.S. were searched. This resulted in the discovery of the bodies of more than 10,000 Indigenous children. The liberal Canadian media describes these events as “tragedies” and publishes reports of unheeded recommendations. For example, the government found many instances of what it called “police mishandling” in Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, a 2012 British Columbia provincial government inquiry into the Pickton murders. This report had dozens of recommendations for the police and provincial government, but none were taken seriously. Indigenous leaders accuse Canada of disregarding the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and children. This is true, but misses the full picture.

In actuality, the settler terror incarnate in the murder of untold thousands of Indigenous women and children is vital to the Canadian state. The settler government “cares” only insofar as the violence must continue. To accuse the police of “mishandling” these cases is an understatement bordering on injustice, for the police are not mere bumbling fools. True to their role in the history of Canada, they are active collaborators with settler terrorists! Some Canadian police admitted in the 90s that they would rather solve one murder of a white, bourgeois victim, than investigate the deaths of a dozen prostitutes — who are disproportionately drawn from Indigenous and racialized women. Police comments of this nature were documented in case studies into the Pickton murders, such as Stevie Cameron’s On The Farm. As for the perpetrators, liberals consider them monstrous, and rightly so, but fail to recognize that becoming a serial rapist-murderer is the logical apotheosis of settlerism. There are no acts more viscerally colonial than direct, individual sexual violence and murder against the colonized. To understand the causes of this violence, and its ubiquity in Canadian society, one must recognize the mountain of colonialist cruelty in Canada’s dark and genocidal history — the mountain these acts stand atop. 

The inability to recognize such grotesqueness condemns liberalism as a failed ideology. Even when some well-intentioned liberals document the atrocities in historic works such as Clearing The Plains, by James Daschuk, or true crime texts like Cameron’s On The Farm, the most they can accomplish is a grim witness-bearing. There is no prescription in liberalism to end the spilling of Indigenous blood by settlers and the settler state. The best liberalism can offer is some befuddled discourse and solemn “remembrance.” As Daschuk said in an interview with Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix news in 2016, referring to the deliberate mass starvation of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian government, “the stories were so profound and the truths, in some cases, were so ugly that we can’t turn our backs on them.” But what does it mean to not turn one’s back? In Canada’s case, not a lot — typically some mumbled apology and dead-end state “inquiries.” In that same interview from nearly a decade ago, Daschuk stated, “I think we’re at a moment. I think there’s enough momentum, and goodwill in the general population” to “examine how our society might right its inherent inequalities.” But in the years since, this hasn’t transpired, nor can it. The graveyard of failed bureaucratic endeavors surrounding Canada’s genocidal past and present, which includes the now-dissolved Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Forsaken inquiry in British Columbia, and whatever crib-strangled half-effort will soon emerge in Winnipeg, is only expanding, while the “inherent inequalities” remain and genocidal injustices continue.

Anti-colonial resistance must be found beyond liberal frameworks. On July 7th, the pig government of Manitoba told the families of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, to their faces, that they would not search the Brady landfill, despite the feasibility study demonstrating that a search was possible. In a hollow and tired deflection, Premier Stefanson cited safety concerns to workers conducting the search, and suggested that the search should be the federal government’s responsibility. In response, Indigenous activists, including Morgan Harris’s daughter, Cambria Harris, rightfully and immediately blocked access to the landfill, returning to a protest tactic first applied last year, when these murders first came to light. This people’s blockade against the settler government is continuing, even though the City of Winnipeg filed an injunction on Tuesday, July 11th to have it forcibly dispersed. Naturally, the demonstrators are unlikely to acquiesce to the city’s demand, and have every right to hold their ground.

The reoccupation and blockade of their own stolen land is an essential tactic for Indigenous resistance to colonization across Turtle Island. From present struggles in Wet’suwet’en and Landback Lane, weaving back through the “IdleNoMore” movement and “NoDAPL” protests at Standing Rock, Indigenous actions have been most successful when they impede the movement of the settler state, settler capitalist firms, and settler “private citizens,” and settler access to land. Looking only slightly further back into history, the settler government’s fear becomes palpable when it is confronted with armed land reoccupations, as occurred during the Kanesatake Resistance (Oka Crisis) in 1990, and Wounded Knee in 1973. These brave acts of popular anti-colonial resistance stand at the head of five centuries of Indigenous resistance, and will continue until settler colonialism is finally dismantled. The nascent actions to blockade Brady landfill are only a thread in this storied history.

Unfortunately, until they are united in a broad people’s anti-colonial movement, these actions can only delay and prolong the ongoing displacement and genocide regime of the U.S.–Canada settler empire. It is a death by a thousand cuts. The 1980–94 Clayoquot protests (The War in the Woods) did not prevent greedy settlers from harvesting old growth lumber in British Columbia for long — similar events unfolded only three decades later in the 2020–22 occupation at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). The capitalists, motivated by their unceasing, existential drive for endless profits, will never willingly stop; they will raze the whole Earth, if they are allowed to do so, and they will be aided at every step by the capitalist class-dictatorship state. Clayoquot and Ada’itsx demonstrated that the state has endless patience and capacity to jail peaceful protesters. The plaudits heaped by the state on acts of peaceful resistance, thereby condoning and denuding these actions of revolutionary impetus, are another obstacle. Still, it’s clear that while Canada, its police, and its corporations exist, there can be neither lasting peace nor permanent victories in the Indigenous liberation struggle. There can be no justice for the tens of thousands of children buried beneath residential schools or for the uncounted hundreds, if not thousands, of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Unfathomable cruelty characterizes the Indigenous experience in Canada and across Turtle Island. The settler state offers only this choice: they may live on the rez (reserve/reservation) and contend with an ongoing cultural and literal genocide, or they may leave. If they leave, however, they’re extremely likely to be criminalized, rendered homeless, victimized by physical, emotional, and sexual violence (including disappearance and murder), or any combination of these traumatic experiences and horrible fates. If they are murdered, their bodies can be buried in landfills or fed to pigs. Their spirits and families can find no peace. Yet liberal settlers dimly wonder why the phrase “Reconciliation is Dead” is popular.

The sum of this experience is sometimes called the “Fourth World” — in which primarily Indigenous and Black people, but also gender nonconforming and disabled people, live Third-World conditions in allegedly First-World countries like Canada or the United States. In this framework, Fourth World communities are understood to occupy a unique underclass, beneath the settler working class proper. Fourth-World workers are locked in a web of contradictions with the capitalists, the First-World workers, and the “Fourth-World” propertied classes all at once.

Fourth Worldism dovetails with Engels’ theory of labor aristocracy and Sakai’s theory that settler proletarianism is a myth. In letters to Marx in the 1850s, Engels worried that England, then the “most bourgeois of nations,” feeding itself on the spoils of hundreds of millions of people in its colonies, would soon have not only a bourgeoisie — its capitalists — but also a “bourgeois working class.” Marx and Engels feared that England’s colonial plunder would be sufficient bribery for its working class to betray their own class interests at the expense of racialized workers and workers abroad. Marx, for instance, wrote that the English working class would never free itself from “its own” capitalists until it stood in solidarity with liberation movements in Ireland, India, and other British colonies. The situation Engels described is sadly true in Canada and the U.S., where the settler proletariat has, time and time again, betrayed its class interest as workers to align with the settler capitalists, at the expense of  Turtle Island’’s colonized and other “Fourth World” peoples. Sakai takes Engels concept to its furthest extreme and claims, “Amerika [or canada] is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities.” For Sakai, settlers only exist to brutalize the Indigenous proletariat, whose slaughter and dispossession built the luxuries they enjoy.

Regardless of whether we find these theories plausible and rigorous, or nonsense, the wretched lived experience of Canada’s Indigenous populations cannot be denied, nor can the solution to their predicament be avoided. The Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island understand that the settler state will not change its colonialist character out of good will; it will only capitulate to any demands made from a position of power. As Mao said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The present mobilized resistance, while heroic, must spark the revitalization of Indigenous revolutionary anti-colonial organization, complete with the capability for armed struggle. When Indigenous nations make the settler pay in capital, real estate, political standing, comfort, and blood for his broken treaties and residential schools, his sprawling suburbs and golf courses, his oil pipelines and cleared forests — then and only then will the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty become realizable. The 1974 successful re-establishment of Ganienkeh as Kanienkehaka (a sovereign nation governed by its own laws and traditions) by the Mohawk, against the U.S. government, shows only an elementary hint of what could be. Let a thousand Ganienkehs overgrow the entirety of Turtle Island!

Among the settlers there is a desperate need for mass cultural upheaval. We must expunge the cultural and economic conditions that culminate in the violation and murder of Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, and the thousands of other Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). This begins, at the community level, by terrorizing the terrorists — by keeping a vigilant watch on settlers who show any political inclinations toward fascism and any personal inclinations toward domestic, sexual, and other interpersonal violence. Pickton and Skibicki could never have gotten away with their crimes for so long, had they not been shielded by whole communities, who (at best) looked the other way and (at worst) aided and abetted them. But this is only the elemental level. The solution cannot be merely personal and communal; it must be political. Communists must heed the call of Indigenous liberation. Full decolonization, which can only mean the abolition of the existing settler state and the utter destruction of the U.S.–Canada Empire and its settler society, the total restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, and the prolonged reeducation of the settler population must be included in our minimum programme. This is the only way towards any semblance of genuine “Truth and Reconciliation.” Only the anti-colonial revolution can achieve anti-colonial justice. If projects cannot uphold this bare minimum, they will be eradicated in the forthcoming revolution. If we settler would-be Communists fail to reeducate ourselves, then we will rightfully reap the 531 years of rape and murder we continue to visit upon this land and its people.

Author’s Endnote: In this piece I have used standard capitalization for illegitimate place names, such as canada. Rest assured, this was only done for legibility, and I don’t consider canada to be a legitimate nation.