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. 

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.

Editor’s Note: In the continued flood of members leaving the Party for Socialism and Liberation many have been earnest in their desire to ensure the movement can learn from this organization’s impending collapse. This week we are publishing five new letters outlining various struggles within the organization and its utter inability to solve any internal contradiction.

The first letter conveys the collective frustrations and justified disgust of a NYC District Committee elected by membership to advance base-building, and undermined at every turn by a “duplicitous” central leadership. The next perspective (as well as the last) outlines not only years long struggles between the Salt Lake branch of PSL and national leadership, but the utter lack of any kind of institutional structures to help local leadership through internal or external struggles. Rather than play a guiding hand, national liaisons actively undermined criticism and struggle in favor of putting personal and political differences under the rug—hoping that through liberal interpersonal kindness contradictions would cease and the branch would wholly submit itself to the whims of Brian and Ben Becker (read more here). A majority of the letter writers have spent a significant portion of their lives in dedication to this opportunistic and parasitic organization. Rather than making the most use of these dedicated comrades, national leadership and national liaisons found every way by which they could miss-place this revolutionary energy into work that will never bring about the authors’ revolutionary aims.

Despite the betrayal by this so-called party, some of these letters still express hope that the PSL is capable of change, and that the members within have the means to change it. This could not be further from the truth. The PSL is an opportunist organization of the highest order which fundamentally cannot be saved. As more and more information is brought to light on the undemocratic behaviors of the organization’s central leadership, cover-ups of abuse, refusals to engage in criticism or collective struggle, and the strict enforcement of settler lines on colonial and anti-imperalist questions—there can no longer be any doubt that the PSL exists solely as a mechanism to de-fang the revolutionary movement by misleading earnest radicals into a counter-revolutionary machine. If you are a member you must leave, if you’re a group of disgruntled members leave together and contact the All-Empire Worker’s League. It is time to bring an end to this bloated carcass of a so-called party, to leave it festering will only bring further rot to our revolutionary movement.

The letters have been reproduced nearly exactly as they were received. Minor corrections were made to formatting, citations were added for some quoted text, and names of local members have been redacted. Regarding the redacted names, abbreviated letters have taken their place and our editors have attempted their best to maintain consistency with the references to named individuals. There are a handful of exceptions, with important targets of criticism (Ben/Brian), as well as public figures within or formerly within the organization being fully named. Walter Smolarek’s letter, which is frequently mentioned in the following documents, was published last week by our Editorial Board.

To all those who have been harmed by the PSL’s actions, and its further in-actions, we give our love.

In Solidarity,

Editorial Board of Unity Struggle Unity

NYC District 1 District Committee Letter:

Dear comrades,

We are writing to submit our resignation as the District Committee (DC) of District 1 (Brooklyn and Staten Island) of the New York City Branch and as members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Each of us entered this organization with the intention of dedicating the rest of our lives to it because we genuinely saw it as the most viable vehicle for the advancement of socialism in the United States. We were thrilled to have been elected by our members on the specific, openly-stated mandate of advancing base building in our district. We are resigning because we have come to know with full clarity that it is impossible to carry out that mandate from within the PSL.

We have known for some time that there is an opposition to base building that goes to the top leadership of the PSL, and that the democratic space to put forth our ideas on their political merit is intentionally and underhandedly shut down, both of which we have each experienced individually and collectively. As leaders within the New York City branch, we work in constant close proximity to a clique of national leaders (they call themselves “the center”), headed by Ben and Brian Becker, who have their office here. Publicly and with general membership, they agitate about the need for the working class to get organized. Privately, they are generally hostile to deep organizing work in favor of an agitation-only approach: constant mobilizations, forums, tabling, and flyering. When the PSL creates new organizations, they are primarily as fronts for PSL agitation, rather than means of raising the organizational level of the working class as a whole. Because of the proximity of the NYC branch to this clique of national leaders, we do not functionally have a Steering Committee (SC) that is empowered to draw its ideas and analysis from its membership’s practical organizing or a concrete analysis of our local conditions. We are not provided the practical skills or orientation to durably organize the working class of New York City. Any promising attempts at this kind of organizing are intentionally undermined. This has led to the deep political underdevelopment of our branch.

Those of us who believed that there was any democratic space in our branch were thoroughly disabused of that notion by the NYC Branch Conference held this past March, the first ever such gathering in the history of the PSL. Its stated role was as follows:

1. To directly address the stated challenges and harness the immense potential of our growing branch, we take inspiration from the Party Congress and propose the establishment of an annually occurring Branch Conference. This conference will serve as a dedicated forum for strategic alignment, democratic deliberation, and collective leadership development.
2. The Branch Conference will be constituted by a broad representation of the branch’s membership and activity, representative of the branch’s on-the-ground realities and diverse experience.

Despite the above, which the membership voted to ratify at the Branch internal, previously the nominally highest body of the branch, the Branch Conference was a farce of democracy. None of the base building experience that had accumulated in our district, by far the largest of the 3 districts in the branch, was included in the topics of discussion. In response to the document one of our members submitted on the base building work in his unit, a member of the Central Committee (CC) privately characterized it as a sign of the “anarchistic” tendency in Brooklyn toward mutual aid in a remark to a member of the former D1 District Committee. The document was not taken up for discussion at the conference. During the conference, when our members contributed their views on why the branch should take up base building, another member of the Central Committee openly stated, “The PSL is not a base building organization.”

In sum, we learned that a separate, unelected body had decided on the entirety of the conference agenda, which they organized to favor lengthy presentations by members of the center led by Ben Becker, followed by relatively short periods of discussion. They also decided that we, as elected delegates to the Branch Conference, would vote on a series of resolutions in the final half-hour of the two-day conference, resolutions that reflected the presentations of the center and were crafted by the aforementioned unelected body. When delegates motioned to request clarification on, amend, or table these resolutions, Ben Becker angrily hovered over the mic, eventually castigating the delegate who motioned to table a resolution that mandated the NYC Branch to commit to funding “a new center” as a top priority, declaiming that he didn’t understand why any member wouldn’t immediately understand its necessity. Most delegates had just heard of “the center” for the first time that day, when it was mentioned during a fundraising presentation that preceded the vote on resolutions. When a delegate asked for some definition, another member of the Central Committee dramatically hushed the crowd. We were all left without any clarity on where the center ended and the leadership of the NYC Branch began. Although the delegates voted to put the resolution to a vote by the incoming Branch Committee, the resolution was never raised in that body and it was subtly alluded to at a Branch Internal to appear as if we had voted in favor.

Despite all this, we had believed that it was possible to protect the space within our district for deep, neighborhood-specific organizing work to continue and struggle for a political realignment of the organization based on comrades practical exposure and assessment of its value. However, as the results of this work and comrade’s confidence in it has grown, we have only faced increasing and more direct pressure to squander it from the Steering Committee, and members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee. Often this was done under the guise of directing us to cancel any local activities or otherwise divert the necessary forces from it for the sake of clumsy agitational initiatives, attending recorded webinars, or ensuring maximum member attendance at mobilizations that do not draw from the working class in neighborhoods we organize in. This was done by design, even as the number of members in our branch exceed 280. Other times this was said directly. In a private conversation with one DC member, Ben Becker derided mass organizing for “tethering us to the lowest common denominator of our class.” His disgust for our work and our class is truly appalling.

The open, undemocratic attempts this past week by the top leadership of the PSL to crush our work has pushed us to the breaking point.

Last week, we circulated a strategy document for our district, which was a normal act for an incoming leadership body whereby we undertook an assessment of the previous period that reflected the work of our members, in deep conversation with them, and produced a strategic orientation and an accompanying set of tactics by which they could concretely measure their work going forward. We simultaneously shared the document with our Steering Committee liaison. Instead of receiving our ideas as a valuable contribution to the organization, one of us was called into a meeting with our liaison to be definitively told that our district’s strategic orientation to base building represented a “departure” from the strategy of the New York City Branch, and the national strategy of the PSL. When asked for clarity on what that strategy was, our liaison described it as (limited to) intervening in spontaneous mass movements and agitating for socialism.

In our strategy document, we defined base building as “a historically communist, long-term strategy of increasing the relative organization and strength of our class through working alongside it, winning its credibility, and building our influence. Practically, this is accomplished by committing to particular local areas, weaving ourselves into the fabric of their struggles, earning the leadership of our class, and positioning ourselves to lead the uprisings to come.” We see base building as the only way to durably build the level of working class organization needed to eventually wage revolutionary struggle, and the only way to durably build mass socialist consciousness. Alongside communist cadre, our class must go through its own practical experience by which it comes to see the correctness of our ideas. Simply relaying those ideas is not enough. That is to say, we see base building as the only viable long-term means of achieving the PSL’s stated political program.

In the week following the distribution of our strategy document, the Steering Committee, which contains members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee, coordinated inactive rank-and-file members of the District to discredit the elected leadership of the district by disrupting the planned unit meeting discussions of the document, and further by sending this same group of members, which includes a current Steering Committee member, to disrupt our planned district retreat where we presented and facilitated discussion on the strategy document. After the retreat, we learned from multiple other comrades that this group had all been reading their talking points from a shared, pre-prepared document, and were text-coordinating throughout the meeting. These members have been entirely absent from any of the local, neighborhood work that the district has carried out the past year. For some of them, it was their first time attending any sort of internal Brooklyn meeting in years. The points they raised on both occasions were not based on the political merit of our ideas or the work of active district members, but instead relied on personal attacks against us and pulling rank based on seniority. At the retreat, when we presented a new mass organizing project that we are undertaking, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, for the first time to the whole district, this group sought to sour the broad member support for the project by launching pre-prepared attacks that accused us of wasting Party resources and “gaslighting” our members. Not only were these bad-faith criticisms based on distortions of our position, they were blatantly disrespectful to seven non-DC comrades who presented on the Freedom Center and to the others who had been leading this organizing and thoughtfully discussing and assessing this work for months. We were disgusted by this display of disrespect for our members and our class. It further cemented our certainty of the deep unseriousness of the leaders of this organization.

In addition to these open attacks, behind closed doors we have been undermined by the highest body of the entire national organization. We had invited (now former) Central Committee member Walter Smolarek to speak at our retreat, to which he accepted. We had cited his Liberation School article, “Dual Power and Serving the People in the U.S. Revolutionary Movement,” and experiences building the Philadelphia Branch in our strategy document and were excited for our members to hear remarks from a long-time national leader on why communists should care about the organizational level of our class, and for Walter to learn more about the base building projects in our district. Late into the night before our retreat, Ben Becker convened the Standing Committee of the PSL to vote to block Walter from speaking. We were not provided any explanation.

We were pushed over the edge by our experience at the Branch Committee meeting this week. Four of us are elected members of the Branch Committee and the remaining two are observers. At the meeting, we explicitly asked for clarification on whether the view of the Steering Committee is that our strategic orientation to base building is incompatible with the strategy of the branch and the party. While we had already accepted this, we owed it to our membership to raise this question with the highest body available to us. We also asked for an explanation of the attempt by the SC to undermine the democratic processes of the preceding unit meetings and district retreat, and for the author(s) of the shared talking points document to be identified, because rank-and-file comrades had raised this as a major concern. SC members lied to our faces about the coordinated nature of the attacks and avoided our question about the document entirely. Instead of providing clarity, the Central Committee members who participated in the discussion (with the exception of Walter) concealed their true views on base building, offering confused assertions that they were open to the deep organizing that has gained momentum in Brooklyn, but simply have concerns rooted in their political experience that base building doesn’t work. They concluded the discussion by asserting that it would continue within a smaller body, a future meeting between the SC and DC. The next day, Ben submitted a document to the Branch Committee that opens, “I’m all for neighborhood organizing.” We know this is another lie.

Following the BC meeting, Walter reached out to us. He shared his disgust at the duplicitous conduct at the meeting and informed us that many of the branch and national leaders present had been secretly strategizing for months to crush our neighborhood organizing and other PSL mass organizing efforts across the country. They have counter-organized members of the district to oppose this work. The recent Conference on Organization was designed with this purpose.

Further, Walter shared his resignation letter with us and plan to submit it. His experiences affirm so many of our own. One of us who is employed at the national office that houses some party staff, including members of the national leadership clique, has been repeatedly summoned to a Steering Committee member’s office to defend and explain decisions made by the DC and unit leads to prioritize their neighborhood organizing work. She has been reprimanded, told that these decisions are “unacceptable,” and pried for information. A number of us were previously members of other branches that have have historically had more autonomy, given their distance from these national leaders, and were shocked by the political underdevelopment of the NYC branch when we transferred. One of us has experience as a member of the SC of another branch, where he was directly told by Brian Becker that the branch had to cease its base building work in favor of an agitational flyering initiative.

We were outraged and horrified to learn that the national leadership has been conspiring behind our backs for months to put a stop to our district’s deep organizing work, and to crush the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, which our members have been building with great effort and political seriousness. We don’t see any point in continuing to engage in a farcical process to “resolve” our political disagreements with a leadership this duplicitous.

Our commitment to the members of our district, whether you choose to leave or stay, remains just as strong and sincere as it ever was. For a long time, we believed it was not only the best approach but our responsibility to shield you from the rot at the heart of this organization and the hostility of national leadership to your work. We wanted to protect the space for you to carry out the work you had seen was correct from your own practical experience undaunted by the serious deficiencies in the organization. We have reached the point where that is no longer possible. We have done our best to guide you through this period on the strength of your own practical experience and have reached the end of that runway. Now we must speak plainly. We do not see this organization as able to be reformed nor do we see the fundamental contradiction between base building and an agitation-only approach to be resolvable within it. We have taken the decision to resign with the utmost seriousness and consideration, not only for its implications for our lives, but that of our members, and our class, to whom we hold the highest fidelity.

We are so proud of the ways you have grown as leaders and organizers alongside us. The past several months of training ourselves to become cadre, organizers capable of helping our class to realize its power, and the beautiful, real work of building durable relationships with the organic leaders of our neighborhoods have forever fortified us with a living accountability to our class that far supersedes our commitment to the PSL. We understand why an undemocratic leadership who relies on our warm bodies to unquestioningly carry out their ideas would go so far to keep us from this work. The sober reality is that the ultraleftist rigidity they engender systematically underdevelops the organization and renders it incapable of becoming a serious political force in this country with a mass base. This deeply saddens us. And we agree with Walter that it would be irresponsible for us to continue building this organization.

Given the magnitude of our political difference with national leadership, the lack of democratic mechanisms to continue our work, and our real opportunity to start something new, we have decided to leave the organization with Walter.

We are setting out to continue our work and to build the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, an example of what we see as a definitive example of the next phase of our organizing: a mass organization that formally fuses cadre with the working class by way of base building. We have a proposed interim structure that will allow this work to continue, along with the base building work in Sunset Park, and for us to retain our community partners from across Brooklyn.

We hold great confidence in our ability to continue this work without the PSL. We have largely built it with our members and with our class without branch support in the form of connections, material infrastructure, ideological guidance, or practical skills, and with a great deal of constant undermining. We are excited about what we can build with full organizational focus and capacity.

In terms of what broader organizational form comes next, we second the point in Walter’s resignation letter about it being too early to announce a full political program, but we are committed to building a project on a national scale. We know this will be difficult, but as communists we are committed to doing the difficult, necessary thing, rather than remaining in an organization that we do not believe in and whose national leadership is conspiring to crush the strategic approach and work that we wholeheartedly believe to be politically and historically correct. We invite you to leave with us and we also invite you to continue working with us in good faith as members of the PSL if you see fit.

It has truly been the honor of our lives to serve as your District Committee.

With unshakeable conviction and revolutionary love,

Your D1 District Committee: D. K., E. C., J. R., J. M., M. T., and R. H.

L.M’s Letter:

Dear comrades,

I am writing to submit my resignation to the party.

I write to you with both regret and excitement. As a portion of my total life I have dedicated more of my life to the building of this branch than any other member in the organization. With the leave of absence of Comrade Q I have spent more time in the party than any active member. I was 19 years old when I joined the party eight years ago. I was arrogant and didn’t know anything about organizing besides my limited experience with Planned Parenthood. I was honored to be elected to our first Steering Committee despite being one of our youngest members. The party provided me a political home, tempered my dogmatic and idiosyncratic understanding of theory and provided me a structure. I have dedicated my life to the party and more importantly to the class struggle. When faced with the choice of going to college to further my career prospects or to continue my work leading the branch I chose the party. I simply don’t know what it means to operate as an adult outside of the party organization.

This is why I am filled with a great sense of regret. I wish the party were the organization I thought it was. I wish that we were engaged in the work promised to us when we were recruited. I joined as a part of the first wave of socialist revival in the late 2010’s. Since then the movement and in turn the party have grown considerably and I have become increasingly aware of the limitations of the party to grow into the organization our class deserves and so desperately needs. I will return to these limitations but I must relate to comrades that I have experienced periods of extreme demoralization, not at the state of struggle in the US or of the supposed “backwardness” of our class, but at the state of our party. I’m sure many in our branch have had similar feelings in recent years.

Attached to this document you will find two letters. In the first of which you will find the resignation of Comrade Walter Smolarek. A comrade who joined when I was in 4th grade learning basic algebra. You may know him as the longtime editor of Liberation News and the occasional host of The Socialist program. Smolarek lays out many of the political as well as democratic issues with the PSL. This is why my writing today also carries a great deal of excitement. When I read Smolarek’s letter I felt a deep sense of joy because he was expressing many of the same criticism’s of our party I harbored. I have always made it a point to read every critique of the party I can so I could make a sober assessment of them. I have always found them to be unfounded and based in liberal and anarchistic ideals, until now. Prior to reading Smolarek’s letter I had already been considering whether to break with the party for some time. There is understandably little literature on when and how to split with an existing party. Lacking historical reference I created a set of criteria as to when a split is not only the right of a member but their responsibility:

• The party is organizationally or politically heading in a direction contrary to goal of revolution.
• The party is functionally not capable of reform through ordinary means.
• The member(s) splitting are capable of effectuating a split which has real potential to serve the goal of revolution.

The first two conditions are dependent on one another. If an organization is moving away from its revolutionary goals but does present the realistic possibility of reform towards such ends it is the responsibility of members to struggle towards that end. Let me not be accused of ultra-democracy because I believe if an organization is moving towards revolution even if it cannot be realistically reformed it would be wrong to effectuate a split because in this case the reformers would be those trying to turn away from revolution. However let it be said that inability to reform can itself be a hindrance towards the goal of revolution, especially when that horizon is not close at hand. The final condition has less to do with whether a split should be pursued and more with when. For a while I have been convinced that the first two conditions were met by the PSL. It was only with Walter’s letter that I became convinced that the third condition was met. I could have attempted to form a split months ago but I hesitated at the possibility of any new organization being isolated and suffocated due to its lack of support. This is what I told myself but it would be disingenuous not to recognize some cowardice in being afraid to take the dedicated cadre to do the hard work of building a new organization.

There may be some of you who think that splitting is inherently wrong as it weakens socialist organizations. To this my only response is that the party would not exist without the split performed initially by Sam Marcy from the Socialist Workers Party followed by the split of our founders from the Workers World Party. So the question cannot be reduced to splitters or non- splitters and must be taken on the basis of ideology and organization.

The second letter is something I wrote almost two years ago addressed to the Steering Committee outlining what I saw as the limitations of democracy within our branch. Although the letter was unsent at the time because I determined that our leadership was already struggling against growing factionalism within our branch I have shared it with multiple SC members in the years since. The purpose of its inclusion is to show that independent from Smolarek comrades across the nation, comrades you know, have been coming to similar conclusions. That letter to the Steering Committee was limited by the fact that at the time I thought the party could be reformed and that I limited my criticisms to the branch rather than the organization as a whole. In this letter I will attempt to address these limitations.

The PSL tries to critique American liberal democracy for its emphasis on the form of democracy without its actuality. We critique the idea that democracy is an event recurring every 2-4 years when we vote for leaders. However in function we accept a level of democracy which acts exactly like this. There is no effective recourse to hold elected leadership to account. In the first place our constitution has certain provisions which allow existing leadership an insurmountable level of control over the democratic processes. This is not simply democracy under centralized guidance but a hollowing out of democracy as a meaningful force in our party. The provision in the constitution which allows the central committee to appoint up to 40% of the voting members of congress allows existing leaders to hold a strong(if not insurmountable) plurality. Theoretically this plurality can be overcome but it is practically immovable. In effect it means that those who wish to change the composition of leadership or oppose the CC’s position must work to convince more than 4.5 times as many delegates as the CC does.

This is not to say that the CC should not be able to appoint voting delegates. In the years that I worked on the National Fund Drive Central Committee(NFDCC) I could have been the most diligent and politically apt comrade imaginable but since this work would not have been done at the branch level it would not be factored into members choice on whether to select me as a delegate. So in this manner there is a real need for the CC to have some discretion on delegates but 2 out of 5 delegates is an absurdity. The basic argument surrounding such a provision is that it creates a level of continuity. We should not throw away the concept of continuity but we must ask to what degree should it be prioritized over our ability to grow our working class democracy alongside the movement?

Secondly although the CC does not control a majority through the appointments they are also benefited by other extra-constitutional undemocratic practices. Chiefly a lack of transparency in the workings of leadership. Lenin was consistent in critiquing both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadet parties for their lack of transparency. It was a point of pride for Lenin that all the problems inside the RSDLP were being laid bare so that workers could make up their own minds about the leaders and misleaders in their movement. In my letter to the SC two years ago I predicted that without transparency the SC as a whole would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of members since they could not see if it was a specific member or group of members behind a wrong headed tactic. This is also true of our national organization. We are able to see the reports from congress but without an ability to see the debates behind the choices we are unable to hold specific leaders to account. If our delegate voted contrary to our revolutionary values how would we know? How would we hold them accountable when elections came around for the next congress?

This is not a hypothetical question. Few rank and file members are aware that at our last congress some members attempted in good faith to disagree with the position put forward by the CC on the question of how to position ourselves relative to artificial intelligence. If we thought the CC was incorrect or that they mishandled the disagreement how would we democratically attempt to change the direction of the party on this vital question facing our class? As Parenti once said, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input.”

It seems as though such accountability and debate are anathema to those who currently run our organization. In pre-congress docs for years we have been told about the goal to massify the party. It is my belief that it is impossible to massify the party if we do not have a means by which to absorb and resolve the debates which will naturally emerge amongst our class. People can accept defeat in a debate on a specific proposal but they cannot be expected to take part in building an organization which doesn’t have any means by which to have such debate.

Many members have made arguments about transparency in recent months. Many of them have been in good faith. However there are members who have raised the banner of transparency from the SC only when it could serve their careerist ends. When they were in leadership they took advantage of this obscurity to misrepresent their fellow leaders to members. However as soon as they found themself in the minority transparency was an ideal to be fought for? No I doubt they will follow us because the cause of democracy and debate was a means towards their egoistical ends.

It is in light of these and other facts that I make the choice to forge a new path outside of the party. It is a difficult step, it is a scary step and there is no guarantees about the future. But I feel I owe it to my class to take it. I have seen too many hard working and genuine comrades become burnt out and turning away from organizing entirely due to struggling against the sins of our party. This is why a wrongheaded party is not just a mistake but something to be fought against as it siphons limited energy from our class that can be harnessed toward revolutionary ends. I have seen many leaders resign quietly. I respect this choice but I think it makes it difficult for the movement to learn any lessons for the future. In leaving the party I think it is vital that we do the work to reflect on the failures and limitations of the PSL as well as its strengths. Dialectics requires that we see the necessity for the party at a specific juncture in history and absorb its strengths while leaving behind as many of its issues as we can.

I have witnessed resignations before and know I may be slandered for many things by the party. I know many of you are dedicated fighters for socialism even when we have disagreed we have fought side by side. My hopes are that even if we have disagreed in the past you will remember that I have always been open and honest about where I stand. I hope that this letter will help those of you who are dedicated to the class struggle to see the limits of the PSL. I invite you to embark with us on a new path to build the kind of organization we were promised when we were recruited.

In Solidarity,

L.M

D.W’s Letter:

Comrades I have chosen to submit to this branch as a whole my resignation, I have done this in violation of the constitution and by-laws because I agree with you all that our branch is in need of transparency to tackle the political disagreements that have paralyzed us for so long, and I believe comrades deserve to understand the type of organization that they are in. I know that this will be characterized in many ways, it may be described as uncomradely, it may be described as disagreement with the possibility of socialist revolution, it may also be characterized as an unwillingness to submit myself to democratic centralism or the will of the collective by accepting the outcome of the SC elections. I want to assure you none of these things are true. I declined nomination because I knew I couldn’t complete the term.

I joined the party 6 years ago because I believe that socialist revolution is not only possible, but that as a mother I have a life long duty to the struggle for socialism. It is not a matter of sentimentality but of practical necessity, it is in it’s actualization that my own children’s future becomes secure. In those 6 years I have spent 5 of them in various appointed and elected leadership roles the last 2 as a member of the Salt Lake Steering Committee. I have worked tirelessly to build our branch and the movement for socialism. I was the State Chair of the Vote Socialist Campaign, at my own expense I have attended international delegations, answered the call for out of state deployments, and earned the confidence of our comrades being elected as a delegate to the 6th Party Congress. I have not made this decision lightly, but I hope that by explaining how I came to it, each of you can make an informed decision as to where to direct your energy without false pretenses.

I am leaving the PSL because I no longer believe that it is capable of carrying out the tasks required of any party that hopes to call itself the vanguard, despite it’s ability to raise its profile and increase its ranks well beyond its current numbers. In my time in the branch there have been recurrent struggles over our approach to mass work and the actual practice of democracy within the party. Having to struggle through differing ideas about a question or practice isn’t inherently a problem. However I have seen how a lack of internal structures and an unwillingness of the National Party leadership to assert authority where necessary has allowed flagrant violations of our constitution and bylaws to occur on a regular basis with no accountability. I have seen over and over the tendency to smooth over disagreements and debates with rhetorical unity, obfuscating all manner of political differences. I have seen first hand how one on one conversations are used to prevent the emergence of disagreement, which almost always relegates the disagreement to the realm of the interpersonal. The consequences have been felt by everyone in our branch even though many of you lacked the information to understand what was happening. I will fully acknowledge that as a member of the Steering Committee I have participated in withholding information that I thought comrades deserved to have to make informed decisions, my only defense is that I did so inline with Party discipline and inline with the directives of the National Party leaders.

Many comrades trace the problems in our branch to the retreat after the Palestine movement began to fade. The issue of democratic participation in discussion and debate, and the responsibility of comrades to carry out the resulting work according to the principles of democratic centralism has long been a flash point. It was the final iteration of housing unit work building the Tenants Union of Salt Lake that offered us the first real test of party structures from my experience. This period in our branch was marked by lively debate in our units and a high level of engagement from rank and file members, members in the units had a high degree of input on how work was unfolding within the confines of building out the tenants union. As a member of the Extended Steering Committee and a lead of the housing unit I attempted to resolve a question about our strategy towards developing TUSL between my unit and SC members in the unit. We had diverging positions and ideas about the appropriate way to move forward so I attempted to resolve the disagreement through all of the channels available, using our constitution and by-laws to guide me.

After having several questions taken to a vote in our unit with the SC members in the minority, our unit attempted to carry out our collective decision, members of the SC used their influence to formally and informally encourage comrades to carry out the work in the way the minority voted. When this was raised to the full Steering Committee in an Extended Steering Committee meeting, it was decided that I would develop a proposal laying out the concrete path we would take to build TUSL, and the SC and Extended SC would vote on it to end the debate. The proposal that I put forward was adopted by the full Steering Committee and immediately SC members in the unit started advising the unit to carry out work in contradiction to the adopted proposal. In response I planned to call a branch meeting on the basis that the branch meeting is the highest body of the branch where I planned to call for a branch vote on the strategy of TUSL. Up to this point the Steering Committee members in the housing unit had pushed for disagreements between comrades to be resolved through informal one on one or small group discussion until they reached consensus instead of encouraging the debate and differences to be clearly discussed in the unit meeting for all members to understand. My position was that if a disagreement existed among the leadership body of the branch and the membership we should be open with the branch about what those disagreements were. Not only so that we could gain the input of the branch but so comrades could adequately assess the decisions of the leadership body and the individual members elected and appointed to it.

Through out this time I was engaging in debate and struggling openly about the direction that we went, however my genuine political disagreement was treated first as irritation, then as an interpersonal clash, and eventually as full blown insubordination and subversion of Party norms. While leadership was understandably frustrated that the branch was bogged down in internal conflict, the position I was putting forward was that in a democratic centralist organization we are expected to have intense debates and disagreements and when consensus cannot be reached we should vote and all be held accountable to carrying out the decision reached by the majority. Given that I had seen members of the SC refuse to accept the decisions of the majority in their unit, gossip about comrades, and move to overturn a decision they didn’t personally agree with, I lacked trust that leaders in our Party are actually accountable to the principles of democratic centralism in practice.

My insistence on bringing this disagreement to the full branch would also mark my first experience with members of the National Organization Department coming to SLC to resolve internal dysfunction. During that visit our liaisons met with the extended steering committee and asked why we were pushing for our proposal to go to a branch vote, I told them I believed I was following the method laid out in the constitution for resolving disagreements like this, I was told that the language of the “branch being the highest body” does make it my right as a member to bring any decision before the branch to vote on, but that isn’t how we handle things in reality. I agreed not to bring the proposal to the branch and our national liaisons helped us come up with a plan for moving TUSL forward which I took up enthusiastically, shortly after their visit the Steering Committee removed me from my role as deputy of the housing unit and removed Liz as the lead. Along with other long time members of the housing unit who had sided with my position in the debate, we were removed from housing work all together. There was never a reason given other than the Steering Committee had decided to do a branch reorganization and that is what the needs of the branch called for.

I must admit that my removal from housing work was a deep blow it was an area of work I’d done since before joining the party, I wrestled with feeling wronged and lied to and I questioned if the Party actually operated the way leaders said it did. I reflected and decided I could look at my removal from housing work as a personal attack, or I could see it as an opportunity to show the members of leadership that viewed me as combative that I was serious about party discipline. I put my all into developing the first iteration of an organized comms team in the branch right before the Palestine struggle would start picking up momentum. The uptick seemed to settle tensions in the branch for a while, we got into a regular work flow but as the movement endured for months we were faced with the question of developing a strategy for our work in the Palestine movement. This was something that the SC said they did not have the capacity to develop and said that it would have the unit take up. Myself and another leader developed a proposal that the unit voted in favor of. This strategy was then challenged by members not in the unit at the behest of SC members in the unit who disagreed with the strategy and found it too confusing for people to understand. This led to the strategy being put up for a vote in a special meeting where anyone from the branch was able to attend. Before this strategy was able to be adopted we had the 2024 SC elections where 3 long time SC members left the Steering Committee. With the election of a new steering committee the contradictions left unresolved from disagreements over the correct approach to mass work and base building and the correct approach to developing political strategy again came to a head immediately.

The period following the election of the 2024 Steering Committee was marked with an extreme amount of disunity internally because it was grappling with it’s members D and K breaking party discipline and sharing internal SC deliberations with a former SC member X and her partner N. This led to a campaign to create a faction in the branch where D and X were hosting secret strategy retreats with student comrades without the knowledge of the elected steering committee. Simultaneously N and X were actively calling decisions made by the new SC into question before the full branch, and used their informal relationships to gossip and disparage the new SC to emerging student leaders. The refusal of a highly respected former SC member to accept the legitimacy of the newly elected SC, represented the first time the authority of an elected Steering Committee as a body would be challenged in the branch. We would later learn in early 2026 that these strategy calls with N and X, never stopped, but I’ll write more on that later.

Following the departure of X, K, and N from the branch D remained on the SC, without K on the SC and finding himself frequently in the minority, he continued to meet with student comrades attempting to counter organize against the decisions of the SC that he personally disagreed with. While Devin was not solely responsible for the hardened positions within the SC, his repeated violations of the constitution and by-laws represented the primary contradiction preventing our branch from being able to become unified around a shared path. This culminated in irrefutable proof that he had knowingly encouraged comrades in Mecha to call a counter event to one he knew the SC had just voted on calling. The SC and our liaison worked at length to consolidate the student comrades being influenced by these actions and open the door for any questions about what they had heard from D and others, our mistake was in not being absolutely clear about what was happening and providing our perspective so that comrades could decide for themselves what to believe. At the time talking about the specific violations comrades had been carrying out was seen as a threat to the unity of the branch and our ability to win over those student comrades, who through no fault of their own had been mislead by leaders of the branch that they trusted.

The lull in the Palestine movement in the summer of 2024 and the final stretch of the Vote Socialist Campaign would follow a familiar pattern, D, L, and, I found ourselves faced with similar questions, and similar diverging understandings of what it meant practically to apply the party line on mass organizing and how we prioritize the interests of base building with the interests of flexibility to respond to the surges of the protest movement or other national campaigns like Vote Socialist 2024. This was also when the branch formally started approaching CU. As I mentioned above D was not alone in hardening the positions in the SC, during this time he did have moments of explosive rage directed at him in SC meetings by L. Instead of being called out directly in those moments, L was privately talked to later about the need to engage with D constructively. Unfortunately the mediation with members of National that was meant to finally resolve the underlying diverging ideas on the correct path for our branch was not scheduled by them. D’s position was that the best tool to build a relationship with CU was TUSL, L and I advocated for us to build an organizational relationship with CU as PSL, our suggested first attempt was in the final weeks of the VS24 campaign, the SC had decided to launch a branch wide push directing all activities to tie back to promoting the campaign. D agreed to talk with B and feel out how she felt about us doing outreach for Salt Lake Immigrant People’s Agenda and sharing materials about the campaign too where it made sense, he also got approval from the SC to bring a handful of comrades to participate. After several outings and no discussion about the Vote Socialist Campaign going on between PSL and CU leadership, Liz and I pushed for us to pause trying to build the relationship with CU until after the election. This was met with resistance from D and meetings with the SC grew increasingly tense. Around this time the SC found out that Devin was hosting a private Black August event with student comrades to do an independent study on the National Question despite members of the NOD actively trying to discuss those questions and provide clarity on them from National. This was the final straw for the SC in which we demanded the NOD take some sort of corrective action towards the factionalizing being carried out by an active SC member.

As a consequence D was asked to stop attending SC meetings and informed by the NOD that he would need to participate in party work with CU accompanied by a comrade who could report back what happened to the SC. Following the election in November the branch launched into interest meetings and in January of 2025 began preparing for the Jan 20th inaugural We Fight Back rally. We approached CU to collaborate and partner with us on the event which they agreed to, after a challenging start and misunderstanding about the social media announcement we pulled off a successful rally. Comrades expressed excitement about the success of those attempts, and the SC hoped to build on that. We attempted to launch an emergency response network that would be developed through organizing meetings held at the LC. Failing to establish any partners or real involvement from CU, we determined we lacked the man power to effectively create these networks with so many people in different areas. We stopped hosting the organizing meetings and attempted to determine a more comprehensive approach to the We Fight Back days of action as the No Kings movement was starting to develop. This would lead to a pivot away from CU and us looking for other opportunities to engage with immigration defense. Devin disagreed with this approach but was no longer in SC meetings, so he used committee meetings and unit meetings to raise what he saw as failures of the elected SC to secure the relationship with CU. Comrades not in the faction were seeing SC members give contradicting directives and were confused by the constant tension. As the end of the term was drawing to a close Liz and I informed our National Liaison that we planned to refuse to accept nomination and threatened to demotivate at the election if Devin was allowed to run without answering to the branch about his misconduct.

Agreeing that some sort of disciplinary action was warranted but unable to approve anything more within the NOD, our liaison told D he could not accept nomination for the 2025 term and that failure to change his conduct would result in expulsion. The plan after elections was to take up the question of immigration work, develop a strategic outlook for the branch, and plug D into work that he enjoyed. It was deeply important to the incoming SC to show him that we saw his contributions as a comrade and that we weren’t going to spend the term trying to punish him or get revenge.

After the SC retreat in April there was a flurry of activity we moved quickly to implement a structure that would allow for comrades to participate in the decisions about carrying out our work, but would centralize the relationship building and strategy development in the SC. It wasn’t perfect and the SC attempted to build a second tier of leaders through one on one asks and opportunities working closely with a handful of comrades. The limits of this were felt immediately, without the explicit role and responsibility of being an appointed leader in the branch comrades we hoped to raise up didn’t have the clarity about what we were expecting of them. Without a regular division of labor and regular meetings comrades were incentivized to pick only the meetings and events that interested them.

Another variable arising out of the SC retreat was the break up between A and L which created a dynamic where often L would verbally attack A and Dodge if they asked clarifying questions or suggested that there was disagreement with her positions. There were many meetings where we were unable to finish our agenda because L would storm out or shut the conversations down. For a lot of this period I attempted to play a mediating role where I was trying to translate the legitimate issues L had to the rest of the body, but also act as a support so that L didn’t feel attacked by the legitimate questions being raised by other SC members. This was an error because it reproduced the dynamic in which SC members and liaisons had one on one conversations to attempt to indirectly deal with the problem which only created the conditions for suspicion.

After an intensely scary experience at an immigration rally that A was the tactical lead for, police appeared to be kettling protestors and Liz in the lead truck got caught between them. She developed a deep distrust of other SC members acting in a tactical role. Only exacerbating this distrust were the tragic events at the No Kings rally in June. L and I had been the tactical and security leads, but after getting to the front of the march that had missed the end point at Wallace Federal, L and I were separated from the rest of the contingent. We had just brought the runaway crowd back around the corner, and were a few yards ahead of the Sky apartments when we heard the shots. We tried to get back to the comrades behind us and turned around not knowing where they had come from and saw Z. The next period was chaotic but at almost every turn we took to get back to the contingent police were charging towards us. Unable to find our way back we called A and told him to lead comrades out of there. Afterwards L experienced severe PTSD which she later expressed not feeling supported in by the SC.

All of these factors had the effect of creating explosive meetings that left every member of the SC stressed out about our weekly meeting. After coming back from Congress, M was assigned as our National Liaison because she would be able to provide the close consultation that the SC needed so that we could finally get work moving in our branch. After several attempts to talk to L and the SC together and individually, she asked L to take a leave of absence for a few months so that the rest of the SC could have some space. L refused and the NOD put her on an LOA from the SC but they did not want us to tell the branch in an effort to protect L’s privacy and to keep the peace. Complicating matters was a convergence of interests of L and D both wanting to engage in immigration work with Bailfund and CU. Liz then knowingly pushed bailfund in chats and directed her partners to lobby for bailfund in other committees against the directive of our liaison. In an unprecedented move in December the NOD formally suspended L for 6 months for uncomradely conduct and failure to abide by democratic centralism. This was the opportunity for the National Leadership to reassert norms and expectations in our branch that even elected members of the the SC are accountable to the constitution and by-laws. Unfortunately P left the party and we were faced with reality that we were starting completely over with a new liaison H.

The approach that H wanted us to take saw the issues in the branch as mostly rooted in the realm of the interpersonal. He spent more time communicating with D than he did asking the SC how things had developed in the branch. When presented with irrefutable proof that X and N had just told comrades to call for new SC elections because they had concerns about the disciplinary action taken against L, H asked if we’d ever talked to X and asked her to stop interfering in the branch, when we said we had and so had our former Liaison, he assured us that he would talk to her and tell her how serious what she was doing was and that she needed to stop. Then he told us the next step was a convo between A and D to determine if it was possible for them to move forward that was mediated by C. D and A reported extremely positive feelings about their discussion. However at the May branch meeting D would then ask A and O to motivate for U’s return and insinuated that to not do so would be undemocratic. Following that meeting he went out with student comrades and shared his disagreement with the SC’s approach to branch work.

Despite no evidence of real resolution, H provided the SC, D, J, R, and E with 4 points to serve as a basis for unity and turning the page in the branch. This is supposed to clarify the problems and help us understand what we need to do to move forward, yet it opens with a point about not litigating the past despite acknowledging we have differing interpretations of what happened over the last “few months”. When I asked how the NOD intended to ensure that the next SC put the agreement into practice and what they planned to change to provide the level of support that a brand new SC would need given the experience of the last two years where the needs of the party often meant that our branch was waiting for National to respond on disciplinary matters long after they needed to be addressed. H assured me they’d be in close consultation and available to support facilitating conversations about branch strategy including about CU with the branch, and that if a comrade were to violate the agreement they would be talked to because they shouldn’t be here. When I clarified, great so you’re saying the NOD is committing to expelling any member that violates this agreement, he said no, he couldn’t commit to that in the abstract.

Another example of the disconnect between the practice of our party and the way that it is defined in our constitution and by-laws was demonstrated when H came to SLC last week ahead of our nominations, the question of L’s suspension ending was looming. As a member of our central committee, he did not know what the suspension was for or how long it was. He told us it would probably be easier for her to meet with members of the SC and as long as she agreed to the agreement then she would also be able to come back. This was shocking to me, why doesn’t the party have some sort of standard practice for handling disciplinary measures? Why is there no record of the discussions or decisions of other liaisons to ensure continuity and fairness for members dealing with such things?

So far I’ve attempted to detail the understanding that I had as an SC member of the problems in our branch. These problems are not comrades, they are structural. L.M’s letter explains some of the possibility of effectuating change through the Congress. I however want to share my experience of how the Party Leadership handles debate and discussion when a controversy is raised. I have witnessed first hand a fellow congress delegate brought to tears on the congress floor for raising a passionate demand for a thorough analysis and debate on a party line. She was told that she was harming the unity of the party and that she needed to speak in favor of their proposal for ending the session on the AI question. They then asked other attendees to also speak in favor of it, without those comrades reading it ahead of time. All of this would have been concealed from the delegates if not for Kei Pritsker formerly of Break Through News, sharing those details with the whole congress on the basis that it was not the right way to engage in democratic debate and delegates deserved to know. Both of those comrades have since left the party.

I waited until today to send this so that I could hear the response from our National Leaders to Walters’s letter, I wanted to ask them what general lessons can leaders take from this to ensure the unity of our branches and I wanted to know what the Executive Committee sees as it’s biggest area of growth. I am a firm believer to fix a problem, you have to admit you have it first, I don’t believe that the Party is willing to acknowledge to it’s rank and file members the real truth about the way the party functions and the calculations that are being made in how their branch is engaged with. It’s obscured from us, and often under the pretense that we are missing context or can’t understand the complex background which made up a certain period.

However the Party also is raising up many cadre who will be capable of winning, because the rank and file members that join this party do so on the basis that they are really building what we say we are. I cannot stay in this party because if I did I would have to lie to my comrades about where I stand. I refuse to accept that we must keep making the same mistakes, or to cover up the mistakes and mishandling of our branch on the basis of false unity.

For those comrades that read this and have questions, I will be honest with you. For those that want to stay, I’m rooting for us to see revolution in our lifetimes. For any comrades that read this and feel like me that you cannot go on this way any longer, rest assured you are not alone and we welcome you in charting a new path.

With Revolutionary Optimism,

D.W

Logistical Question

There is an inherent complexity in this break that due to our longstanding position within the party we have been entrusted with the control of the 501c4 which holds the financial resources of the branch. It is our belief that in any meaningful split with the party there is cause for a just division of resources as we just as much as you have build those resources and intent to use them for revolutionary ends. However the party has historically held the position that anyone who leaves the party due to political disagreements is counter revolutionary and persona non grata. Therefore we make the offer that we sit down for negotiations as to a reasonable division of resources. For legal reasons the 501c4 cannot simply give a large portion of funds to an individual. Therefore we offer to put down several months rent and continue to pay for the existing subscriptions the branch has(canva, comcast, zoom etc.) until such a time when the branch can set up its own 501c4 which can legally receive its share of the funds. Once said organization has legal standing we can begin the process of the aforementioned negotiations to find a means by which to perform such a division.

L.M’s Letter to The SC:

Comrades of the steering committee,

I have long had questions about the real practice of democracy within the branch. I have at different points voiced aspects of these questions but I must reflect upon my own unwillingness or inability to formulate them in any systematic manner. The fullest exposition of these doubts was raised after the SC changed its policy regarding observation of their meetings, which happened in the last few months after I had attended a few such meetings. Comrade A was kind enough to have a call with me to try and explain the reasoning for the change and to hear me out for well over an hour about my concerns. It was my hope that such concerns would be brought to the SC but so as to return his kindness I would like to formulate these concerns so that he doesn’t have to represent a comrade in their absence. I also would take this opportunity to flesh out my arguments—with the benefit of time to research—and respond to some of his initial counter points. In a sentence my concern could be put that unity requires the light of open debate to build. I intend to show that this isn’t just an ideal of “freedom of criticism” but a result derived from the experience of the socialist struggle. I hope that the good faith extended to my initial doubts raised with comrade A will continue in the reception of this piece and that anywhere in which I err I will receive a similarly good faithed critique.

Our current SC has inherited certain issues which have pre-existed its election and I do not envy your task in trying to handle these historic weights on your back. I think the previous SC(that prior to the election of D.W) identified an aversion to disagreement whether that be in professional or interpersonal spaces. I think in general our culture encourages us to look for some higher structure to resolve debates whether that be the boss, HR or the police. Further I think the culture within Utah makes such open disagreements extra uncomfortable. That SC assigned readings which dealt with disagreement and has proposed a mediation process both of which were oriented toward the productive resolution of primarily interpersonal squabbles. I think these are good steps but I think they fail to address that unless we can have productive, democratic and professional debates we will never become a party of a class; a party which can absorb thousands, hundreds of thousands of members. As we grow so too will the contradictions and divergent opinions within our party. Our strength will be in our ability to maintain these contradictions while still being able to act decisively.

One of my long-time concerns is the lack of awareness within the rank and file membership of the real debates and divergent tendencies of our branch. I think this has been caused in the first place by the aforementioned aversion to open critique but also by the tendency for debates to be held in one on one conversation or in conversation between rank and file members and leadership. I will make reference to debates within our TUSL and pre-TUSL work which I think are both emblematic of the issues and were where many members first realized these challenges within the branch regardless of their divergent interpretation of events. The first example will reveal that I do not see myself as above the critiques I level at our branch.

Early in the debates around our housing work, comrade L and I thought there were certain tendencies which revealed a lack of understanding about party principles and the practice of democratic centralism. Specifically around our openly identifying as socialist and putting forward a concrete party program. While we had done some work to make these critiques in our meetings around specific tactics we were employing she and I also went to comrade A to voice our critiques. I believe in a healthier environment and with greater experience we would have made these critiques plain within the bounds of those housing meetings. Over time we did not feel that these concerns were properly addressed within the body and it became clear that there were differing tendencies within our work. These tendencies began to solidify as they tend to into blocs however these blocs and their positions were hardly clear to newer members both of the branch and the committee. Especially when the LC committee was dissolved and absorbed into TUSL the history of the debates was not clear to members. Many of these disagreements over tactics took place between formal and informal leadership in private chats. When you enter a committee and you witness what had at that point become a heated debate without the context it is easy for what were at their core political struggles to appear as interpersonal or petty squabbles. This appearance would inevitably become reality as the increasingly solid blocs had no real method by which to settle their differences. These issues were only exacerbated by problems which have been recognized by subsequent steering committees of the inconsistent reporting of committee work to the SC by its members. Comrades who had legitimate political lines, regardless of their veracity, were viewed as obstinate. The question of their continued membership within the party was even raised. We speak of resolving interpersonal issues but we have had little discussion of how it was a failure of branch structure that they became interpersonal in the first place!

I apologize for the digression into branch history but I feel that it will be helpful in understanding my concerns and why until recently I have had fear to raise them. I appreciate that we are in a less tenuous position as a branch and I believe the work of this and the previous SC have gone a long way in making me feel able to raise real concerns without being viewed as the branch “reply guy” or as contrarian. However as stated I feel we need to continue our work in order to become a party which can claim for itself the place of vanguard. Namely I think while the debates have somewhat simmered down we have not addressed the lack of political openness necessary to have real legitimacy.

In my call with comrade Q I raised my concern that we as a branch do not know what the SC is discussing nor do we know the results of the discussion. I gave the analogy to if the public were unaware of who voted for a specific bill in the houses of the senate. How would we know which senators to condemn and to protest? Which to vote for or against? We would view such lack of openness as a severe lack of accountability and a testament to a lack of democracy. This is the reality within our branch. Comrade A raised a counterpoint that he did not see it as a fair comparison as there is a large qualitative difference between a bourgeois congress and a revolutionary party. I would ask what are these differences? First that they hold state power and secondly that they are viewed by the general populace as more legitimate than our party. The first of which is the goal of all parties which have ever existed and thus I do not think should be relevant to our discussion on democracy. The second I believe only proves my point. They are viewed with greater legitimacy than our party and if they hid their deliberations as we do to our members they’d lose legitimacy as a whole rather than of this or that part of their body. This or that leader.

Much has been made about projecting unity from the SC for fear of exacerbating the fractures within our branch. I ask, does hiding your disagreements build real unity? Or does it lend to the discrediting of the whole membership of the steering committee? When three of you make a bad call and we, the rank and file membership, are ignorant as to the two dissenters, how are we to hold you accountable at the next election? How are we not to condemn the whole of the SC for its errors? Despite pedagogy becoming a buzz word within our branch we have shown little interest in the education of our membership about the tendencies within our own branch.

Let it not be said that this is just my opinion. As I raised in my call with Comrade Murphy the RSDLP was the only party within Russia to go to such lengths as to publish the minutes of its congresses. In his work, “But Who Are The Judges” Lenin went so far as to critique the liberal party, the Cadets, for their lack of openness:

“The liberals sneer at the struggle within social democracy in order to cover up their own systematic deception of the public in regard to the cadet party…There are no records of the proceedings of the cadet congresses. The liberals issue no figures of their party membership either as a whole or by organizations. The tendency of different committees is unknown. Nothing but darkness…Lawyers and professors, who make their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and praise open activity by parties while actually flouting the democratic principle of publicly and concealing from the public the different political tendencies within their own party.” (bolding is my own)¹

Let it be remembered that the RSDLP was an illegal party! Which we are not! Yet we feel so unconfident in our disagreements that we hold ourselves to a lower standard. Not just for the public but for our own members? In gleaning lessons from historical examples it is necessary to move beyond the simple question of what was done but to the political purpose for which it was done. Toward this end Lenin’s critique of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is more exemplary:

“[D]uring the period of the greatest liberties, the period of most direct influence upon the masses, they concealed from the public the existence of two different tendencies within the party. The differences of opinion were as great as those within the Social-Democratic ranks, but the Social-Democrats tried to clarify them, whereas the Socialist- Revolutionaries tried diplomatically to conceal them…’Not to wash one’s dirty linen in public’ is a thing the S.R.’s are adept at. The trouble is they have nothing to show in public but dirty linen. They could not tell the whole truth about their relations with the Popular Socialists in 1905, 1906, or 1907…Our Party’s serious illness is the growing pains of a mass party. For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organizations of the Party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built, and we are building it. We have succeeded in putting the views of our two currents truthfully, clearly, and distinctly before everyone. Personal bitterness, factional squabbles and strife, scandals, and splits—all these are trivial in comparison with the fact that the experience of two tactics is actually teaching a lesson to the proletarian masses, is actually teaching a lesson to everyone who is capable of taking an intelligent interest in politics.”²

The RSDLP made its disagreements public but we as a branch can’t even acknowledge them to our members!? The purpose of open debate as revealed by this quote was to instruct and build the competency of the class in understanding its leaders, misleaders, and the real political lines they represented. If there are fractures within our branch as Comrade Murphy put it we are doing all of these class fighters a disservice by hiding them under diplomatic language! We are treating those who are the most committed to the struggle with kid’s gloves. When we ought to be educating them as to the real sources of division. Is the cause a fear that they won’t understand these divisions? Or is it that we ourselves do not? And thus cannot claim any right as educators. If it is the former I say you are casting doubt on our members and their ability to understand politics intelligently. If it is the latter then it is your responsibility as leaders to stop pussy-footing around issues and get to the heart of matters.

As a more modern reference to support my position let us look at the wikileaks of the DNC in its attempts to obstruct the primary election of Bernie Sanders. When these leaks were revealed a great mass of his supporters saw what Marx and Lenin had said countless times: when the working class wins by the rules the ruling class will do everything in their power to subvert the rules. As such the democrats lost a great deal of legitimacy. While I don’t think we would go to such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not open, in this most open of times for organizing, we risk losing legitimacy if the ruling class should ever reveal the lack of unity amongst our leaders.

If the lack of transparency should be doubted I will make reference to one of the few real debates I was witness to. Before the policy of SC observation was changed I was at a meeting where you voted on the proposal raised by comrade Hovermale in regards to our masking policy. After an intense debate, which left some comrades visibly on the verge of tears, a vote was taken to settle the matter. Three comrades voted in favor and two against. I must admit I was grateful a vote was even taken. However since this vote I have not witnessed, and I may be wrong, any announcement as to this new policy?

This leads into my concerns about the policy about SC observation. Whereas the previous policy allowed one to attend any SC meeting save the portions regarding matters of membership and security now members are expected to provide a concrete reasoning behind their observation. How is one ever expected to do so in this reality in which we actually live when the questions being discussed by the SC are not published? When the ongoing position of the SC is to not reveal the debates going on in its halls? Whether intended or not this policy makes observation of your actions almost exclusively by invitation.

I want to be abundantly clear that I do not advocate for any form of ultra-democracy by which every choice is debated by the full membership. Rather I call simply for real mechanisms by which that membership, which elected you, can hold you accountable. To quote Michael Parenti, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure,open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry,”³ or in this case members.

When I brought up the importance of publicizing the minutes of their congress to comrade A he raised a good question about whether the RSDLP had a similar policy for their local bodies. While I still would like to better understand how they were organized locally I think this misses the historical trees for the forest. As we repeat often there is no one mode of organizing which is eternally correct. My point thus far has been about the Leninist principled commitment to educating the masses as to the different shades of opinion within the party. It must be repeated that the RSDLP existed as an illegal party and we do not. Even within the context of intense political repression of the RSDLP their newspapers did publish their disagreements within the St. Petersburg branch. Our party does not have such localized newspapers as modern communication technology has allowed for a greater degree of centralization through the apparatus of Liberation News.

The last point I will address regarding comrade A’s reply to my initial concerns was that he said comrades in national said they felt we had allowed too much debate to occur without a unified response from leadership leading to fractures within our branch. While he would not share specifics which might be relevant to my reply, on first glance I cannot accept this position.

As stated earlier it was our lack of openness in regards to debate which led to fracturing and the development of petty squabbles. Had leadership issued a unified response during the intense period of debate within TUSL it would have been based on largely unreliable reports from the SC and would only have led to resentment not to real unity. Perhaps if the SC at the time had a real unity based on accurate reporting of the events such an assessment would be correct but as I’ve said in previous meetings: one can declare unity between a hair brush and the kingdom of mammals but this does nothing to give the brush mammary glands. Unity is to be won, not declared.

In conclusion, I don’t have a perfect solution to building unity within our branch which must be built by concrete struggle over our real disagreements but we only do ourselves a disservice by glossing over these disagreements with diplomatic language. I have raised the need before to have real meeting procedures for debate and resolution and I feel I was viewed as being overly formalistic but it is through such procedures that the ruling class has learned to maintain its hegemony regardless of their personal disagreements. If we are to build a truly mass party which can maintain the disagreements which will inevitably become more intense I think we ought to learn from them.

If I did not view the SC and our party with a certain level of legitimacy and hope for our ability to overcome such struggles I would have already left to organize somewhere else. My real hope is that we can shine a light on our disagreements so they can be resolved, not in an anarchistic fashion of perfect consensus but through us being able to disagree and submit to the will of the majority. I hope for no more than something accepted by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the whole of European social-democracy in the 20th century: democratic centralism.

In Solidarity,

Comrade L.M.

Anonymous Letter:

Hi all, I am writing this letter to express my resignation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Growing this organization has been the major focus of my life for the past 7 years, and I do not make this decision lightly. However, through my experiences with national leadership, especially after moving to NYC 2 years ago and operating in close proximity to the Center, I no longer believe this organization to be capable of bringing about broader, meaningful change for the working class in this country. While in NYC, I have been involved in trying to base build with my class, a strategic orientation that is so diametrically opposed to the PSL’s strategy of agitation and protest that the highest levels of PSL leadership have worked to undermine and sabotage base building work in Brooklyn. My belief in the need for socialism and working class organization is as firm as ever, which is why I believe it my responsibility to take the best possible road to build working class power, which is outside the PSL. I joined the PSL in Pittsburgh shortly after graduating college, but I met the party in Boston as a student at MIT. My first exposure to the PSL was a few weeks after Trump was elected in 2016. My initial enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders turned into a deep disillusionment with the electoral system when the DNC systematically sabotaged his candidacy, and this led to a search for new ways to fight for change outside the electoral system. My first ever protest was the night after Trump’s election. I began getting involved with some student organizing and attending more protests regularly around Boston. My decision to join the PSL came as PSL members built the MIT graduate union from the ground up. I saw how involvement in the union built power to fight for meaningful change for people I knew, and how being a part of a union changed people’s outlook from cynical to hopeful and empowered. I wanted to learn to organize from the people capable of building something as impactful as the MIT graduate union. I was the 5th member in the Pittsburgh branch at the time I joined in March 2019. My time there was mostly consumed by attending protests throughout multiple mass upswings, from the 2020 BLM uprisings to the Roe v Wade decision getting overturned to the Palestine movement. I became well-versed in the rinse-and-repeat cycle of tactics I later learned was the essence of PSL life: protest, flyer, forum, protest, flyer, forum. I knew it was insufficient. I knew we needed to go deeper. I experimented with new ways of organizing around widely felt issues, but attributed any lack of success to my relative inexperience as an organizer.

In summer 2024, I got a new job and moved to Brooklyn. I was excited to learn from new mentors and develop my ability to organize from those in the leading branch initiatives that included writing software for a member management system, creating an education portal for socialist political education, advising PSL members across the country on legal rights when being charged for free speech activity, and more. I was asked by Brian Becker to leave my software job to go to law school, then a few months later asked by Brian again to make staying up-to-date with AI development my main political focus, Brian seemingly having lost interest in encouraging a contingent of comrades to attend law school. I felt the effects of whiplash at the changing speed and urgency for an extremely wide array of national priorities, almost none of them having anything to do with organizing our class. I eventually dropped involvement in the majority of these responsibilities to focus on neighborhood organizing in Brooklyn.

In summer 2025, I was asked to attend the 6th Party Congress as an observer. When a debate around AI was sparked, I was asked to be involved in the resolution as a professional machine learning engineer. I took part in “secret” meetings which consisted of numerous meetings with a small group of about 8 people, including the person who raised criticisms of the party’s AI position. At the same time, the person who raised criticisms privately expressed concerns to me about the nature of the Congress and the lack of comradely debate. At the time, I didn’t understand her concerns and tried to use my role to keep the peace. When asked by national leadership to get on the mic in open discussion about AI to share specific talking points while establishing my authority on the subject of AI, I complied. However, this experience left a bad taste in my mouth and the comrade who raised the debate in the first place shortly thereafter left the organization.

Shortly before the Congress, the PSL made the “Sick of ICE” sick outs in solidarity with immigrants a primary focus of political activity. As a liaison with two branches, I was tasked with ensuring those branches carried out this national priority. In an internal meeting, I raised that the steering committee of one of those branches received broad pushback around the initiative and the branch was not enthusiastic about participating. These criticisms were on the grounds that a general strike could not happen by raising a call on social media and that this looked immature. A central leader of the PSL, instead of being open to criticism, instructed me to intervene more forcefully in instructing the branch to carry out the directive, insinuating that they simply misunderstood the task. A few months later, the central directive of the PSL became the general strike orientation. In a national leadership meeting, Brian Becker motivated for the need to agitate around a general strike and that the task at hand was to raise the working class’s consciousness around the need for a general strike. I was disturbed by his orientation. It contained a number of completely ahistorical interpretations of the Russian Revolution, and completely ignored that a general strike can only be possible through a very high level of organization of the working class. After this, I became increasingly embarrassed by PSL national directives with which I increasingly disagreed, especially including a polemic against the leaders of the Minnesota Model, a statewide coalition of unions, community organizations, and other progressive groups aimed at building working class power who had also raised the call for the January 23 Day of Truth and Freedom in response to Renee Good’s murder. I had already considered the Minnesota Model a template to aspire to, and became incredibly frustrated when PSL leaders openly denigrated the leaders in Minnesota and took credit for the success of January 23. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of the undemocratic nature of both the New York city branch and the overall national organization of the PSL. I have witnessed both Ben and Brian Becker ridicule comrades I deeply respect, both in private settings and in open meetings such as the NYC Branch Conference. I have witnessed coordinated efforts by national leadership to stifle political debates around base building to reaffirm agitating for socialist consciousness as a higher strategic objective. I see base building as a common sense focus on organization of the working class instead of the PSL’s obsession with endless agitation. The fact that base building is such a major threat to the PSL that a debate around it cannot even be allowed leaves me with little hope in the future of the organization.

Through these experiences and many others, I have come to the decision over the course of the past year that I must continue building working class power outside of the PSL. This is an organization that is deeply politically flawed and whose leadership naively believes that agitation and mobilization alone can bring about revolution. If this weren’t bad enough, any democratic pathway to change this orientation is stifled or shut down before a debate can even occur. I believe that in order to win, socialists must organize the working class. I look forward to continuing to fight to make this vision a reality.

E.’s Letter:

Hello comrades,

I wanted to let you know that after careful and thoughtful consideration, I’ve decided to end my candidacy and stop pursuing membership in the PSL. This is a multifaceted decision that was not made easily or taken lightly. I have a few reasons, but before I get into that, I just want to make it clear that I am not interested in taking a break and coming back later; this decision is final for me and there is not room for negotiation, even if my concerns are addressed. I am sending this letter to our Ogden unit because I feel connected to each of you and care about everyone a lot, and I wanted to be as open and honest with y’all as I can.

First, it is important to clarify that I made this decision independently from D’s and L’s resignations. I have taken approximately a month long break and was not aware of their exit until Monday evening. I made this decision two weeks ago and have been trying to find my words since. I do find the things shared in their letters as well as Walter Smolarek’s letter alarming. It has definitely given me further confirmation that now is the correct time for me to exit.

I would be remiss if I didn’t address a few concerns I have had. In particular I have questioned the actual practical application of the constitution and bylaws for some time now, and I found myself returning to them and finding contradictions with what is written and what is practiced. On several different occasions, whether in readings, lectures, or communications, I have felt the familiar tinge of coercion that I know so well from being a member of the LDS church for 23 years. I have difficulty with the NFD, and as someone who is facing financial hardships, something about it has never sat right with me. Dues are something I can understand, but I have felt like I’ve been asked for money by National A LOT over the last year and it has made me uncomfortable. Especially when I don’t see the PSL doing anything that concretely improves the material conditions of anyone with those funds.

These concerns also coincide with the personal experiences of my best friend who was a candidate in another branch in another state. This branch knew of a city council candidate who was predatory and frequently sexually harassed queer youth in the community. My best friend informed their branch leadership and was promised the PSL would not endorse nor affiliate with that candidate anymore. This did not happen and the branch continued to affiliate with and support him despite the evidence. I tried telling myself “it’s just a bad branch” and realized how much that sounded like the oft repeated mantra I had while a member of the church, “it’s just a bad ward.” I know that what other branches do is their own business and not related to the Salt Lake City branch. However, for me it calls into question the integrity of National if things like this are able to happen on a local level.

When I consider also the things that Walter Smolarek wrote about in his letter, it brings many more questions to light about the actions and motivations of National. I have come to find that I no longer trust them, and so I can no longer pursue membership in this organization. I want to end by saying that the last year I have spent organizing with y’all has been life changing and I have learned so much. It has simply become clear that this is not the path that is right for me to take. Thank you for your time, and for everything this branch has taught me about organizing. I will carry this time and these experiences close to my heart always.

Thank you,

E.

Citations

1. Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “But Who Are the Judges?” Proletary, No. 19., Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/05b.htm ︎
2. Ibid. ︎
3. Parenti, Michael. 2004. Superpatriotism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 81. ︎

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.” ︎