Ask Lemmygrad

I read quite a bit of it. I must be missing something big for it to make any sense at all as a comparison. One is a national imperialist party, one of two parties who holds power in the world-spanning US empire, and is capable of carrying out genocide (and is doing so right now). One is a grassroots organization with very limited reach and influence. That doesn't change the fact that SA allegations need to be taken seriously, but it does make the timing and nature of allegations different. Also different is the way in which it has been done with this thread. This was not a thread compiling resources and providing sourced information to make a case against PSL for a specific, described purpose. It was a thread asking a leading question and letting the reader fill in the blanks with their imagination. And PSL is not an organization with immense power and a sparkling reputation in the public eye for millions of loyalists, which needs a dose of reality applied to it. It is a (relative to the existing power structures) tiny and struggling organizational effort in the core of the empire. And with it being in the core of the empire, it is especially vulnerable to both infiltration and the various imperialist tendencies in the very population it's trying to recruit membership from. If it is failing to be disciplined on those fronts, it deserves criticism for doing so; from fellow anti-imperialists and communists who are trying to make better happen. But there is a tendency for people to approach this kind of thing with individualist thinking, to view it not as an "us problem" but as a "them problem" and "I'm not part of it because I condemn it and I don't support them." Sexism happens in the most banal, everyday ways in a patriarchal society. The point there is not that it should be seen as normal and ignored—just the opposite if anything—but that, much like being anti-racist, opposing it means more than saying it's bad and saying people who are doing it are bad and should feel bad and you should be mad at them.

At some point, we have to actually develop processes of disciplined accountability. I don't see how anyone would even begin to do such a thing for a party like the democratic party, but it is possible to do so with communist or communist-adjacent orgs. That is one of the differences in comparing. It should be possible to approach this in a way that can get real results in accountability, with organizing efforts like PSL. With a party like the democratic party, it's more a matter of helping people understand how systemically unconscionable they are and how irredeemably captured by imperialist interests and all the oppressive isms tied up in that. It does us no good to apply the same approach to an org that is meant to have the potential to resist the empire, to only treat it as a hopeless endeavor in need of being putting on blast with tactless dismissal if any hint of bad behavior comes out of it. We can't afford to give up on orgs like this as victims of poor leadership.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear or not, but I'm kind of tangentially getting into a pattern that I see with US "left-leaning" orgs and how people talk about them. "This one is bad for this reason, this one is bad for that reason," okay, so what are we doing for alternatives then? Where are we leading people if the only options are bad? Is there no way to root out issues in any of these orgs? Is the only solution to tell people they are bad and to stay away from them? What does that accomplish for organizing?