76
PSL: To Our Comrades (Rhode Island PSL) (shawarmarxist.substack.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
135 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hello, it's me again

This is another article that's been going around. I talked to some comrades up in Rhode Island and apparently the author of this kind of has some eh stuff going on and was actually kind of a jerk but still here's more kind of evidence of what's going on.

Notably one thing is that they say that the PSL Miami branch is dissolved. I don't know like anything about this.

It kind of feels like live archaeology at this point, just trying to archive and document the kind of discussions that have been going on. I honestly really have incredibly little faith in the party to continue to survive and end up being the party that we need. I think a new party is clearly going to need to form.

If you have any thoughts or additional points of information that can be used to, like, bring together the understanding of what went wrong and what's been going wrong, please put it below.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It's true that the same terms are used to describe negative experiences in both but in ISO it seems to have been truly rampant and systematized via the structure of its mentor-mentee program and who they decided to fill in each role. A lot of socially maladjusted men "mentoring" college students in one on one conversations with many direct personal reviews and decision-making power over their role in the org.

Every former ISO members I've worked closely with seems to have actual trauma from it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    My branch didn't have an explicit mentor-mentee program like that but the fact that there was an old guard (in every branch, as far as I saw) that relied on the constant churn of college students doing the busywork definitely made for that kind of dynamic. @PowerLurker@hexbear.net 's read of this post ("centralized leadership demanding blind faith, zero real internal democracy, and a feeling of a corporatized internal culture where rank and file cadre are treated as dutiful little employees all ring extremely true") applies 100% to how the ISO operated. It was during the Trump years that some of these contradictions became untenable, because there were so many new members and it was a lot more clear that it didn't have to be like that. But anytime we tried to argue against the "campus orientation" we were treated like we were bringing up a long-settled struggle session, and no more struggle on it would be tolerated, even though the times and circumstances had changed and the internal failures of it were as obvious as you say.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago

    That tracks, absolutely. In addition to the abuse dynamic the inability to handle growing pains literally from the campus orientation, when members worked into the org discover there isn't an internal path to influencing its direction.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent