PSL, women leaders respond to deceptive open letter from former candidate-member Leah

We rarely issue a public reply to an Internet critique full of mischaracterizations of our Party. What’s the point of arguing with individuals who are accountable to no one, especially when we have important organizing to engage in?

Leah’s letter, however, comments on a wide range of organizational questions with the implied authority of a former member who presumably knows about things “from the inside,” and it could therefore deceive unsuspecting people who come across it online. So for the public record we cannot let the falsehoods go unchallenged and contradictions go unexposed.

Leah was an active candidate-member of our organization for less than six months in Sarasota, Florida; she issued her letter from Europe, where she has been living for the last six months. First, the PSL Sarasota branch leadership writes:

“We fully reject Leah’s fruitless effort to divide the ‘good’ local branch from the “bad” national organization. Leah lauds the many achievements of our branch — achievements in the class struggle, in developing women’s leadership, fighting for trans rights, in combating chauvinism and in handling disciplinary issues . But all this good work flows directly from the guidance, training and internal culture of the national organization. There is much more that could be said about Leah from those of us who know her best, but we will just leave it at that.”

Now to respond to the central accusation of Leah’s letter — the scandalous notion of a “culture of pervasive misogyny” within the PSL from which women are leaving in droves. The fact is that the rate of retention of women members is higher than that of men. Additionally, women comprise half of the Central Committee and a majority of those on local Steering Committees across the country. Leah’s letter was circulated among all these elected women leaders of the PSL to weigh in. In reply, they unanimously issued the following letter:

“We are women, who in addition to our jobs, family and other personal responsibilities, devote our lives to building the revolutionary working-class movement and the PSL. We are elected members of the Central Committee and/or local Steering Committees, and play various roles in the National Organization Department.

We are writing to reject and renounce the false claims of former candidate member Leah from Florida, whose resignation letter “Women and the Vanguard Party” is being circulated on the Internet alleging a “pervasive culture of misogyny” in the PSL.

The Party described in Leah’s resignation is not the Party as it actually exists on the national and local level, the one we have been building and helping to lead, consciously and painstakingly, day by day, for years.

The small handful who have resigned, most of whom are either new candidate members or have been members less than a year, seem to be completely unaware of the Party’s record and processes for handling sexist misconduct, and our continuous and ongoing work in this field. They in fact articulate a reactionary position — dressed in left phrases — that violates the communist position and the Party’s Program on building working-class unity and the unity between and among the oppressed.

Worst of all, they erase the Party’s active and impressive leadership from women and LGBTQ people. We have been working for years to construct a powerful revolutionary organization, which educates its members and the broader class with a correct line on gender oppression, which empowers and consciously develops women and LGBTQ people as genuine leaders, on an elected (not tokenized) basis. This has been our goal since our founding in 2004, and we made it an explicit priority item of our mass work in 2012 as well as a focal point of the most recent Party Congress in 2016, and in the launching of Breaking the Chains magazine. And we have succeeded. We put women’s liberation at the center of our work. Of course, this is an ongoing and unfinished process, and we expect mistakes will be made along the way that we will rectify as needed, but we stand behind and affirm the Party’s record and work, and our role in it.

Any acts of sexism and misogyny in the Party’s ranks, whether expressed online or offline, are serious. As revolutionary communists and feminists we take a principled stand in solidarity with any victims. But anyone who accepts Leah’s distorted narrative about the PSL, feminism, democratic centralism and Marxism-Leninism is being led astray.

We repudiate and reject the notion that the PSL is systematically patriarchal or structurally misogynist. We recognize based on our own experiences and work over many years that this is a false line of attack.

Signed unanimously by all the women members of the following bodies:

Central Committee
National Organization Department
Albuquerque Steering Committee
Asheville Steering Committee
Champaign-Urbana Steering Committee
Chicago Political Committee, Steering Committee
Dallas Steering Committee
Denver Steering Committee
Los Angeles Steering Committee
New Haven Steering Committee
New York City Steering Committee
Philadelphia Steering Committee
Portland Steering Committee
Sacramento Steering Committee
San Diego Steering Committee
San Francisco Steering Committee
Sarasota/Suncoast Steering Committee
Seattle Steering Committee
Washington, D.C. Steering Committee

The letter’s other claims

Leah used none of the party’s internal processes to bring up criticisms of the party’s political line, nor the party’s organizational methods to bring forward disciplinary charges or complaints. She chose instead an echo chamber of friends on Twitter to voice her opinion rather than having them tested, challenged by her own comrades. In this sense, we believe she forfeited her right for a point-by-point, detailed debate with the PSL. We will say, however, that the other points in Leah’s letter are as distorted as her false claim of a culture of misogyny.

The letter:

• omits that in the debate on Twitter between PSL members, regarding Leah’s particular articulation of “materialist feminism,” the point that triggered the dispute was Leah’s assertion that trans and gay men form part of an “oppressor class” over women and her assertion that trans men have no place in a discussion of misogyny despite their lived experiences. (And this was based on the anti-Marxist notion that men and women in general form distinct classes with antagonistic interests based on an opposing relationship to the means of production.) The letter further omits that two trans women and three trans men in the PSL were objecting to these formulations . She instead chose to grossly mischaracterize the other side as “misogynistic.”
• falsely asserts that the Party did not follow up with or take any corrective action with those involved in this unproductive and antagonistic debate on Twitter. (The national organizers were focused that day on the Syria withdrawal announcement, while others were on the road for organizing trips, but still contacted all the respective branches to follow up with the members involved in this dispute on Twitter; and these meetings happened within days.)
• falsely suggests that the Party did not allow her to debate her views, and that we failed to act on her charges. The first time we heard her organizational criticisms, and first time we saw the screenshots that she falsely claims constituted “misogyny,” were in her resignation letter.
• erases the leadership of women and people of oppressed nationalities who have far more experience and knowledge than her, and who work every day to build and improve the PSL.
• grossly exaggerates and distorts the Party’s policy about communications between members. Our norm is for the local branch unit to be the primary place where members should discuss sensitive internal matters, Party policies and make collective evaluations. (To make matters worse, the letter quotes out of context a section of an internal document that had not been released — which is highly unprincipled for any “communist.”)
• strips out of context Lenin’s writings on democratic centralism. His demand that all Party members be allowed to criticize the Party’s policies in public was limited to a very short moment in Russian revolutionary history, in 1906, when he wanted to prepare the ground for a new split in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. The Bolsheviks had just merged with the Mensheviks, over Lenin’s misgivings, and during this time he refused to have the Bolsheviks be silenced by a Menshevik majority. This practice was not part of the Bolshevik and Leninist tradition once the split from Menshevism and social-democracy was made.
• is at its core hypocritical. On the one hand it says the PSL must let members debate the Party’s Program on Twitter. On the other hand it says the Party must discipline comrades for Tweets that she says are wrong.

Leah’s letter (and Tweets) reveal major political differences with the PSL. She does not share the Party’s approach towards building unity among the oppressed and working class, and thus she should have ended her candidate-membership before she did so. That the letter tries to conflate these political differences with a struggle against misogyny is highly deceptive and opportunistic.