For whatever it means for you comrades, my former branch is absolutely falling apart. Leadership has had to be constantly engaged with comrades 1:1 to get them to stay or to not leave for other projects or lifeboat groups who’re trying to keep party members; and it means a ton of people who wanted to do other things are just burning out like flies. My local branch has, I think, tipped right overboard into some extremely inexcusable tactics and behavior; and my disappointment is immeasurable.
I understand I’m posting about this a lot, so, Mods or Admins feel free to tell me to stop, I just want this to be on people’s radars so bad. This hasn’t really hit the mainstream “left” yet, I haven’t seen people even locally who’ve taken an anti-party stance for a long time (correct or not) talking about this.
The fact that your branch leadership has to do damage control with members sounds alarming to me. I would expect within a well functioning centralised democracy, the branch would call a meeting to collectively decide their stance and further actions, rather than leadership already taking a position and trying to convince members to do the same. That doesn’t sound democratic at all.
I didn’t have a lot of context outside of the branch for a while, and I thought it was still evolving; but this is essentially how all of our group “discussions” went. Leadership made the decision on what would be right ahead of time, and it was membership’s job to get on it
That is fucked up. I hope there are some branches that did handle this issue democratically. If not then I think the larger issue at hand is the lack of democracy, because that also explains the initial bad handling of SA cases.