Response to Walter Smolarek’s Resignation

PSL Central Committee internal statement

[Not to be re-shared, distributed or posted anywhere]

Summary

Two members of the PSL Central Committee (Walter and Lillian), working with a small group in Brooklyn, formed a secret faction and have broken off to launch a new organization that is premised on conclusions that are far different from the PSL's political line. The faction is attacking the PSL and its elected leadership with a personalized and sensationalized narrative, hoping to persuade members to resign, but the political essence of the faction is the fundamental issue. They reject the need to build a communist, Marxist-Leninist party in the near future. They reject the optimistic assessment put forward by the PSL that a mass socialist revival is underway, and the objective basis exists to develop a large-scale communist party by actively intervening in all the emerging struggles and movements with a clear and popular presentation of the socialist horizon. Rather than revolutionary optimism, their factionalism is rooted in a deep pessimism, that the right-wing of the capitalist class is ascendant in every way, that the far-right will gain from the explosive contradictions of capitalism, and that the left is worthless. According to their presentation, all the mass movements in recent years in the United States, including the mass movement against racism in 2020 and for Palestine since 2023, have been worthless because they have not led to lasting reforms to improve the lives of the working class. The only thing that would give such movements value is if they translated into “enduring” “intermediate” mass organizations of the working class — the model for which they have never explained. It does not matter that these movements have shaped the consciousness of tens of millions of people, exposed the imperialist state, spurred the formation of hundreds of new radical organizations and collectives, affected the political correlation of forces, and drawn tens of thousands towards parties like the PSL. Walter Smolarek, one of the two leaders of this tendency, recently told us that even if the PSL grows to 50,000 members, it will be meaningless.

Leaders of the factional attempt to divide the party have stated that the top priority should not be to build a revolutionary Party, but to build “mass organizations and institutions of the working class,” to rebuild the “social fabric” and “subjective forces” destroyed by neoliberalism, after which a genuine Party can eventually be built. At a recent CC meeting, one of the leaders explicitly rejected the concept of the “actuality of revolution” — dismissing the idea that revolutionary possibilities will open up in our lifetime and working towards this should be the Party’s chief objective. Walter Smolarek insisted in the last week that the Party’s notion about the prospects of revolution in the United States are ‘ridiculous.’ From this non-revolutionary outlook several conclusions follow: the Vote Socialist 2024 campaign was a mistake because it

could have folded into the Jill Stein campaign; agitating for a general strike as the tactical horizon of the anti-Trump movement was wrong; and the January 30th National Shutdown was a mistake because it damaged our relations with social-democratic leaders of certain unions and non-profits. No matter that the Vote Socialist 2024 campaign helped popularize socialism in a way that no independent socialist campaign has in decades. No matter that a general strike did actually take place. No matter that the Jan 30 shutdown actually advanced the living struggle of the masses and pushed back the Trump administration’s invasion. These conclusions are rooted in significant political differences from the PSL, and constitute a political basis to leave it. The underlying theory represents a form of reformism and "economism," which Lenin fought against his entire political life, and if adopted, creates a road straight towards social-democracy and NGO-ism. A huge section of today’s progressive labor unions and NGOs are led or mentored by ex-revolutionaries who made the same calculations in the 1970s and 1980s: to wind down their Party formations, to focus on non-revolutionary mass organizations, to supposedly prioritize blocking the right-wing, to gradually drop explicit anti-imperialism and socialism so as to not alienate the liberal bourgeoisie, all while telling themselves they remained loyal to Marxism and reading Marxist books together in private. They are still dedicated to a better world — but they lost faith in revolution, adopted a different read of the objective situation and logically adopted a different strategic framework. The political dispute is not about the merits of mass organizing, or whether or not to go among the working class, especially the lower and deeper strata to fight alongside them for their immediate grievances. The Party engages across the country in this kind of work in neighborhoods, workplaces, disaster zones, and elsewhere, and we seek to do even more of it, deepen it and systematize it. Walter's document conveniently denies this work is happening. The orientation of the Party is to jump at every opportunity to join or stimulate a site of struggle, to advance struggles wherever they are in motion, and to try and bring existing mass organizations of the working class into motion. With the Party participating and fighting alongside them in the struggle, carrying with it agitation and education, we know that any struggle, no matter how big or small, can lead people to the socialist conclusion — that the working class must seize political power. All this activity is why thousands of young workers have been won over, recruited and trained by the Party, as well as an increasing number of existing leaders of the class — all of whom are erased in this portrayal of "already politicized activists" from the middle class. The vanguard party is forged through all manner of economic and political struggles, and serves as the true durable institution of the working class because it carries with it all the lessons of previous political and economic struggles, and weaves them back into the living struggle. These are the basic elements of Leninism, which the faction is attempting to liquidate by borrowing a mishmash of social-democratic theories (most heavily from Jane McAlevey's writings and trainings).

Unfortunately, this faction never made their views known for debate. Instead, they plotted in secret, possibly for over a year, and launched an unprincipled campaign behind the back of the leadership and most members to create a secret faction within the Party. This is all now confirmed from the notes of the Brooklyn District leadership, going back months, which reveal a sophisticated and coordinated operation to intentionally build a faction. Members of the District were individually tracked and assessed based on their “level of awareness” of the faction and their “level of consolidation” to its line. The long-term goal was to take over the

branch step by step by getting their adherents in positions of influence, while masking their different political line. To succeed, faction members were oriented to have evasive communication with the New York Steering Committee about Brooklyn organizing, so as to not draw out larger political conversations. New Brooklyn members who volunteered for other citywide activities (such as petitioning for the "Andre for the Bronx" campaign) were carefully approached and “inoculated” with phone calls that appeared to just be check-ins, but were intended to ensure people weren’t lost to "the center." They prepared their questions in branchwide internal settings not to stimulate genuine discussion, but to draw out potential new recruits for their faction. The goal was to identify real or perceived contradictions in the branch, which always exist, and raise them just enough to recruit without being discovered as a hostile force.

At the same time, their notes reveal a strategy to conceal their differences from the Branch Committee — the highest body of the branch which they were a part of — because it might have triggered a larger political discussion and resolution (when they wouldn’t have the forces yet to win power). They collectively decided not to run for the Steering Committee so the political issues would not be drawn out there. Once they successfully captured the District Committee, their plans escalated to carve out space inside the organization, to remove unit leads deemed unreliable to the faction and to bureaucratically isolate comrades who were “with the center.” But it appears they moved too fast, making the Steering Committee aware that something deeper was going on. We have receipts for all of this.

A huge amount of energy they could have actually spent on base-building in the working class they instead spent on secretly base-building inside the Party.

Without ever raising their differences within the existing structures of the Party, they suddenly resigned, circulating documents filled with falsehoods and distortions, yet still revealing their defeatist, pessimistic view of the prospects for socialism in the United States. They never raised their arguments internally or used the existing Party structures, which are fully available for resolving differences, or for having votes on fundamental issues of strategy, tactics and program. That is because their goal was never to resolve differences. They worked to conceal their views over a long period of time so they could build up their forces secretly, and quietly reorient people to their liquidationist approach by pretending there were no political differences. Their faction had nothing to do with the absence of debate, despite their presentation. Their departure was triggered because there was about to be a debate. They would have to submit to the majority position under the norms of democratic centralism and then would lose their momentum. Resigning in this fashion gave them a kind of fake moral high ground, a way to gain sympathy with comrades who legitimately want to improve the Party.

What finally provoked the faction’s departure was that the debate was now going to come out into the open, to be discussed and debated in the Central Committee and other leadership bodies, including in New York. Resigning after losing a debate would have left them too weak to launch an organization. They clearly decided it would be better to allege, falsely, that no space for debate was available inside the Party, and then cobble together a wide range of distortions and grievances, unrelated to the core political issues, which could shock people into resigning and joining their new group.

Most jarring was Walter's vague and false allegations about the treatment of women leaders and staffers in the party center. Half of the staff in the center are women, as are over half of the

Central Committee. He does not speak for them, and has no right to. Knowing they would reject his characterization, he conveniently dismisses this as a feature of "blind deference" among a "staff of devotees," while dismissing the Central Committee as "inconsequential." The central role of women leaders, achieved in the PSL through their track record in the struggle (not quotas), does not mean our work in this area is complete. This has been and will continue to be an area of focus for our Party. Because patriarchy is so integral to capitalism, bourgeois society ascribes a gendered division to labor, with men playing more political roles and women confined to logistics and administration. This tendency plays out in all organizations, including within left organizations, and therefore has to be constantly and consciously combated. Nathalie, a long-time CC member in San Francisco and a mass worker-leader, wrote an individual response to Walter's letter, which will soon be circulated to the National Council. In it she says:

"I serve now on the Central Committee with Gloria, Sheila, Karla, Satya, Claudia, Rachel, Karina, Sarah, Claire, Layan and Hannah who I feel I must name because we as women leaders were wholly erased in the preposterous descriptions of the internal culture of our

leadership. I am proud to sit with other leading comrades on the CC all of whom, if you are to believe this letter, are relegated to a position of 'total deference to Brian and Ben Becker.' I speak for myself when I say that Brian and Ben have earned my respect and I have learned a great deal from both of them. However, the idea that we women comrades and leaders only move politically and organizationally in deference to Brian and Ben should not be entertained." Walter doesn't even consider the possibility that the high level of unity among the Party's leadership and staff in the center might be forged through years of working together, struggling through issues, developing a common perspective and high trust. When he says "people I once respected come into the Center only to assimilate into total deference," this is a way of saying: a series of independent leaders, capable of forming their own opinions, came in to the center and ended up working well with the Party's top leadership. It is preposterous to turn this into a bad thing.

Walter and the leaders of this faction are not whistleblowers. They are not trying to improve the organization or resolve any deficiencies. They are weaponizing the fact they were inside the leadership and privy to certain information and internal contradictions to selectively present a distorted narrative that, they hope, will lead comrades to sign up for a new organization that they will now lead. This grouping is actively reaching out to PSL members around the country, trying, and failing, to break them away from organization.

Rather than present the political differences honestly, they are preying on comrades’ physical distance from the national leadership and the difficulty of separating fact from fiction. They are also preying on deeply ingrained anti-communist and anti-Party tropes — of power-hungry and unelected leaders, living large, with secret agendas different from what they espouse publicly. Never did we think that by including Walter into leadership discussions of real issues in the organization, he would then exaggerate and distort them to launch a new group. As this factional campaign erupted, the PSL is under the highest level of state scrutiny in its 22-year history, with leading Trump administration officials vowing to "dismantle" the organization, and the right-wing media sniffing around us at every turn. To conduct a political struggle in this way — first through concealment and factionalism, then through the mass

circulation of angry, vindictive letters — is a gift to our real enemies, the capitalist state, which seeks to infiltrate all leading progressive organizations, identify contradictions and exploit them. After this statement, we have no intention to spend any more time dealing with this faction, either in writing or otherwise. We will of course defend our Party and our membership. But we already have an enormous set of tasks in front of us: to advance the class struggle, to build the socialist movement, and to continue improving our Party. We are resolute in our path. We are confident that the liquidationist character of their new organization will soon be made evident in practice.

Below are some of Walter’s arguments, responded to point by point, as well as a series of lessons and takeaways.

— Central Committee of the PSL.

This statement was reviewed, amended, and adopted unanimously, 23-0.

Point-by-point rebuttal

On his strategy of concealment

Quote:

I have made the calculation to conceal my full political views in order not to be displaced from central leadership, not out of a desire to retain any title but out of serious concern for the irresponsibility of the impulses of the Party's top leaders and a commitment to mitigating them. This is a pitiful position. But I firmly believe that if I had done anything other than this, I would have been rapidly marginalized from meaningful positions of leadership and would not have been able to prevent top Party leadership from making decisions that would endanger the entire membership in gravely serious ways.

This explicit admission of political concealment so as “not to be displaced from central leadership” is indeed “pitiful.” But he does not provide one example of ever doing anything to restrain the so-called irresponsible “impulses” of the top leadership which were “endangering the entire membership in gravely serious ways.” By power of suggestion, it insinuates illegal adventurism — where there has been none — and merely stokes panic and alarm. It is pure recklessness to write in such a manner. The Party leadership has been open with cadres across the country about the new McCarthyite operations targeting the Party, and we have made it a top responsibility to defend our members arrested falsely in the struggle. We have a demonstrated track record of navigating a range of security threats, while still growing the Party and maintaining our militancy. This excuse for staying silent rings hollow. The real reason Walter stayed silent is that he wanted to stay in leadership. To have his true ideas put up for debate in the Congress or Central Committee — the ones he expressed in his resignation — he would have been defeated. Maybe the majority of the Congress would not have elected him to the Central Committee if he presented such non-revolutionary conceptions. Maybe the Central Committee would not have re-elected him as Communications Director if it knew he had a totally different view of agitation, communications and the explicit promotion of socialism. That wouldn’t be undemocratic suppression; it would be totally democratic. That Walter tries to give his concealment a heroic purpose is absurd; it’s a violation of the elementary principles of democracy and a betrayal to everyone who voted for him.

On the Conference on Organization and revision of By-Laws Quote

Comrades do not generally know that the Branch Organizing Conference only came to life because Ben Becker was concerned about bringing the Bylaws changes that he sought to make to the floor of the Party Congress. He worried that the changes, most notably significantly lowering the requirements of membership, would be controversial. His solution was to propose bringing together a body of hand-picked branch leaders to act as an acceptable enough substitution for the Congress to sign off on the changes. But in the process of putting together this group, he got carried away and the idea grew and grew into a de facto second round of the Congress -- but without the constitutionally mandated processes, elections, and rights. In the end, the same hesitations over bringing the Bylaws to a vote led to them once again being put off, this time to the Central Committee.

The distortion here is indisputable. The Fifth and Sixth Party Congress both voted to authorize the incoming Central Committee to revise the By-Laws. No new idea about membership was being smuggled into our By-Laws by a small group. The Congress passed the following resolution, the last section of which speaks directly to the membership issue: WHEREAS, the Bylaws of the Party for Socialism and Liberation were last amended in 2023; and

WHEREAS, the Central Committee has the authority to amend the Bylaws following an appeal to the membership for amendments provided the amendments are taken up at an in-person meeting (see Appendix Resolution to Amend Bylaws in the Bylaws);

WHEREAS, the membership has submitted amendments following an appeal for such submissions; and

WHEREAS, the Party has more than doubled in size since the time of that amendment; and WHEREAS, the Party’s increased visibility has and will continue to create more opportunities to recruit from broader sectors of the working class; and

WHEREAS, the Party must adapt its structures and membership norms in order to effectively utilize the opportunities created by this quantitative and qualitative growth; THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED the Sixth Party Congress tasks the incoming Central Committee with considering the amendments provided by the membership AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the Sixth Party Congress tasks the incoming Central Committee with amending Sections 3 (“Local Organization”) and 4 (“Party Membership”) of the Bylaws. The amendments shall account for new branch structures necessitated by growth (i.e. units, districts, branch committees, branch congresses), evaluate which provisions have already become outmoded based on existing practice or are practically unfeasible, and establish a simplified presentation of membership requirements that facilitate the Party to recruit and retain members from broad sections of the working class while still retaining the fundamental distinction of the Leninist Party form (based on consistent activity, not mere agreement on paper.) [emphasis added]

Walter is being dishonest in the extreme. No small “hand-picked branch leaders” would be deciding on the By-Laws after the Congress, but the newly elected Central Committee itself. It’s worth reminding comrades why we did this. As Walter knows well, we spent huge parts of the

Second, Third, and Fourth Party Congresses on the Constitution revision process. In each of these, nearly whole days were taken up with long debates and votes on particular phrases on non-political procedural issues, which could not be revisited again for years. As the Congress

grew in the number of delegates, these textual revisions became more challenging, and so the 2019 Fourth Party Congress adopted a resolution to separate the By-Laws and Constitution into separate documents explicitly so that future Congresses could focus more on political and organizational issues. Unlike the Constitution, which represents the foundational organizational principles, By-Laws procedures would need to be adjusted more frequently than every three years since we were growing out of our existing organizational norms. So the CC has been reauthorized at each of the subsequent Congresses to revise By-Laws, and it has done so. Walter knows that the current by-laws revision process is the same as it has been for years, but conceals it.

If one looks deeper, he has actually turned the reality of this conference upside down. Even though the CC had the full mandate to make such By-Laws changes on its own, we wanted more debate and feedback about such important issues. Rather than trying to secretly “lower the membership requirement,” Ben and Husayn openly motivated for a simplified presentation of membership requirements at the Sixth Party Congress, which then adopted this task explicitly in the above resolution, in pre-Conference documents, and at the Conference itself. This was not done in secret.

What he describes conspiratorially as “lowering the requirements of membership” ultimately was proposed as changing meeting attendance from “required” to “expected,” putting meeting attendance under “Party work” rather than a standalone condition of membership, and an expanded definition of Party work to facilitate members doing organizing at their jobs and in their neighborhoods, while still reporting and coordinating with their local units. At the October 2025 CC meeting, rather than vote on the revisions, the CC decided to convene the first ever Conference on Organization to hear from branches at all levels on how changes to the branch and membership terms would impact their local organizing — to not rush into things. Rather than passing the changes at the CC, we continued to work on them and then sent them to all Steering Committee members in the whole country, along with a lengthy explanatory document. All SC members were given an opportunity to submit changes, and 170 of whom were then invited to the conference to provide feedback in person. Dozens of comrades submitted questions, thoughts or amendments to the range of by-law revisions under discussion. Then there were 90 minutes of open discussion in front of the Conference in which the membership definition change was discussed.

The Conference in May 2026 could not vote on the revisions because it is not a duly elected body to do so. The Congress had authorized the CC only to make changes, not the Conference. Who explained this to the Conference attendees? Walter. He wrote the pre-Conference memo explaining the By-Laws revision process — and he did so correctly and precisely. So he hasn’t forgotten anything; he is deliberately sowing confusion.

This discussion of membership requirements and By-Laws in fact speaks to the democracy of the organization.

Local internal education

There has also been a growing panic amongst the top Party leadership that several areas are succeeding in … conducting their own internal education. The Conference became a key venue to check this trend, but with great efforts made to disguise the Party leadership's true aims. … Members were not told that the leadership is suspicious of branches exploring education beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF.

Response

There has never been a national effort to stop branches from developing their own educational materials. The main criticism from the branches has been the opposite: the inadequacy and irregularity of the production of national educational materials — not that they’ve been shoved down their throats. Improving this has been identified as a priority at the last two Congresses and repeated Central Committee meetings. Comrades have demanded more standardized internal education materials to be used locally, and updated candidacy classes. It led to the formation of the Education Department in 2022 — which was then disrupted by the fact that the two co-Coordinators became our presidential ticket — and which is now being rebuilt. That is why the National Cadre Education program and materials, another project Walter was brought into a couple months ago and never criticized, was greeted with wide enthusiasm by branch leaders across the country.

Has any branch ever been reprimanded or treated badly for developing materials “beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF?” There was indeed one recent example of “suspicion” of a branch’s internal education priorities, and that was with Denver in May of this year. What was the basis of this “suspicion”? A Steering Committee member circulated a document to her branch alleging that a new substitute candidacy program had been developed independently by another SC member and the National Liaison (Lillian). In these classes, all five of which were taught by these same two people who have since resigned, there was not a single mention of the Party at all, no reference to its strategic framework, and no Party branding. A third SC member then wrote to the national organization that he believed the whole branch was being made to take these classes to reorient them away from the Party. These two Denver SC members worried that, given other comments they had overheard, it was part of a political consolidation process to lead towards a factional break. When the charge of factionalism was made, members of the Central Committee flew out to Denver and met everyone in question and asked directly about the accusation of factionalism, which they vehemently denied as a lie, and which we then took at face value. As for their local class series, we came to the following group agreement with all members of the SC that we then presented to the branch: “The 5-part class series is not a replacement for the existing PSL candidacy material, which will still be used by sponsors for new candidates. Once new PSL candidacy classes are instituted nationwide, these will be adopted in Denver, with local sessions added if so desired by the SC.” A month later, those who denied they were organizing as a faction have indeed left as a faction. The 5-part series is apparently being prepared as the educational program for those who have also left in Brooklyn. So the one time in 22 years we’ve been “suspicious” of a branch’s internal education, it was because of the vigilance of two out of three of the branch’s SC members, and it was weeks later confirmed as indeed part of a factional operation.

Ability to debate the Party’s strategic framework

Instead of making direct interventions that could be debated on their political merits, members were presented with a wildly inflated picture of the PSL's strength and an orientation on the current political landscape that anticipates nearing ruptures of a revolutionary proportion. The practical implication of such an outlook is that members must make their singular focus "building the Party" in preparation for these impending critical openings. They were given cherry-picked history lessons on the Bolsheviks and the U.S. Communist Party suggesting the PSL is on the brink of a massive expansion in scale and influence.

Response

To be precise, the formulation we are using is that building the Party is the “top priority,” not the “singular focus.” This has been the Party’s top priority since its founding in 2004, even when we have been involved in all kinds of movement-building and mass organizing. What we are identifying now in the objective political situation, especially compared to our founding years, is the opportunity for the Party to grow into a much stronger force. It is the largest revolutionary Marxist organization in the country; it has a solid foundation of cadres and branches around the country; it is entering a period of increasing social, economic and political ruptures and crises of legitimacy that will intensify mass interest in socialism and create new mass struggles that will intensify interest in getting organized.

As for a "strategy of revolution," elements of this have been sketched out many times in classes and documents over many years, keeping in mind that a certain level of abstraction is necessary since the future cannot be scripted. The following language was sent to Walter just last week, and was up to be discussed and debated again at the upcoming Central Committee, containing the following Draft Theses

The Party’s overall strategic priorities are stimulating mass struggles, developing depth of cadres, growing its influence within the working class, and building mass socialist consciousness.

These priorities flow from our theory of revolution, which requires 1) the objective existence of a revolutionary crisis — the most dynamic and complex political situation conceivable, when there is not only an intolerable situation for the working class but paralysis among the ruling class; 2) the existence of a vanguard Party with sufficient strength, influence, and capacity for centralism to act as needed; and 3) the majority of the working class being won over to socialism. Winning

political hegemony over the radicalizing layer of the class requires a sustained, creative, multi-front campaign of agitation and propaganda: mass communication on every burning issue, cultural interventions, electoral campaigns, and a consistent public presence that presents the PSL not as one organization among many but as the communist party of the United States. That will happen because the organization proves itself to be correct in its analysis, capable of building effective movements and united fronts in the living struggle of the working class, and can show the credibility of its program by recruiting workers from all sectors. The strategic framework of the PSL, codified across the last three Party Congresses, begins with a political assessment of the objective situation: we are living in a period of rupture, produced by new contradictions that are not resolvable under capitalist property relations and US imperial control of the global order. ... Diagnosing this conjuncture is not the same as saying

revolution is imminent, or that the left is automatically the main beneficiary of these shifts. It means that the political terrain is very unstable, more so than in decades, that the potential for widespread struggles and the conditions for dramatic shifts in mass consciousness exist, and that our strategy must be calibrated accordingly. Our revolutionary optimism is based on the analytical recognition that capitalism will not be able to solve these existential structural contradictions, and they are thus prone to explode in unmanageable ways. The timing of these ruptures can not be predicted but their arrival is inevitable. Before revolution, societies tend to proceed through stages of mounting disequilibrium, political crises of legitimacy, events that serve as shocks to the system, and then finally unforeseeable triggers. Common features include unwinnable wars, ecological disasters, intra-ruling class struggles, and financial crises. We cannot know where in the historical process we are. The question is whether we are agile enough, strong enough, and politically prepared enough to act as the world shifts. The idea that all this, and the overall thesis of building mass socialist consciousness, has not been directly put forward before the membership and the leadership for real discussion on its merits is absurd. It goes back years and years. Even in the last month related to the Conference, Walter has had every imaginable opportunity to debate the question of scaling up the Party and the political assessment on which it is based. Here is the exact timeline:

● April 20: The core political framework of the Conference is circulated by Brian to a group of 12 Central Committee members and other leaders in New York City, where it is discussed at great length in a two-day retreat. Each comrade speaks about their views on the document and its central theses. Walter participates in the discussion but offers no disagreement. The document is open for additional edits before going to the Central Committee. Walter proposes none.

● April 27: the document is circulated to the whole Central Committee and a virtual meeting is scheduled for May 2 for discussion. Walter is present, it is discussed for over 90 minutes. Walter expresses no disagreement.

● April and May: The Conference planning committee, which Walter was a part of, meets weekly, works out the agenda, core points and organizational documents of the conference — the conference he now trashes. Walter speaks up on a range of issues, like everyone else in the committee. He expresses no disagreement on any of the core political analysis or themes in the meetings or in the office.

● May 8: The political document is circulated to the National Council and an open discussion was held there in front of all steering committees nationwide. No disagreement from Walter there, or outside the meeting, or after. A submission form is sent to all attendees to submit documents in response to the political framework document. Around 10 comrades and multiple branches write in with their reflections. Walter sends in nothing.

● May 22: The Central Committee has an in-person all-day meeting prior to the Conference to discuss its political themes and objectives. At the meeting, Brian makes the point that we should not go through an immediate period of rapid growth, and should focus on internal consolidation for a period. This is debated, but Walter sits silent.

● May 23-24: Walter gives a presentation at the conference about anti-billionaires sentiment, and how this has been built through repeated mass movements and political turning points over the last 20 years. He literally had the stage and the mic and the

opportunity to speak to the whole leadership but expressed no alternate view. The Conference proceeds for two days. Walter expresses no disagreement, either in front of the body or in the presiding committee.

● May 25: The CC has a debrief the day after — in which many areas of improvement and critiques were raised by many members of that body. Walter stays silent. ● May 26: A feedback form is circulated to all conference attendees about the By-Laws, or any other reflections from the Conference. Several important submissions come in. Walter submits nothing.

● May 28: The conference planning committee organizes its own debrief, in which Walter finally spoke and only for the first time said the conference lacked a clear “action plan for the branches,” but again expressed no political disagreement. He agrees (clearly disingenuously) to a series of post-Conference tasks, including volunteering to help with planning new training schools for unit leads and Steering Committee members, write new organizational manuals, and help convene working groups on different fronts of struggle precisely to develop more action plans.

● June 2: Ben circulates to the Conference Presiding Committee a Draft Report, with each paragraph presented as a separate political thesis so that each can be debated by the Central Committee. The preface to the document reads: “The [theses below] are intended for discussion, amendment and ratification at the Central Committee, to ensure we have formally adopted a strategic framework for the Party before we move forward. Each thesis can stand on its own for discussion, but together they constitute the political and organizational framework for the period ahead. We can of course add to it as well, if there are elements of our perspective that are not captured here but need to be worked out.” Walter offers no thoughts.

● June 5: The Central Committee receives the draft report, with a virtual meeting scheduled for June 14 to discuss, amend, and adopt it.

● June 5: Walter resigns eight hours later in the name of “democracy,” trashing the conference.

How could such a deliberately evasive person now present himself as the champion of open political debate and transparency?

Communist organizing at the workplace

Another instructive example of what has been going on behind the scenes is the semi-controversy that arose around a seemingly new labor orientation given at the conference. In the panel on organization entitled "Building the Organization to Scale," there was a speech given by a young union member who is not part of the national leadership. It may have seemed curious to attendees that this speech was not given by a member of the Labor Department leadership or Central Committee. That was because Ben and Husayn recognized that the content of this speech was a departure from the previous orientation that had not been run through other Labor Department leaders, and thus sought to distance themselves from direct responsibility for it. The comrade's speech made the argument that we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions. They're too few, too weak, and too slow.

Instead, our orientation to workplace organizing should focus on promoting Party literature, forming discussion groups, and recruiting coworkers to the Party and to the Action Network. Response

The comrade in question did not say “we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions” — this is utter distortion. He is a worker-leader of one of the key union drives in the country! That is a campaign the Party has sent several key cadres into. What he presented in this case was what we can do in workplaces where traditional union activity is impossible or practically dead. To correct Walter’s distortion, we need only quote from the Draft Report on the Conference, which he received days before his resignation, and, like all the other Draft Theses, was going to be up for discussion and amendment among the CC. The thesis on workplace organizing reads:

“We are deploying more members into audacious labor union work than ever before. This involves strategic implantations and concentrations in certain industries and developing new agitational tools to build an expanded base in the working class. Our approach to all union fights is to make them fights for the whole class, as well as schools of socialism, with the [recent teachers] strike as a great example of how long-term work in strategic areas can lead to outsized impact. Our goal in new organizing is — in the best tradition of Communism — to make them social crusades and battles, especially seeking out opportunities where the intervention of devoted comrades can move larger numbers and lead to breakthroughs that ideally sparks a new contagious wave of labor revival.

“Still we must recognize that ninety percent of workers in this country are not in a union, and that number is increasing. Based on the current organization of work, especially the large number of workers now working contractualized, remotely or in small teams, there are significant obstacles to winning unions and contracts in big parts of the working class — especially via the current NLRB process. If the only way we know how to bring socialism into the workplace is by first building a union, we start from a position of having no access to the vast majority of the working class. Union organizing is important where conditions for it exist, and the party should pursue it there but it cannot be the only instrument to reach the working class on the job (where people spend a majority of their waking hours). The examples of the PSL Shipbuilders in Virginia — ten workers, one candidate member, a shop paper, built entirely without institutional resources — demonstrate that it is possible to build socialist organization, raise class consciousness, and recruit to the party in workplaces without active union life. We should seek out any and all creative ways to bring socialism to the masses in the workplace and draw the most advanced workers into the party.”

One may agree or not with this perspective, but it was not hidden. We were about to discuss it in the Central Committee and among the Labor Department leadership before it would be circulated as an orientation to the membership.

Party support for community centers

I have been extremely disturbed by the secret machinations within the New York office to extinguish or wrest control of the base building projects gaining ground in Denver and Brooklyn. Both areas, through separate processes of development, have found their way to building community center projects that operate as genuine mass organizations. There was an initial attempt to dissuade each area from this direction, but when the dissuasion didn't work, the

approach was taken to give leaders of both areas the impression that the top leadership was nonetheless supportive of their projects and interested in further debate and discussion. Response

There was neither extinguishing or wresting control of anything. The desire to support creative projects and interest in further debate was genuine. Denver was not dissuaded from the work of building a community center. There was in fact an immediate and enthusiastic offer to fund it and support it, with comrades’ dues. In addition to continuing to pay one national staff person who had moved to Denver and became its Co-Director, the other Co-Director was also funded nationally! We did this because we assumed we were all aligned politically. In fact, when the funding was agreed to, it was said that we hoped we could reproduce such centers in all regions of the country. Many of the Party’s top leaders — those described falsely as enemies of base-building — have personally co-founded similar community centers in other cities, and have many positive lessons to share from these experiences. There was no articulation of any ideological disunity at this time from Denver or any notion that their conception of “base-building” would require the liquidation of Party-building, or a rejection of the Party’s strategic framework. These two comrades on staff had the least amount of national oversight of any staff people, based on assumed trust that they were working hard on local projects and had little time for anything else. One of them was asked repeatedly to help organize the Conference on Organization, but she declined. What other branch has two full-time local staffers paid by the national organization?

There was no “subterfuge” against Denver either. When one SC member in Denver on her own accord circulated a document criticizing those two Denver staff members for preparing the Colorado People’s Center in a manner that wasn’t transparent with the branch and the SC, and erased the Party, this was brought to our attention. The Party center had zero role in that document being written or distributed, and up to this point had no idea there was any division in the Denver SC. Then, a third Denver SC member wrote a document to the center alleging a faction was being secretly organized. Only at that point did we become aware that underneath Denver's limited communication with the center was a significant dispute, and we informed the rest of the Party’s leadership that something was up (including Walter). Walter was then in the center and persuasively told us “there’s no way” these Denver leaders intended to leave the organization, concealing that he was already setting the stage for a new organization himself. Ben and Claudia traveled to Denver and came back optimistic, reporting that the charges of factionalism had been denied, the SC had been apparently stabilized. While the comrades had shared some long-held disagreements with the national perspective, we hoped a new stage of political candor would open with Denver. Lillian declined to present her views to the Conference, when offered. Instead we planned to return to Denver after the Conference to have a more rigorous discussion about the relationship between base-building, movement organizing, and Party-building. We affirmed that different strategies can be used in different local contexts, and affirmed that we have never adopted a one-size-fits-all approach to branch-building. That discussion never happened due to the faction’s departure. In fact, the faction left to preclude the discussion.

Immediately upon returning to Denver from the Conference, Lillian — who had said nothing inside the CC meeting debrief — launched into an open attack on the conference at their branch internal before all the membership, violating the prior agreement of the Steering Committee and

violating the group agreements from a few weeks prior, which was to first bring disputes to higher bodies. There was never any real intention to debate.

Brooklyn District leaders organized a faction and debate was not suppressed

In recent months, I have been aware of growing outrage in the office about the Brooklyn leadership's focus on cultivating community partnerships and relationships, and most vehemently the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center. I have been approached multiple times, in secret conspiratorial huddles and one-on-one meetings, trying to ensure that I don't sympathize with the efforts. … I have tried to generally avoid involvement in these discussions because I know the only goal is to pin me to a position against the members in Brooklyn. ,,, Avoiding involvement became impossible when I was asked repeatedly to put my name to a document opposing base building in Brooklyn, a position I clearly do not support. I was asked first by Layan and Wyatt at the Branch Organizing Conference, then again in the New York office in a one-on-one with Ben Becker.

I informed [the SC] that the previous night I had been reached out to by the Brooklyn leadership to speak at their district retreat based on my experience and writings on base building, and I had planned to go. … The Standing Committee of the Central Committee had just held an emergency meeting and voted that I could not speak at the retreat. … I later learned that at this retreat, a group of five members intervened forcefully, disruptively, and in a clearly orchestrated manner. Each of these members is current or former staff. The entire retreat, these five members read from a document on their phones, in a way that was completely unsubtle and visible to all attendees. One of the members emotionally stormed out. Having the experience of 17 years in the organization, and a decade in national leadership, I am certain that this was coordinated by Ben.

This is quite an astonishing narrative. After admitting to concealing his views for years, and pretending to be in agreement with the Party’s strategic framework, Walter feigns surprise that people fell for his trick and approached him to intervene politically to help build a higher level of organizational and ideological unity between a local steering committee and its district leadership (which was then claiming, disingenuously, that they had no political differences with the Party). Yes, comrades went to him because they considered him as someone with a balanced and nuanced view, who was well regarded by the Brooklyn District leaders and the NYC Steering Committee, had written about base-building before, believed in popularizing socialism (they thought), and could now write an updated synthesis that shows how the building of mass organizations at the neighborhood level would fit into the Party’s overall strategic framework based on its years of experience. Members affirmed to Walter “this will be good because it can bring the issues out,” and Walter seemed to initially agree. Walter was asked to “huddle” by the NYC Steering Committee so he could help strategize how to have an organized discussion and productive synthesis after the District retreat, a retreat the Steering Committee expected would be volatile based on the disagreements already expressed by members in their unit meetings. Those members were not coached or organized by Ben, a

totally false allegation. The Steering Committee had decided not to try and fight it out with the District leadership in front of their own members. The city’s elected leadership hadn’t been invited to speak, hadn’t been consulted about the strategic document before it was circulated, and had no chance to have a meeting beforehand to discuss it. The process was backwards for a Leninist party, but they decided not to intervene anyway. Further, in the context of an emerging political dispute between a Branch and District leadership, it wasn’t appropriate for a member of a Central Committee to go into a meeting of the membership and take a side against the city leadership. That is why we have higher bodies.

How is it that Walter was so ready to violate the basics of democratic centralism that he has taught to so many others? Was it just a noble commitment to debate? No, the truth is that the Brooklyn District leadership had already decided to use this retreat as the next big step in consolidating a faction.

The groundwork for Brooklyn’s faction had been laid for months. The retreat and discussion over base-building merely provided the trigger for them to move. Their campaign involved removing unit leads who they considered disloyal, discouraging members in the District from attending other events in the city, and deliberately limiting communication with the Steering Committee to the least possible so they couldn’t be accused of totally breaking Party norms. This went on for months. Walter, sitting in the same office as the Steering Committee, apparently reported back to the District leadership their growing frustration about all this. Meanwhile, the faction oriented their core leaders to say as little as possible if asked anything about what organizing was happening in Brooklyn, to be evasive, to minimize, to not agree to individual phone calls and meetings, and not provide answers that could lead to follow-up questions or discussions. Their notes show the scale of the operation. The goal was to buy time and consolidate forces. Meanwhile, the faction pursued selective outreach to individual members in other Districts who they thought might have organizational frustrations and grievances.

In his final week in the office, Walter agreed to write a manual on branch building that would be used as a training document for the whole membership, which would go over base-building and Party-building at the neighborhood level. He agreed to spend the summer planning major Party events and schools, alongside other CC members who would plan this out together. The whole thing has been proven to be a deception. Or, rather, he was going to continue to do this work on

false pretenses for a while longer until the Brooklyn faction revealed itself. Some of Brooklyn’s faction canceled their dues prior to the Branch Committee meeting. Their notes show months of factional planning. Yet now they claim that it was at this meeting, where the debate finally started to come out, that their democracy was suppressed. That debate was meant to continue two days later, but instead they considered it the most opportune time to leave. If they had stayed, and if a consensus position was adopted, or a majority vote taken, they would have been defeated and not been able to claim “no space for debate” in their resignation letters.

False presentation of base-building

Quote

I have heard them talk behind closed doors for months about their opposition to the base building and mass organizing work that comrades are doing across the country, and have read

draft documents they've written to combat the trend. This position was alluded to in a document written by Brian Becker that characterized mass organizing work as “too pedestrian," but Ben Becker wrote more explicitly against base building and mass organizing in a document titled “Turning to the working class: What it should mean and what it shouldn’t." This document was circulated amongst the inner circle in the New York office, but was ultimately not shared out of concern that it would cause debate. In preparatory documents for the conference, key objectives included establishing that "pivoting is the essence of revolution," and "deep organizing..isn't part of [our] theory of revolution."

Response

Beware the strategy of selective omission. Here is the full quote of what Brian Becker called “too pedestrian” — and it is not a rejection of “mass organizing” at all:

“There is a mistaken notion that our goal is to simply assimilate into working class communities, become familiar with the issues in those communities, be accepted by those communities, and then, over time, we will develop individualized relationships with a select number of people who

will then join the unit and join the Party. This is way too pedestrian. Our focus should be reaching those parts of the population that are already becoming political, becoming radicalized, or are in motion in response to a form of injustice or exploitation. (Emphasis added). It is when people are engaged in struggle that their ideas change, and it is when they are in those struggles that they realize that they want to join an organization to become effective.” What Brian is clearly describing is a passive, slow and uninspired (“pedestrian”) approach to Party-building, which sequences it behind individual relationship-building and leaves out the struggle of the masses. Instead of this pedestrian approach, the document emphasizes getting engaged in any site of struggle, against any form of injustice, and that is where we will build our movement, our Party, and where people will be open to new ideas. This is the basics of Leninism — building socialist consciousness through engagement in the struggle, and drawing those with socialist consciousness actively into the Party — but the fact that Walter so strenuously objects to it, going so far as to misquote it, shows he has gone far down the road of economism that Brian’s document warns against.

In Ben’s unpublished and unfinished document “Turning to the Class: What It Should Mean and What It Shouldn’t,” we can find none of the quotes mentioned here. These quotes seem to just be invented to pin a position on Ben that he doesn't hold. Ben sent his draft document to Walter for comradely feedback — and because he never got any from him or the rest of the presiding committee, he therefore didn’t circulate it right before the Conference. But the questions of mass organizing, the meaning of base-building, best practices and methods in neighborhood and workplace organizing, all of these are constantly being discussed by the Party at all levels, and the stated goal of the Party in recent national meetings is to develop a more comprehensive theory of branch-building. The Party has no history whatsoever of concealing our views on any of these issues. Each issue of The Party Organizer always seeks case studies for such ground-level mass organizing work, as examples that all members can learn from.

Preliminary Lessons for the Party

Is every element of the document an invention? No. There are, of course, always real deficiencies in the organization, which we readily accept and many of which we have already been working to resolve.

Decisions without execution: For instance, Walter throws a jab about the absence of the "AI commission" and "Trans liberation commission" decided upon at the Congress. True. But he was a Central Committee member just like the rest, and on staff, and showed no initiative himself to bring either of these into existence. Perhaps he was too busy, but to lay this shortcoming at the feet of one or two leaders is dishonest. There are many projects we have decided upon that are not yet brought to fruition. We are sure every branch leadership in the country could review its notes and find projects and tasks it agreed to do, and did not yet carry out. We aren’t proud of this phenomenon, but it’s the reality. This isn’t about anything but capacity, time, and the many shifting pressures and new things the organization is responding to, which need to always be prioritized. In this particular case, we have never built a commission on ideological questions — although we know they are part of the communist tradition — but we want to. So now have to figure out the methods to bring it into existence as a new organizational process.

Expanding and formalizing leadership: Walter repeatedly complains about “actual decision making and implementation would remain completely under the control of Brian, Ben and the circle they keep around them.” This is a mischaracterization. What we do have is the elected executive leadership of the Party (the Standing Committee of the Central Committee), in which Walter for a few years participated as an observer. Elected executive leaders do in fact decide on what to prioritize amid a huge variety of contending pressures and opportunities. That staff are then used to implement such decisions of the elected executive is also not nefarious. What is a real problem, which we have sought to resolve, is the smallness of the group, and the informal method with which some decisions get made. Even elected leaders to the Standing Committee, if they’re not present at all times, can be out of the loop, creating new problems. Unlike a corporation, we have to assume any of our top leaders could be taken off the playing field by the state at any moment. This makes it a prime priority to train more leaders and to share information among leaders, and between branches and the center, so that information does not become centralized just in individuals, but institutionalized. We have begun to introduce new reporting routines for this purpose, and are discussing how the CC can be reorganized for more in-person and virtual meetings.

In this spirit, we created the Political Coordination Committee, which Walter derides as an “unelected leadership clique.” This was done to expand the circle of leaders beyond the elected Standing Committee, and to expand high-level political discussions to a larger number of cadres and leaders. It was created first as an interim body at the height of the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing in all elected CC members in New York, as well as the full-time staff leading major national departments and areas of work. Far from anything covert, a presentation on how this body functions, and how the organization of the center needs to be improved even further, was given to the whole CC in the October 2025 meeting. This development has widened leadership discussions and debates, not narrowed them, and drawn in many rising women leaders, including elected Central Committee members — who Walter dismisses as undeveloped "blind" followers and functionaries. One recent resolution of this body

is to carry out more intensive political education to further develop this next generation of ideological and political leaders.

While the Political Coordination Committee has been an advance, we still need to resolve the overstretched nature of certain leaders, which creates frustrating bottlenecks, as well as the unevenness of reporting, note-taking and accountability for prior decisions. We’ve discussed the challenges we’ve run into in sharing information across the leadership, working across teams, and methods for keeping the whole Central Committee informed and engaged, while they are themselves dealing with demanding work schedules across many time zones. This is complicated work, and we have no blueprint to work with. We are constantly seeking new methods to improve.

Party culture and functioning of the center: In multiple leadership bodies, and in the CC itself, we’ve also discussed in recent meetings the need for deliberate training in communist values and “Party culture” to foster more collaboration, avoid cliquishness, deal with conflicts head on, and more. This has to be prioritized. CC members openly presented at the Congress how a center was both a necessary development and could give rise to bureaucratic inter-office politics and cliquishness — as well as the danger of factionalism! At multiple Central Committee meetings, and in our most recent days-long leadership retreat, we identified how problems of informality and adhoc-ness of certain decision-making and leadership structures can exacerbate such tendencies, as well as the informality around scheduling, on-boarding, and work expectations.

By-Laws for the national organization: None of the above problems are secrets. In fact, we restated at the Conference on Organization how the next stage of By-Laws and procedural revision would be to improve and systematize our national functioning, where we still are quite underdeveloped given the size of the Party. As the Party grows, each stage creates an enormity of new tasks, projects, problems and threats, which strain the existing organizational norms. This dialectic will never end — we expect the pressure on the center will only increase as the Party scales up further.

Scaling responsibly: At our recent leadership retreat, we resolved to study the best practices of other types organizations that have scaled up, the literature on leadership, cross-team collaboration, and to carefully consider the formation of new national departments with their own kind of executive leadership. This requires study of both communist and non-communist organizations.

Leadership identification: Finally, these resignation documents also present us with an opportunity for reflection about how people get into positions of central leadership to begin with and long-standing staff. The criteria for that has always been based on personal trust, hard work, initiative, but the party must more deliberately train all of its staff and leaders and cadres in non-stop ideological formation and in communist values — including to practice radical honesty with one’s political views and concerns. Once on staff, revolutionary optimism and belief in the Party can never be taken for granted, but must be consistently reinforced through study, discussion and a living connection to the class struggle.

In summary, we will keep pushing forward with all these areas of improvement, and many others, not because of the resignation documents or the claims of the faction. These were all issues that were being openly discussed already, which is why Walter knew how to twist them.

In our view, no organizational changes would have prevented this factionalism because at the root it is not fundamentally about people or processes — it’s a totally different political outlook. For them, now is not the time for a revolutionary perspective, a cadre-based vanguard party, or a time to anticipate and prepare for ruptures. Where we see opportunity, they see a wasteland.

Where we see ruling class instability, they see stability. Where we see a generation of young working people coming towards socialism, and towards the Party, they wave this off as meaningless. Those theoretical differences, and totally different readings of the political conjuncture, will become more and more apparent in the field of practice, and it is where their theory will be tested and the debate will be settled. We are confident in our path.

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Pub: 17 Jun 2026 14:59 UTC

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