Rita Nowak
Note: minor edits on 1/29/23 for grammar and clarity
The necessity to broadcast the crimes of the Dallas Cult has taken me out of my isolation. Our voices need to be heard, not because anybody necessarily cares about a tiny clique of irrelevant morons, but because:
- If we believe in proletarian justice we should hold that no one guilty of physical, emotional, sexual, financial (and so on) abuse and violence against the masses should be free from repercussions: their crimes must be known;
- Since there are real organizations doing meaningful revolutionary work internationally who might have misconceptions on the situation in the United States, thanks to a deeply false misrepresentation published on an international forum, it is our duty to speak the truth openly.
We are committed to truth and justice. The Dallas Cult is committed to lies and injustice. Let us be clear about the truth: the CR-CPUSA does not exist. There is no liquidation attempt. In the spring of 2022 the vast majority of the membership of the CR-CPUSA, Tribune of the People, and related organizations united to resign from these organizations and to isolate the small clique centered on cult leader Jared Roark, also known as Dallas, Ed Dalton, Kavga and Cathal. These organizations are no more. There is nothing to liquidate.
What unity we had soon corroded after we had successfully destroyed the cult, preventing any unified public action. Many of us had to turn away from political work to tend our wounds and process our grief. The only thing that brings me back is the hope that sharing the lived experience of those who participated in these organizations might save someone else from joining the next abusive cult organization that appears under the guise of ‘communism’ or ‘leftism’.
The stories I’ve heard, the documents and communications I’ve read, would make any person sick and remove all doubt on the class character and human character of the Dallas Clique, but these aren’t my stories to tell. I can only share my own experience: being sexually assaulted, emotionally abused and neglected by members of the cult; having my passion and labor exploited for their selfish ends; watching money get stolen from the people to fund the leaders’ parasitic lifestyles; becoming permanently damaged by the psychological warfare conducted within the organizations. And that is before we even approach something resembling a political criticism (this is to come).
In the coming weeks I will be publicizing everything I can that can expose the errors and crimes of the cult. In the true spirit of letting a hundred flowers bloom, I will let the people speak in their own voice. The only worth of this blog is its access to an audience, so I will use this resource to the best of my abilities.
Finally, a promise. Or many promises. When I was de facto head editor of Struggle Sessions, I promised our readers that we would listen to their criticisms, that we would open up the journal and let a thousand schools of thought contend within it. Struggle Sessions was never able to do that because it was a cult-organ with the goal of psychological indoctrination, but I believed that we could, and I now want to make good on that promise with the few resources I have.
Attached below is a pdf of most of the criticisms our readers and contributors sent in as part of the ‘letters and criticism’ campaign (lightly edited for clarity and to protect identities). It documents the struggle between on the one hand the readers and some contributors to Struggle Sessions, and on the other hand the leadership of the cult: head editor Sig Hausner and, behind him, Kavga/Cathal. Our readers believed as I did that Struggle Sessions could be reformed through the Maoist process of criticism and self-criticism. I hope this may be useful to someone in any case.
One final note: as this correspondence makes clear, there was a lot of internal and external debate on ‘the gender question’. The fact is that the leadership flatly denied the existence of non-binary people and considered it a reactionary concept. They were also firmly transphobic by all measures (intentionally misgendering trans comrades, pressuring people into detransition, imposing reactionary metaphysical ideas about gender) but were careful how they went about it due to a prevalence of trans people within their organizations. If Struggle Sessions publicly appeared to dip its toes in transphobic and homophobic rhetoric, it is because its writers knew well enough not to fully express their real views on the issue.
Ex-Struggle Sessions 