What does the SWP's way of dealing with sex assault allegations tell us about the left?

How do we deal with sexual violence on the left? Here's a case study.

The Socialist Workers' Party, for those who aren't familiar with it already, is a political organisation of several thousand members which has been a prominent force on the British left for more than 30 years. They are at the forefront of the fight against street fascism in Britain, were a large organising presence in the student and trade union movement over the past several years, and are affiliated with large, active parties in other countries, like Germany's Die Linke. Many of the UK's most important thinkers and writers are members, or former members.

Like many others on the left in Britain, I've had my disagreements with the SWP, but I've also spoken at their conferences, drunk their tea, and have a lot of respect for the work they do. They are not a fringe group: they matter. And it matters that right now, the party is exploding in messy shards because of a debate about sexism, sexual violence and wider issues of accountability.

This week, it came to light that when allegations of rape and sexual assault were made against a senior party member, the matter was not reported to the police, but dealt with 'internally' before being dismissed. According to a transcript from the party's annual conference earlier this month, not only were friends of the alleged rapist allowed to investigate the complaint, the alleged victims were subject to further harassment. Their drinking habits and former relationships were called into question, and those who stood by them were subject to expulsion and exclusion.

Tom Walker - a party member who walked out this week in disgust - explained that feminism "is used effectively as a swear word by the leadership’s supporters.... it is deployed against anyone who seems ‘too concerned’ about issues of gender."

In a brave and principled resignation statement published yesterday, Walker said that:

". . . there is clearly a question mark over the sexual politics of many men in powerful positions on the left. I believe the root of this is that, whether through reputation, lack of internal democracy or both, these are often positions that are effectively unchallengeable. Not for nothing have recent sex abuse allegations in the wider world focused on the idea of a ‘culture of impunity’. Socialist Worker has pointed to the way that institutions close up to protect powerful people within them. What is not acknowledged is that the SWP is itself an institution in this sense, with its instinct for self-protection to survive. As previously mentioned, its belief in its own world-historic importance gives a motive for an attempted cover-up, making abusers feel protected."

Members are now leaving the organisation, or being expelled, in large numbers after the case came to light at the party's conference and transcripts of the discussions were leaked online.

The writer China Mieville, a longstanding member of the SWP, told me that, like many members, he is "aghast":

"The way such allegations were dealt with - complete with questions about accusers' past relationships and drinking habits that we would instantly, rightly denounce as sexist in any other context - was appalling. It's a terrible problem of democracy, accountability and internal culture that such a situation can occur, as is the fact that those arguing against the official line in a fashion deemed unacceptable to those in charge could be expelled for 'secret factionalism."

Mieville explained that in his party, as in so many other organisations, the power hierarchies which have facilitated problems such as this have been controversial for a long time.

"Many of us have for years been openly fighting for a change in the culture and structures of the organisation to address exactly this kind of democratic deficit, the disproportionate power of the Central Committee and their loyalists, their heavy-handed policing of so-called 'dissent', and their refusal to admit mistakes ," he told me. "Like the current situation, a disaster catastrophically mishandled by the leadership. All of us in the party should have the humility to admit such issues. It's up to members of the SWP to fight for the best of our tradition, not put up with the worst, and to make our organisation what it could be, and unfortunately is not yet."


The British Socialist Worker's Party is hardly atypical among political parties, among left-wing groups, among organisations of committed people or, indeed, among groups of friends and colleagues in having structures in place that might allow sexual abuse and misogyny by men in positions of power to continue unchecked. One could point, in the past 12 months alone, to the BBC's handling of the Jimmy Savile case, or to those Wikileaks supporters who believe that Julian Assange should not be compelled to answer allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.

I could point, personally, to at least two instances involving respected men that have sundered painfully and forever friendship groups which lacked the courage to acknowledge the incidents. The only difference is that the SWP actually talk openly about the unspoken rules by which this sort of intimidation usually goes on. Other groups are not so brazen as to say that their moral struggles are simply more important than piffling issues of feminism, even if that's what they really mean, nor to claim that as right-thinking people they and their leaders are above the law. The SWP's leadership seem to have written it into their rules.

To say that the left has a problem with handling sexual violence is not to imply that everyone else doesn't. There is, however, a stubborn refusal to accept and deal with rape culture that is unique to the left and to progressives more broadly. It is precisely to do with the idea that, by virtue of being progressive, by virtue of fighting for equality and social justice, by virtue of, well, virtue, we are somehow above being held personally accountable when it comes to issues of race, gender and sexual violence.

That unwillingness to analyse our own behaviour can quickly become dogma. The image is one of petty, nitpicking women attempting to derail the good work of decent men on the left by insisting in their whiny little women's way that progressive spaces should also be spaces where we don't expect to get raped and assaulted and slut-shamed and victimised for speaking out, and the emotions are rage and resentment: why should our pure and perfect struggle for class war, for transparency, for freedom from censorship be polluted by - it's pronounced with a curl of the upper lip over the teeth, as if the very word is distasteful - 'identity politics'? Why should we be held more accountable than common-or-garden bigots? Why should we be held to higher standards?

Because if we're not, then we have no business calling ourselves progressive. Because if we don't acknowledge issues of assault, abuse and gender hierarchy within our own institutions we have no business speaking of justice, much less fighting for it.

"The issues of democracy and sexism are not separate, but inextricably linked," writes Walker. "Lack of the first creates space for the second to grow, and makes it all the more difficult to root it out when it does." He's talking about the SWP, but he could be talking about any part of the left right now, in its struggle to divest itself of generations of misogynist baggage.

Equality isn't an optional add-on, a side-issue to be dealt with after the revolution's over. There can be no true democracy, no worthwhile class struggle, without women's rights. The sooner the left accepts that and starts working the enormous stick of priggishness and prejudice out of its collective backside, the sooner we can get on with the job at hand.

Looks like the CIA finally got to the SWP and they're gonna split into a million factions. If the Czar's secret police existed today Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky would all have dozens of rape allegations against them.

babyhueypnewton posted:

discipline posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Looks like the CIA finally got to the SWP and they're gonna split into a million factions. If the Czar's secret police existed today Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky would all have dozens of rape allegations against them.

gosh I bet it has nothing to do with the fact that the SWP is both useless, pathetic and full of misogynist goons

this is true. however the negative responses have been purely liberal, ironically showing that the SWP is dead but not for the reasons you'd think.

basically critics of the party's policy have posted things like this:

The disputes committee hearing - and by extension the entire mess that followed - should simply never have happened. To be honest, it is nothing short of incredible that it was allowed to go ahead. What right does the party have to organise its very own ‘kangaroo court’ investigation and judgment over such serious allegations against a leading member? None whatsoever.

Of course, I am dead set against the capitalist police and courts, and the way they treat people. That doesn’t mean we can go off and set up our own.

that's exactly what it means. do the naxalite maoists go the police when they have a theft or murder? do communist parties go to the police who exist solely to destroy them? do we condemn bourgeois legality and the bourgeois disciplinary state apparatus but use it when the issue is "serious enough"?

the SWP probably did a terrible job of deciding the case and im sure the party sucks, but clearly people do not realize what it means to be part of a party who's sole purpose is the violent overthrow of the state and to devote one's life to revolution and therefore become an enemy of all the powers of world capital. sad to see something like this destroy a party that I don't care about but sets a bad precedent.

babyhueypnewton posted:

discipline posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Looks like the CIA finally got to the SWP and they're gonna split into a million factions. If the Czar's secret police existed today Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky would all have dozens of rape allegations against them.

gosh I bet it has nothing to do with the fact that the SWP is both useless, pathetic and full of misogynist goons

this is true. however the negative responses have been purely liberal, ironically showing that the SWP is dead but not for the reasons you'd think.

basically critics of the party's policy have posted things like this:

The disputes committee hearing - and by extension the entire mess that followed - should simply never have happened. To be honest, it is nothing short of incredible that it was allowed to go ahead. What right does the party have to organise its very own ‘kangaroo court’ investigation and judgment over such serious allegations against a leading member? None whatsoever.

Of course, I am dead set against the capitalist police and courts, and the way they treat people. That doesn’t mean we can go off and set up our own.

that's exactly what it means. do the naxalite maoists go the police when they have a theft or murder? do communist parties go to the police who exist solely to destroy them? do we condemn bourgeois legality and the bourgeois disciplinary state apparatus but use it when the issue is "serious enough"?

the SWP probably did a terrible job of deciding the case and im sure the party sucks, but clearly people do not realize what it means to be part of a party who's sole purpose is the violent overthrow of the state and to devote one's life to revolution and therefore become an enemy of all the powers of world capital. sad to see something like this destroy a party that I don't care about but sets a bad precedent.

i agree with the general idea of what you're saying but dont be patronizing. a lot of people DO realize what it means to be part of a revolutionary party but one of their central values is an end to sexual violence. if the SWP can't even do that as well as the fucking UK criminal justice system then what's the point?

that the idea of being a party, truly independent of state power and responsible for all the functions of life among the masses, is unimaginable to us in the west while it is reality in many parts of the third world

I gather you mean naxalites and such, who else follows this model?

'Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one.'

Mandel says:

Marx fully appreciated and stressed the civilizing function of capital, which he saw as the necessary preparation of the material basis for a 'rich individuality'.

...

For socialists, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can therefore never imply rejection of the extension and differentiation of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural state of these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this rational Marxist sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can only mean: rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production which continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and one-sided. This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship between the production of goods and human labour, which is determined by the commodity form under capitalism, so that henceforth the main goal of economic activity is not the maximum production of things and the maximum private profit for each individual unit of production (factory or company), but the optimum self-activity of the individual person. The production of goods must be subordinated to this goal, which means the elimination of forms of production and labour which damage human health and man's natural environment, even if they are 'profitable' in isolation. At the same time, it must be remembered that man as a material being with material needs cannot achieve the full development of a 'rich individuality' through asceticism, self-castigation and artificial self-limitation, but only through the rational development of his consumption, consciously controlled and consciously (i.e., democratically) subordinated to his collective interests.

So perhaps it is important to understand our relation to the bourgeois state justice. At which point can a revolutionary party step in to affect 'the material basis for a 'rich individuality'? At what point is it possible to not simply negate but SUPERSEDE the bourgeois justice system (negate the negation)? The problem with the bourgeois state justice is not that it doesn't administer justice or that it is corrupt (even if it wasn't corrupt, it'd still be a problem), but that its justice is narrow and one-sided.

I boldly venture, lol, the possibility that we must take a complex view towards the bourgeois state. Who provides water service for the people? Who ensures mass transportation? The working class certainly, but bourgeois state institutions are a concrete fact of life. People survive on state-run services. The welfare system may be tail-ended with imperial arms, but what's the concrete meaning of a first-world communist party rejecting governmental daycare services for single mothers? Principled serving the people is supporting the people's welfare, principled anti-imperialism is refusing to support wild-eyed adventurism and crimes against our brothers and sisters. Only in these senses, to me personally, is the triumph of the people inevitable. This is not romantic, high-octane work. This is not jungle combat and one-woman stands against soldier-thugs. It is the truly glorious, tireless, and unending work of preparing a better world.

These issues, to me, mean future developments. One day maybe you can indeed go in a hail of gunfire. When the bourgeois state collapses / turns indisputably against the people (such as in 1917, such as in the Naxalite corridors), then we may pursue seizing (building) the revolutionary state. That day maybe sooner than we think. But just go and try to set up people's tribunals right now, in the vicelike grip of the bourgeois state, and people will rightly see you as insane zealots. Are we a cult or are we scientific, focused on the concrete?

Specifically what I think your focus is, and what sometimes I think western communists spend an inordinate amount of time doing, it's certainly something I've done, is transposing a revolutionary situation onto western conditions. We are not in a position to act as if we are at the 'weakest link': the contours of a revolutionary state in our area of the world are not forthcoming. We cannot demand a revolutionary party for unrevolutionary circumstances. We work with what we have.

BF got mad because there's alot of posters that 'play-act' the radical yet they're not actually involved in any communist groups or actions. I don't judge those people, I was only briefly involved in labor organizing myself. There are indeed serious personal issues that one must mediate and work through to get seriously involved, and I don't resent anyone for their struggles. But I think we cannot talk about 'seizing'/replacing the state when the state has a monopoly. Action must be principled, but also practical and pragmatic. Not the SWP, nor any first world communist party, ideologically-pure or no, can realistically hold a people's court for violent offenders. The dutiful Cheka arose not fully-formed from within the Communist Party, but was a necessary solution to concrete conditions of sabotage, white terror, and infiltration. Maybe someone can correct me here but the *successful* revolutionary party does not take on the sceptre (symbolic phallus) of law and order unless there's a space for it. After the bourgeois state has shown its malevolent final form, after the revolutionary struggle has shaped the properly-revolutionary organization.

I think that maybe it's time to shift focus on the work at hand, not how we'd like it to be.

discipline posted:

where are u from drwhat. are u a swede. my best friend from childhood lives in sweden now, the sex slave of a wealthy nordic oil engineer.

canada. no state-assigned sex slaves for me

tpaine posted:

discipline posted:

where are u from drwhat. are u a swede. my best friend from childhood lives in sweden now, the sex slave of a wealthy nordic oil engineer.


sweden is the sex slave of a wealthy nordic...what now??

yeah, if anything sweden's the Big Daddy in any perverted Scando-liason

wasted posted:

going six figures into debt with little hope of having a job at the end of law school? sounds like a plan to me

sounds like an excellent way to permanently commit yourself to overthrowing capitalism