For those who are not left-wing feminists and so had no idea about the recent history of the Socialist Workers' Party, I offer some highlights of the New Stateman's attempt to explain it all.
article extract
In 2010, one of its leading members, who has always been referred to as “Comrade Delta”, was accused of sexually assaulting a young female “comrade”, and the party’s attempt to deal with the matter via a “disputes committee” composed largely of his colleagues has provoked anger and derision. Three further allegations of rape prompted claims that sexual abuse was “endemic” within the organisation.
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The party’s decision to investigate the allegation internally, through its disputes committee, rather than referring it to the police, is the most remarkable aspect of the affair: ithas astonished people outside the SWP, and some within it, too. “What right does the party have to organise its very own ‘kangaroo court’ investigation and judgment over such serious allegations against a leading member?” wrote the formerSocialist Workerjournalist Tom Walker in his resignation letter. “None whatsoever.”
David Renton, who is also a barrister and has dealt with cases of rape and sexual harassment, believes that it didn’t occur to the disputes committee to suggest that the woman should go to the police – as one of its members later said, the committee had “no faith in the bourgeois court system to deliver justice”.
Comrade W’s reasons for not reporting the case to the police are less clear, but Renton suggests she may have had two concerns: as well as the understandable fear that the police would treat her case insensitively, she may have believed that their priority would be to secure a conviction against the leader of a revolutionary party – an attitude, he adds, that stems from an overestimation of the SWP’s significance. “People on the left often do this,” Renton says, citing Julian Assange’s belief that the rape charges against him must be politically motivated because he is “the world’s number-one bad guy”. In other words, she may have been trying to protect the organisation from what she saw as a “predatory man” who should not be in a leadership position, and from state scrutiny.
Regardless of what her motives were, Comrade W was “doubly betrayed”, says another former member called Linda Rodgers. She came to the SWP because she trusted it, and it should have told her it wasn’t competent to investigate. “Would the DC [disputes committee] have investigated a murder?” Rodgers wrote. “I would guess not, but then what does that say about the level of seriousness with which the CC and DC treat rape?”
Kimber maintains that because the complainant did not want to go to the police, they had no choice but to investigate themselves. Yet the decision left the disputes committee “hopelessly out of its depth”, David Renton says. None of its members had relevant experience, nor did they not seek advice from party members who were lawyers. “I’m gobsmacked that no one ever said
to the SWP, ‘Look, if you take statements, you’re collecting criminal evidence.’”
Published accounts of the hearing, which was held over two days in October 2012, exposed even more egregious flaws: Comrade Delta was supplied with details of the complainant’s case weeks in advance but she was not allowed to see his evidence beforehand, and the committee members – who included colleagues of Delta’s, old and new – asked her questions about her drinking habits and sexual past. Comrade W left the room in tears, saying that they thought she was a “slut who asked for it”.
Yet it was the suggestion that the leadership had protected one of its own, and persuaded hundreds of members to collude in a cover-up, that convinced many people it was irredeemably corrupt.
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The Disputes Committee told the conference that it had reached a unanimous verdict: Comrade Delta had not raped Comrade W. It also found that he was not guilty of being “sexually abusive or harassing”, though not unanimously: the chair of the committee said he had decided “that while sexual harassment was still not proven, it was likely that it had occurred”. He also felt that Delta’s conduct “fell short” of what “one should expect of a CC member”.
The complainant was not allowed to speak, though she had wanted to, but other people spoke on her behalf: one asked the conference to reject the report because of the “serious failings in the way the hearing was conducted” and another said that W felt “completely betrayed” by the way she had been treated since the hearing. Theconference was also told that a second complaint of sexual harassment had been made against Delta which the committee had not investigated. “It was all beyond belief,” Rosie Warren says. “I wasn’t the only one who cried after that session, from fury as well as despair.”
The delegates were given no good reason to approve the report, beyond that the people on the panel were long-standing members with good reputations. “I couldn’t believe those voting in favour of the report had been sat in the same room as me,”Warren says. “I couldn’t believe they were people I had respected, taken leadership from – I couldn’t believe that we were even in the same organisation. I couldn’t believe theinjustice.”
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Its broader culture was also called into question. “When you treat human beings as disposable objects in the name ofla causa, when appropriation of activists’ labourand good will is the norm, when exploitation of your own side goes unchallenged, sexual abuse is one probable outcome,” wrote Anna Chen, who worked unpaid on various SWP press campaigns, including Stop the War. She believed the SWP’s habit of “ripping off their activists for wages, thieving their intellectual efforts and claiming credit for their successes” had initiated a pattern of “diminishing regard for their members”, which had led to the point “where even someone’s body is no longer their own”.
The party’s hierarchical structure and its culture of “loyalty beyond logic” concentrated power in the hands of the central committee at the Vauxhall headquarters. Yet the leadership had no intention of “opening up the party’s structures”, as its first response to the debate made plain. Towards the end of January, Alex Callinicos published a long article inSocialist Review, the party’s monthly magazine, which examined the necessity of “deepening and updating Marx’s critique of political economy” and referred to the Delta affair, in passing, as a “difficult disciplinary case”, significant in so far as it prompted “a minority” to dismiss “democratically reached conference decisions” and, hence, undermine democratic centralism.
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David Renton and 165 other people left in January to form a new group called rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st century) and he believes the SWP has been left with no more than 200 active members. Richard Seymour says its rump of “worker-ist activists” is “brain-dead, unpleasant and thuggish” – and destined to become more so. “It is toxic,” he says. “It’s doomed.” [bold mine]
Rosie Warren’s verdict is even more damning: she says the only thing left for the leadership to do is to issue a full apology, and then “declare that anything that was ever good about the SWP has been utterly destroyed, and pack up and go home”. [bold mine]
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www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2014/05/comrades-war-decline-and-fall-socialist-workers-party
Anyway, on that cheery note, back to Matt Walsh.