I’m glad Sandra isn’t here anymore to see how her party, the Socialist Workers Party, deals with accusations of sexual harassement and rape (as reported by Laurie Penney):
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.
Lenny isn’t impressed either, both by the waqy the central committee handled the original accusations and now has tried to stop criticism of its attempts at covering it up:
This is the thing that all party members need to understand. Even on cynical grounds, the Central Committee has no strategy for how to deal with this. A scandal has been concealed, lied about, then dumped on the members in the most arrogant and stupid manner possible. The leadership is expecting you to cope with this. This isn’t the first time that such unaccountable practices have left you in the lurch. You will recall your pleasure on waking up to find out that Respect was collapsing and that it was over fights that had been going on for ages which no one informed you about. But this is much worse. They expect you to go to your activist circles, your union, your workplaces, and argue something that is indefensible
Richard Seymour is right to put this despicable affair in its proper context, that of a failing, undemocratic, unsocialist party ruled by a nomenklatura of central committee members and hacks, lurching from crisis to crisis, with no real answers to contemporary crisises other than what can be gleamed from the moldering manuscripts of the party’s founder, Tony Cliff. That the CC would cover up sexual assault was only a matter of time, as the leadership has been busy for years if not decades creating the very atmosphere in which these attacks thrive.
The SWP has always been dedicated to the principle of democratic centralism, in which policy and ideological decisions are supposed to be taken by the leadership as a whole, then directed by the central committee, with no room for base politics once these decisions have been made. This is of course rife to abuse and it has long since degenerated into a mockery of socialist democracy: the central leadership is free to think out and dictate policy on its own whim, with no democratic oversight whatsoever, as all room for debate has been removed from the party except for during ritualised conventions.
Sandra, though an active member of the SWP for years, was quite aware of these failings, summing them up as the party being ruled by a generation of professional activists convinced it’s still 1973 and the revolution is right around the corner, but she was equally convinced that flawed as it was, the SWP was one of the few, if not the only political organisation capable and willing to remake the inequalities in our society. But, no matter how cynical she was, I don’t think that she expected the leadership to be as clueless and evil as to coverup sexual assault; nor would she have wanted to stay in such a party.
