In recent years, I have developed a grudging admiration for the International Socialist Organization for its outspoken opposition to the Assadist left and for its refusal to adapt to the DSA’s “inside-outside” Democratic Party orientation. Furthermore, its willingness to open its newspaper up as an open forum to debate out whether to support the Sandernista movement impressed me as a sign that rigid “Leninist” norms are being abandoned even if with baby steps. Finally, someone I have deep respect for is an ISO member and a highly regarded journalist whose membership is an open secret. I was able to have lunch with him about four months ago and the topic of the ISO came up. I told him that I was pleased with the growing openness and flexibility of the group. So was he, he said, but added that it still had a long way to go.
So, despite all the articles I have written for the past 20 years holding the ISO’s feet to the fire, I am saddened by its current crisis that reflects both a malignant misogyny in the organization as well as a tendency by some of the top leaders to tolerate it, if not participate in it personally.
This has been a simmering dispute since 2014 when ISO members complained about a rape culture in the organization that ironically mirrored the British SWP being torn apart by the refusal of the Callinicos leadership to expel a party leader charged with raping a rank-and-file female member. Both state capitalist groups were going through the same crisis simultaneously and both were in a state of denial.
In the SWP’s case, the denialism led to a massive loss of members. Like a time-bomb with a very long fuse, the ISO’s denialism has finally caught up with it. At least you can say that unlike Callinicos and company, they seem up to the task of cleaning house.
At the 2014 ISO convention, there were concerns about the leadership not giving due weight to the woman’s side in a rape investigation in an article titled “Believing Survivors: A Response to Concerns”:
The first disagreement S raises in her document is an argument that due process is fundamental to democracy, and that the changes we suggest would eliminate due process. We believe our policy would not eliminate due process, which is fair treatment in adjudication. We maintain that anyone accused of sexual assault or intimate partner violence in our organization should have an opportunity to defend themselves, make a statement, produce evidence, and, if desired, appeal a decision.
Our disagreement is centered around what constitutes sufficient evidence to find that someone has violated our organization’s code of conduct in these cases. The Steering Committee document suggests we should be predisposed to believing accusers, while simultaneously presuming the innocence of the accused. Here we run up against a problem: Is it desirable – or even possible – to believe both accuser and accused? We believe that logically, practically, and politically speaking, the answer is no. [emphasis in the original]
The S referred to above is Sharon Smith who was the National Organizer of the ISO at the time and who emphasized in her article titled “The complexities of rape and sexual assault: a contribution” the need for “due process” in judging whether an accused member was guilty or not.
In this year’s convention, not only was Sharon Smith’s “due process” argument rejected, she and other long-time members were voted off the Steering Committee and replaced by those who would have agreed with the authors of “Believing Survivors: A Response to Concerns”. A letter by a former member [FM] to the convention was the trigger:
You have recently elected the respondent in the NDC’s (National Disciplinary Committee) first sexual misconduct case to the ISO’s highest leadership body. This member was accused of rape. My committee voted to expel him, but we were pressured to rescind our verdict. This is not a document I want to write. But my conscience will not allow me to keep quiet. Few in the organization know about this case, in part because the former leadership obscured its existence. The fact that the accused ultimately rose in stature within the ISO is a testament to how unevenly sexual assault cases have been handled.
This was enough to foment a determined revolt against the Steering Committee members aligned with Sharon Smith, Lance Selfa, Paul D’Amato and Ahmed Shawki and to produce badly needed reforms. (I only mention these people because of their high profile.)
The SC [Steering Committee] had an emergency meeting last night to begin a discussion of the implications of this document and what next steps need to be taken. Here are some of the immediate steps we have taken:
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- We immediately responded to FM and to the allies who were copied on the email to thank her for sending it, informing her that we would be sending it out and discussing as a leadership and stating that we take this very seriously.
- After SC members asked that the respondent identify himself and resign, Joe R identified himself and voluntarily resigned from the SC and said he would take a leave of absence. We voted to suspend him and stipulate that a decision will be made on his membership status after a body independent of the SC had deliberated, created a process and made recommendations based on further investigation into this case.
- In addition to a process for taking up these very serious allegations, we need to empower a body independent of the current SC who can investigate the conduct of the 2013 SC and the central participants in that 2013 process. Whether that should be the recently formed #MeToo commission, the NDC or some other body still needs to be determined, but will be soon.
- We are organizing a joint meeting with the NC this week to discuss this fully and to develop a process for a public statement about this. We will also be inviting the original NDC members to this meeting. In addition, this meeting will be discussing how to create a space for membership-wide discussion.
- Nikki W from Portland is organizing a support call for survivors or others triggered by this document. It will include trained mental professionals who can help comrades to process this. We will send these details out today; you can also reach out to her at nikkiwilliams23@gmail.com if you need resources or support before the call. The document is very clear and rather than editorializing, we will leave comrades to read and assess it for themselves. We will be writing assessments, a public statement and providing space for analysis and discussion of what took place, lessons learned from it and what needs to change in the coming weeks. We believe it speaks both to failures of our political culture that we have identified as well as failures to adequately address the needs of survivors, a lack of understanding of the dynamics of rape and sexual assault and the failure to create a process that could prioritize doing our best to determine the truth of what happened over bureaucratic proceduralism. This is not separate from the issues we have been reckoning with and the culture we are fighting to transform – though this experience is a particularly acute and devastating manifestation of this culture. There is no way to move forward from this without the utmost honesty and critical assessment.
One of the side-effects of the rape crisis in the British SWP was a re-examination of Leninism, the poorly understood organizational model embraced not only by the ISO, the British SWP but just about every other group on the left that has a schematic understanding of the Bolshevik Party.
Richard Seymour, who was one of the leaders of the SWP that resigned over the rape cover-up, wrote an article titled “Is Zinovievism finished? A reply to Alex Callinicos” that drew a dotted line between covering up sexual predation and Leninism:
Alex Callinicos’ article on the crisis in the SWP purports to be a defence of Leninism in the face of a ‘flood of attacks’ – by which Alex means the crisis that has engulfed the party over the mishandled investigation of allegations of rape and sexual harassment against a Central Committee member.
The piece does nothing of the sort, but is rather an encapsulation of the flaws that have brought us to this pass. It is clearly intended as an opening salvo in the CC’s response to the growing opposition within the party. In particular it draws on the long tradition of dealing with dissent over particular issues by means of the absurd implication that that dissent is an attack on the heritage of the October revolution, accompanied by an airy dismissal of the actual facts. This maneouvre assumes the following equivalences: that ‘revolutionary party’ means the model of democratic centralism adopted by the SWP in the 1970s; that this model replicates that of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the decisions of the current leadership therefore embody the legitimacy of that revolution, which we can expect to be replicated in the conditions of the UK in the 21st century. This is pure substitutionalism – and on its own measure of providing strong interventionist leadership, is a complete failure.
Isn’t this the same dynamic that was at work in the ISO?
There is just too much of a pattern in these “vanguard” organizations for it to be only a coincidence. The first major occurrence was when Gerry Healy got booted from his own sect-cult after imposing himself on just one too many young female members. It took years for him to be punished, just as it took such a long time for Harvey Weinstein to face arrest.
My own former organization has had the same track record. A member named Mark Curtis was arrested for the attempted rape of a 15-year-old African-American girl in 1988 and served 8 years of a 25-year sentence. At the time and even now, Jack Barnes insisted that he was innocent. After Curtis was released from prison, he was arrested for soliciting prostitution by an undercover cop. This time, he was expelled from the SWP. When Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir” appeared, I characterized his account of being molested as a young child by an SWP member who baby-sat for him as bogus. I refused to believe that the party, no matter its other deep faults, would not let such behavior go unpunished. Now, I am not so sure.
What do all these groups have in common? To start with, rape and sexual harassment are not universal. Some groups are totally innocent. It is not as if reading “What is to be Done” gives some alpha male the idea of raping a female member. But when and if an alpha male does carry out such a crime, there is a tendency to clear his name because the thought of losing a star member who might be the Lenin of our age is too much to bear.
It is a fixation on the idea, even if unstated, that all are led by Lenin’s avatar. Whether it is someone batshit crazy like Jack Barnes and Gerry Healy, or relatively sane like Alex Callinicos and Ahmed Shawki, there is undue confidence in the helmsman. You can see how ruffled the feathers of a leadership can become when faced by such charges. They say that the fish rots from the head downward. This is just as true of Leninist formations as it is for the mafia. On February 19, 2014 The Steering Committee and National Committee of the ISO issued a statement titled “A Response to Slander” that fired back at the Renewal Faction, whose views are now embraced by a new steering committee. The statement says:
The former members, grouped together in the “Renewal Faction,” cynically distorted an account of a case–written in a document meant to be for internal discussion about the process of dealing with such cases, given their rarity in our organization–in order to falsely equate a local situation in the ISO with the mishandling of rape charges against a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party-Britain that caused a profound crisis in that organization.
In fact, the equation was mathematically, morally and politically correct. I have no idea whether the new leadership can do everything that is necessary to restore confidence in the organization but I wish them the best. I don’t believe that the ISO is a nucleus of a vanguard party that is so necessary but until the real thing comes along, they are the best people on the left as far as I am concerned, warts and all.
