27.03.2014
The new moral panic
Charles Gradnitzer looks at the most recent move to further ostracise the SWP
On March 11 a statement announcing that the Socialist Workers Party had been banned from holding its annual Marxism event at University College London by the University of London Union was posted on Facebook. It was signed by five ULU sabbatical officers, with many student activists adding their names in support. It was then subsequently published on the student union website1 - after a vote on the ULU executive, where six officers were in favour, two voted against and one abstained.
After the statement was published, the initial five sabbaticals were joined by a further three - including ULU president Michael Chessum, who had been accused of trying to overturn the decision and ignoring the various attempts of the ULU women’s officer to contact him. One notable absence from the list of signatories is the ULU vice-president and member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Dan Cooper. While Cooper seems reluctant to state his position regarding this decision, the AWL has produced a reasonable statement opposing the ban on Marxism.2
At the National Union of Students women’s conference on March 19, the person who spearheaded the ban, Susuana Antubam, was elected national women’s officer of the NUS on an intersectional-feminist platform, narrowly beating the Labour Students-backed candidate,3 and was pleased to announce that she had “annoyed” the SWP in her hustings speech.
In an unprecedented move the SWP responded with a statement of its own.4 This statement is a flat-out denial of matters of public record and one is left in awe at the amount of cognitive dissonance the author must have had to endure in order to produce it.
Of course, nobody expected SWP leaders to hold their hands up and admit that they nearly destroyed their own organisation in order to cover up allegations of rape made against their national secretary. It was, after all, the very bureaucratic centralism that produced the crisis in the first place that still prevents them from admitting any wrongdoing or even acknowledging many of their other wrongdoings over the past three years.
Having said that, however, the statement produced by ULU is simply wrong, both in terms of the arguments it makes and the conclusions it draws.
The first argument is that the SWP is a gang of victim-blaming rape apologists and that in order to support young women on campus the SWP must be prevented from speaking there. The sabbatical officers at ULU presumably believe, having won a student union election on the back of a 2% turnout, that they have been appointed arbiters of what is and is not acceptable to say, to determine in advance the harmful consequences of allowing the SWP to speak on campus, and relieve us of the responsibility of deciding for ourselves what we might not want to hear. As abhorrent as the SWP’s defence of Martin Smith has been, we are all grown-up enough to make that decision.
The second argument is that the SWP should be kept off campus ostensibly on the grounds of protecting students from sexual harassment and violence - freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are collateral damage. Nothing new here, of course - it has often been the case that freedom of the press, speech and assembly have been curtailed on the grounds of protecting the public from harm.
The argument here bears a striking resemblance to that put forward in 1919 by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the US supreme court when he upheld the conviction of socialists Charles Schneck and Elizabeth Baer for distributing anti-war literature. In his statement he argued that it was right to prevent freedom of speech on the grounds that allowing the Socialist Party to agitate against World War I posed a “clear and present danger”, in that it would bring about “evils” that Congress had a right to prevent.5
To my knowledge nobody has ever claimed they have been sexually assaulted at Marxism or any other SWP public event. Rather, as is the absolute norm, sexual assault occurs in private circumstances and where the man is known to the victim. But, by presenting their decision as a matter of women’s safety, the ULU guardians of morality are attempting to protect themselves from criticism: you are either ‘with us’ or you are a ‘rape apologist’. The result is that the very people who defend the turning over of SWP stalls, setting fire to copies of Socialist Worker and tearing down SWP posters6 are now demanding a ‘safe space’ for themselves.
Furthermore, this selective application of the ‘safe spaces’ policy serves to demonstrate that the ban has little to do with making campuses safer for anybody. In December 2010 the NUS leadership actively campaigned against the 30,000-strong demonstration organised by National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, preferring instead to hold a poorly attended candlelit vigil, on the grounds that the demonstration would be unsafe.7 Today some of the very same people who organised that demonstration in the face of massive police repression and violence are now signing a statement justifying the banning of an event on the grounds it is unsafe.
We arrive then at the third and final argument: the SWP is simply not worth it. Having looked into their crystal ball and determined that the SWP cannot be won round to intersectional, feminist politics, the sabbatical officers have declared that they are out of reach of any sort of “progressive debate” and therefore have no right to use ULU facilities.
It may be true that die-hard SWP loyalists like Rhetta Moran need deprogramming rather than debating, but no-one in the SWP ought to be regarded as being beyond persuasion. And what about those on the periphery - including new members or contacts - who have not been involved in the factional struggles of the past three years? It is important to fight against this culture of anathematisation among the left - a culture that, ironically, the SWP itself has promoted and encouraged in the past.
When the subject has been broached on the internet, a common argument has been that to oppose the ban on the Marxism festival is to contradict or deny the ‘autonomous decision of an oppressed group’. The idea that a statement signed by 80-odd people representing less than one percent of ULU’s student population, a third of them men and a quarter of them studying at universities in Scotland or Birmingham, represents the ‘autonomous’ will of women at ULU is absurd. This is a political statement from people who subscribe to particular variety of bureaucratic feminist politics - a politics that claims that one’s identity makes one beyond challenge.
Either the knowledge and historical memory of oppression has no objective basis and can only be derived from personal experience - in which case the rest of us are left with no frame of reference, should intra- or inter-group conflict arise; or we can learn from collective experience, which can be analysed and discussed by everybody. Indeed one need only look at the response of intersectional feminists to those who have themselves suffered at the hands of the SWP, yet still oppose the ULU ban, to see that this deference to personal experience mysteriously vanishes as soon as it comes into conflict with their conclusions. However, this hypocrisy is rarely pointed out simply because most people do not assert political or moral authority over others on the basis of their experience or identity.
Socialists must fight for the freedom of assembly, association and speech on a consistent and principled basis. These rights are not special privileges only to be afforded to ideas and organisations we can tolerate; they are not privileges that can be denied through the infallible clairvoyance of the benevolent NUS bureaucracy.
We champion these rights in our own interest - we need them in order to agitate for our own ideas. If we think that somebody is a rape apologist or an organisation is institutionally sexist, then it is our right to argue that and to convince others. But it is not our right to pre-empt the decision of others and prevent them from coming to their own conclusions. By doing this we make not just ourselves, but everybody else, a prisoner of our own narcissism.
These rights are important because they allow us to sharpen our arguments, clarify ideas and arrive at the truth. Nobody has the right to determine which subjects are acceptable to discuss. To allow such a thing to happen is to hand over the ability to think and to make decisions for yourself to a stale bureaucracy. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg observes in Zur russischen Revolution, “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element”8
> Notes
2. www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/03/19/ defend-free-debate-campuses.
3. www.nusconnect.org.uk/news/article/womens/ National-Womans-Conference-2014-Day-2.
4. www.swp.org.uk/press/response-statement-ulu- 13-march-2014.
5.
www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/249/47.
6. See ‘Autonomists in “feelgood” attack on SWP’ Weekly Worker December 19 2013.
7. The Guardian December 6 2010.
8. www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/ russian-revolution/ch06.htm.