Don't call yourself a revolutionary...

An excerpt from: Don't call yourself a revolutionary - A dispatch from Seattle

From Shades of Silence , by Infinite Venom

Don’t call yourself a revolutionary if doing the work around confronting sexual assault and patriarchy is not considered worthy of time and effort, yet you can put massive numbers of hours into planning other campaigns that keep you inside of your comfort zone and give you the illusion that you are “productive”. No, you are not being productive if you think winning small victories and keeping yourself seen and heard matters more than tearing down the oppressions that lead to the necessity for doing the campaigns in the first place. No, it is not a matter of capacity or time management. I see what you are doing. You are counter-revolutionary.

Rape and death

Excerpted from Undoing Sex: Against Sexual Optimism by C.E. in Lies: A Journal of Material Feminism Vol. 1.


VI – RAPE AND DEATH
There is then some truth in the phrase, misattributed to Andrea Dworkin, that “all sex is rape.” Rape and sex are far from foreign to each other, but rather are mutually constitutive elements of a broader structure of exploitation. Rape’s violence and transgression is not aberrant but rather a defining aspect of sexuality. It is the original appropriation driving all subsequent consumption or self ownership, a threat or reality that renders sexuality meaningful. Defining the qualities that make sex an event unlike rape becomes difficult; there is no true absence of force, nothing to “consent” to that isn’t on the terms of male power.

The by now traditional feminist approach to ending rape — recognizing rape as a moral outrage, attempting to isolate its unacceptable features, and remove its cancer from the otherwise healthy body of sexuality — fails from its outset to address this reality. In practice, this often adheres to a colonialist pattern, civil society offering its hand in saving or correcting an aberration. Rape, we are told, is violence, not sex. The rapist is an almost metaphysically different creature than the normal man, either a monster or, for liberals, simply very sick. It’s something Other, a quality of the fallen. Yet the concrete realities of rape flagrantly contradict this. The oft-cited statistic that we are much more likely to be raped by someone we know, rather than some stranger lurking in an alley, confirms the suspicion one gains by painful experience. Rape amounts to a horribly normal exercise of power — men over women, white over brown, straight over gay, jailer over prisoner, and so on. “A rape is not an isolated event or moral transgression or individual interchange gone wrong but an act of terrorism and torture within a systemic context of group subjection, like lynching.”

Throughout the whole of sexuality we can find many of the qualities attributed specifically to rape. It’s not a stretch to say that the affective labor of sexuality, the emotional work of another’s subjectification, is exploitative. Likewise the structural constraints on consent, the subtle and not-so-subtle violence that make “no” unheard or unspeakable, can be experienced as coercion, and the abdication of self-definition and submission to another’s will often required to enter into sex can be felt as violation. It is in such experience that the presence of rape, its inextricability from sex becomes clear, yet to flatly characterize all experience of sexuality as rape would be a denial of difference. Sex and rape are not two points on a spectrum of gendered violence and exploitation, one being simply more painful, but rather rape is distinct aspect of patriarchy and sexuality coexisting with and mutually definitive of “normal” sex, which lives a different life socially. Designations of whose rape is tolerable or encouraged and whose is a moral outrage are themselves a concrete  relation. As much as rape may give sexuality its (gendered) meaning, it is not meted out equally, and weaponized beyond a narrow, binary scope of gender.

Put bluntly: rape is a function of social death. To be raped is not unlike torture in that the raped is placed beyond the bounds of law, norm, or simple caring. To be raped is to be at a point of absolute objectification, boundaries not just violated but uprooted entirely, made meaningless. No help arrives, no language exists to communicate or reconcile one’s pain because one is at the point where normalcy produces, contains, and makes operative excess, silence, and the incommunicable. Yet this is not the constant experience of a monolithic class of “woman”; for many it is possible to be seen as defileable, to have a purity deemed worth protecting from transgression, and so such excess is meted out sparingly and discreetly. It is only sometimes that one’s rape even bears the name or meaning of rape, and where it is nameless it is institutionalized — as in prisons where it is made into a joke, or in the many private hells where one is always “asking for it”. Over and over in historical moments of genocide and  colonization mass rape emerges as an institutional principle, and in a similar though not coterminous movement rape is prescribed in nearly all modern societies as a means of normalizing deviant bodies.  This death haunts the sexuality of civil society. It is the difference that establishes the not-me, not-male, not-subject, not-woman patriarchal desire needs so that it has an object to act upon. Likewise gendered labor and gendered self exist only in relation to this notness, to some degree fragilely living with it, in partial and productive silence, and to some degree shifting such violence elsewhere.

Modifying our first statement — rape is implicated in all forms of  sex, and to perceive rape rightly as a scandal calls into question the foundation of every form of sexuality. Normative, civil sex is only one part of a system that has rape as its basis, as a central operating principle. The imagined integrity of the perfectly consenting subject amounts to little more than a regulatory principle of rape, a purity to be defended against a threatening Other. Which is not to say that assertion of dignity, of the right to not be raped, by those denied it is not a frequently necessary, worthwhile move. Rather, feminism needs to be wary of falling into a cultural conservatism that identifies rape as exogenous to sex and the social, as a disease to be cut away. To challenge rape is to challenge all conceptions of sex and bodies available to us; to undo it would be to uproot thousands of years of society, from what may well be civilization’s beginning.

PLP is threatening activists with state repression

PLP party leader in Los Angeles Hugo Sarmiento is threatening activists with libel suits for exposing his role in leading the cover up and defense of admitted rapist and PLP member Seth Miller.

This is in direct contradiction with their own letter claiming they "...would never expose other activists to fascist State violence to settle our political disagreements."

For a more detailed analysis of PL's hypocritical, dishonest letter, please read an earlier post, "How PLP Unwittingly Confesses to Misogyny and What We Can Do About It".

IWW branches' statements of solidarity

The San Diego and Boston IWW General Membership Branches have endorsed separate statements of solidarity with survivors of gender-based violence and against PLP's defense of rape.

Statement of Solidarity with Survivors of Gender-based Violence and Condemnation of the PLP’s Defense of Rape and Class Reductionism

IWW Boston GMB - 1/20/2013

http://iwwboston.org/2013/01/21/statement-of-solidarity-with-survivors-of-gender-based-violence-and-condemnation-of-the-plps-defense-of-rape-and-class-reductionism/

Preamble

A few years ago, a Fellow Worker was raped by Seth Miller, a member of PLP in Los Angeles. He and the Fellow Worker had been friends and had done organizing together prior to this attack. Last year, the survivor decided to go public with what had happened and approached PLP hoping that they would help her hold the perpetrator accountable. The response of the PLP has been appalling: obstructing the survivor’s desired accountability process, and requiring only a self-evaluation and a drinking partner for the perpetrator. Worse still, they have started an insidious misinformation campaign intended to undermine the credibility of the survivor, her account, and her allies. In their official response they claim to fight “sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny in every aspect”, and then promptly continue with slandering the survivor and her allies as “informant-provocateurs” acting in collusion with the “fascist police state.”

In our analysis, what leads groups to engage in this kind of rape apologism and victim blaming is the ideology of class reductionism. Stated simply by the folks at the riseup.net, class reductionism is "The idea that class oppression supersedes race or gender oppression." Consequently, all forms of oppression -racism, sexism, ageism etc. - are merely reflections or flavors of class oppression. According to this line of thinking, anything that interferes with a class reductionist organization's program to overthrow capitalism and abolish class oppression can rationally (and conveniently) be suppressed by any means necessary. We seek to distinguish this from an approach to anti-capitalist organizing that sees intersectionality rather than a hierarchy of oppression.

The response of PLP is class reductionism at its worst. It is being deployed here to protect the privileges of men and clad rape apologism and victim blaming in the false armor of bogus class struggle heroics. It is our duty to recognize and take action when those that call themselves revolutionaries perpetuate the forms of oppression that keep the working class divided. There is nothing more damaging to class struggle than denying the interrelatedness of all forms of oppression or subsuming the real, lived experiences of comrades into a self-serving ideological framework: one that does not face the reality of oppression but instead prevents the underlying social relations which prop up privilege and maintain oppression from ever being analyzed properly, much less dismantled.

Resolution

Whereas the Boston Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World is determined to fight rape culture and patriarchy in our union and in society at large, and


Whereas we reject class reductionism (the belief that class oppression supersedes race or gender oppression), and,

Whereas our approach to the class struggle recognizes the intersectionality of all forms of oppression without the attempt to simplify or reduce them into a hierarchy, and

Whereas a Fellow Worker was raped by Seth Miller, a member of the Progressive Labor Party, as described at http://necessarymeansfight.blogspot.com/2012/12/progressive-labor-party-defends-rapists.html, and

Whereas the response of the Progressive Labor Party to the survivor’s efforts to have them hold Seth Miller accountable has been abhorrent, and


Whereas the Progressive Labor Party has sought to undermine the credibility of the survivor and has sought to protect the rapist, and


Whereas the survivor, a Fellow Worker, has asked that we a) exclude PLP from our organizing campaigns and spaces, b) warn our allies, c) examine and address patriarchal behavior in our organizing communities, d) actively support and defend survivors of sexual violence, and


Noting the formation of an anti-patriarchy committee at the Boston General Membership Branch Meeting on January 13th, 2013 to address the problem of patriarchy within our branch and in our organizing, including the implementation of this resolution, therefore be it


Resolved, 
That the Boston General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, in solidarity with the survivor and in support of her wishes, will no longer collaborate in organizing campaigns or share organizing spaces with the Progressive Labor Party, or any other organizations which protect rapists and promote rape culture through their words or actions. This proposal and accompanying documentation will be made available to groups that we organize with, and to the stakeholders of venues where we meet regularly. We pledge to stand in solidarity with all victims and survivors of gender-based discrimination, assaults, and other forms of violence, both in the “revolutionary left” and in the broader society. We recognize that the only way to do that is to listen to survivors and to honor their wishes.

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San Diego IWW's Statement of Solidarity with Survivors of Gender-based Violence and Condemnation of the PLP’s Defense of Rape and Class Reductionism

The San Diego Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World stands in full solidarity with a Fellow Worker who was raped by a prominent organizer in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). The response of the PLP has been abhorrent, combining a meaningless self-evaluation and a slap on the wrist with insidious undermining of the survivor, her account, and her allies.

In their official response, they claim to fight “sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny in every aspect”, while in the same breath slander the survivor and her allies as “informant-provocateurs” acting in collusion with the fascist police state. The PLP has made clear that the oppression of women, even in its most horrific and violent manifestation, means nothing when it interferes with their prescription for revolution. They will do anything to make this go away. PLP would rather slander the survivor than take necessary action to address the problem that one of their members has committed sexual assault. Their response is class reductionism at its worst. It is being deployed here to protect the privileges of men and cloak rape apologism and victim blaming in the false armor of bogus class struggle heroics. It is our duty to recognize and take action when those that call themselves revolutionaries perpetuate the forms of oppression that keep the working class divided. There is nothing more damaging to class struggle than denying the separate existence of other forms of oppression.

We will work to stand in solidarity with all those who experience gender-based discrimination, assaults, and other forms of victimization-- both within the “revolutionary left” and in broader society. Our stance is that the work of class struggle must be combined with struggles against all forms of oppression, without the attempt to reduce or simplify them into a hierarchy. Members of the San Diego IWW pledge to redouble our efforts of addressing patriarchal behavior throughout our union and within the broader community.  We will take action to create a working sub-committee to confront patriarchy in our union, and directly address the way that our dynamics contribute to the oppression of our comrades and women everywhere.    

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Statement of Solidarity with Survivors of Gender-based Violence and Condemnation of the PLP’s Defense of Rape

The Los Angeles/Ricardo Flores Magón General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, January 27, 2013 

In Solidarity with the Fellow Workers of the Boston General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, The Los Angeles / Ricardo Flores Magón General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World support the following Statement of Solidarity. The Los Angeles GMB of the IWW supports the Boston GMB’s positions of solidarity with the Fellow Worker who was raped by Seth Miller, member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), and will integrate region-specific methods of solidarity with our Fellow Worker. Furthermore, the LA GMB will assess and deconstruct patriarchal elements from within our branch’s functions and promote outreach to survivors of gender-based violence.

Background Information:
A few years ago, a Fellow Worker was raped by Seth Miller, a member of PLP in Los Angeles. He and the Fellow Worker had been friends and had done organizing together prior to this attack. Last year, the survivor decided to go public with what had happened and approached PLP hoping that they would help her hold the perpetrator accountable. The response of the PLP has been appalling: obstructing the survivor’s desired accountability process, and requiring only a self-evaluation and a drinking partner for the perpetrator. Worse still, they have started an insidious misinformation campaign intended to undermine the credibility of the survivor, her account, and her allies. In their official response they claim to fight “sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny in every aspect”, and then promptly continue with slandering the survivor and her allies as “informant-provocateurs” acting in collusion with the “fascist police state.”

We at the Los Angeles/Ricardo Flores Magón General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World condemn the Progressive Labor Party’s response to the Fellow Worker’s demands for justice against their rapist. It is our duty to recognize and take action when those that call themselves revolutionaries perpetuate gender violence by protecting rapists, ignore the survivor’s demands, and attack the survivor for demanding justice.

Resolution
Whereas the Los Angeles / Ricardo Flores Magón General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World is determined to fight rape culture and patriarchy in our union and in
society at large, and

Whereas a Fellow Worker was raped by Seth Miller, a member of the Progressive Labor Party, as described at: http://necessarymeansfight.blogspot.com/2012/12/progressive-labor-party-defends-rapists.html, and

Whereas the response of the Progressive Labor Party to the survivor’s efforts to have them hold Seth Miller accountable has been abhorrent, and
Whereas the Progressive Labor Party has sought to undermine the credibility of the survivor and has sought to protect the rapist, and

Whereas the survivor, a Fellow Worker, has asked that we a) exclude PLP from our organizing campaigns and spaces, b) warn our allies, c) examine and address patriarchal behavior in our organizing communities, d) actively support and defend survivors of sexual violence, and

Therefore, be it resolved that the Los Angeles / Ricardo Flores Magón General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, in solidarity with the survivor and in support of her wishes, will no longer collaborate in organizing campaigns or share organizing spaces with the Progressive Labor Party, or any other organizations which protect rapists and promote rape culture through their words or actions. This proposal and accompanying documentation will be made available to groups that we organize with, and to the stakeholders of venues where we meet regularly. We pledge to stand in solidarity with all victims and survivors of gender-based discrimination, assaults, and other forms of violence, both in the “revolutionary left” and in the broader society. We recognize that the only way to do that is to listen to survivors and to honor their wishes.

- The Los Angeles/Ricardo Flores Magón General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, January 27, 2013 

Woman Dies as a Result of Reporting Rape by Notre Dame Football Players

A woman was raped by famous and popular football players. She reported it. They bullied her to attempt to silence her and eventually drove her to suicide. The football players have suffered no consequences.

Why I won’t be cheering for old Notre Dame  

“She said she’d been raped by a member of the football team at a party off campus,” the R.A. told me. I also spoke to the R.A.’s parents, who met the young woman that same night, when their daughter brought her to their home after leaving the hospital. They said they saw — and reported to athletic officials — a hailstorm of texts from other players, warning the young woman not to report what had happened: “They were trying to silence this girl,” the R.A.’s father told me. And did; no criminal complaint was ever filed.

This violence and deliberate tragedy is massively overshadowed by Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend story.

Patriarchy of Structurelessness - Rape Culture in Anarchist Practice

There have been multiple excellent critiques on how Progressive Labor Party and the UK’s Socialist Worker’s Party have grotesquely mishandled the situations of rapists within their leadership. Anarchist groups are neither immune to sexual violence, nor to protecting rapists at the expense of survivors. As anarchists, we are foolish, irrelevant, and hypocritical if we do not examine the structure of anarchist organizing and how it enables perpetrators of sexual violence.

Let’s compare the structures of PL vs. the common structures of anarchist organizing spaces that enable patriarchal violence:

	PLP	Anarchists
Bro code	Male-dominated groups fear confronting their own patriarchy; machismo is valued	Male-dominated groups fear confronting their own patriarchy; machismo is valued
Unity above accountability	Party unity is primary	Group cohesion is primary
Political priorities	Class struggle is primary, feminism is anti-working-class	Attacking the state or capitalism is primary over attacking internal oppression
Structure	Rigid structures prioritize party leadership, party cohesion	Hidden structures based on social capital and friendships prioritize “cred” and charismatic white men
Accountability processes	Pointless “self-criticisms” with no change in individuals, structures, or politics	Prioritizing rehabilitating and healing perpetrators of violence over protecting survivors’ safety
Social relationships	Prioritizing party members as more important people than non-members	Unwillingness to disrupt social relationships with harmful people
Individual value	A rapist is more important to the party than their victims	A rapist does more or better work than their victims

Anarchists must stand for something
Every anarchist group already agrees to basic principles of anti-oppression, whether it be from the state, economic relationships, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, etc. These principles must be put in practice to our best ability in our everyday work, or our political projects are meaningless lies we tell ourselves.

Too often organizing spaces for specific projects become support groups for shitty people at the expense of organizing. Not only to these people blow apart projects everywhere they are involved, but they continue to operate freely, moving from project to project and network to network. At the same time, targets of their behavior (usually women and people of color) join, quickly burn out, and are never seen again. If your group has ever noticed, “Why are there so many men here?” or “How can we get more people of color to join?” or “How do we get women to speak up?”, it’s your fault. The culture within your group is oppressive to these people, and they are sick of explaining to you for the thousandth time to shut up in meetings when others are talking, or prioritize their suggestions, or not to be condescending and patronizing, or to stop hitting on them after meetings, or to do some fucking work outside of meetings instead of just showing up to meetings and blabbering about your awesome ideas and cred.

Our capacity is limited
We do not have the expertise, numbers, or structures to be mental health counselors, rehabilitation coordinators, and justice systems within our organizing groups. Building these structures could be useful projects, but we cannot divert our energy from our other important goals to “rehabilitate” rapists or racists or jerks or let projects fall apart because someone is harming the group and the group is too cowardly to confront them. It’s also important to realize that many worthwhile modes of restorative justice are considered the role of the state, and the state will come after you if you step on their turf.

We must acknowledge that everyone is imperfect and support each other in our personal growth. We also must expel clearly harmful people from organizing spaces. We must not take energy from other important projects to fix harmful people. We need to support survivors of violence and oppression at the expense of including violent or oppressive people. That this is not part of our culture is shameful and shows the deep hypocrisy of our movement. If we allow oppressors to operate within our groups, our organizing is nothing but masturbatory, self-congratulatory, hypocritical bullshit that perpetuates everything we tell ourselves we’re against.

References
Tyranny of Structurelessness, J. Freeman
What does SWP’s way of dealing with sexual assault allegations tell us about the left?, L. Penny
The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities; C. Chen, J. Dulani, L. Piepzna-Samarasinha
Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements, C. Morris
Misogynists and the Left, M. McAlpine

From Delhi to Los Angeles to Steubenville…Smash Rape Culture Everywhere!

The case about the young woman who was brutally gang-raped in Delhi and died from the injuries has made international news. The broadcasted images of mass protests are quite inspiring because it appears that a new generation of youth are radicalizing and confronting patriarchal culture across South Asia. In early December—in the so-called feminist paradise of Sweden—teenage girls rioted in Gothenburg after being called sluts on Instagram. How about in the “land of the free”? Where are our riots against patriarchal culture? Because the truth is—we have lots to riot about.

In the U.S., like most patriarchal societies, people are taught to be concerned about protecting the life of the perpetrator and oppressor, rather that the life of the person that has been forever traumatized. U.S. society is also taught to rely on a racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic judicial and prison system to solve systemic problems. For those individuals who are interested in pre-figurative politics and transformative justice—how we confront oppression also reflects that type of society we want to create. But the struggle to confront patriarchy and rape culture will not be transformed through
meaningful conversation, because it is a war. The battles we wage each day to create cultures of consent and empowerment are part of a wider struggle for total liberation. The more that we discuss patriarchy and call people out for sexist, homophobic, and transphobic statements or “jokes,” the more likely it is that we can make our social and activist spaces safer. Such safe spaces and support networks allow us to do more than just confront personal situations, but to create societal changes. While the personal is political, we need a collective of folks for emotional and political support to confront oppressive bullshit. The physical and mental safety of our comrades is of paramount
importance.

This blog seeks to force the rapist Seth Miller and his party, the PLP, to be accountable. However, rape and the socialization of rape culture is not an anomaly, but the specter of it is always present. Just this week protests mounted in Steubenville, Ohio after Anonymous helped publicize a case in which a teenager was gang-raped by football players. In another case a few months ago, a teenager in Kentucky made her sexual assault case public after a gag order was placed on her to not discuss her case and protect her violators. The teenage victim told the Louisville Courier-Journal: “For months, I cried myself to sleep. I couldn’t go out in public places. You just sit there and wonder,
who saw (the pictures), who knows?” Just as this case proves, the courts and those who support patriarchal culture are deeply concerned with protecting sexual assaulters and rapists who are given a slap on the hand and license to do it again. An individual’s trauma or the possibility of future victims is rarely put into account. As Silvia Federici argues in her book Caliban and the Witch, rape culture is deeply embedded in our societies after centuries of oppression and trauma. Since it was internalized through socially accepted violence, it will be not be defeated without public discussions and direct action. We must confront impunity, rape culture, and dynamics of patriarchal domination, which feeds the oppression of our bodies and the exclusion of our self-empowerment.

One of the Steubenville Rapists

What will you do about people like this? 

They usually win.

http://www.yourdailymedia.com/post/steubenville-covers-for-its-high-school-football-stars-rapists/

http://planetransgender.blogspot.com/2012/12/anonymous-to-release-all-steubenville.html

How PLP Unwittingly Confesses to Misogyny and What We Can Do About It

Background

On December 16th, 2012 allies of a Los Angeles area activist who was raped by Seth Miller, a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), decided to make public their fight against sexual violence. Seth raped his close friend and college classmate in 2006. After years of inaction on the part of PLP to address the issue, and months of concerted effort to push PLP to do something about the rapist in their midst while respecting PLP’s desire for secrecy, these allies had the audacity to speak publicly about their experience and encourage others to join them in challenging PLP.

A number of statements that detail the history of PLP’s involvement in sexual violence can be found on this site, run by allies of the survivor: http://necessarymeansfight.blogspot.com/

In response to these public statements, PLP released a letter criticizing the allies for daring to tell the truth. You can find their letter here. Similar statements have been released by individual party members to smaller audiences in the last few weeks.

Why PLP’s Letter is an Attack on Women and Our Community

Their statement is the best evidence so far of why PLP itself is a problem. Alternate titles for PLP’s letter could include “Misogynists Unwittingly Confess to Misogyny” or “Shut Up Bitch, I Said Shut Up!”

The goal of PLP’s letter is to take something that is unambiguously wrong, the rape of a woman and subsequent cover up, and make it ambiguous. The tactics they employ warrant listing as we are likely to see them again. They parrot rehearsed statements about the oppression of women to demonstrate their “ally” status, they cast doubt on the testimony of the victim by referring to an “alleged rape,” they attack those who dare to speak up as being “fascist, bourgeois, counterrevolutionaries,” they abstract the discussion to one of process rather than outcomes, they blatantly lie about the actions they have or have not taken, they feign victimhood for being called out and imply that their history of activism in the past ought to buy our silence.

PLP’s letter is directed at three primary audiences: the survivor and her allies, the broader activist community, and PLP’s general membership, affiliates, and allies who may just now be learning of the extent of PLP’s cover up.

As a direct response to the survivor and her allies the letter amounts to one profoundly misogynistic and deeply delusional assertion: "Shut the fuck up!" The survivor and her allies must keep their mouths shut because their honesty hurts PLP and hurting PLP is synonymous with hurting revolution. The survivor and her allies should feel ashamed of doing damage to PLP, an organization worth their support, because it has the right analysis of class and oppression. I am hesitant to write what should go without saying: an organization that does what PLP has done does not deserve support and PLP’s vision of revolution is neither “revolutionary” or worth envisioning.

As a statement to the broader community the letter is designed to muddy the waters. Readers are encouraged to question the credibility of the survivor and her allies and to focus on any number of issues other than the fact that Seth Miller, rapist, remains a prominent member of PLP. Their hope is that by distracting from this, readers will be disinclined to challenge PLP and the issue can eventually boil over without any real consequences. To this end, PLP hopes we will engage in protracted tit-for-tat debate about the finer details of the history and the nuances of revolutionary theory, making the basic reality of rape and cover up undecipherable beneath all of PLP's distractions.

As a statement to PLP’s general membership, affiliates, and allies the letter is even more troubling and outrageous. It is a call to dismiss the public statements by the survivor’s allies outright as the machinations of agent provocateurs. It recasts PLP’s secrecy and cover up efforts as righteous acts of resistance against the police state, which PLP fantasizes is aligned with rape survivors instead of against them. In this context, the survivor and her allies become the enemy, the dangerous, bourgeois, fascist, counterrevolutionary “other” that must be stopped. If you think I am exaggerating, consider this facebook comment about the survivor and her allies published on December 29th at 6:40PM by Fernando Chirino, PLP member and faculty at Chapman University:

“... Burning hacienda/ plantation owners is ALWAYS a good thing. The REAL problem is getting to that haute bourgeoisie to put them on a spit. I also wouldn’t mind using coward ass, white, petite-bourgeois anarchist COPS and counter-revolutionaries-in-disguise that some of my well-meaning friends and comrades unintentionally legitimated by trying to organize with them... as the hot coals to start up the main roast.”

I feel compelled to take a moment and say that any member of PLP who believes it is an act of  “cowardice” for a survivor of rape to go public in a hostile world does not understand the meaning of the word “courage.”

The letter has one implicit demand from for all groups of readers, that we recognize a collective, comradely obligation to protect PLP from harm. PLP is the real victim in their telling of the story. They would like our protection from things that will hurt their recruiting, from the possibility that their work on behalf of immigrants, workers, or students might be damaged by their work against women, and yes, they also want protection from the police state which they incorrectly imagine would lift a finger, even against PLP, to defend the survivor. In short, PLP expects that we will all protect PLP from being judged by its deeds.

PLP’s letter is in perfect harmony with PLP’s public anti-Feminist position, as stated their March 2012 article, “International Women’s Day: Only Communism Can End Sexism,” from PLP’s publication Challenge:

“Feminism, a bourgeois philosophy, disregards the class nature of sexism. Anti-sexist struggles must reject it, because it divides the working class by blaming male workers and shunning them from anti-sexist struggles. This all-class unity for women sets us up for fascism by mobilizing women against their own class interests."

For PLP, when gender concerns are in conflict with class concerns in organizing projects, gender defers to class. PLP promotes a hierarchical, ladder-like understanding of oppression where women’s struggles are not only a lower rung than class struggle, but even below a concern that men might be made uncomfortable by feminism and feel too "shunned." In practice this means that if you commit a misogynistic act but portray addressing that act as being in conflict with "class struggle," even if that act is rape or the cover up of rape, you can get away with it because only a “fascist” would “mobilize women against their own class interests." This is nothing but more of the old, “after the revolution” bullshit that is more about enjoying the benefits of patriarchy than it is a commitment social change. Case in point: Seth Miller raped a woman and is still promoted by PLP as a leader in our activist communities while PLP is criticizing the people who dared to point that out.

Fortunately, no amount of lying, threatening, accusing, misogynistic theory, or manipulative co-optation of our movement’s language of revolution and community can distract from the following basic truths:

1. Seth Miller is a rapist and continues to be a member of PLP.
2. PLP leaders have decided at multiple points over the last six years to do nothing, ask that others stay silent, and hope the issue goes away so that they can continue to work with Seth without complication.
3. PLP only ever talked about some vague future “dialogue” as a way keep the survivor and her allies silent while hiding their decision to do as little as they can get away with.
4. PLP blames the survivor for not doing enough, and going about what she has done in the wrong way. They locate the social burden outside of themselves and Seth Miller. 
5. PLP remains to this day more concerned about publicity and their reputation than the fact they have a rapist in their midst. 

PLP's commitment to obfuscation and inaction along with their implicit demand for protection amounts to a message to all survivors and everyone who has not (yet) been assaulted, "be quiet and don't complicate things." It is also a message to every perpetrator and potential perpetrator of sexual violence, "we got your back and understand how hard this is on you."

It is now a matter of historical record that PLP will sacrifice the bodies and souls of comrades for the sadistic pleasure of prominent party members, as long as the party thinks that doing so will not hurt them in their "real" work. No amount of canned lines about revolution and women’s struggle can negate what PLP tells the community through its actions, or the basic facts of this issue up to this point. The question that PLP has put before the rest of us is, “Should we protect PLP?"

Should We Protect PLP?

Despite PLP’s longstanding desire that this story never be told, they have only ever had the option of how it would be told. PLP’s assumption that secrecy was to be the permanent mode of existence for the survivor as well as a viable approach to addressing the widespread sexual violence in our movements demonstrates only PLP’s depravity. Pressuring the survivor to remain silent in any way is itself an act of violence, replicating the experience of being a discardable tool for another’s use including the terror and  profound degradation accompanying that experience.

I will forever feel guilty for accommodating PLP’s desire for secrecy so long before going public. I wanted to give the people who I trusted and respected in that organization every opportunity to do the right thing, in the hopes we could have told a more empowering story about solidarity against patriarchy’s most extreme and violent manifestations. During this time I was depriving our community of critical information about the real danger that PLP and its members pose to women, and my accommodation of PLP may have had tragic consequences. Our impulses to hope things will work themselves out, to avoid conflict, and to see harsh truths in more comforting lights can be both liberating and oppressive forces. PLP turns these impulses against our community, using them the same way a cop uses his baton to bash our brains in. Their goal in weaponizing our impulses to hope and unity is to achieve our neutrality.

Neutrality is the position which accommodates PLP’s demand for protection and silence. By doubling down yet again on secrecy, obfuscation, and inaction, PLP gambles that the rest of the community shares their misogyny. They are counting on us to buy into the idea that class and gender struggles are in conflict and that class trumps gender, they are counting on our desire to avoid confrontation, they are counting on our cowardice to prevent us from making all of the interpersonal sacrifices that we must make to confront PLP but are so much less significant than the sacrifices that are demanded of survivors of sexual violence. By playing for neutrality as the position that protects their interests at the expense of the survivor and women generally, they have removed the neutrality from neutrality. PLP is not worthy of the protection that silence and neutrality affords them. We can no longer tolerate PLP or any groups or individuals that share their values.

Given PLP and Seth Miller’s utter lack of accountability and continued demonstration of profoundly unself-critical misogyny, we must achieve the total exclusion of PLP and all of its members from our organizing and social spaces. We can no longer pretend that through the course of time PLP will reform itself. We cannot entertain the possibility that any solution outside of exile is appropriate while the basic facts of Seth Miller and PLP’s actions are being obscured and denied. I have learned the hard way that the desire to pursue other options is nothing but the desire to return things back to normal at the precise moment we are confronted by how horrific normality is. Changing that reality is not possible without first accepting it, a step PLP refuses to take. Our reality is that we live in a world where rape is OK, and it is so because we don't do anything about it.

We must not believe in PLP because PLP does not believe in us. Their cynical gamble reveals how little faith PLP actually has in our community’s real potential for courage and revolution. Whatever it is that PLP is fighting for, despite whatever sincere delusions they may have about their efforts, PLP is not working for us and is not working for revolution. We cannot tolerate the presence of any group in our community when that group’s position to that community demonstrates such undeniable contempt and pessimism, and we cannot count on others to do the work of confronting PLP for us.

by J. Ball

Macktivists, Brocialists, and Manarchists are We All: Exorcizing the Demons in Our Movement and Ourselves

[This could probably go without saying, but for good measure: TRIGGER WARNING!]

Several months ago, I learned that a comrade and friend was raped by Seth Miller, a member of the Progressive Labor Party. I was shocked to hear, but as glad as one can be in this situation that a group of activists and friends were standing up with her and charging PL to hold Miller accountable. At the same time, because of my own history of grievances with PL and its members, I worried that this demand would fall on deaf ears. Initially, several members of PL seemed to take it seriously–they promised to bring it to the leadership and see to it that there was justice. But over time, it became clear that PL as an organization, from the senior leadership to these members who originally promised to help, were doing everything in their power to not bring Miller to accountability but rather to shield him, justify his actions, and attack his accuser. With communists like these, who needs capitalists?!

This is all the more troubling because I know some of these members who are defending Miller. It should be clear enough to anyone with half a sense of decency, much less feminist or leftist politics, to understand that telling a rape survivor that what she suffered wasn’t rape, that it’s just “gossip,” that the attacker is too important to the movement to be kicked out creates an environment where rape is excused ahead of time–where it is made clear that nothing will be done to prevent members from raping others, and that nothing will be done to punish them. But what is less obvious, but just as present, is the culture of rape within PL (and, indeed, many other leftist organizations and circles) that enabled Miller to rape my friend and, likely, other women. Unless PL takes an active stand against rape and rapists, one can only assume that their vision of revolutionary utopia is one in which women have little control over their own bodies, where party members can terrorize others with no consequence.

Shortly after the first public statement was released about Miller and PL’s coverup, I was asked to write something about PL and my experiences with them and their members at UC Irvine. Aside from recounting the events with broad strokes and offering an elementary analysis, as I’ve done above, I have little more to contribute in those areas, which others have written extensively and beautifully about already. And, as a man who no longer lives in Southern California, nothing I could write can or should equal what the women (and male allies) actively organizing against Miller and PL have already written and will continue to write. What I hope to contribute is additional history of PL’s culture of rape and misogyny and some personal experiences relative to the culture and defense of rape and sexual assault in activist circles, and social circles more broadly. In what follows, I don’t name names. As much as it is about these individuals and their actions, it is also about something much larger; it may be clear to some who I am referring to, but I don’t want their individual personalities to draw from the larger issue of sexual assault in our communities.

PL, Behind the Curtains

I came to UC Irvine several years ago as a grad student, after spending all four years of my undergraduate career involved with various activist groups and primarily organizing around workers’ rights issues and international solidarity. Searching for a continuation of this work, I sought to get involved with the only group at UCI interested in workers’ rights, and, in reality, the only group that was radical or organizing. What I found, I soon discovered, was not at all what I was looking for.

The group was dominated by older men, primarily grad students (including several in my department); but the gendered power dynamics were addressed by pushing women into public, formal leadership positions. As one could expect, this resulted in a cloaked power structure, where the men made decisions, while the women would face the responsibility for those decisions. Additionally, as exists in many (all?) other groups, there was a gendered division of labor: men take part in the “intellectual” work and claim publicity (writing, speaking at rallies, choosing which films to see and what articles or books to read in discussion groups), while women took on more rote work while staying in the shadows (working with the administration, outreach to other groups, making sure everyone does what they promised to).

But merely a gendered hierarchy and division of labor do not equate a rape culture. That’s where a lot of the interpersonal relationships come in. One of my strongest recollections from my short time in that group was an incident of one of the male leaders slut-shaming the women when they wanted to go out dancing one weekend. There was much more wrapped up with this incident than just inferring that these women were promiscuous because of an association of women going dancing together where there would be men, taking a paternalistic, Austen-esque view that women needed to be protected and chaste. What this was about, fundamentally, was controlling the bodies of women in the group. Whether it was understood by them as such, the men didn’t really want the women to mix with outsiders, much less outside men. By attempting to attack and undermine their sexuality, the men sought to control women’s sexuality. Men also used relationships with women in the group to control how they voted on things or carried out actions for or within the group. Men also used relationships with women outside the group in order to recruit them.

Along these lines, there were a number of actions I witnessed, designed to isolate group members from other social structures, so that they would be reliant on the group, and especially the leadership, for socializing. Frequent group dinners would be expected of any student club to build camaraderie among members, but this group went further, such that the group itself was the encapsulation of its members’ social lives.

Of course, as I discovered, the group was little more than a front for PL. The two oldest men in the group, who largely ran the group, were members of PL. Let’s call them “D” and “F”. D was a high-level leader in PL, while F was only really associated with PL at the time but is now more active. Most of the decisions of the group, while voted on at meetings, were either decided ahead of time by D and F and their allies, or vetoed afterwards. In one case, after I proposed and took on the responsibility for a film screening, I was told just a few days before that “they” decided to cancel it; telling me was more of an afterthought. But this is to say that the mechanisms of power and control didn’t exist isolated within that group; in reality, the actions of men in the group, especially D and F, were intended to make sure the group’s decisions were in line with PL’s, and to screen and recruit students to PL.

There were actually instances in which student activists who didn’t toe the PL line within the group were forcibly purged. One such student was a freshman my first year of grad school, and, I thought, had a tremendous natural potential for organizing. Unlike others in the group, especially D and F, she came from a poor family, and was working in addition to going to school; as a result of this background, she had a rapport with the workers that no one else could match. Despite this potential, which everyone acknowledged, she (actually her relationship with the workers) was seen as a resource to be exploited, and there was little effort to nurture and mentor her as an organizer, and even her efforts to seek this experience as opposed by some in the group. She ended up dating a campus groundskeeper (which was also, similarly, exploited), but when they broke up following her discovery that he was cheating, other members of the group (especially D and F) continued to maintain a relationship with him rather than her. They would invite him to group functions that were kept secret from her — despite her still being active in the group — and she actually found out that, while they were dating, D and F and others would hang out with him and his other girlfriend. Eventually, after the break-up, she was pulled aside by F and one of his other male allies after a meeting, and told that she was being kicked out of the group in a way that was, at a minimum, unintentionally threatening, violent, and patriarchal. The two of them told other group members who weren’t part of PL or the inner circle that she chose to leave.

Because the group was focused on campus workers, it’s also important to examine the group’s (and PL’s) intentions with those workers and their unions. In retrospect, most of the group’s interactions with workers were dictated by an interest in developing a relationship of dependency. A main reason why the film screening mentioned above was canceled was that the film, and my planned discussion afterward, emphasized worker agency and a vision of unions of, by, and for workers — that is, a union not controlled by bureaucratic leadership or an outside political party. The group often held meetings and events only for workers, and it was really a one-way flow of knowledge. The workers were to be evangelized into communism and recruited for PL if they passed some litmus test; it was not believed that student activists could learn from workers. If anything, workers’ experiences were cannibalized and forced into the PL narrative.

Many of the workers felt uncomfortable with this political proselytization, and those few who actually attended PL meeting were put off and didn’t go back. F would often take the role of speaking forworkers, and managed to get himself onto the bargaining committee of one group of workers, where he dictated their strategy and decisions, and even turned the committee against the union that was representing them, during bargaining. Thus, and ignoring many other reaffirming examples, the group’s interest in workers’ rights did not translate into direct action in solidarity with workers (a la USAS or other groups), but was only something to be leveraged in order to trick workers into feeling dependent on students, with dreams of a power/party structure such that PL, viz. D and F and other student activists, would be at the top of the pyramid, with workers as their foot soldiers at the bottom.

Obviously, the workers never fell for it, and in many cases used D and F and the student group to get what they want; they were smarter than the student group gave them credit for. And, ultimately, it’s of no surprise that this should happen, because there is little incentive to join a political party unless you have come to believe the dogma or have a high-level position.

It’s More Than a Women’s Problem

While PL is marked as a target here, their treatment of Miller is just the most recent occurrence of a repeating phenomenon on the left. What I’ve outlined as my observations with this PL front group at UCI illustrates the mechanisms of hierarchy and patriarchy that allow a rape culture to form within organizations and communities. This culture makes it such that when one member is injured by another, whether by sexual assault or other means, there is an economizing that is done by the leadership, to determine which of the two members is more valuable. If the rapist, as in the case of Miller, is found to be of value to the organization, then that person is kept while the survivor/victim is purged. This goes far past simply blaming the victim, to treating the victim as a cancer that needs to be excised, rather than holding the perpetrator accountable. Or, the survivor may become convinced that it’s better to just stay quiet, because speaking up would mean more attacks against her (accusations of lying, etc) and removal from the space and therefore from her social circle. Within these structures, it is often preferable to pretend the attack didn’t occur. The rape-supporting structures within many of these organizations and communities resembles those of caricatured college fraternities; however, because these groups claim to be fighting against the very thing they are perpetrating, avenues for recourse and accountability may be even more tenuous and frightening than they are in the rest of society.

As few of my friends know, I unfortunately have first-hand experience with how these structures can work (albeit outside of leftist circles). I apologize for how this information is being conveyed–it is something I wish could have been dealt with properly, on its own, and I don’t mean to detract from what PL and Miller have done. It is something that has, for a long time, been difficult for me to come to terms with, but I decided I need to share in order to help others understand what is happening now.

When I was about 15, I was sexually assaulted. I was molested by a peer during a Boy Scouts camping trip, while I was in my tent. What was most difficult was that I was not alone in my tent, but that I was sharing it, at the time, with 4 other friends. And they watched, laughing, as it happened. Some of them were also classmates, while the rest I only knew through the Scout troop. The way that I internalized this all, as I assume anyone else would, was that I believed it was my fault, I convinced myself that this wasn’t sexual assault but a joke. I was afraid to speak out about it because it was my friends, because I was ashamed, and, most importantly, because I had no other social or support structure to fall back on. To cope with my inability to address what happened to me in any meaningful way, I blocked it out of my memory for 5 years, until it painfully came back and since hasn’t left.

Still, women are by and far much more likely than men to be targeted for sexual assault or rape. But it does happen to men, and rather than intending to make this, yet again, just about men, by recognizing that it doesn’t just happen to women, it’s easier to understand that sexual assault affects everyone, and that the burden of fighting sexual assault in our communities does not fall only on women. It is important also to recognize that sexual assault is not exclusive to hetero communities.

What I have come to understand from that experience, and what I have seen too many times since, primarily within activist groups, is how sexual assault comes to be seen as permissible: how perpetrators think that it’s ok or that they won’t be punished; how it’s excused, ignored, or reinforced by others in the group; and the psychology of victimhood and roadblocks to even seeking justice or accountability.

We Need to Kill the Monster Now, Not Later

What needs to be done would take too long to describe here in full, and has already been done articulately in too many other places to list.

In short, we need to fight patriarchy and sexual assault right now, not after the revolution. We need to examine our communities and our own behavior to see those aspects that contribute to a culture of rape and sexual assault. We need to make sure that sexual assault is discouraged, not permitted, and take preventative action rather than waiting until the unspeakable happens in our community. We also need to make sure that our communities practice real processes for accountability and justice — this means the right to confront one’s attacker, the right to be taken seriously, and the right to be included in any accountability process (none of which were respected by PL). This also means that, if the attacker is not cooperative, not willing to meet the reasonable terms of the person they attacked, etc., that person needs to be removed from the community, forcibly if necessary. They don’t need a drinking buddy or to write self-critical reflection papers — they are a danger to the community, just as Seth Miller still is, and need to be prevented from attacking anyone else, by whatever means are deemed necessary by those who they endanger.

Anything short of this is counter-revolutionary, and demands immediate consequences.

From we are the crisis

a short piece on sexual assault and activism in Southern California

It's been a while since I've put anything on the blog. I've been caught up in the process of putting together a draft for the dissertation, along with the stuff of everyday life, but I thought I would put that aside to deal with a fairly significant issue within radical politics in Southern California, although it has national implications. A recent campaign was started by a small number of activists in the area in response to the sexual assault of an anarchist activist by a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member, Seth Miller in 2006. In the succeeding years, a number of attempts have been made to confront Miller and to get the PLP to take action and hold Miller accountable for his actions. The party did nothing at the time, and it continued to stall when another group tried to bring up these issues six years later in the summer of 2012. At this point, Miller is still an active member of the party in New York, and the party has demanded the silence of those who are still seeking his accountability. You can read a brief description of this process, as well as a call to action here. The program that they ask to implement is, in fact, fairly minimal, requesting that the PLP be excluded from the institutions, structures, and spaces of the activist community as long as they continue to protect Miller, and refuse to take the issue of sexual violence seriously as a political, rather than private issue.

Unfortunately, these issues don't come as a surprise to many of the activists that I have been in conversation with. The Progressive Labor Party has a reputation for not taking issues of sexism seriously within its own structures, and has been more than willing to overlook the poor behavior of its activists. Although I have heard nothing specific, from the sounds of activist conversations, it sounds like this incident is not isolated within the structures of the party. This issue becomes apparent in its treatment of the situation with Miller, as it has refused to engage with activists on the issue, and has engaged in a series of victim blaming. Just as notably, as the necessary means posting notes, "The party has, however, asked that the activist and her allies stop spreading “gossip” about Seth because they see the activist’s rape as a private matter rather than a political matter." The party has, in effect, dismissed decades of work on the part of feminists, and is attempting to enforce a set of divisions between the public and the private, the political and the personal, that has largely been rejected by even bourgeois social structures. Those structures of division go back to the party's reactionary investment in the nuclear family, a position that is derived from a limited and problematic reading of Friedrich Engels's The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which falls into a similar defense of the nuclear family, despite its recognition of the structural linkage between state domination, private property, and the construction of the patriarchal family. It's also worth noting that Miller is the son of significant party members, giving him additional protection from the implications of his actions.

The party's refusal to act then has to be understood within a nexus of a set of problematic theoretical positions, along with a selfish desire to protect its cadres at the expense of the larger activist community. This situation is the danger of the kind of cadre and vanguard structure that is created by organizations like the Progressive Labor Party, placing the care of their members above the social justice and needs of the community, particularly those who are privileged members, ensconced within its multi-generational structures. Additionally, these benefits don't seem to be given merely on the basis of seniority, and are far more frequently granted to men. Within this context, it's hard to take the PLP seriously as an organization committed to the fight for social justice. It's members and fellow travelers need to be challenged in this regard, and those who continue to participate in its structures and defend its policies need to be excluded from activist spaces. Social justice cannot function as long as there are princes in its midst, along with the patriarchal structures that go along with those figures. As long as we allow the organization to engage in the forms of obfuscation and dissemblance that it is involved in, because of their commitment and meaningful contributions to other struggles, we become complicit in the organizations refusal to confront sexism and reinforce the contemporary sex/gender system. To put it simply, we become complicit in the injustice of the world.

It's also important not to make this a sectarian issue, for a number of reasons. To begin, the issues that we see in PLP are neither restricted to it as an individual organization, nor are they restricted to cadre organizations as a particular type of organization. I've seen sexist men allowed to get away with atrocious sexist behavior because of their prestige within the informal networks of anarchist activism, for instance, and within other progressive structures. If this generational defense of Miller is an issue of a particular type of cadre and vanguard organization, we see other forms of the defense of men who commit acts of sexual violence and contribute to the sexism of our society as a whole. Far too often, criticisms of other types of organization become a way of refusing to deal with the real problems in their own organizations. As the call for action in Necessary Means notes, this moment should be a point for reflecting on our own informal and formal organizational behavior, to confront the sexist and patriarchal behavior that exists within ourselves, collectively and individually. Additionally, making the issue sectarian offers the Progressive Labor Party far too many easy narratives out of the issue, transforming it into an issue of red-baiting, or other distractions. We need to focus our attention on the ways that this situation is symptomatic of larger, structural issues within our communities, rather than transforming it into another petty anarchist vs. marxist turf battle. Along with this, there is something deeply problematic in the way that women's struggles are instrumentalized in service of these sectarian fights, a way that those fights are no longer understood within their own terms, but only in the service of another type of struggle.

To stick to the kind of critical self-reflection that I am insisting that others engage in, these issues certainly have their analogues in Irvine. The kinds of sexist structures within that context tended to be informal, tied into the networks of friends and allies that made decisions about the structure and nature of demonstrations in the early part of the protest movement. It was notable that these networks were dominated by men, and were nearly exclusively made up of men. Some of the folks who made up those networks had ties to PL, but the anarchist networks had very similar issues. It's notable that in my time in Irvine that no one has set up lessons on how to facilitate a meeting, network, or set up an action. These issues have gotten better over the years. I don't think that we see the same issues that defined the years of 2009-2010, but I think we have a long way to go. Within that context, I feel it's worth noting that I didn't do enough to challenge those problematic structures of the early period of mass protest, all too often trying to establish myself in those circles, and contributed to the problems of creating activist structures that were not open to the participation and contributions of women. I've never been terribly fond of the confessional, and have often agreed with Spinoza that those who repent are twice wretched. But for the very little that it means, I apologize for my mistakes and contributions to the often problematic and sexist environment of UCI activism. Perhaps more significantly, I will try to avoid these pitfalls in the future.

reposted from Work Resumed on the Tower.

The Raveonettes - "Boys Who Rape Should All Be Destroyed"

Revolutionary Heartbreak: Why Every Single Rapist Has to Go

Everything that rises must converge.

I'm sure by now you've read the criticism that my comrades have produced about the Progressive Labor Party's gender politics and their response to the reminder that Seth Miller is a rapist. Through all of our organizing on this issue, our position has been that PLP must administer a systemic solution to the problem of a rapist in their midst, and we've advocated this on behalf of our comrade at every level of leadership to which PLP will grant a non-member access.

To this point I've been able to compartmentalize my feelings by seeing the accountability process as another realm of organizing, but I felt personally betrayed when I learned that PLP implemented a process independently of the process we had been discussing for months. It was a harsh reminder that within the constellation of sexual violence, the political can be very personal.

In the few days since our collective released the original statement calling out Miller and PLP, I've been told by one PLP member that the information I have needs to “be corrected,” but they were not willing to tell me what we have wrong. Moreover, I've been very disappointed in my comrades' efforts to help. People seem afraid to cut out friendships at the expense of dealing with something as difficult as rape, but the pain of cutting those ties is nothing compared to the profound and dehumanizing pain of being raped.

This essay will read to many of you like personal narrative, but you must not dismiss it because it isn't explicitly political analysis. What I describe here reflects real friendships and real communities— relationships that are completely destroyed now because the party decided it was better to let Miller remain than to expel him and support his victim. Maybe there's a political lesson in here somewhere. I just hope I can show how we are all deeply destroyed by rape.

Finally, a disclaimer. A few people from the party have told me to stop gossiping about this to my friends. This is not gossip. Calling this gossip renders a very serious political problem into meaningless social fodder, and it turns fighting patriarchy into labor that is gendered and dismissed as idle and childish. To those members of the party: you will not silence me like that.

This is not a love letter.

I sat on a rickety chair at a recreation center somewhere in Los Angles, and every few minutes a toddler stepped on my foot while amused adults tried to corral the kids back to a play area in the next room. On either side of me people were packed elbow-to-elbow at long folding tables eating homemade food from paper plates. The crowd of 150 or so overflowed into the alley behind the recreation center, and folks took turns at the tables while comrades performed revolutionary songs, poems, and speeches.
 At the end of the night everyone huddled back en masse to sing “The Internationale.” Everywhere I looked fists were aloft. It was like home.

This was the annual Progressive Labor Party May Day dinner. I was invited by a man I knew from organizing on my campus. I'll call him Jay. We started out as distant colleagues working for different unions, but over time we developed a close friendship that, at least for me, transcended our divergent politics. The emergence of that friendship is how last spring I found myself meeting more and more members of PLP, and how I found myself thinking seriously that this was the kind of fulfilling, communal life I wanted to be part of. Everyone was so kind and welcoming. It felt as though this whole world had unfurled before me and I was just supposed to step into it and belong. Maybe I exaggerate, but even in retrospect my reflection feels true to my experience, and it's important to establish that real bonds have been broken throughout all of this.

If any of them knew who I counted among my comrades, they didn't show it. No one ever asked me to identify my politics or defend my positions. No one even explicitly asked me if I was thinking about joining the party. No one until Miller. He sat next to me in front of the stage during the May Day general assembly at Pershing Square. The moment Jay got up to speak to another friend, Miller started in on me aggressively asking questions about my politics.

“So tell me again why you haven't joined the party yet,” he opened. I explained that I don't identify as a statist and I disagree with the premise of democratic centralism. “We'll have to work on that,” he countered. Nearby another PLP member sat watching the stage. He had been really kind to me a few weeks before when I attended a party at his house with Jay. When I tried to make eye contact for an intervention though, he would not look my way.

Maybe Miller sensed my distaste for his questions, because he started pointing out reasons why I would make a good comrade. I laugh at the right jokes. I seemed to fit in with his friends. I was evidently down for antagonizing the cops. I evaded eye contact because I felt uncomfortable from the attention and because the comments seemed to simultaneously mock and flatter me—a strategy known as “negging” to another misogynistic group, self-styled “pick-up-artists.”

This anecdote might seem incidental, but I see it as a symptom of larger problems regarding the ways PLP recruits and retains members and especially women. There's a really telling line in Criticism and Self-Criticism: “But anyone who divides his political comrades from his friends, who keeps one set of ideas for one and another for the other and never the twain shall even overlap, is just as useless as the person with no friends outside the Party.”

This directive to make your friends your comrades at all costs devalues genuine relationships that people build outside the party. But more importantly, it renders those relationships mere recruitment grounds. Ultimately, it's a predatory position. According to the party, a member is useless if he cannot bring his outside friends in. So he must bring them in by any means necessary.

As I learned more about PLP, I started to question whether my friendship with Jay was premised on the principles outlined in Criticism and Self-Criticism. Late one night after hours of tossing back beers in a dim bar on the outskirts of downtown, I told Jay about this insecurity. I told him that I knew the party sees building meaningful friendships as part of its organizing strategy. I said that I was afraid he only spent time with me to recruit me. “I don't see it that way at all,” he explained. He came to the party on his own, had to ask someone how to sign up, and he wouldn't expect anyone else to do things differently. I was wrong about his motivations, and it was enough to convince me that I could trust Jay. His words affirmed the faith I had in his promises to help make sure something happened about Miller.

As I write this I am thinking about three moments with Jay—three moments that define the trajectory of our friendship:

First. We are in his truck and I'm looking at a copy of Challenge, at an article he has written. He tells me I don't have to read it; that he is embarrassed by his writing because it can't compare to what I do; that I am a word architect and the way I write, the way I talk about writing, is beyond him. I read the article and I tell him which parts I like. I worry that I didn't praise him enough, that I should have told him that I like how earnest he is when he writes about politics.

Second. We are on the patio of a coffee shop talking about many things, but I am avoiding saying the words I need to because I'm afraid he will disappoint me. I tell him his friend is a rapist. His jaw drops. I start to cry. He rubs his face, takes off his cap and rubs his shorn hair. He does not know what to say or how to act, so we go dinner and when he drops me off at home we sit in front of my house for a very long time. He says he will help however I need him to. He says he'll burn bridges if it's for a good reason. Later he sends me a text message that says, “WTF. We'll figure it out. Sorry for not knowing, which is messed up on so many levels, not least of which resulted in ur exposure to a bad person. Thanks for being principled and bringing it to light.”

Last. We are in his truck again, but this time I am sobbing because his friend, a leader in his club, suggested that my comrade's rape was adultery and told me that she would have to prove rape happened if we wanted PLP to do anything about it. I tell him through gasps, in the shakiest voice, that this is the logic of cops. I tell him that I started hating cops when they wouldn't protect me from the man who stalked and assaulted me years before. I tell him that this world isn't safe for women. I turn and look at his face as we're stopped at a light in Beverly Hills. He is wiping something from his eyes. When we drive past the La Brea tar pits I ask him to pull over and we walk around the grounds. He tells me that the smell of tar reminds him of his grandfather and playing in the countryside as a child. It's comforting to him in a way that I cannot understand, but his candor comforts me.

As I write this I think about those three moments and I cannot help but compare them to a present in which I have been utterly abandoned. More importantly, I must compare them to a present in which any solidarity between our circles of comrades is impossible. It is a present in which we will never march together against the capitalist state—a present in which we will never be able to work toward revolution because supporting rapists is counter-revolutionary.

And as I think about these moments, I experience profound senses of rage and grief: rage for my comrade who has suffered untold physical and emotional torture on account of what Miller did; grief for losing Jay, who I still love despite this all. I have to believe that PLP is earnest in their decision. The failure to remove Miller from the party and from the organizing spaces we share must be to them a genuine and realistic move in support of revolution as they see it. It must be a kind of religious fervor to think a rapist can be reformed. It must be a twisted kind of faith. That is the only way I can understand things anymore.

What is to be done?

The solution is simple. Eject Miller from the party. Keep ejecting rapists from the party. It isn't difficult. It isn't, as Jay suggested early on, something that must be struggled with for a positive outcome. Just make the decision that the revolution will be feminist and do it.

Radical men theoretically are opposed to structures that enact violence against certain classes of people, whether those classes are workers, people of color, or women. When women* are attacked, it is the responsibility of all radicals to demonstrate solidarity with victims, but in this case, PLP would only consider a process that fit within their parameters. They were uninterested in hearing what our collective wanted to accomplish, and instead insisted that the victim be forced to relive her experience in front of an audience which would judge her truthfulness; if this tribunal decided that she was telling the truth, then they would be willing to give her an audience with Miller where she could confront him and he could apologize and they could both heal.

There will no resolution in this instance if PLP thinks the solution to systemic sexism is individual reform. Rape is political. The writers of an anti-rape zine I admire put it best: “Sexual assault and rape are not things that just happen. They are not merely individual transgressions. These are political— intentional perspectives of a system of domination; a system which is always violent, hostile, and manipulative; a system which cannot be addressed by “fixing” individual perpetrators on an individual level and then welcoming them back into the arms of the community they attacked” (Dangerous Spaces
17). Though the party outwardly appeared invested in an accountability process that at least included the person Miller raped, what they actually did was laughable at best. In a meeting in New York last summer, the party decided that we have not provided conclusive proof that Miller is a rapist, and therefore he only needed to start drinking with a buddy and write a self-criticism about his relationship to patriarchy. Steps like this, the party hopes, will ensure Miller is safe to be around.

Both of these processes, however, set up a system of male-supremacist jurisprudence that provides gendered parameters for what can and cannot be discussed about the rape and the rapist. Just as rape comes to be defined by what men as sexual violation distinguished from their image of “normal” sex, justice in this case becomes defined entirely by the rapist and his apologists. I'm drawing on Catherine MacKinnon here, and what she says about rape between acquaintances seems relevant. MacKinnon points out that women “often feel as or more traumatized from being raped by someone known or trusted, someone with whom at least an illusion of mutuality has been shared, than by some stranger” (177), but PLP seems to operate under the assumption that because Miller and my comrade were close friends his violation of my comrade must not have been so bad. For them, it's only a little misunderstanding to be resolved through a heart to heart talk. That would be justice, according to PLP.

But I am inclined to believe that there is no such thing as justice for someone who has been raped. It is not an act of violence that can be taken back. It is not something for which a person can apologize. A rapist rapes and must not be forgiven because in that forgiveness we accept that rape is the unfortunate choice of a single bad individual. To forgive the rapist is to affirm that he is “an almost metaphysically different creature than the normal man, either a monster or, for liberals, simply very sick” (CE 36). Forgiving our rapists denies that rape is entirely commonplace—an every day exercise of power against which all other sexuality becomes consensual. I want to quote at length from an article recently published in the journal of materialist-feminism, Lies:

Put bluntly, rape is a function of social death. To be raped is not unlike torture in that the raped is placed beyond the bounds of law, norm, or simple caring. To be raped is to be at a point of absolute objectification, boundaries not just violated but uprooted entirely, made meaningless. No help arrives, no language exists to communicate or reconcile one's pain because one is at the point where normalcy produces, contains, and makes operative excess, silence, and the incommunicable...It is only sometimes that one's rape even bears the name or meaning of rape, and where it is nameless it is institutionalized—as in prisons where it is made into a joke, or in the many private hells where one is always 'asking for it.' (CE 37-38)

Rape is embedded into the very fiber of our existence. It is so much a part of our communities and our institutions—our social relations, our material conditions, our discursive practices—that it is practically invisible. But the mundane quality of rape does not mean we are left without pain. The rapist tears our bodies, turns us into meat, and those around us are forced to watch, forced to become, in their own way or another, a kind of rapist themselves. Everyone betrays someone eventually. That's what rape does to us all. And that's why every single rapist has to go.

* I use the term women here, though I recognize that the use of these terms is inherently problematic. I intend to use the term not as a means of oversimplifying dynamics but of providing shorthand for the structural relationship between individuals gendered male and individuals gendered female, as well as the structural relationships between individuals who are not gendered in these ways.

Works Cited

C.E. “Undoing Sex: Against Sexual Optimism.” Lies 1 (2012): 15-44. Web. http://www.liesjournal.info/files/lies-final-for-online-download-done.pdf

Criticism and Self-Criticism. http://archive.org/stream/CriticismAndSelf-criticism/CSC_djvu.txt

MacKinnon, Catherine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

Dangerous Spaces: Violent Resistance, Self-Defence, and Insurrectional Struggle Against Gender.