In the last ten years, massive movements against sexist violence and harassment of women have shaken the world. #Metoo was part of this development in shining a clear light on how men in power of any sort used their position to force themselves on women and how women often have to accept this in order to hold on to their jobs, their positions and their career chances. This is nothing new, it is an inherent part of each class society. But the newly awakened women’s movement shows how consciousness has changed massively, with the new generation of women saying or rather shouting: we do not accept this anymore!
The 1980’s started a period in which post-feminism was dominant, structural oppression and discrimination of women was said not to exist anymore. If women didn’t “make it” in society, it was because of the choices they made. Low wages were due to bad study choices. Working part time was because some women choose to put their family before their career, which then led to low pensions. Partner violence happened, but women had to “just get away”. Sexism was something to joke about, if you didn’t think it funny you were being uptight. In that period of post-feminism, feminist struggle came largely to a halt, all that remained was the struggle for a few women to obtain high positions in politics, in companies, in all sorts of organisations.
This picture has fortunately been shattered to pieces by a decade of women’s struggle, which had an increasing effect on all struggles in society and has helped push the consciousness forward in the working class on the need to fight against gender oppression. It is no wonder that women, and mostly young women, are at the front of many of the revolts we have seen in the last years. Many sections of the then Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI, now International Socialist Alternative — ISA) were active in these women’s movements, often as the most active in the streets, always with a program that challenged the capitalist system as being guilty for structural sexism in all aspects of life.
But while these sections built up impressive campaigns — in Ireland, Brazil, Russia, Belgium — and many other sections made excellent interventions whenever these issues came up in their countries, the day-to-day leadership of the CWI, the International Secretariat, never got involved. At best they were not interested, at worst they actively advised sections to stay away from these movements. There was no international coordination of the work on women’s issues, no attempt was made to elevate the experiences of the sections who developed a socialist feminist approach on an international level. Absent from the newly emerging women’s movement, politically the IS developed more and more an “economist” view on questions of sexism or other forms of oppression. Economism means you defend women’s struggles on wages, working conditions, public services, etc, but you don’t campaign against sexism in society as that would be “divisive for the working class”.
It is a concept that is totally wrong. Women’s oppression and class oppression are intertwined. Sexism divides the working class. Bourgeois or establishment feminism is also divisive as their “solution” is only the feminisation of the elite, changing little to nothing for the broad layers, often asking working men to give up their “privileges”, that is a full time job on a steady contract, decent pensions etc not to improve the situation of women workers but in a race to the bottom. A real socialist answer to this however is not to ignore sexism, but to fight it with a socialist feminist approach, demanding that these become rights for all workers and fighting every form of oppression. This is the approach developed by many of our sections in the last decade, an approach that is part of the best traditions of the workers’ movement and an approach ISA is dedicated to revive. To do that in the International itself a break with the old CWI leadership proved necessary. This was shown openly in the faction struggle, in which the question of the women’s movement and other movements against oppression was a central issue, that led to a minority around the old leadership splitting away in 2019. They left and we changed the name of the International to International Socialist Alternative (ISA). Since the split, an International Women’s Bureau was set up and elected at the World Congress. This Bureau was instrumental in launching Rosa — International Socialist Feminists as an international campaign, organising a first broad international women’s meeting in April and four sessions on issues of women’s and LGBTQI+ oppression during our Virtual Marxist University in July.
In turning the page, ISA is founding its approach on the best experiences and practices of the sections who have done extensive work against sexism and women’s oppression and have established internal practices that fight sexism in their ranks. We understand that sexism is an integral part of the capitalist society we live in. As we build organisations that fight the system on every level, and hold a zero-tolerance approach towards discriminatory behaviour, we understand we cannot rule out that members can have sexist attitudes as we all grew up with them. But whereas we cannot be responsible for every act of every member, we are responsible for the education given to our members on these issues and the atmosphere in our parties. We are also responsible for how we handle complaints for sexist behaviour against members. That’s why the International Women’s Bureau is now working on a proposal for international guidelines in the fight against sexism within our own ranks to be discussed in the leading bodies of ISA and in all sections in order to make full use of the many good policies and practices developed in our sections to adopt a common approach.
It is within this framework that we discussed a horribly mishandled case, dating back to 2012 — 2013, of serious sexual violence and harassment that occurred in the then French section of the CWI, now a section of the “refounded CWI”, in effect the minority that split off from what is now ISA. At the same time, an ex-member of the CWI has started an individual campaign in France to name and shame the perpetrator of these acts, a leading figure in the section then and now. Unfortunately, the ex-member brought this case in the public domain against the expressed wishes of the main victim at the time. This puts an unbearable pressure on the victim having no control over the public narratives about her case. Whereas we treat such cases with the utmost discretion, protecting the private lives of the victims, in this case we agree with the victim that a political answer, not from third parties, but from the victim herself, is more than justified.
We are honoured that T, the main victim of this abuse, remains an active member of the ISA. Her statement follows below.
The International Executive of the International Socialist Alternative (ISA).
Since mid-July 2020, a public campaign (“ARV Justice”) to denounce rape and sexual harassment that occurred in Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), the French section of the CWI at the time and of the “refounded CWI” today, was launched by a former member of this organization. As the main victim of the acts denounced, I find myself in the right, but also in spite of myself in the obligation, to react publicly.
First of all, I would like to point out that I am not at the origin of this campaign, and that the person behind it has not asked for my agreement nor my opinion, neither on the substance of the campaign nor on its form. I explicitly asked this ex-member to stop, but he refused.
The acts were committed between 2008 and 2012 by A, a GR leader. In an internal commission of inquiry, he acknowledged the facts described by various young women, while denying that his attitude posed a problem and refusing the term “rape”. After a report of the investigation, and after a long discussion, the GR leadership voted to accept the term ”rape“ to qualify what happened and excluded A for one year. This duration is ridiculous in comparison to the acts committed and the victims’ demands were never taken into account. This was made possible by a huge lack of feminist consciousness within GR, with the support of the International Secretariat of the CWI, by hiding the nature of the facts from the rest of the International, and by methods of intimidation and demoralization on the part of A’s allies towards the victims and those who supported them, which is often called ”second rape”.
A few years ago, the #MeToo movement saw many women publicly denounce the rapes, harassment and other sexist acts of which they are victims. Like the majority of the labor movement, I rejoiced in what this movement allowed: that shame would change sides, that women would realize that they are not facing these types of problems alone, but that they would be discussed collectively.
The task of the socialists, in my opinion, is to politicize this issue, to show the link between sexism and class society, to bring this issue to the workplaces, and to use Metoo to fight sexism within the organizations of the labor movement. For the labor movement does not exist outside of society. It is subject to pressure from capitalist society and if we do not actively fight sexism, racism, homophobia and other forms of oppression, these will exist within the organizations and will not only be a danger to the members who are victims of them, but also a brake on the fight against capitalism.
For Marxists, the oppression of women has its origin in the class division of society and is not separate from the oppression of workers in general. Capitalism has inherited the oppression of women from older class systems and has accommodated it in its own interests: women are a pool of lower paid workers because their wages were often seen as supplementary income in the family, and they perform domestic work unpaid but essential for society. The capitalist class uses sexism to “divide and rule” and maintain its domination. It is not possible for the working class to win its historic battle against the capitalist class if it lets itself be infected by sexism. The emancipation of women and that of the working class are therefore part of the same process.
A crucial error of the “refounded CWI”, of which GR is part, is to consider that it is precisely feminist struggles, not sexism, that divide the working class. For them, women should keep quiet about oppression unless it can be very directly linked to the obvious interests of capitalists, such as the gender wage gap or cuts. For them, a woman who complains about sexism alienates the solidarity of working class men. Without them realizing it, it is in fact insulting to the working class, which they consider sexist in essence and incapable of evolving on this point (they have a similar and even more blatant attitude on the question of transphobia).
At the time of Metoo, I chose not to denounce the acts of which I was a victim in GR publicly. The important thing for me was to change things within the CWI so that such a thing could no longer happen. I was confident that things were moving in the right direction with the socialist feminist ROSA campaigns in Ireland and Belgium and the feminist work that was developing in many other sections. I thought that as the debates on fighting sexism progressed, feminist consciousness would change within the CWI to the extent that GR, an unrecoverable sexist sect in my view, would disappear from the International.
In recent years, the leadership of the CWI has not understood the importance of the feminist movement and its new stakes, and has not been able to face the tasks that should have been those of a revolutionary leadership. On the contrary, the International Secretariat of the CWI and a minority of its members have locked themselves into an economist approach to feminism and have dismissed all new issues of feminism as “identity politics”. This is one of the aspects that led to the split of the CWI in 2019, between International Socialist Alternative (ISA) of which I am a member, on the one hand, and the re-founded CWI (grouping around the former International Secretariat, of which GR is now a part), on the other.
As a member of ISA, I salute the work that has been done by ISA since the split to build the ROSA campaign, for the creation of an International Women’s Bureau, and for the development of an international policy against sexism within the organization. The GR affair has since been re-discussed and the international leadership of ISA has overturned the decision to reinstate A taken by the CWI at the time.
While I am satisfied with the measures taken by ISA, it is true that I did not win my case in the French courts. But what kind of justice are we talking about?
In September 2019, Sandra Muller, the initiator of the hashtag “balancetonporc” (“snitch on your pig”), the French counterpart of metoo, was sentenced to pay 20,000 euros to the person she had publicly accused of sexual harassment, Eric Brion, while he admitted the facts she was reporting in her tweet are correct.
Sandra Muller has been sentenced to pay much more than the compensation a woman can get by filing a sexist complaint, and there have been no convictions for the insults and death threats received by women who have used the hashtags metoo and balancetonporc.
It is completely illusory to believe that the current judicial system has the mission of bringing justice to those who are victims of specific oppressions. It is a system in which one layer of the elite enforces laws made by another layer of the elite. Through feminist struggles (and struggles against other forms of oppression), we can change these laws in favor of the oppressed. But their application will remain subject to an interpretation tinged with dominant prejudices, which will work in favor of the oppressor, and by magistrates from and representing the dominant layer (with rare exceptions).
Moreover, the whole issue at stake in trials is whether or not the accused is guilty and what society will do with that person. Victims will obtain reparation only in very rare cases and after a long and trying procedure. The lack of resources in public services makes it difficult to obtain free psychological help. It is the relatives or associations of victims who will help them as best they can to rebuild their lives.
It is necessary to break with this “justice” to establish one whose primary mission would be the fight against oppression and exploitation, with elected magistrates trained to recognize and fight violence against women but also racist and homophobic violence.
We also need hiring and funding in public services for, among other things, free access to psychological assistance, accessible school nurses in every school and sex education courses that include the notion of consent. Demands for employment and housing for all are also essential to ensure that women are not trapped in abusive relationships for economic reasons.
Shortly after denouncing A in GR, I pressed charges without much hope of conviction, since I had no material evidence, several years had passed, and because of the very nature of the judicial system developed above. I did it above all so that possible future victims could rely on this first complaint.
The prosecutor decided not to prosecute and I did not take the initiative to file a lawsuit as a private party. That would have required a lot of time, energy and means that I preferred to devote to the collective feminist socialist struggle rather than to an individual legal battle.
Nevertheless, the person behind “ARV justice” intentionally provoked A and his allies to sue him for defamation, which they did — how could they not, knowing that one of those people is a city council member? Which means that my rape case will indeed be discussed in court, but with the rapist as the plaintiff!
Apart from not having asked the victims’ consent to use their story publicly, a sort of forced metoo, and being of no use to the feminist socialist struggle, the ARV denunciation campaign gives ammunition to the enemies of the labor movement. They can very well take this story and generalize it to all leftist organizations, including those that actively and sincerely fight against sexism.
For years, I have been fighting to overcome the demoralization and disgust inspired in me by the GR and the International Secretariat of the CWI, to continue to build a socialist international where I can defend my ideas and fight for socialism and for the end of all forms of oppression. Far from bringing me any “justice,” this campaign is trampling on my efforts by allowing my story to be used against the socialist labor movement of which I am a part, instead of being used, as I wish, to draw lessons for the future.
I call on all those who have been alarmed by this campaign to fight sexism in the political and trade union organizations to which they belong, in their workplaces and in their schools, and to always be vigilant so that cases of sexism are not used against what the victims are fighting for without their consent, which constitutes a “third rape”.
T, Main victim
