Bogey Bowler
During a recent trip to Sheffield, a comrade recounted a weird episode that highlighted for me some of the absurdities - and real dangers - that are implicit in the ‘safe space’ scaremongering currently being whipped up by sections of the left.
My comrade and two members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty - female and male - were leafleting a government building in the centre of the city on an employment victimisation case. Things were proceeding as these things generally do until Maxine Bowler - prominent Socialist Workers Party activist and central committee loyalist - pitched up and disappeared into the building.
The female AWL comrade was instantly alarmed: “What’s she doing here?” she asked, clearly disconcerted. “Er, she probably has a meeting here,” someone said. The AWL comrade was not reassured at all, however, that comrade Bowler must surely have some legitimate business on the premises and claimed that comrade Bowler’s individual presence in this large building made her feel “not safe”: here was a ‘rape denier’ - she is a member of the ‘rape denying’ SWP disputes committee, after all. This was no flippant remark: I’m told that the AWL comrade was obviously upset and appeared at one point to be on the verge of tears. So I’m certainly not questioning her sincerity here; quite another thing is the supposed threat that Maxine Bowler represents to other women. Seriously, what did the AWLer think comrade Bowler’s presence portended?
Perhaps the ‘sleeper’ male rapists amongst the hundreds working in the building would suddenly be activated when they spotted Maxine in the lift, knowing that they could now assault women in their workplace and then scuttle along to this SWP comrade for an alibi and a character reference? Was it perhaps being suggested that comrade Bowler herself represented some sort of physical threat to the women there? Really, what nonsense - and potentially dangerous nonsense.
At one point, incredibly, the AWLer actually proposed that security staff be approached to deal with comrade Bowler! Did she want this SWPer expelled from the building? Should a posse of vigilant guards have shadowed this dangerous fiend around until her business was concluded, then firmly deposit her onto the pavement? Why muck about? Why not simply phone the police and make the world a marginally ‘safer space’ for women by having Bowler (along with the rest of the SWP majority) banged up?
Let’s stop this, comrades. The problem is not that comrade Bowler - or the revolutionary organisation to which she is loyal - deny rape, despite the shockingly badly bungled and crassly insensitive way a recent accusation was handled by the leadership and its disputes committee. The problem is that the bureaucratic centralist regime that holds sway in the SWP - with the consent and connivance of comrades like Maxine Bowler - disempowers the membership and creates an inner-party regime where gross abuses of power by an unaccountable apparatus (yes, including rape) are made potentially easier.
Incidentally, this is the point of the ‘Rape is not the problem’ headline in our March 14 issue that some comrades have baulked at. The problem with the SWP is its semi-Stalinist internal regime, not a generalised culture that pooh-poohs the notion that women are sexually assaulted: a rape accusation was a trigger to the crisis, not the cause. We need to call for a democratic revolution in organisations like the SWP and use every opportunity we can grab to engage with its members to agitate for it. Its exile from the workers’ movement would be a disaster - for all of us, actually.
I’m sure some comrades will accuse me of ‘not taking rape seriously’, of trivialising the real distress of this AWLer or of using language that unconsciously reveals sexist assumptions. I flatly reject all that. In fact, it seems clear to me that politics of the sort that engender the type of brittle, irrational and childlikeresponse of this individual AWL woman to the deadly serious question of rape are actually the trivialising element in all of this.
What is certainly not serious is to react to the appearance of ‘bogey woman’ Bowler - or any other SWPer, people who are our comrades in a common movement - as if the wicked witch of the north has just touched down at the head of a squadron of flying monkeys.
Mark Fischer
London
