leyton96
NGO's selling privilege checking solutions
He's definitely SWP. On the TUSC steering committee he was named by the SWP as their Councillor.
SWP expulsions and squabbles
- Thread starter Nigel Irritable
- Start date
He's definitely SWP. On the TUSC steering committee he was named by the SWP as their Councillor.
barney_pig
Po-cha-na-quar-hip
I think lava letter remained loyal to the swp. He has probably gone through a record breaking number of party monikers in his time as councillor: elected as a socialist alliance candidate, then respect, then TUSC and finally as an independent.
His wiki page still has him as a loyalist
His wiki page still has him as a loyalist
leyton96
NGO's selling privilege checking solutions
He was never elected as a TUSC candidate on the ballot paper. Since the Respect split he has always run as an 'Independent Socialist'.
I think academia can still work on the 'nod basis' a close family member got into a top university after doing some work for one of the head honchos, he liked him, though he did have the requisite quals, and in some ways, I think it was ok,
I'm not comfortable with these 'outing' campaigns on campus and elsewhere, especially as you say its not clear on what basis he got the Phd place, on the other hand, social work is not the most advisable area for someone accused of such an offence.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
How hands off is the SWP cc is the question - and if involved what does this say about their long term relationship with the accused given that leading members were privately asked to fund his studies.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
I don't have any problem with a group making people aware of his background, but if they are going to do that then they should be clear about what they are claiming.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Establish the existence of the wicth hunt please.
bolshiebhoy
socialism leinster drink
The hounding of someone accused but never proven to be something isn't a witch hunt?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Where is this hounding?
The party that you don't have the bottle to actually join argues that he has a case to answer if he ever tries to rejoin. Does that not apply to society as well? Do we not get to question him on the case he has to answer? The stalinist logic at work here (the party has decided, the matter is now closed, it is now no one elses' business) is clear for all to see. God, it's so blatant.
The party that you don't have the bottle to actually join argues that he has a case to answer if he ever tries to rejoin. Does that not apply to society as well? Do we not get to question him on the case he has to answer? The stalinist logic at work here (the party has decided, the matter is now closed, it is now no one elses' business) is clear for all to see. God, it's so blatant.
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Idris2002
Christmas Eve, you know?
Anecdote time: at a party in Dublin a couple of years ago, I met a girl who admitted to my face that she had always been pencilled in for a particular job that I had, at that point, recently applied for. (I would have been a bad fit for it anyhow, and even if it had been a fair fight there's no guarantee I would have got it). I also applied for a thing in New Zealand where I was told over the grape vine that someone else was going to get it "on the nod" - this person had been hanging around that department on short term contracts for a few years, and had been doing all the shit work no-one else wanted to cover. I don't have much of a problem with that sort of scenario.
bolshiebhoy
socialism leinster drink
The prof replies to Tithi from the ISO's disingenuous "I don't really want to get involved in your internal row" letter.
REPLY TO TITHI BHATTACHARYA
Dear Tithi,
I was in two minds about replying to a letter that, though addressed personally to me, is plainly intended as a public intervention in the debate insides the SWP and indeed has already been posted online. But I decided in the end to take it at face value and respond in the hope that you are genuinely interested in what I think. Since we have had friendly relations in the past, I would have appreciated if you had contacted me privately to get my side of what has happened first, but I suppose that would be asking too much. I'm glad that you still regard the SWP as your organization, even though you are currently a member of the International Socialist Organization (US). It is open to question whether pronouncing with such confidence on a case of which you admit to having 'no knowledge of the ins and outs' is the best way of expressing your sense of belonging. But then I have given up speculating about the intentions of those who, from a distance and in ignorance of the facts, have chosen to taken sides in our internal arguments.
Your critique of Charlie Kimber's and my articles is highly selective and thoroughly tendentious. Of course, we are well aware that women's recognition that they have been assaulted very often only emerges through a long process and thanks to caring support. So, also of course, the fact that W did not claim in 2010 to have been raped in no way invalidates the complaint of rape that she made in September 2012. That was common ground among all concerned when her complaint was investigated, and I don't understand how you can infer the opposite from our articles, imputing morally repugnant attitudes to women to Charlie and me that we reject with horror. As part of the same campaign of misinformation to which you have apparently succumbed, it is now being asserted that rape was alleged in 2010. All that Charlie and I did was to point out that this too is untrue.
I quite understand why you should be so contemptuous of mere 'facts' such as this. This frees you from the obligation to find out what happened, and allows you to assert, for example, and again without any evidence, that in our articles we denied 'the integrity and testimony of the female complainants'. It also lets you ignore our efforts to ensure that the second complaint was heard and that our disciplinary procedures have been reviewed. This kind of intervention in our crisis serves neither justice nor the truth.
You start your letter by praising the SWP and my own past work. How dare you then, from such a position of evident ignorance, accuse me and the rest of the SWP leadership of putting our interests before those of the party? We are happy to place our arguments before 'the full membership of the SWP' . It is they who will determine the party's fate.
In comradeship,
Alex
On 19 Oct 2013, at 16:14, Tithi Bhattacharya wrote:
Dear Alex,
I address this letter to you because amongst the current members of the SWP CC I have known you the longest. For very long I have restrained myself from saying anything about the dispute in the SWP. Your recent response to the 18 comrades on the ISJ editorial board has forced me to change my mind. I will not waste your time here by filling paragraphs about how your book Making History was one of the key conceptual scaffolding for my Ph. D. Thesis and later my first book. Although I could. What I will state, briefly are three things:
1. how much your work, over the years, has animated my understanding of Marxism.
2. How inspired I was to meet the SWP as a student in London in the mid 1990s and what attracted me most to the Party was it’s members’ open derision for all aspects of bourgeois sexuality/morality—I came from three generations of Stalinism, such attitudes only existed in early Bolshevik writings for me!
3. How distressed I am about the public stance you have taken regarding the current crisis in the SWP in your most recent response to the other comrades on the ISJ editorial board.
Let me state at the outset: I have no knowledge of the specific ins and outs of the dispute. I do not know the women who have made the complaints very well. I am not going to make an argument that all women should be believed when they make a complaint about sexual assault (that is an argument of a vastly complex and dense nature that I am not about to take up here).
I am concerned here about two examples of blatantly sleight of hand arguments that you and your co-author employ in your recent response to the other ISJ editors. I am sure you do this consciously, because to assume ignorance of the social context of these particular arguments on your part would be insulting to both your politics and your mind.
1. You and Charlie Kimber begin the article (2nd. Paragraph) with this assertion:
“We italicise the date, because contrary to some of the falsehoods currently circulating, this was the first time that rape had been alleged against this comrade. “
This is your first disingenuous argument. You make this claim knowing perfectly well the very long history of complaints by women under capitalism where women’s consciousness of the assault is often fragmented, delayed and very often pieced together only through a process of supportive dialogue with friends, family and loved ones. You of all people cannot be unaware of the vast literature that exists about the ‘unhappy consciousness’ that diminishes rape/sexual assault in its first approximation in the survivor’s own mind in order to make the unimaginable, tolerable. It is only through support, discussion, sometimes long years of therapy with professionals that survivors give themselves permission to identify and acknowledge what really happened.
Did this happen with comrade W? I have no way of knowing for certain. But for you, as a revolutionary socialist, to write of the woman changing her narrative from harassment to rape without providing this fundamental context of how or why a complainant ‘changes’ her complaint under capitalism is, to me, horrifying. You write of this delayed and ‘changed’ rape complaint the way the bourgeois press would write about, say, poverty. As a 'fact'--rather than as the outcome of a series of complex and dense historical processes. That you assert this ‘fact’ in service of an organ of the party that came up with, to say the least, a disputed verdict only makes this more distressing.
2. You and Charlie Kimber repeatedly use ‘confidentiality’ regarding the dispute cases as something which stops you from discussing such things in public. This is your second sleight of hand. To an outsider it appears that if you were unethical and broke confidentiality you would have an even more damning case against the opposition comrades.
Is that true? Maybe, maybe not. Again, I have no way of knowing. What I do know is the word confidentiality is used here in a highly charged way: to disingenuously invoke a long history of real struggle against sexist handling of cases of sexual assault in order to protect the identity, welfare and integrity of the female complainant. What you Alex, and Charlie Kimber are doing--is using your reader’s perception of that history to call into question the integrity and testimony of the female complainants and their supporters. Are the survivors of sexual assault in your organization really more concerned about the ‘confidentiality’ of process than the resolution of this crisis in an open democratic manner in front of the full membership of the SWP? Having met and spoken with one of the complainants, it is hard for me to believe that the women concerned would put the survival of the Party’s current leadership over the survival of the Party itself and its long history.
What I have stated above are essentially the ways in which you have by omission and by rhetorical sleight of hand disregarded or recrafted particular aspects of the historical experience of women under capitalism to state your case at a specific dispute within your organization. The SWP used to be my organization for many years. I will continue-- in many many ways --to think of it as my own, as long as I know that there are comrades within it fighting for a set of revolutionary Marxist politics, and not merely for a set of organizational procedures that have been called to question. Perhaps this is the tragedy of my own unhappy consciousness that still refuses to accept the enormity of disappointment.
Sincerely,
Tithi Bhattacharya
P. S. Although this letter is meant to state my disagreement with Alex, I hope the 18 comrades who signed the recent ISJ document will use my voice as one more raised to rebuild the SWP. They may share/use this letter as they collectively see fit. I do not know all 18 of you personally and hence cannot cc it to all on that list, I apologize.
REPLY TO TITHI BHATTACHARYA
Dear Tithi,
I was in two minds about replying to a letter that, though addressed personally to me, is plainly intended as a public intervention in the debate insides the SWP and indeed has already been posted online. But I decided in the end to take it at face value and respond in the hope that you are genuinely interested in what I think. Since we have had friendly relations in the past, I would have appreciated if you had contacted me privately to get my side of what has happened first, but I suppose that would be asking too much. I'm glad that you still regard the SWP as your organization, even though you are currently a member of the International Socialist Organization (US). It is open to question whether pronouncing with such confidence on a case of which you admit to having 'no knowledge of the ins and outs' is the best way of expressing your sense of belonging. But then I have given up speculating about the intentions of those who, from a distance and in ignorance of the facts, have chosen to taken sides in our internal arguments.
Your critique of Charlie Kimber's and my articles is highly selective and thoroughly tendentious. Of course, we are well aware that women's recognition that they have been assaulted very often only emerges through a long process and thanks to caring support. So, also of course, the fact that W did not claim in 2010 to have been raped in no way invalidates the complaint of rape that she made in September 2012. That was common ground among all concerned when her complaint was investigated, and I don't understand how you can infer the opposite from our articles, imputing morally repugnant attitudes to women to Charlie and me that we reject with horror. As part of the same campaign of misinformation to which you have apparently succumbed, it is now being asserted that rape was alleged in 2010. All that Charlie and I did was to point out that this too is untrue.
I quite understand why you should be so contemptuous of mere 'facts' such as this. This frees you from the obligation to find out what happened, and allows you to assert, for example, and again without any evidence, that in our articles we denied 'the integrity and testimony of the female complainants'. It also lets you ignore our efforts to ensure that the second complaint was heard and that our disciplinary procedures have been reviewed. This kind of intervention in our crisis serves neither justice nor the truth.
You start your letter by praising the SWP and my own past work. How dare you then, from such a position of evident ignorance, accuse me and the rest of the SWP leadership of putting our interests before those of the party? We are happy to place our arguments before 'the full membership of the SWP' . It is they who will determine the party's fate.
In comradeship,
Alex
On 19 Oct 2013, at 16:14, Tithi Bhattacharya wrote:
Dear Alex,
I address this letter to you because amongst the current members of the SWP CC I have known you the longest. For very long I have restrained myself from saying anything about the dispute in the SWP. Your recent response to the 18 comrades on the ISJ editorial board has forced me to change my mind. I will not waste your time here by filling paragraphs about how your book Making History was one of the key conceptual scaffolding for my Ph. D. Thesis and later my first book. Although I could. What I will state, briefly are three things:
1. how much your work, over the years, has animated my understanding of Marxism.
2. How inspired I was to meet the SWP as a student in London in the mid 1990s and what attracted me most to the Party was it’s members’ open derision for all aspects of bourgeois sexuality/morality—I came from three generations of Stalinism, such attitudes only existed in early Bolshevik writings for me!
3. How distressed I am about the public stance you have taken regarding the current crisis in the SWP in your most recent response to the other comrades on the ISJ editorial board.
Let me state at the outset: I have no knowledge of the specific ins and outs of the dispute. I do not know the women who have made the complaints very well. I am not going to make an argument that all women should be believed when they make a complaint about sexual assault (that is an argument of a vastly complex and dense nature that I am not about to take up here).
I am concerned here about two examples of blatantly sleight of hand arguments that you and your co-author employ in your recent response to the other ISJ editors. I am sure you do this consciously, because to assume ignorance of the social context of these particular arguments on your part would be insulting to both your politics and your mind.
1. You and Charlie Kimber begin the article (2nd. Paragraph) with this assertion:
“We italicise the date, because contrary to some of the falsehoods currently circulating, this was the first time that rape had been alleged against this comrade. “
This is your first disingenuous argument. You make this claim knowing perfectly well the very long history of complaints by women under capitalism where women’s consciousness of the assault is often fragmented, delayed and very often pieced together only through a process of supportive dialogue with friends, family and loved ones. You of all people cannot be unaware of the vast literature that exists about the ‘unhappy consciousness’ that diminishes rape/sexual assault in its first approximation in the survivor’s own mind in order to make the unimaginable, tolerable. It is only through support, discussion, sometimes long years of therapy with professionals that survivors give themselves permission to identify and acknowledge what really happened.
Did this happen with comrade W? I have no way of knowing for certain. But for you, as a revolutionary socialist, to write of the woman changing her narrative from harassment to rape without providing this fundamental context of how or why a complainant ‘changes’ her complaint under capitalism is, to me, horrifying. You write of this delayed and ‘changed’ rape complaint the way the bourgeois press would write about, say, poverty. As a 'fact'--rather than as the outcome of a series of complex and dense historical processes. That you assert this ‘fact’ in service of an organ of the party that came up with, to say the least, a disputed verdict only makes this more distressing.
2. You and Charlie Kimber repeatedly use ‘confidentiality’ regarding the dispute cases as something which stops you from discussing such things in public. This is your second sleight of hand. To an outsider it appears that if you were unethical and broke confidentiality you would have an even more damning case against the opposition comrades.
Is that true? Maybe, maybe not. Again, I have no way of knowing. What I do know is the word confidentiality is used here in a highly charged way: to disingenuously invoke a long history of real struggle against sexist handling of cases of sexual assault in order to protect the identity, welfare and integrity of the female complainant. What you Alex, and Charlie Kimber are doing--is using your reader’s perception of that history to call into question the integrity and testimony of the female complainants and their supporters. Are the survivors of sexual assault in your organization really more concerned about the ‘confidentiality’ of process than the resolution of this crisis in an open democratic manner in front of the full membership of the SWP? Having met and spoken with one of the complainants, it is hard for me to believe that the women concerned would put the survival of the Party’s current leadership over the survival of the Party itself and its long history.
What I have stated above are essentially the ways in which you have by omission and by rhetorical sleight of hand disregarded or recrafted particular aspects of the historical experience of women under capitalism to state your case at a specific dispute within your organization. The SWP used to be my organization for many years. I will continue-- in many many ways --to think of it as my own, as long as I know that there are comrades within it fighting for a set of revolutionary Marxist politics, and not merely for a set of organizational procedures that have been called to question. Perhaps this is the tragedy of my own unhappy consciousness that still refuses to accept the enormity of disappointment.
Sincerely,
Tithi Bhattacharya
P. S. Although this letter is meant to state my disagreement with Alex, I hope the 18 comrades who signed the recent ISJ document will use my voice as one more raised to rebuild the SWP. They may share/use this letter as they collectively see fit. I do not know all 18 of you personally and hence cannot cc it to all on that list, I apologize.
Rosen weighs in again:
http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/swp-untruth-about-me-from-callinicos.html
http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/swp-untruth-about-me-from-callinicos.html
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
a tad hypocritical the Prof or you using the word disingenuous considering the dishonesty of both of you
What occurs to me with all the claims/counter claims of dishonesty made by the prof and others is that the swp board of directors (or more specifically, their spokesMEN, appear ill equipped at dealing with the turmoil of criticisms that they face. Presumably, in an earlier, pre web steam age, whenever political issues arose that were controversial, they were probably resolved by a quick cc meeting (or maybe a telephone conversation or two), and things could move on, with little consequential scrutiny or accountability. Issues could be squashed, more or less at source. How the prof must long for those bygone golden days...
Alex needs a new department i reckon, something akin to the bourgeois political party.'rebuttal units' that we occasionally hear of.
Alex needs a new department i reckon, something akin to the bourgeois political party.'rebuttal units' that we occasionally hear of.
discokermit
Well-Known Member
creeping about the halls of residence, eyeing up the teenagers. what a cunt.So. Delta has funding to do a PhD in social work
http://angrywomen.wordpress.com/201...given-phd-place-at-liverpool-hope-university/
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
The problem I have with you Pickman's is, you seem to have either no comprehension of the socialist worker position, or no desire whatsoever to take on what socialist worker is saying. The way like a child you gleefully seizes upon a contradiction, in after all what is a dialectical analysis, is just stupid. I therefore have to assume you're dishonestly refusing to take on, what after all is quite an ABC of revolutionary politics argument. Quite common sense argument.
Did Princess Diana, or Margaret Thatcher for that matter, suffer from women’s oppression? Once you become part of the ruling class, no, not the fundamentals of women’s oppression. Even middle-class women are to an extent excluded from the fundamentals of women’s oppression. Concerns over sexist labels, sexuality, influence on appearance, and other sexism wouldn’t really add up to much of oppression, if you overcame the fundamental causes of women’s oppression, discrimination in education, housing, pay, access to equal opportunities and one in particular, childcare.
It’s a bit like claiming that Barack Obama suffers from racial oppression. Again, compare his life to some black person from the ghetto. Is he really oppressed?
My other question was, did Diana benefit from women’s oppression. Class, the class system, is the cause of women’s oppression. It doesn’t exist because society is simply misogynistic, it exists because the oppression of women benefits this system, by making the working class pay the cost of producing the next working class. It benefits the ruling class at the top of the system, so Diana did benefit from women’s oppression.
Class is the cause of the oppression, and class is the solution to the oppression. This is why it is important not to give an inch to the idea that Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher etc are somehow in solidarity to the working class women because they are in some kind of solidarity of women’s oppression. They are not. This was the big arguments at the time of Diana and Thatcher, that somehow Thatcher was some kind of step forward forward, but they were part of the problem, not the solution. Just like Barack Obama is part of the problem, not the solution.
But even to suggest, as Belboid did, that men benefit from women’s oppression is wrong, for the same reasons. There is an appearance that men are better off. Men do have on average better wages than women. But if women’s wages were brought up to the same level as men, it wouldn’t be men that would suffer, it would be the ruling class. In fact men would benefit, as I pointed out earlier. But there’s an even more important reason than economic gain.
Class is the cause of women’s oppression, class is the solution. In Northern Ireland Protestants in solidarity with their bosses appeared to benefit from sectarianism, after all they received more wages than the Catholics. And yet the wages of the Protestants in Northern Ireland, were lower on average than workers in England and Wales and Scotland, why? Because Irish workers were divided upon sectarian lines, the bosses could beat them more easily in any wage disputes etc. This is why we need to emphasise solidarity between male and female workers, and not so illusions in solidarity between classes. Class is the cause of women’s oppression, and class is the solution to women’s oppression. We don’t want to argue as revolutionaries that men benefit from women’s oppression, we should point to the truth that men benefit from women’s liberation! We should be promoting solidarity in the class, not between classes.
The point for revolutionaries is not to interpret the world, but to change it. And to do that we don’t want to just give the best description of how it appears, we want to lay bare the logic of how it works.
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TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
Pickman's model/that's shut you up
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belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
actually, this just shows that you dont understand the SWP's position.
Yes, Diana and Thatcher suffered from the oppression that affects all women - around their appearance for instance. you would have to have your head buried in the sand to fail to recognise that.
That has nothing to do with the suggestion (that I haven't made) that men benefit from women's oppression.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
What a hypocrite you are, I've just mentioned that.
and here http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/swp-expulsions-and-squabbles.303876/page-455#post-12635115
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
no you dishonest little man, you denied it, a somewhat different thing. Even Callinicos would be embarrassed by your arguments. Now you go further and deny that middle-class women aren't oppressed! HilariousWhat a hypocrite you are, I've just mentioned that.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
Yeah Princess Diana had childcare problems
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
did she have issues of childcare? As a member of the ruling class she benefits from the system, so she benefit from the oppression of women?
the point being made, is as obvious as the nose on your face. It's attacking the myth that women had some kind of solidarity with Thatcher, Princess Diana. That's it.
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belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
so those without children are now added to the list of non-oppressed women! you really are a fucking joke.
Good thing no one has proposed the myth that women had some solidarity with thatcher. Except you
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
You are not being serious???
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