See the original blog post, "PLP Defends Rapists" for the announcement and call to action regarding PLP's defense of admitted rapist Seth Miller.


***TRIGGER WARNING*** Everything in this blog is a frank discussion of sexual violence and rape.



Tuesday, January 29, 2013

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.


Sunday, January 27, 2013

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.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

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".

Sunday, January 20, 2013

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.


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.    


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 

Thursday, January 17, 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.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

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:
PLPAnarchists
Bro codeMale-dominated groups fear confronting their own patriarchy; machismo is valuedMale-dominated groups fear confronting their own patriarchy; machismo is valued
Unity above accountabilityParty unity is primaryGroup cohesion is primary
Political prioritiesClass struggle is primary, feminism is anti-working-classAttacking the state or capitalism is primary over attacking internal oppression
StructureRigid structures prioritize party leadership, party cohesionHidden structures based on social capital and friendships prioritize “cred” and charismatic white men
Accountability processesPointless “self-criticisms” with no change in individuals, structures, or politicsPrioritizing rehabilitating and healing perpetrators of violence over protecting survivors’ safety
Social relationshipsPrioritizing party members as more important people than non-membersUnwillingness to disrupt social relationships with harmful people
Individual valueA rapist is more important to the party than their victimsA 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

Friday, January 11, 2013

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.