Why I was pushed out of the Socialist Alliance

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TW: mentions and details of sexual harassment, assault, rape and discrimination.

(I have deliberately not included names or details of people involved in this who have not given me express consent and I would like it to remain that way).

There are many aspects of the Alliance that I will always be grateful for having experienced: their tendency to create long-lasting support networks to the point where its hard not to feel like you have developed an entirely new family, their ability to introduce you to other political networks that a political outsider would simply struggle to do (which in and of itself is probably an issue for the left generally) and their ability instantly throw you into positions of authority particularly for impoverished people or oppressed minorities who aren’t used to having their opinions taken seriously. However, when I witness behavior that I believe to be strongly against my own morals, I will not fail to address that. My morals are always how I identify myself and I think that’s why I’m the kind of person who’s never really been able to put a political party before them: my identity is my principles and political leanings – not a political party. If that party happens to fall in line with the majority of those principles, that’s mainly just a bonus for me.

So, this is where what I believe to be a contradiction of my own political beliefs or a strong sense of cognitive dissonance if you will began to impact on my (what was at this point) very active involvement with the Socialist Alliance. I was working on Green Left Weekly (being paid a nominal, although not large, amount) and on the Resistance: Young Socialist executive.

The issue first arose when I was at a Women’s Collective banner paint with another Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance member who drew my attention to a meme on Shit Salties Say (which for those you who haven’t seen it is basically just a page to write shit about Socialist Alternative). So, it was surprising for a member of the Socialist Alliance to see a meme on there directly targeting the Socialist Alliance).

This was the meme.

 

My first instinct was thinking about how I had seen people on Facebook complaining about Socialist Alliances ‘broshevik’ problems, but considering I had just had a huge argument on Facebook with someone in the party who had very misguided ideas about feminism (although, I grant, I overreacted a bit, too), I didn’t instantly dismiss it as sectarianism.

Frankly, I considered it to be partially true already. Any member would find it hard to deny (although I’m sure some publicly would) that we do have some sexist men in the Socialist Alliance. We, in fact, have sexists from all genders and very little/ almost nothing is done about it.

Most people in the party did however instantly pass it off as sectarianism, but that simply didn't feel right to me.

After angrily demanding questions about this on the Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance Facebook page (which admittedly was brash but I was angry), I was contacted by two members of the Resistance: Young Socialist Executive and later two members of the Socialist Alliance (who were members at the time anyway) who all confirmed for me that there were, what I perceived to be, far more serious issues within the party when it comes to dealing with grievance complaints particularly around sexual harrassment. Since, it also seemed to me in Sydney that sexual harrassment wasn't dealt with expediency, I didn't find that hard to believe.

However, I have elected not to go into greater details of other people's stories for obvious reasons. Here, I am simply telling my own.

So, my next step at this point was to speak to a member of the National Executive who firstly told me that they were unaware of the situation so I made an appointment to have a face-to-face meeting.

During this meeting with the National Executive member I had two goals in mind: force the National Executive to deal with this in a meaningful way and see if there was anything that could be done to improve the feminist culture in our own branch including making a formal complaint against a member who had been harassing me. I understand it may have looked odd to choose this time to do it but I was scared of a culture like the one I had heard of repeating in Sydney and I had been advised by one Brisbane branch member that they simply purged people who make comrades feel uncomfortable/ commit harassment/ assault. So, I thought, if you can there, surely what I was arguing for wouldn't be that controversial.

Now, to explain my own harassing scenario I have to take a few steps back. When I first joined the Alliance, there was a member who had made me feel incredibly uncomfortable: often herding me away from the group to talk to me alone and away from everyone else, telling me things that where wildly anti-feminist and then asking me “not to repeat them or he would get into trouble,” asking my phone number saying that it was a “comrade thing” but then calling me every third day to talk about everything but activism, and constantly violating my bodily autonomy without any indication from me that I would be OK (even when I sometimes expressed I was annoyed). He would particularly do it if I tried walking away and talking to other people, and more particularly if I attempted to talk to someone in another political faction. In a simple sense, it would have easily passed for harassment, and in a more complex sense it felt like he was trying to assert ownership over me – for both himself and the party.

Now, to the branch’s credit a few other members cottoned on to this and asked me if he was annoying me and said they would back me if I wanted to put in a formal complaint. However, they also said that he already had numerous complaints against him and that he regularly uses settings like O-week to try and pick up women under the guise of recruiting them.

So, I experienced pretty strong cognitive dissonance again. As a feminist, I wanted to show the bastard I wouldn’t stand for it and in a pragmatic sense I assumed that my complaint wouldn’t do anything (since apparently seven or so others hadn’t) and therefore I would still have to see him after having gone through, what I assumed, would be a humiliating formal complaint explaining my situation (potentially with him in the room) or be forced into mediation with him. Either way, I felt I would end up being humiliated with no formal power.

I didn’t express this at the time but I was a new member and simply didn’t feel comfortable.

Now, back to the meeting, I sat down with a member of the National Executive who told me that they were aware of the situation and didn’t need my help with it because they where having a meeting about it that.

So, I tried to tell them what I had been hearing anyway. Because I was unwilling to name people (they had asked for their names to be kept out of it at the time because they were scared), I was instantly dismissed.

I was also told that the incident I was referring to hadn’t been the one that they were currently dealing with (a whirlwind of confusion).

I tried to explain one of the specific stories I had been told about and was dismissed again for not naming the person who had told me about it.

So, instead I expressed the need for us to look at things like this internally: “is there anything we can change? Would consent culture classes for the branch executives help in anyway?”

I then tried to put my complaint forward about the member I believed to be harassing me. I was harangued for not making the complaint sooner. I was also told that I should simply have felt comfortable telling him to go away or telling him that I wasn’t interested.

I countered with: “surely that’s irrelevant as to whether or not its actually harassment, though? I mean women are hurt violently all the time for rejecting men.”

The response was along the lines of: “well, I can’t do anything for your own personal concerns but these are your comrades, you should be able to feel comfortable around them.”

I strongly disagreed with that line of thought. I didn’t know these people that well comparatively to other friends and I don’t simply just trust anyone. I think it would be foolish to believe that no matter how feminist an organization claims to be or even requires you to be (which the Socialist Alliance simply doesn’t anyway) that you are instantly to assume you are in a space free of sexual violence or violence just generally. That simply seemed…unrealistic to me.

Nonetheless, my personal request to put in a sexual harassment complaint was not taken on board because the harasser “had already been given a talking to.”

I later followed this up with a branch organizer requesting for the harasser to be taken off Oweek organizing as he was still being invited to Oweeks and was told that it was at too busy of a time to talk to me about it because movement work was taking priority.. To my knowledge, he’s still a member.

In fact at a rally only a week or so later after I attempted to put in the harassment complaint, I saw him at a refugee rally and an organizer indicated to me “he’s talking to that woman we are trying to recruit, and I don’t feel comfortable with him talking to her, can you please keep an eye on him?”

I was fuming. It seemed to me that I was being asked to babysit a 30-year-old man in order to make sure he wasn’t sexually harassing anyone.

I later found out that I would be able to write policy around this to push for strong policy change around grievance complaints. I decided to go ahead with it.

I asked for that same member of the National Executive, since I personally assumed if I could make the policy seem logical to someone in a leadership position, I could make it seem logical to everyone else in the party.

Firstly, the member of the National Executive expressed to me that “consent culture was a radical feminist position that was separatist” (although I was later accused of liberalism for arguing for consent culture classes so the politics on this just seemed confused to me).

The policy I wrote can be read on Alliance Voices.

The TLDR version is that I argued for the abolishment of the show cause measure, which is maybe an extreme measure, but I wanted serious change. Past events in and my own experiences in the branch instilled in me a lack of trust of any executive to deal with sexual harassment and assault with expediency or gravity. So, I assumed we would need policy that essentially forces them to do just that.

Since then, I’ve been given some great alternative ideas which is more of a happy-middle policy line on this that I also agree with.

Cut to a few weeks later and Jaz Priddey called me about concerns in the Adelaide branch. They were more broadly about political disagreements in the branch. She said that people there were being discouraged from going to the Canberra Tent Embassy, that they where being discouraged from doing things within anti-poverty networks which she strongly disagreed with and that an older member was being told they where too old to participate and newer members where being told that they where too inexperienced to participate.

Despite being on the branch executive, Jaz told me that none of her ideas where getting through and she was being consistently voted down, because there was far too much political and ideological hegemony within the branch occurring. She told me that about half the Adelaide branch where ready to leave as a result and that if serious change didn’t occur she would simply leave herself.

I agreed that we had often been discouraged from going the Redfern Tent Embassy in Sydney which I didn’t like and that there was little autonomy for Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance members in their organizing in that Socialist Alliance members mostly controlled how Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance members organize at a branch level. I also found it unfair that the paid full time organizers seemed to have the most say in the Sydney branch because they were simply the ones who were able to put the most work in – often because there were closed meetings (outside of Branch Coordinating Committee meetings) that no one outside of the full-time organizers where invited to. In fact, to my knowledge, general members who asked to sit in on them where even told to leave the room.

I had been told by a comrade who had less to do with the branch that other parties simply don’t allow for paid members to be on any decision making committees and even though I was a paid member I would have happily have taken that hit if it meant more democracy for the branch more generally.

I saw this as a pretty reasonable disagreement so I suggested forming a political tendency because I remembered reading that the constitution gave us the scope to do just that.

I had no idea at the time that it would end as badly as it did though.

I was invited to discuss this online with four other Adelaide branch members and I invited in a few Sydney members who agreed with my line of thinking. We decided we would write a manifesto (which I think has since been taken down from Alliance Voices) and maybe some Pre Conference Discussion (which is the presupposition to policy being voted on at the national conference).

I was conscious that not a lot would actually occur though unless we acted as a collective and we were clear on our political message since tendencies had been formed in the past and didn’t get anywhere, so we decided to add people into the tendency on a broad political pitch.

We decided that everyone should get a say in the manifesto so we can behave as democratically as possible. However, some people we spoke to about the tendency contacted several branch organizers confused as to what was going on as they still didn’t understand what a tendency was (our bad explaining I guess).

The branch organizers responded by asking for a meeting with me after work one day. I also recently found out that that a member of the tendency in Sydney had singled me out to a branch organizer as one of the people in the tendency and implied I was the main organizer of the tendency. That’s incorrect; we were trying to act as a collective. I was putting in a lot of work but I only saw that as fair because I was the only one actually being paid to do things for the Alliance.

Prior to the meeting a branch organizer consistently harassed me for names and I said that we were formalizing soon and they’d be able to see all the names once they have published work for the manifesto which would be in a few days. She harassed me again for the names and then accused me of being ‘hostile’ when I didn’t comply.

I didn’t want to give her the names because we simply weren’t organized. We didn’t know who was ‘for sure’ in the tendency and everyone hadn’t finished writing their part of the manifesto, which I attempted to express at the time.

They called for a meeting with me and I asked Jaz if she wanted to sit in too. They asked us to stop contacting people in Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance as it was “getting in the way of recruiting.” I countered that there where no clear directions for forming a tendency in the constitution so I wasn’t behaving unconstitutionally. However, they implied that I was violating another part of the constitution which states that members can have their membership revoked for “bringing the party into disrepute.”

That night at a rally, one person in the tendency spoke to another branch organizer who said to them that they wanted to have me kicked out for “bringing the party into disrepute.”

So, since that night, I was waiting for someone to bring this up with me and have me kicked out with a claim about ‘undemocratic’ behavior.

A week later, a branch organizer told me that I would be presenting the tendency at a branch meeting. I was confused but since I was only given a day’s notice I still didn’t have the time to cohere with the tendency and expressed that I didn’t want to be undemocratic within the tendency and present something that wasn’t representative of everyone.

Nonetheless, the branch meeting that night opened with: “Jemma will be presenting the tendency she has formed since she has been making serious allegations about our dealings with sexual harassment and sexual assault.”

I tried to defend the tendency and explained clearly that it was, not only just one aspect of the tendency, but also that we simply wanted to change party policy. They then asked me to present my PCD (policy) around sexual harassment and assault (a discussion which had also been moved forward three weeks without much notice). I presented the policy as best I could, but what followed was a long round of what I perceived to be posturing, bringing my character into question and even demotivating me to discuss policy at the conference “because I don’t have opinions that are representative of the party.”

I left that night in tears with no sympathy – except from one comrade who has now been told not to have anything to do with the party by a branch organizer for simply wanting to associate with me.

Cut back to two days after I presented the tendency at a branch meeting when I went into return to the National Office a branch organizer took me aside and asked me to explain my actions. They said that they had “sufficient evidence that I was pushing for a split within the party, that I was planning on publishing information about them, and that I was conspiring to destroy property and goods.”

They said that if I didn’t resign they would be forced to “undergo a criminal investigation into this” and likely have me “pressed me with criminal charges.”

I was shocked and my instant response was to resign.

Looking back I do regret it a bit. They had no reason to press me with criminal charges, they never once told me what the “sufficient evidence” was despite me prompting them for it several times and only one of the things they listed was even a potential criminal matter – which they have no evidence to prove and I definitely wasn’t planning on doing that. I have offhandedly said before “oh, I’m so angry I just want to burn the place down” but I thought it would have been obvious that, that was just my brand of humour which was said emotionally with no plans for follow through. Despite having expressed my anger at the Alliance, the thought of literally destroying their property just seems silly.

I had considered publishing things, but I would only have done it if I left the Alliance and was satisfied I was unable to change things (which is quite clear now) and nonetheless that’s a civil matter – if any matter at all.

I wasn’t pushing for a split – however, I did often express with other members of the tendency that I just wanted to leave and they expressed the same thing.

But at the time, I was scared because I am an active activist and I was conscious that the police already addressed me by name at every rally I turn up to. I don’t know what they’d do if the Socialist Alliance asked for them to initiate a criminal investigation.

I’m telling this story not because I think anyone would be even remotely interested in the bureaucratic inner workings of a relatively small political party, not to defend my character (only people in the Alliance know about this so far and I don’t think it would have been in their interest to talk about it publicly – although they will now undoubtedly respond to this blog with an open letter doing just that) but because stories like these have floated around the Socialist Alliance for at least a decade.

There are entire organized groups of people in certain states made up of ex Socialist Alliance members who all have extremely similar stories about the organization and left for exactly the same reasons (well, not quite on the threat of criminal charges but you get the drift of what I am saying). What scares me most about this situation, though, is that none of these ex members were believed and its very possible that I won’t be believed telling this story, either.

Yet, I am not angry, I am not bitter, I simply believe that it’s in the public interest for any potential joiner of the Alliance to understand what they may face when considering joining. To not hold an organization to account, whether they are on the far left, centre left, right or even on Mars for that matter, for not putting otherwise good ideological theory into practice, would be against every cell of what I believe in.

So, that’s what I’m trying to do right now.