A postscript: The Sexual Inequality Party

Andrea Constand, Cosby's accuser, who is not mentioned by the WSWS

By Frank Brenner

I think maybe it’s time for the Socialist Equality Party to consider a name change - to the Sexual Inequality Party. I already examined their willful blindness to sexual abuse in a previous post. [1] Here I just want to add a postscript on their reaction to the guilty verdict in the Bill Cosby case. [2] I don’t think it’s over the top to characterize this article as obscene - for its complete indifference to Cosby’s victims. There isn’t a word of sympathy for them anywhere in the article. Even the name of Cosby’s accuser in the case, Andrea Constand, is never once mentioned.

As I noted in my post, the sympathy of WSWS writers is typically for powerful men who stand accused of sexual abuse. So, in Cosby’s case, we are told, the judge’s decision in the second trial to allow five other women to testify about their abuse by Cosby constituted “moving the goal posts” legally so as to secure a conviction. Which amounts to saying that Cosby is the victim of a judicial frame-up.

In the first trial, only one other woman besides Constand was allowed to testify (though others wanted to). There are as many as 60 women who claim Cosby abused them but only Constand’s case was still within the statute of limitations. But just because the legal expiry date had passed for these other women doesn’t mean that Cosby didn’t abuse them. In fact, there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence that confirms their stories, including non-disclosure agreements and hush money paid to some of these women by Cosby as well as grand jury testimony in which Cosby admitted to repeatedly drugging his victims. It could be argued with a lot more justification that the first trial, where all but one of these women were shut out from the proceedings, amounted to “moving the goal posts” in Cosby’s favor.

A constant theme of the WSWS coverage of cases like this is the need to defend due process and the presumption of innocence. These are indeed important legal democratic rights that need to be defended (though as I’ll get to shortly, the WSWS has a huge blind spot about another democratic right). But the Cosby case had way more due process than 99 percent of people ever get who are caught up in the justice system. He had the best legal minds and courtroom strategies money could buy and he was given two full-scale trials. If this isn’t due process, then the term has no meaning. But reading the WSWS the impression you get is that it is Cosby who is the victim, not his accusers. It would seem that even when due process leads to a sexual abuser’s conviction, this is still not enough for the WSWS. So maybe something else is going on here, maybe what they really want is to make sexual abuse vanish as a public concern.

The same article misrepresents a NY Times op-ed by law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer. Tuerkheimer was arguing that the Cosby case might mark a turning point. She writes:

“#MeToo can best be understood as a needed corrective to a longstanding reality: Women who report sexual violations by people they know, including mentors, co-workers, bosses, classmates, acquaintances, friends and intimates, are often not believed.” [3]

One study she cites found that half of police detectives believe most of the sexual assault accusations brought to them are false, whereas the actual number of false accusations are typically in the order of five percent. It’s impossible to imagine any other category of crime - murder, robbery, simple assault - where such a situation prevails. It is this “credibility discounting” - not only among police but also among district attorneys, judges, juries etc. - that is a major reason for why sexual assault remains a vastly underreported crime.

To make its case the WSWS journalist, Tom Carter, deliberately misrepresents what Tuerkheimer writes.  Carter states,

Tuerkheimer’s article, titled “The Cosby Jury Finally Believes the Women,” testifies to the erosion of democratic consciousness among substantial sections of middle-class academics influenced by identity politics. Her line of argumentation inevitably undermines the defendant’s right to the presumption of innocence. Moreover, the entire approach runs counter to essential democratic legal conceptions governing a criminal prosecution. The issue confronting a jury is not whether it should, as a general principle, believe women rather than men, or vice versa. [Our emphasis]

Carter’s claim, that Tuerkheimer is saying that women are always to be believed and that this is an attack on the presumption of innocence, is a complete distortion of what Tuerkheimer is saying.  Rather Tuerkheimer is pointing to a longstanding prejudice against believing the accusations of women in sexual abuse cases. She is arguing for the elimination of that prejudice.  That is completely different than arguing for the replacement of that prejudice with another prejudice, namely to always believe the accusations of women. In her conclusion she writes:

“Jurors do not come to a case against Mr. Cosby, or any other defendant, as blank slates. Instead, provided they have not prejudged the facts, jurors evaluate the evidence admitted at trial fairly, applying common sense and their general understandings of how the world operates. In the past, this important work was routinely infected by misconceptions about sexual assault, resulting in the vast underestimation of survivors’ credibility. #MeToo is only beginning to remedy that profound distortion.”

It is because of that profound distortion - rooted in misogyny - that the justice system is an INjustice system for a huge number of women who are victims of sexual assault.

But the WSWS is indifferent to any of this. Specifically, they are blind to a democratic right that is just as consequential as due process - the right to consent. As soon as you take that right seriously, then it becomes evident that there are significant limitations to due process. Sexual assault almost always ends up in court as he-said/she-said cases, which is to say cases where there is no independent corroborating evidence such as a witness. Even if the she-said is more believable than the he-said, it's extremely difficult for that on its own to rise to the level of 'beyond a reasonable doubt' required for a conviction. And as Tuerkheimer notes, that difficulty is hugely compounded by the system’s built-in misogyny.

As far as the WSWS is concerned, this is no problem so long as the rules of due process have been observed. But this is the standpoint of a legal pedant, not a Marxist revolutionary. Here we have a category of crimes where a great many women (and some men) are being abused, often scarred for life, and yet few perpetrators are ever brought to justice. It is to #MeToo’s credit that it has focused a lot of public attention on this grave injustice. But here Marxists would part company with liberals like Tuerkheimer in insisting that within the constraints of bourgeois legality it is never going to be possible to fully reconcile due process and the right to consent (a subject for a possible future post). That being said, whatever advances can be made for justice for women within bourgeois constraints should be supported. In that respect, Marxists can never be members of a Sexual Inequality Party.

---

[1] Willful blindness on sexual abuse, Frank Brenner,

http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2018/03/willful-blindness-on-sexual-abuse.html

[2] US media escalates #MeToo witch hunt after Cosby verdict, Tom Carter, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/30/cosb-a30.html

[3] The Cosby Jury Finally Believes the Women, Deborah Tuerkheimer, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/opinion/metoo-cosby-guilty.html

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Karl Marx 200 years later

Marx statue in Trier

by Alex Steiner

On May 5^th the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx in the German city of Trier.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ideas of no one person of the past two centuries has had a larger influence on the course of history than Marx.  It is also just as true to say that no one since Jesus has had his ideas so bastardized and misused as Marx.  Marx's philosophy of emancipation was turned into an apology for state repression and social inequality at the hands of the Stalinists. Hundreds of millions of people had their impressions of Marx and his thought colored by that upside-down caricature. It is impossible to make an objective assessment of Marx and his work without that consideration.

As with all anniversaries of prominent figures, one can expect a litany of Op Ed pieces and academic forums.  Marx’s 200^th birthday is no exception.  It has dawned on the powers that be in his native country, Germany, that Marx can be commodified and turned into a tourist attraction. The most publicized of these rituals took place in the city of Marx’s birth, Trier, where a 15-foot-tall statue of Marx, presented to the city by the government of China, was unveiled on May 5.  The BBC reported that on the day prior to the unveiling,

President Xi Jinping on Friday gave a high-profile speech praising Marx as the greatest thinker of modern times.

He urged China's ruling Communist Party to go back to the roots of Marxism, and said the party would forever remain the "guardians and practitioners" of its theories.

Students and most civil servants in China must complete mandatory courses in Marxism.

The irony of this was not lost on the BBC reporter, who commented,

Despite this, China's capitalist system is home to hundreds of billionaires and a widening gap between rich and poor. [1]

Yet another news source not know for its radicalism, CBS, was also moved to comment on this strange event,

Promoting Marx is seen in part as a way for the Chinese president to strengthen ideological control and counter critics within the ruling Communist Party unhappy with his move in March to eliminate presidential term limits. Xi is also general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, an official that is also not term-limited. [2]

There is historical precedent for a revolutionary movement being transformed into a doctrine rationalizing oppression.  It should not be forgotten that Christianity, beginning as a messianic movement of slaves revolting against their oppressors, was in the next three centuries transformed into the state religion of the Roman Empire.

One of the consequences of the bastardization of Marx at the hands of Stalinism has been the reaction against Marx from the rebellious generation of the 60’s who were disgusted by Stalinist scholasticism and conflated that with the ideas of Marx.  The New Left embodied these contradictions between a revolutionary impulse and theoretical confusion. But the New Left’s adoption of what it considered a left alternative to Marx ran aground on the wreck of the protest movements of the 1960s.  Nevertheless, those impulses from the 1960’s, while theoretically misplaced, at least had an emancipatory goal, a new world free of exploitation.  The same cannot be said for some of the mutations of 1960’s era radicalism that we see today.  These take the form of an identity politics hostile to the working class, a revival of ethnic nationalism and an overarching conviction that nothing fundamental can be done about capitalism. 

Many of these retrograde tendencies were on display at a celebration of Marx’s 200^th Birthday at the Goethe Institute in New York.  The Goethe Institute is sponsored by the German government and is the organization tasked with publicizing German culture internationally.  While it is a positive development that Marx is no longer ignored by official German cultural institutions, he cannot be so easily assimilated.

Unlike other icons of German culture such as Goethe and Schiller, Marx was a revolutionary whose heritage cannot be reconciled with the agencies of a bourgeois state. It is hardly surprising therefore that none of the speakers at the Goethe Institute panel on Marx had anything to say that would have been remotely recognizable by Marx had he dropped in. One panelist, a retired law professor claimed that the best examples of the socialist experiment in recent years could be found in the “Global South”. She mentioned in that connection Allende’s tenure in Chile before he was murdered by a CIA inspired coup, as well as certain attempts to institute “African socialism” by some of the nationalist leaders of Africa such as Julius Nyerere. This panelist did not seem very curious about why these experiments failed, while at the same time being dismissive of the far larger and longer experiment in socialism, the Russian Revolution, which she considered something primarily of interest to “white people”.  Another panelist, a graduate student in feminist studies, barely concealed her hostility to Marx and Marxism as she went into a long diatribe on ‘gendered economics’.  To his credit another member of the panel, the Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh, tried to gently correct the muddle introduced by the feminist student that we must start with gender as a primary category in all theorizing about society. He pointed out that you cannot start with gender until you have determined where gender lives. In other words, gender has a historical context and you cannot conceive of the emancipation of women without theorizing what an emancipated society looks like. But this was a minor note in a largely confused symposium in which the ideas of Marx were for the most part either ignored or conflated in an eclectic manner with all sorts of other notions that Marx would not have recognized as his own. Nevertheless, the fact that the Goethe Institute staged a celebration of Marx’s 200^th birthday does indicate a recognition that Marx can no longer be ignored or dismissed as an alien presence.

It has not always been the case. The fortunes of Marx’s legacy in his native country has waxed and waned depending on the political climate.  In the latter years of the 19^th century when the Social Democratic Party of Germany was the largest socialist party in the world and commanded millions of devoted followers, it was a common practice for workers who passed away to be buried with a copy of the Communist Manifesto in their coffin.  And during the years of the Weimar Republic Berlin boasted of a street named after Marx. On the other hand, during the Nazi era, Marx’s connection to German culture was completely eviscerated.  He became a prototypical “dirty Jew” in Nazi propaganda and therefore an alien presence in the German soil seeking to destroy its greatness. A tract of Nazi propaganda published in 1944 for the Hitler Youth stated,

Remember how Karl Marx falsified the German conception of socialism as a natural order of life, based deeply in German blood, and turned into the phantom of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This doctrine so deeply mirrored the nature of its Jewish inventor that the world knew only to connect it to his name: “Marxism.” [3]

In the post-war years Marx was lionized in East Germany, particularly in films. (Until the release of Raoul Peck’s ‘The Young Marx’ earlier this year, practically the only films that dealt with Marx or his ideas were produced in East Germany.) This served the interests of the Stalinist regime in the East who tried to legitimize their rule at the same time as they suppressed any dissent to their repressive regime. On the other hand, in West Germany during the Cold War years, Marx was ignored and marginalized.  This only began to change with the rise of the student movement in Germany in the 1960’s. [4]

The Goethe Institute forum, while indicating an attempt to come to terms with Marx, could not escape the broad intellectual climate of our time, which is still largely deaf to that great thinker.  In academia, Marx's scientific work, laying bare the mechanism of the capitalist mode of production, was all but ignored and rarely been taken seriously, even by left economists. For example, the Marxist geographer David Harvey wrote recently,

It is widely believed that Marx adapted the labour theory of value from Ricardo as a founding concept for his studies of capital accumulation.  Since the labour theory of value has been generally discredited, it is then often authoritatively stated that Marx s theories are worthless. But nowhere, in fact, did Marx declare his allegiance to the labour theory of value. [5]

While it may be surprising for an economist who considers himself a Marxist to dismiss one of the pillars of Marx’s understanding of capitalism, the labour theory of value, almost in passing, it is not unusual.  He is joined by many other economists and social scientists claiming to be Marxist or “post-Marxist”.

On the question of the whether the labour theory of value has been discredited, Paul Cockshott wrote a good response,

Harvey claims that the labour theory of value is generally discredited. But in what sense?

It is correct to say that the theory is not viewed with favour in economics departments, but that is for political reasons – the labour theory of value came, since Gray and Marx, came to be associated with socialism. Since academic economists, in general, did not want to be tainted with the socialist label they were at pains to distance themselves from the theory.

But none of them ever adduced any empirical evidence to refute it. It was socially discredited but not empirically refuted. [6]

Harvey has also objected to Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit. He wrote in 2014,

"...those who attribute the difficulties of contemporary capitalism to the tendency of the profit rate to fall are, judging by this evidence of labour participation, seriously mistaken. The conditions point to a vast increase and not a constriction in surplus value production and extraction."

Harvey was answered by Andrew Kliman writing in the blog New Left Project, 

Harvey’s chief complaint is that the LTFRP [the law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall] and the theory of crisis based on it are mono-causal: it ignores other causes of crisis as well as counteracting factors, and its current proponents typically present it in a way that ‘exclude[s] consideration of other possibilities’. I will argue that this is just a strawman. 

The real issue is not that anyone has advocated a mono-causal theory, but that Harvey is campaigning for what we might call an apousa-causal theory, one in which the LTFRP plays no role at all (apousa is Greek for ‘absent’). He is the one who is trying to exclude something from consideration. In light of his emphasis on capitalism’s ‘maelstrom of conflicting forces’ and its ‘multiple contradictions and crisis tendencies’, one might expect that he would urge us to consider all potential causes of crisis, excluding nothing. However, Harvey is not merely suggesting that other potential causes of crisis be considered alongside the LTFRP. He seems determined to consign it and the theory of crisis based on it to the dustbin of history. [7]

I select Harvey as an example not because I think he is a particularly bad interpreter of Marx, but because he is one of the most widely recognized Marxist economic theorists working today. He is in fact one of the few people who take the study of Marx’s Capital seriously and has made important academic contributions to its dissemination.  But he is typical of many of his colleagues in dismissing the theoretical heart of Capital.

Marx's theories were also vulgarized by many of his admirers who turned it into a doctrine of inevitable collapse.  This remains a popular, though completely misunderstood explanation of Marxism today.  

Marx's signature on a slip from the Reading Room of the British Museum where he worked on Capital.

I should add that the Marxian dialectic remains an enigma to even the devoted few who will defend Marx's economic theories. This is a topic about which I have written extensively. [8] Nor has there ever been an honest coming to terms by Marx's followers about the need to extend critical and dialectical thinking into areas that Marx barely touched. They forget that Marx’s original project called for 6 volumes and he was only able to complete the first volume of Capital.  And that was just Capital. Had he lived long enough he undoubtedly would have had something to say about other areas of life. But the fact that Marx never did develop his ideas on psychology or art in any systematic fashion has led some of his followers to proclaim that these topics are either unimportant or irrelevant. 

There is also the question of whether Marx’s early “humanist” writings can be reconciled with his “mature” scientific work.  I have always considered that debate something of an intellectual fraud. There is no question that as Marx matured his understanding deepened and he even reversed his ideas on a number of questions. But I think it is just as wrong to speak of some break between the early Marx and the later mature Marx, as if Marx stopped being a humanist in his mature years or that his scientific work was irreconcilable with his theory of alienation. That dichotomy was introduced by the work of the French ‘structuralist-Marxist’ Louis Althusser, who defended a “scientific” Marx shorn of the Hegelian dialectic. Althusser had his counterpart in the school of Marxist humanists, many of whom prospered in Yugoslavia, Poland and other Eastern European countries in the 1960’s. This group was looking for a source of opposition to Stalinist Scholasticism in the early writings of Marx. Unfortunately, they tended to identify the later writings of Marx with their Stalinist bastardization. These thinkers championed the early Marx’s writings on alienation which they viewed as completely divorced from his later “scientific” work and his theory of revolution.  Many of these defenders of Marxist humanism later embraced nationalism and anti-communism.

The topic was introduced tangentially at the Goethe Institute forum when one of the panelists proclaimed her allegiance to the “humanist” Marx and rejected the interpretation of Marx as “scientific”.  Had I had the opportunity I would have corrected her by pointing out that there is nothing inconsistent between humanism and science. The issue however is complicated by the common misconception that what Marx meant by ‘science’ was something like the positivist notion of science. [9]

Finally, the Marxian political project is resting on hard times.  The only mass political movements willing to identify with Marx are Stalinist parties representing the interests of tiny cliques of oligarchs.  The Soviet Union is gone as are all the deformed workers states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.  Political movements that try to carry out the project envisioned by Marx are practically without exception tiny grouplets cut off from any mass movement.  And these groups tend to veer off into increasing bouts of sectarianism while others dissolve their Marxist principles into opportunist cheering of militancy.    

Nevertheless, Marx remains key to understanding the 21^st century. [10] Of course, Marx did not and could not have anticipated the complex paths and detours taken by history in the 135 years since his death.  Nor was Marx some kind of biblical prophet whose every prediction turned out be true. To be scientific is not the same as being infallible. It is necessary to supplement Marx with the work of other theoreticians, Lenin and Trotsky to be sure, but others as well, if one is to make sense of phenomena such as imperialism, the Soviet Union, fascism, the colonial revolution and the age of neo-liberal austerity. 

In the final analysis, it is impossible to understand our world today without resting on the shoulders of Marx.  That is the basic ground for any theory of political and social emancipation. 

 

May Day 2018 in Bangladesh. This worker is depicting the status of the working class still in chains.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44009621  

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/karl-marx-trier-unveils-statue-200th-birth-anniversary-2018-05-05/

[3] http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/weltparasit.htm

[4] https://www.viewpointmag.com/2014/05/21/internationalizing-marx-an-interview-with-jan-hoff/

[5] David Harvey. Marx’s refusal of the labour theory of value, 2018.

[6] https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/did-marx-have-a-labour-theory-of-value/#harveyref

[7]   http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/harvey_versus_marx_on_capitalisms_crises_part_1_getting_marx_wrong

[8] For instance, see my ‘Case study of the neglect of dialectics’,

http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2013/10/a-case-study-in-neglect-of-dialectics.html

Unfortunately, most of what I have written in this area is in the form of a polemic against one sectarian group and their abandonment of dialectics.  Nevertheless, I think there are some general lessons to be learned from those polemics for those with the patience to go through them.

[9]  See my essay Alienation and Revolution: A Defense of Marx’s Theory of Alienation,

http://permanent-revolution.org/essays/alienation_revolution.pdf

I have also written on this topic as part of an ongoing polemic against David North. See my defense of Marx’s theory of alienation in Chapter 6 of ‘Downward Spiral’, pages 155-159;

http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch06.pdf

[10] Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, someone with whom I have profound political differences, nevertheless  nicely  expressed the views of a new generation when he wrote in an essay titled, ‘Why the ideas of Karl Marx are relevant to the 21^st century’,

For many in my generation, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism have been undermined. That a higher percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 have a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism at least signals that the cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds sway.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/karl-marx-relevant-21st-century

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Hatred of the dialectic

!Forward Dialectics! http://www.articlegallery.co.uk/index.php/project/forward-dialectics/ 

by Alex Steiner

As part of his comment on the MeToo phenomenon which is devoted to an attack on us, David North, Chair of the WSWS Editorial Board, resurrects an argument he has previously used to dismiss all discussion of dialectics.  He writes,

One could not have a better example of sophistry, masquerading as "dialectical logic." Brenner's argument is: MeToo may be guilty of reactionary "overreach." But it has its good side too. The classic refutation of this sort of phony dialectics is to be found in Marx's celebrated response to Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy.” [1]

This is followed by a quote from Marx.

It is interesting that North used exactly the same argument against us in his series of articles titled “The Odyssey of Alex Steiner” only this time in relation to a discussion of the Frankfurt School instead of MeToo.  He wrote at that time,

“Steiner/Brenner are advocating a theoretical eclecticism that has nothing in common with the philosophical traditions upon which the Trotskyist movement is based. Moreover, the very form of their argument—"Can we not learn from...?" "Must we reject everything...?" "Is there not something interesting in...?"—epitomizes the sort of "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" sophistry that Marx invariably subjected to the harshest criticism.” [2]

This is followed by a footnote referencing the same quote from Marx against Proudhon that North resurrects for this occasion.  

This argument from a decade ago is followed by the same dismissal of any mention of “dialectics” that we see today. North wrote then,

“Despite all their rhetorical invocations of "the dialectic," Steiner/Brenner fail to present a historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the Frankfurt School.”

I showed on more than one occasion that North’s narrative on the Frankfurt School is little more than a kind of crackpot philosophy. I will leave that to those who are interested in the topic.  On this occasion I only wish to address his use of the Marx quote. [3]

In response to North, I wrote at the time that,

“Marx’s methodological point was that Proudhon was adopting a vulgar pseudo-dialectics in creating his categories whereas his actual methodology was profoundly undialectical.”

For North and his acolytes, the Marx quote about Proudhon is brought out on any occasion when anyone mentions the word “dialectics” whereas for Marx it served as an example of the vulgarization of dialectics.  And Marx did not stop at the indictment of Proudhon as a vulgarizer, but later on provides an example of what a genuine dialectical analysis of economic phenomena looks like,

“The production relations of every society form a whole…

In constructing the edifice of an ideological system by means of the categories of political economy, the limbs of the social system are dislocated. The different limbs of society are converted into so many separate societies, following one upon the other. How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another?” [4]

North never quotes this part of Marx’s discussion of Proudhon because it makes clear that the alternative to Proudhon’s vulgarization of the dialectic is a genuine dialectic. As I wrote at the time in summarizing Marx’s treatment of Proudhon’s method,

“Note that Marx first of all chastises Proudhon for neglecting the real dialectic of wholes and parts here when it comes to examining the economic categories of a society. Proudhon proceeded as if each part was separable from the whole and thus those parts that were considered “bad” could be discarded while those that were considered “good” could be maintained. But this method, as Marx said, dislocates “the limbs of the social system.” [5]

North’s attempt to refute our arguments by presenting them through the template of Proudhon is in any case based on a willful distortion of what we wrote. We never wrote anything about “preserving the good side” either of the MeToo movement or of the Frankfurt School.  What we did was point to the contradictory nature of these social and intellectual phenomena. But for the “theoreticians” of the WSWS, there are no contradictory phenomena.  All one has to do is identify the class basis behind a movement and you have all you need to determine its nature.  Nor do they ever tell us how they go about their identification of the class nature of these phenomena. (I should qualify that on occasion they reduce the question of the class nature of a political formation by examining the stock portfolios of its leaders. See for instance their discussion of Syriza for an example of this “method”.) For the WSWS pundits, there exists somewhere a pure and unsullied working class which is the revolutionary class in society and likewise a pure and unsullied middle class which is always reactionary unless they are somehow led by the divine intervention of the WSWS to fall in line behind the working class. As we have pointed out on other occasions, the “working class” of the WSWS is an idealized working class that exists only in their heads and has little to do with the messy problems involved in the real working class. For the WSWS pundits this serves as a convenient way for avoiding the problems of class consciousness. Thus, their dismissal not only of the dialectic, but also of any interest in the dynamics of mass psychology.

But let us - as a kind of thought experiment - agree with North that we are every bit the sophists that he claims we are.  We would then ask North, given that Steiner and Brenner are sophists who only bring up “the dialectic” as a ruse to cover up their sophistry - can Mr. North tell us what he thinks a dialectical understanding of social and intellectual phenomena consist of? 

The only thing we have gotten out of North on the question of dialectics is the idea that dialectics is equivalent to materialism and the latter consists in little more than identifying what is real and what is in one’s head and after that all you need to do is to determine the underlying class relations and their evolution.  We are furthermore told very little as to how any of this takes place. 

Let us reduce all this to one simple question as an example of the poverty of the North methodology: “What is the class nature of Karl Marx’s theoretical work?”

Undoubtedly such a question will elicit much outrage among the WSWS pundits and the Internet trolls who populate the WSWS comments section. “Of course Marx’s work was working class! To even suggest it was anything else is tantamount to a form of treason.”

But one might object that Marx did not come from a working class background. His background was firmly middle class and that of his wife Jenny was of the old hereditary aristocracy. That did not change even when the Marx family lived in abysmal poverty during the years of his exile in London. Moreover, his lifelong partner Engels was in fact the manager of his family’s very capitalist manufacturing facility in the city of Manchester. Furthermore, Marx rarely had contact with rank and file workers. One of the few occasions in which he did was a speech he gave to a group of German workers living in exile in Brussels in 1847.  From his earliest years Marx was an active journalist and part of what could be considered the radical intelligentsia of Prussia. He was initially a radical democrat and only later did he become a convinced communist who tied his fate to the struggles of the working class. Was Marx’s intellectual and political evolution not a contradictory one? Is it not more accurate to describe Marx’s class nature not simply as “working class” but that of a person from the middle class whose ideas, as they evolved in the fertile climate of the complex brew of intellectual and political trends to which he was exposed, led him to embrace the cause of the working class?

To be sure there are occasions where a discussion of the nuances of subtleties of class analysis are used deliberately to obscure the class nature of competing political movements.  But it is equally the case that labeling something either “working class” or “middle class” without an investigation of the contradictions involved in such phenomena becomes a convenient excuse for abstaining from real life struggles. A good example of the latter was the attitude of the WSWS towards the referendum of 2015 in Greece.  They labeled the call for a referendum “a reactionary fraud” but then - inconsistently - urged workers to cast their votes in this “reactionary fraud” of a referendum.  But anyone in Greece and internationally with the slightest connection to the working class understood that while the logic of the Tsipras government could only lead to a betrayal of the working class, the fact that they were forced to call a referendum presented a golden opportunity to educate the working class.  That was not possible with the WSWS’s sneering dismissal of the referendum. 

There was indeed a similar issue that came up in discussions with Trotsky in the 1930’s in relation to a proposal for an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Ludlow Amendment.  The Ludlow Amendment called for an end to war. It encapsulated illusions in pacifism and the efficacy of bourgeois democracy. Yet Trotsky’s attitude to this referendum was the very opposite of the WSWS’s attitude toward the Greek referendum of 2015 which was also intertwined with illusions. Rather than calling the Ludlow Amendment a “reactionary fraud”, as the sectarians at that time were doing, Trotsky urged his followers to participate in the campaign for the amendment and in the process seek to educate the working class. He wrote,

“We must advance with the masses, and not only repeat our formulas but speak in a manner that our slogans become understandable to the masses…”

“The referendum is not our program, but it's a clear step forward; the masses show that they wish to control their Washington representatives. We say: It's a progressive step that you wish to control your representatives. But you have illusions and we will criticize them. At the same time we will help you realize your program. The sponsors of the program will betray you…” [6]

It is not hard to guess what Trotsky’s attitude would have been to the WSWS’s calling the Greek referendum of 2015 “a reactionary fraud”.

As a final point I have observed that over the years of our polemics with North and his acolytes, their attitude toward the dialectic seems to have hardened. It is not simply that they dismiss the dialectic, but their rhetoric indicates what can only be described as a visceral hatred of the dialectic. This comes out especially clearly in the comments of Mr. James Cogan, the leader of the Australian section of the group that publishes the WSWS.  Mr. Cogan writes,

“Or will Mr. Brenner present a “dialectical” rationale, employing various abstract invocations of Hegel’s logical categories I’m sure, as to the working class should renounce democratic principles that were developed in centuries of struggle against tyranny and oppression.”

Here the contempt for dialectics is thrown together with a dismissal of Hegel’s logical categories, our use of which, Mr. Cogan claims, amount to a renunciation of democratic principles. Huh?? How does any of this follow from anything we have written? It’s a bizarre outburst from someone that at one time would have been called a cultural boor. But in the diminished intellectual atmosphere engendered by the WSWS such remarks are considered profound and are guaranteed to generate much genuflection by the trolls on the periphery of the WSWS comments sections.

As we said years ago, the time when we thought it was possible to revive this sterile sect has long passed. But perhaps there are still lessons to be learned by others about the fatal destiny of a sectarianism wedded to a hatred of the dialectic.

---

[1] North’s remarks are buried in the comments section of this article: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/10/mess-f10.html

[2] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/fran-o22.html

[3] A detailed examination of North’s account of the Frankfurt School can be found in Chapter 1 of  my polemic Downward Spiral,
http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch01.pdf , pages 23-28.  We developed the view of North’s account as a type of crackpot philosophy in the polemic, Crackpot philosophy and double-speak,   http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2015/09/crackpot-philosophy-and-doublespeak.html .  We revisited the topic in our review of an article by Javier Sethness that justifiably pilloried North, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2015/09/crackpot-philosophy-and-doublespeak.html .

[4] Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6, (International Publishers, 1976), pp. 166-167. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm  .

[5] http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch01.pdf, pages 21-23.    

[6] The Transitional Program of Socialist Revolution, L Trotsky, with Introductory Essays by Joseph Hansen and George Novack. Pathfinder Press, 1973. P. 192-193.

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Willful blindness on sexual abuse

Female farm workers demonstrating against sexual abuse

by Frank Brenner

The following post is a continuation of a previous one, “Some thoughts on Weinstein”. This one is a critique of the positions of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and its leader David North. There is a third part to follow which will discuss due process and consent, among other issues related to #MeToo.

By now we've had #MeToo and the backlash against it and some backlash against the backlash. For me the essential problem with #MeToo is that it has created a climate where there's no distinction between being a prick and a predator. A clumsy come-on or even an inadvertent gesture can now lead to accusations of assault, which can have devastating consequences for the accused. It can also end up demonizing half the human race. As I'll get to in a later installment, though, there is a lot of complexity lurking behind these simple, sensible statements. The messiness of the debate over #MeToo ultimately comes out of the messiness of human sexuality, compounded by the constraints of a fundamentally inhuman society.

But before that it's necessary to draw a distinction between criticism of #MeToo that is legitimate and criticism that isn't. In the latter category I would put criticism that serves to downplay or marginalize the social scourge of sexual abuse. And that's precisely what it seems to me the WSWS is guilty of. They have little or nothing to say about sexual abuse (including as it applies to working class women) but they have a lot to say in defense of powerful or prominent men who've been accused of such abuse. If you read the WSWS, every revelation that has come out of #MeToo is false, reactionary, a witch-hunt. But that is nonsense. The exposure of powerful figures like Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Bill O'Reilly and Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn as sexual predators makes the world a better place for women, albeit only slightly so. Actually, David North bridles at the term 'predator', which he denounces as a modern-day version of the Puritans' Scarlet Letter. Does that mean it shouldn't apply to Weinstein or Moore or O'Reilly? Or Bill Cosby … or Donald Trump? It's true that some of the accusations that have come out of #MeToo are probably false or exaggerated, but that doesn't warrant a blanket dismissal of all accusations. When someone is falsely accused of murder, that is a travesty of justice, but it is even more of a travesty to ignore the murder itself. If you read the WSWS on this issue, the latter is just the sort of travesty they commit.

A few facts: The Center for Disease Control finds that 1 in 5 women (compared to 1 in 71 men) will experience rape or attempted rape at least once in their lifetimes. In 2015 there were 90,000 rapes reported to police, but as is widely known, rape is a greatly under-reported crime. The National Crime Victimization Survey, which tries to measure incidents which went unreported, estimated that in the same year the real figure was over 400,000. These are appalling figures, and even if we reduce them by as much as half to account for any murkiness in the definition of rape, that would make it 1 in 10 women who will experience rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives, and those are still appalling figures. It doesn't mean that women live in a permanent state of fear, but it does mean that for a great many women, probably most, there is always a worry at the back of their minds. And you see evidence of that in everyday situations. As for instance: is there a woman anywhere who doesn't think twice about walking down a street alone at night?

This social reality is a blank page on the WSWS. The website has no section concerning sexual harassment or assault or indeed anything relating to the rights of women, and to the extent that these issues are ever raised, they are only done so in passing. You never see any programmatic demands or meetings or campaigns where these issues are highlighted.

A case in point is the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal. The WSWS didn't devote a single article to this story. It is, according to Wikipedia, “one of the biggest sexual abuse scandals in sports history.” It involved, at last count, 265 girls and young women who were molested by Nassar, who worked as the chief team doctor for USA Gymnastics as well as for Michigan State University. Nassar was tied in to a network of gym owners, coaches and staff involved in the abuse of female athletes, mostly children, that went on for two decades. You would think that anyone concerned about the rights of women – to say nothing of a supposedly Marxist publication (and, one might add, a publication based in Michigan where this story played out) – would want to cover this story in some depth, examine how perpetrators like Nassar were allowed to operate for so long, how authorities ignored or covered up his crimes, and what this says about the whole culture of high performance athletics and especially the exploitability (sexually, commercially and for national prestige) of young female bodies. The WSWS looked at none of this. The one mention of the story is a paragraph in an article on the winter Olympics in Korea.

The WSWS does have plenty of sympathy, but typically for the alleged perpetrators, figures like Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey and conductor James Levine, among others. Some of this is understandable: there is indeed an element of tragedy in the downfall of these talented men. But surely that has to be balanced by some sympathy for their alleged victims. If the accusations were patently false that would be one thing, but that isn't the case with these men: there are multiple accusers who recount similar stories, and each of these men had an 'everybody knew' reputation. Whether any of these accusations ever stand up in court is another matter (which I'll get to later) but legal justice isn't always – and shouldn't necessarily be – the final arbiter in such matters. Does anyone seriously believe that Nicole Simpson wasn't murdered by her husband?

Kevin Spacey is a good example here. The WSWS was quick to come to his defense and denounce the accusations against him as a witch-hunt. Their reaction to the initial accuser, a young actor, was to try to discredit him: “On Sunday, actor Anthony Rapp, for reasons best known to himself, accused Spacey of making sexual advances to him some thirty years ago when was 14 and Spacey was 26.” For reasons best known to himself?? Rapp may or may not be telling the truth but the fact that he waited a long time to make the accusation is anything but unusual. If the WSWS paid any attention to this issue, they would know that it is  common for victims of sexual abuse to stay silent for long periods of time, especially if the experience was traumatic (which is likely the case if you're 14) and/or they feel their stories won't be believed.

Since that initial accusation, 15 more people have come forward to accuse Spacey of assaulting them sexually (groping seems to be a common complaint, though there is at least one accusation of attempted rape). This includes eight people who worked with him on the tv series House of Cards. It also includes another person who claims to have had a sexual relationship with Spacey when he was 14 and Spacey was 24. In addition, there are 20 people associated with the Old Vic theater company who signed statements alleging sexual misconduct by Spacey during his 11 years as artistic director, with three of these people having contacted police. These are a lot of accusations over a long stretch of time, and involving different groups Spacey was associated with, which at least gives the accusations plausibility. And yet so far as I can tell these further accusations have gone unreported on the WSWS.

Which isn't to say that it's wrong to be sympathetic to Spacey. His erasure from the Ridley Scott movie All the Money in the World is chilling and brings to mind victimizations in witch-hunts like McCarthyism. But the analogy between #MeToo and McCarthyism (made repeatedly on the WSWS) is a superficial one. Scott reshot Spacey's scenes in the film (replacing him with Christopher Plummer) for  mercenary reasons – because he didn't want the scandal surrounding Spacey to sink the film and jeopardize the investments of his producers. There wasn't anything directly political about Scott's action, as reprehensible as it was; indeed, this kind of cold-blooded financial calculation is standard practice in Hollywood. In the case of McCarthyism, the witch-hunt was totally political, the purpose being to purge left-wing activists and left-wing culture from the US political scene. Those activists had abused no one; on the contrary, what they were being victimized for was something admirable, their resistance to an oppressive social system. There is nothing admirable about what Spacey is alleged to have done, and even if the accusations against him are only partly true, he bears responsibility for what's befallen him, and his victims deserve more sympathy than he does.

Demonstration in support of the Hollywood Ten victims of McCarthyism

Nor is #MeToo as a movement comparable to McCarthyism. It is true that at times there has been a lynch-mob atmosphere on social media connected to #MeToo, but that is hardly unique to #MeToo. On the contrary, it seems an endemic feature (at least in our times) of platforms like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, which all too often become a breeding ground for trolling and social aggression. It's also true that in the welter of voices that have become associated with #MeToo, there are establishment celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and strident purveyors of identity politics, whose political agendas go from cynical to sinister. But much of this is what you would expect from an upsurge of spontaneous outrage over sexual abuse and decades of frustration over the failure to do much about it by official society, an upsurge that is inevitably going to be very confused given the absence of a broad-based radicalization in the working class. When it came to McCarthyism, there wasn't anything grassroots (or confused) about it, it was a full-throated political witch-hunt by powerful elites in the government and mass media. (The WSWS tries to make out that #MeToo is a conspiracy concocted by the New York Times and the Democrats, but they offer no evidence to back this up. Given their willful blindness to the scope of sexual abuse, it makes sense from their point of view to explain away #MeToo as a conspiracy, but this says more about North and company than it does about #MeToo.)

If we look deeper at the WSWS coverage of #MeToo, two aspects emerge about their attitude to sexual abuse: first that it isn't really about sex and second that it isn't such a big problem.

The first aspect is evident in their initial article on Weinstein: “The real key to Weinstein’s behavior, assuming the accusations to be true, is wealth. The scandal is not about Weinstein personally and his psychological make-up. His is a widespread form of abuse. The common denominator is that the abuse is carried out by those with money and power. It is not about over-active hormones, but a brutal expression of the type of pressure placed upon people: if you want to keep your job, this is what you must do …The right of certain people to act like this, and get away with it, is bestowed upon them by money.”

The claim here is that the Weinstein scandal isn't about sex but about “money and power.” Why should this be either/or? Why can't it be about money and power AND ALSO about sex? After all Weinstein isn't a Bernie Madoff or some crooked congressman. Take away the sex in Weinstein’s case and there is no scandal at all.

There is also the claim that what Weinstein allegedly did “is a widespread form of abuse”. Just how widespread we are told in a later paragraph: “But this sort of extortion of sexual favors is not simply part of Hollywood, it’s part of the American business and corporate culture as a whole, part of the brutality of social relations in the US. How would the New York Times or any major enterprise hold up under scrutiny? Sexual assault or coercion is vastly under-reported in factories (where today union officials have joined supervisors as the guilty parties) and other work places, in the US armed forces, in the vast gulag of local, state and federal jails and prisons, among low-paid and immigrant workers and in all the countless situations in America where the weak find themselves at the mercy of the powerful.”

This is pretty unequivocal: sexual abuse is rampant in America. And it is “vastly under-reported” – including by the WSWS itself, one might add!

But there is also something askew about this analysis. It paints a simplistic picture of abuse as being committed solely by the powerful against the weak. While this is a major part of the story, it leaves out the sad reality that abuse crosses class lines and that, for example in domestic abuse, it is often the weak abusing the weak, which is to say, working class men abusing their wives. (Or similarly the powerful abusing the powerful in the case of wealthy couples, and let's not leave the middle class out of this either.) And this is true not only of domestic abuse. When a woman or a girl is harassed while walking down a street, it's isn't always – or even most often – by someone in a three-piece suit driving a Mercedes.

But a less simplistic picture would make it difficult to write off sexual abuse as being just a manifestation of “money and power”. It would force us to consider that sexual relationships are themselves political, which is to say (not always but all too often) relationships of exploitation and oppression. It would also force us to have some theoretical framework for understanding human sexuality. But this sort of analysis is something the WSWS does NOT want to consider. Names like Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Marcuse, Lacan, Jameson, Žižek play no role in its theoretical work. Indeed, any mention of such ideas is anathema to North and his acolytes, who consider them a subjectivist deviation from their rigidly mechanical conception of Marxism. Sexual relationships are never neat and it is absurd to imagine they are containable by crude categories like “money and power.” An atrophied version of Marxism that is suspicious of any theoretical innovation past 1940 and dismissive of subjective realities like emotions and mass psychology is going to have nothing fruitful to say about sexuality. Instead it's going to try to change the channel, as it were, whenever possible.

So not surprisingly a few weeks later we find the same writer, David Walsh, the WSWS point man on the Weinstein story, presenting a markedly different picture of sexual abuse. “The sexual misconduct campaign is dishonest in so many ways. There is the ludicrous pretense, for example, that Hollywood or the entertainment industry generally is the measure of sexual and workplace relations in America. In the 2014 General Social Survey, a random sample of Americans was asked, 'In the last 12 months, were you sexually harassed by anyone while you were on the job?' In response, 3.6 percent of women said yes, a decrease from 6.1 percent in 2002. Not a conclusive statistic by any means, but not an indication of the 'state of siege' described by the various columnists and pundits.”

Gone is the panorama of rampant sexual abuse in factories, prisons, the armed forces, among immigrants etc. Instead it's just a problem amplified out of all proportion by a privileged few in Hollywood who presume to think of themselves as “the measure of sexual and workplace relations in America.” And then we get a statistic thrown in that Walsh admits isn't conclusive and is based on a random study. But it's conclusive enough for Walsh to dismiss 'state of siege' talk as exaggerated. And of course, a phrase like 'state of siege' is hyperbole. But what is ALSO being dismissed is the widespread nature of sexual abuse that Walsh himself was insisting on only a few weeks earlier. That isn't hyperbole; on the contrary, it's a reality afflicting a great many women in factories, offices, retail, restaurants, farms – in other words, working class women. The British union federation, the TUC, reports that half of the working women in the UK report having had to deal with harassment, in the US the number is closer to three-quarters. When you downplay the extent of harassment, it is the plight of these women that you are brushing aside.

This willful blindness to sexual abuse is also evident in North's major pronouncement on #MeToo. While he excoriates #MeToo at length as a reactionary witch-hunt, he says next to nothing about his own views on sexual abuse; indeed, the term sexual abuse isn't even mentioned until the last couple of paragraphs. The closest we come to any theorizing on the subject is the following:

“The 'Me Too' movement is pitched to the lowest level of social awareness, even on the question upon which it is most focused: sex. Throughout the 20th century, there was a persistent effort to demystify sex, to remove the tyrannical weight of religious prejudice in the evaluation of sexual behavior. Even aberrant and violent sexual behavior came to be viewed as a social and psychological phenomenon that required scientific study and medical treatment. Remorseless and inhumane punishment serves no end other than the bitter desire for revenge.”

From the get-go this gets off on the wrong foot: #MeToo isn't focused on sex but on sexual abuse, a rather crucial distinction. And so, the vague generalizations about the demystifying of sex (by who? one wonders since Freud is a complete blank on the WSWS) miss the point. Or more accurately they leave out the most relevant part of the story: it wasn't just that sex was demystified in the last century, it was also that the ugly reality of sexual abuse was brought into the light of day.

I'm old enough to remember a time when 'beating up your wife' was still considered a joke, and not just in bars or locker rooms but also in polite society and even the halls of Congress. (Actually, it still seems to be popular among Republican politicians, as in Ted Cruz attempting a lame joke at a conservative convention: “No, I have not stopped beating my wife.” Apparently cracking jokes like this shows how tough you are in standing up to political correctness.) Up to the Fifties and even the Sixties and Seventies wife beating was considered a private matter, a secret to be kept from anyone outside the family. If there was any controversy about it, it wasn't about whether to do it but to what extent. A man was the king of his castle, and he had a right to use force to discipline not only his children but also his wife, who as a woman was considered overly emotional and hence essentially childish. You can see this treated in a comic vein in tv sitcoms from the Fifties like I Love Lucy. Whenever the title character gets into trouble, her husband Ricky takes her across his knee and spanks her, to the raucous approval of the laugh track. Or there was The Honeymooners where bus driver Ralph Kramden was repeatedly threatening to whack his wife Alice so hard she'd go “to the moon”, a punch line in a quite literal sense.

This ugly reality was also evident in the legal system's treatment of rape in this era. If a man threatened to use force in order to have sex with a woman, that was insufficient grounds for a rape charge. You needed to show that he had threatened to kill her or inflict grave bodily injury. More striking still is the then-prevailing legal definition of consent, as discussed here by liberal philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum:

“Usually the woman had to show that she had resisted, even in the face of force or the threat of force, because only this was taken to give evidence of non-consent. Some states made resistance a formal statutory requirement, but more often it was read into statutes as a requirement implicit in the notions of force and/or non-consent. The old requirement was that the victim resist 'to the utmost'; more recently, this was replaced by terms such as 'reasonable resistance' or 'earnest resistance' ... A woman who did not resist physically, or who succumbed to lesser threats [i.e. lesser than the threat of death or grave bodily injury] was treated as consenting, and the man's conduct was not criminal at all.” And Nussbaum quotes from a 1973 New York state appellate court decision overturning a rape conviction: “Rape is not committed unless the woman opposes the man to the utmost limit of her power. The resistance must be genuine and active. It is difficult to conclude that the complainant here waged a valiant struggle to uphold her honor.”

Today we recognize such attitudes as blatant misogyny, but they were prevalent not only in legal circles but in society at large until late into the 20^th century, and indeed haven't entirely disappeared even now. Perhaps the best-known pushback by feminists against this misogyny is the 'No Means No' slogan. Though it's often been criticized for oversimplifying the problem (since sexual encounters can be fraught with ambiguities so that sometimes No doesn't really mean No), the impulse behind that slogan is an understandable reaction to a widespread social injustice. This misogyny misshaped what men expected from sexual encounters with women, and it distorted women's expectations as well. As Nussbaum writes:

“Women who had been raped, however violent and non-consensual the incident, felt shamed and sullied and frequently did not even consider turning to the law for help. Often guilt about their own sexual desires, or about having consented to kissing or petting, made women feel that they had 'asked for it,' even when the rape involved violence and substantial physical damage. In addition, women who had consented to intercourse but who had not consented to acts of violence within intercourse also felt it impossible to complain because the reigning view was that a woman who said yes to intercourse had no right to complain about any abuse that ensued. Such a woman would surely have been treated with mockery and abuse by the police had she complained.”

I recently came across an 'asked for it' story when I was looking up the Wikipedia entry for Loretta Young, an A-list Hollywood movie star from the Thirties and Forties who eventually crossed over into tv. Though Young was a devout Catholic, it was widely known in Hollywood that she'd had a child out of wedlock (as they used to say) by Clark Gable. The two had starred together in a 1935 movie (based on Jack London's Call of the Wild) and it was assumed that they'd had the usual off-screen romance. Young made up an elaborate cover story to hide the pregnancy and after the birth she pretended she'd adopted the baby, a true-life melodrama that a good many women had to live through (often, needless to say, with far less money and support than a movie star). But near the end of her life (she died in 2000), Young revealed that though she had flirted with Gable on set, the sex hadn't been consensual. What provoked her to make this claim was learning what the term 'date rape' meant; she suddenly had words to explain the incident with Gable. According to the Wiki entry, Young “had previously always believed that a woman's job was to fend off men's amorous advances and had felt the fact that Gable had been able to force himself on her was thus a moral failing on her part.” Of course we'll never know for sure what happened since Gable isn't around to tell his side of the story. But the fact that Young herself believed almost to the end of her life that she'd 'asked for it' by not doing enough to fend Gable off rings very true. And it speaks to the experience of a great many women who endured date rape without ever realizing that's what it was.

Needless to say, experiences like date rape or terms like misogyny appear nowhere in North's piece or in any of the WSWS coverage of #MeToo. So that when, at the very end of his article, North declares that sexual abuse is a “class issue”, what could be an insight is really obfuscation. To say that the fight against sexual abuse is a class issue SHOULD MEAN that's it's an issue to be championed by the working class and its revolutionary vanguard. It SHOULD MEAN that this fight plays an important role in the agitation and propaganda of that vanguard because it's about defending the democratic rights of all women, including half the working class. But for North it doesn't mean any of that. Labelling sexual abuse as a class issue is just licence for him to forget about it entirely.

There are important class issues pertaining to #MeToo, specifically the complaints of organizations and activists who work with working class women that #MeToo is focused far too much on the relatively privileged women in Hollywood and not enough on those in low wage jobs. But this criticism is only credible if it is based on solidarity with victims of sexual abuse, the very thing lacking on the WSWS. Moreover, the message coming from working women is the polar opposite of the WSWS line: they don't want to renounce #MeToo, they want to it to EXPAND. Hence headlines like: “Will Women in Low-Wage Jobs Get Their #MeToo Moment?” or “The #MeToo Moment: Blue Collar Women Ask, 'What About Us?'”

And there are some reports of working women being galvanized into action. In November a coalition representing 700,000 female farm workers issued an open letter expressing solidarity with the victims of Weinstein et al. This was in the lead-up to a march in Los Angeles to “Take Back the Workplace”.  There was also a piece from National Public Radio also in February, titled “Low Wage Workers Say #MeToo Movement Is A Chance For Change”, that picked up on the recent resignation of Steve Wynn as head of his hotel and casino empire (and also as finance chair of the Republican party) after multiple accusations of sexual abuse by workers in his facilities. It also mentions the resignations of celebrity chefs Steve Besh and Mario Batali after similar allegations by women who worked for them. Restaurant, retail, domestic work and agriculture are all areas where sexual harassment is rampant, and the report quotes a number of women workers in these areas who feel that “this is our shot to make a change.”

It may be that those hopes don't pan out, but Marxists should strongly support the struggles of these women while doing everything possible to make apparent the link between sexual abuse and social inequality. In that regard (though you would never know it from reading the WSWS) there is actually a long tradition of socialists championing the rights of women that goes back to Charles Fourier and continues with Engels (The Origin of the Family etc.), August Bebel (Women and Socialism) and the unprecedented expansion of women's rights in the first years of Soviet power. While in our time it's necessary for Marxists to resist the tide of identity politics, that doesn't mean that all feminism has to be bourgeois feminism. For Marxists to ignore a widespread social reality like sexual abuse is not only shameful but it also cedes the issue to bourgeois feminism, and that serves to strengthen identity politics rather than undermine it. The gist of identity politics is to separate women's issues from class issues, but the sectarian politics of the WSWS does the same in reverse. A 21^st century Marxism would work to bring the two together.

******

A few words more, this time about some criticism North directed at Alex Steiner and myself in a comments section of a WSWS article on #MeToo. Alex will address the philosophical issues in a separate post, but here I want to make a couple of points. North claims that we have broken with our past views that led us to join the Trotskyist movement in the 1970s. We would contend that the opposite is true – it is North and his organization that have broken from the revolutionary traditions of Trotskyism. Of course Trotsky is venerated on the WSWS, but this proves little: Marx and Lenin were revered in Stalin's Soviet Union, even as every principle they stood for was trampled on. North's organization practices a brand of Trotskyism that Trotsky himself would have found unrecognizable: no Transitional Program, no defense of unions from government attack, no upholding the right of nations to self-determination, instinctive hostility to any mass movement of the working class, a virulent sectarianism that brands everyone else on the left as 'pseudo-left', and a cult-like internal regime where political disagreements are suppressed and every resolution is passed 'unanimously'. Here it's worth making a more general point about the relationship between tradition and revolutionary practice. North makes a big deal about upholding tradition, it features prominently in his lectures and writings. But his kind of 'orthodoxy' often ends up betraying the traditions it claims to uphold. This is because there is a dialectical relationship between tradition and practice in revolutionary politics, which 'orthodoxy' is blind to. In the career of the great revolutionary Marxists there always came a crucial moment where it was necessary for them to break with tradition, a break understood as superseding the tradition rather than renouncing it. Lenin and the Second International, Trotsky and the Third, are classic examples. Probably the best-known counter-examples of an undialectical orthodoxy are Kautsky and Plekhanov. The latter in particular is someone North reveres. As the fate of both these men proves, the road to reaction can be paved with even the best of traditions.

References:

David North's main statement on #MeToo is here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/09/pers-d09.html. His remarks on Steiner and myself are in the comments section of this article: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/10/mess-f10.html 

Three other WSWS articles referenced are here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/12/wein-o12.html here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/28/marc-n28.html and here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/01/spac-n01.html.

Martha Nussbaum's book is Sex and Social Justice (1999, Oxford UP). Quotes are from pp. 138-9 & 141.

BuzzFeed did a feature story in 2015 on the Loretta Young/Clark Gable relationship: https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/loretta-young#.ncXnjxPp2  

The NPR story on low wage workers and #MeToo is here: https://www.npr.org/2018/02/06/583428098/low-wage-workers-say-metoo-movement-is-a-chance-for-change  

The story about female farm workers and #MeToo was posted on the Time magazine website: http://time.com/5018813/farmworkers-solidarity-hollywood-sexual-assault/

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