Post it note new items August 2024 – woodsmokeblog

The 12 signatories to the Declaration reiterate the position that

We need an International Conference and a new international organization of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations, at the stage possible today, of coordination, unity of action and the working out a new general line of the international communist movement.

Of course, the ICL pre-empted this call, marshalling its political opposition to what it sees as an emerging revisionist grouping that fails to embrace the Gonzaloist prescriptions for the international communist movement.  Not a recipe for agreement that they insist upon adherence to very particular interpretations of communist experience.

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Another organisation revisiting was the Trotskyist leadership of the SWP. In May, the SWP un-expectantly issued a public statement on its 2013 rape scandal. The aftermath had been similar to the fallout of the WRP’s 1985-86 split, but the SWP avoided oblivion.

As 2013 closed the SWP had lost more or less half of its active membership, including around 95% of its student membership – deadly for an organisation noted for its membership churn. Its reputation in the wider movement – annoyance aside – was in tatters. It was banned from several student unions as a ‘threat to women’, and attempts were made to do the same in trade unions as well. Dissident factions were appearing, and the organisation being shunned. The SWP leadership had addressed this crisis in its journal International Socialism issue 140 on The politics of the SWP crisis. In 2024 it looked again.

The two cases, and the internal crisis that it unleashed, involved women members alleging rape by someone who was then a member of the elected leadership of the party, “comrade delta”, Martin Smith, then national organiser. A second woman had come forward to allege sexual harassment by the same member of the leadership. As the SWP statement described it, “The women making the allegations chose not to take them to the police … given the lack of seriousness with which the police treat such cases. Instead, they sought to pursue their allegations through the party’s ‘disputes committee’.”

Late in 2012 the main complainant had re-examined her own memories of her interactions with Smith, and come to the conclusion that she had been the victim of rape. The disputes committee /DC panel was convened and staffed, by colleagues of the accused leader, and it dismissed the case against Smith. This decision immediately led to clandestine oppositions forming and saw four members were expelled on the basis of leaked Facebook chat logs. In 2024, the SWP acknowledged, “other mistakes we made, the composition of the panel that heard the first case contained people who had worked closely with the person accused.”

At the SWP’s conference early in 2013, in the vote on whether to accept the DC’s annual report, which covered the Smith case, the leadership loyalists defending Smith just edged a slim conference majority; however the full transcript of the debate was anonymously leaked and rapidly published. The bourgeois press then got hold of it.

The SWP leadership invoked party discipline and sanctioned those who rebelled against this scandalous events. They were denounced as wreckers, anarchists, liberals, agents of “creeping feminism”, and so forth. Two factions arose, one – more militant – around Richard Seymour, and including the ‘Facebook Four’; and another, more conciliatory outfit that included many long-standing and respected SWP loyalists and intellectuals, including Ian Birchall and Neil Davidson. The militants chose to resign early on, the ‘moderates’ fought on under the name, ‘In Defence of our Party’, attempting to split members from the leadership loyalists. As with the events around the WRP in 1985, from those struggles other groups emerged. In the view of an 11 year veteran who left, “the SWP suffered the same problems that had haunted the rest of the Trotskyist-left. Splits along essentially generational lines, brittleness to the point of absurdity (treating criticism of “comrade delta” as the abandonment of classical Marxism) and sectarian retreat and isolation.”

Eleven years after the event, the organisation’s leadership owns up to having had inadequate disputes procedures, but not to the fanaticism with which its leadership set out to drive out all who saw those procedures as inadequate at the time. Its statement stated: “we subsequently recognised, the process we had in place at that time was entirely inadequate and we handled the two cases badly. “

After years of previous study and publications on the issues affecting women in British society dating from the Sixties onwards, it acted blind to the power differential between a leading member and a young recruit, in the manner of a liberal ‘age-gap discourse’, but the ultra-centralist ‘command and control’ structure, which amplifies that differential, characterised its response to the concerns raised. Its action made the brand utterly toxic for a new generation of activists outside of its sectarian defensive management responses. The details of the internal crisis in 2013–2014 over allegations of rape are covered here and here  and here and elsewhere.

The “apology” in the SWP’s account of what it learned from this episode was more or less entirely procedural. The problem is seen in the prisms of industrial human relations departments with a pledge that the SWP now seeks to apply the guidelines drawn up by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, drawn up to help employers deal with workplace disputes of this nature.  These human-resources stances, have the fundamental function to protect the employer from reputational damage and expensive litigation. The recruitment issue is obliquely referenced,

“Our current procedures and expected behaviour are on our website. We make sure any new member of the SWP engages with these, and we make every effort to ensure they are taken seriously.”

The SWP leadership’s press release of 16 May 2024 acknowledged, “decisions made by the SWP in 2013 damaged our record—and the current leadership acknowledges the party’s mistakes and is committed to learning from them….We were wrong in how we responded to the two cases described below and we unreservedly apologise.”

“Our 2013 procedures were also insufficiently mindful of or sensitive to the challenges women face when they bring forward serious accusations of sexual misconduct. They also did not do enough to acknowledge potential imbalances of power due to gender, seniority in an organisation and age differences.”

The SWP reiterated that “the person against whom the allegations were directed has not been a member of the SWP since 2013.”

In conclusion the SWP addresses the issue it did not at the time: “We were and remain absolutely opposed to rape-apologism. We are now confident our procedures are robust, helping us maintain our zero-tolerance approach to abuse and harassment. We hope that the measures we have taken will help to reassure those in the wider movement that we do not tolerate rape in our organisation or downplay its seriousness.”

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Ismail Kadare (1936 – 2024) 

The passing of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare was announced on July 1, 2024. Born on January 28, 1936 in Gjirokastra, he died in Tirana, the capital of Albania, at the age of 88. He was came to notice through his poetry in the fifties, and studied literature in the Soviet Union destined to be an “engineer of human souls”.

 A leading international literary figure and intellectual, the writer Ismail Kadare was throughout the Sixities, editor of many magazines including New Albania, an arts and culture magazine which sought to promote Albanian socialism to a worldwide audience. Although some of his work was labelled “decadent” and banned upon publication, as one of the leaders of the Writers’ and Artists’ League of Albania, Kadare was a member of the Party of Labour of Albania.

At the beginning of the Seventies a French publishing house published without Kadare’s knowledge or permission, his novel, The General of the Dead Army. It became an acclaimed masterpiece all throughout the world and was translated into dozens of languages in a time when Albanian literature was all but unknown. Then The Wedding was next, tracing the emancipation of women since the People’s Revolution. The Castle, about Skanderbeg’s heroic rebellion against the Ottoman hordes. Chronicle in Stone followed, his first book about the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War, revolving around a child caught in the occupations of nazis and fascists. Ismail Kadare himself grew up amidst this occupation and terror. The Great Winter, an 800-page socialist realist novel about the heroism of Enver Hoxha and the Albanian people was set against the ideological struggle of the Moscow meeting in 1960. (Drawing on Ismail Kadare Has Died byN. Ribar, The Voice of Albania)

His literary output can be characterised as falling into two periods that of those published and promoted by the socialist Albanian state, with frequent references in the Albanian press to new releases and translations of his work, Kadare was being hailed as a “hero of the new Albanian literature”. And those, published from the nineteen Eighties onwards, praised by the western literary circles. An obituary in The Guardian was entitled, Ismail Kadare, giant of Albanian literature.

Among Kadare’s best-known books are The General of the Dead Army (1963), The Siege (1970), The Ghost Rider (1980), Broken April (1980; blood feuds in the highlands of north Albania), The Palace of Dreams (1981), The Pyramid (1992), and The Successor (2003; regarding the mysterious death of Hoxha’s handpicked successor, Mehmet Shehu).

A dissonant chord in the praise for his literary output comes from his detractors in a critically selective appreciation from the Canadian Hoxahist, The Voice of Albania, and other fellow writers:

 “Kadare was an astute chameleon, adroitly playing the rebel here and there to excite the naive westerners who were scouting for voices of dissent from the east. But there is absolutely no question about what kind of animal he was and what pack he ran with; in fact, his résumé screams careerism and conformity.”

 Kadare lived for 30 years in Tirana, in an apartment which now houses the Ismail Kadare House museum and archives. However it was a life in the elite not without its complications: it was later reported that in 1975 he was denounced, for a political poem entitled “The Red Pasha”, narrowly avoiding being shot, and underwent internal exile in a remote village deep in the central Albania countryside for a short time.

In 1981, after publishing The Palace of Dreams, Kadare was accused of deliberately evading politics by cloaking much of his fiction in history and folklore, and The Palace of Dreams was expressly condemned in the presence of several members of the Albanian Politburo. In the novel, an authoritarian dystopia (the imaginary U.O.S.; the United Ottoman States) through an enormous bureaucratic entity (the Palace of Dreams) collects every dream in the empire, sorts it, files it, analyses it, and reports the most dangerous ones to the Sultan. The work was banned—but not before 20,000 copies had been sold. His novel The Concert, a satirical account of the Sino-Albanian split, was also criticized by the authorities and was not published until 1988

The Voice of Albania,  noted that at the Scientific Conference held on November 13-14, 1989, in a speech entitled “Our Time and Our Literature” Kadare stated: “The time of socialism in Albania is one of extraordinary events and the greatest emancipation the Albanian people have seen throughout their whole history.”

Within a year he asked for political asylum in France. Showered with international awards and recognition, “for the last 34 years of his life, Ismail Kadare served as an anti-Albanian voice of reaction. “ Compared to Franz Kafka, he had claimed that his books served as veiled criticism of the system of people’s state power in Albania.

Towards the end, he claimed a classless neutrality , insisted that he was “not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime.”

Association Press reported Kadare was granted a state funeral on July 3 at the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Tirana, and two days of mourning were declared in Albania.

Kadare’s works have been published in 45 languages withmost of his approximately 80 novels, plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, and story collections translated into different languages. Wikipedia provides a list of the Kadare novels translated into English, noting that some Kadare books were translated into English by David Bellos, from French translations rather than the Albanian originals.