03/24/2018
Gender Oppression and Abuse in SMSC
by Cantara and Jose and edited and reviewed by Victoria, all former members of the leading body of San Marcos Socialist Collective
San Marcos Socialist Collective has been on hiatus for about 5 months following the culmination of an accountability process for an ongoing abusive situation within our organization. As of now, SMSC is effectively defunct as the members have moved on to other work with other radical or progressive organizations in the San Marcos, Austin, and San Antonio areas.
This is a post that seeks to detail the collective failings of our organization in direct connection to an abusive situation. We use a lot of definitions and language from a report made in 2005 by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Ad-Hoc Community Accountability Working Group.* This report has been extremely helpful in identifying our collective failings in this situation. There is a lot of helpful and important information in this report and the authors of this document encourage anyone to read it because it is specifically made for progressive, radical, or revolutionary organizations. If anyone also has additional, more recently made resources, please feel free to bring those to our attention.
As a revolutionary socialist organization, part of SMSC’s Points of Unity are to dismantle patriarchy, which is the cultural, political, and social system of power given to men over all other genders. The specific POU that addresses this is as follows:
“We fight against white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism and recognize their distinct historical legacies and social power structures and struggles. These violent forms of structural oppression harm people materially and stand as an obstacle to the achievement of revolutionary solidarity amongst the socially oppressed and the working class. Chauvinistic viewpoints can arise even within a socialist organization and we must take proactive measures to combat them.”
Patriarchy manifests at the institutional, as well as the interpersonal level. It is important to state that racism, transphobia, ableism, and class struggle do interact with patriarchy, resulting in multiple points of intersection, but sometimes it is easier to identify what system of oppression was the root cause of a toxic environment or interaction. Patriarchy is that system of oppression for this situation. The abusive situation was allowed to continue because of patriarchal practices in our organization and resulted in and upheld gender oppression.
The situation involved the abuse of a woman on SMSC’s leading body, but broader patterns of gender oppression were at work. Duties that involved highly masculinized behavior were praised while duties of more culturally feminine behavior were not commented on or praised at all. The work of women and non-binary folk, work fitting into either masculine or feminine behavior, was not as valued as equal to the work of men in the collective. A more concrete example was the appointing of the abuser to a position of power on the leading body as well as a position of power over the two other women on the leading body. This gave ripe conditions for abuse. All of these together contributed to intense internalized misogyny for the woman members, that manifested in many ways but ultimately contributed to a culture of silence about gender oppression.
The exact details of the abuse are not up for argument. What we can say is that it followed a typical abusive pattern and that the abuse also took place over the course of a year. Like most abusive relationships, it had a cycle, a point where the abuser seemed to be following boundaries and goals set by the member with the abuser, behavior seemed to be improving, followed by a complete reversal of this progress and a return to abusive behavior. If the member had not taken action after been encouraged by people outside of SMSC to have the situation be heard by our sister organization, Austin Socialist Collective, there might have been another cycle of reconciliation followed by abuse. It is important to note that the member had private conversations with members of SMSC where the abusive behavior was recounted, but, because of the shared relationship with the abuser, no action took place to take the member out of the situation. We break down exact failings in the paragraph after the timeline.
This is a timeline of the accountability process that took place:
The member eventually decided it would be necessary to approach one representative from our sister organization’s (Austin Socialist Collective) Women’s Caucus for advice. The representative immediately knew this situation required action as put forward in the sexual harassment and bullying policy that was shared with our organizations, and advised our member so. The member decided to start the process. As the SMSC leading body was compromised due to the abuser’s position on it, as well as the incompetency to protect the member, the leading body could not carry out the duties stated in the sexual harassment and bullying policy which we adopted. It is important to note that none of the leading body had studied the policy.
An arbiter that was chosen for situations like this took the member’s account.
The member and the arbiter presented the information to the Steering Committee, which includes one representative of the Women’s Caucus of ASC, the body that wrote the policy.
The steering committee and the arbiter decided on the course of action for the abuser, which was the immediate removal of the abuser from membership and all channels of internal and external communication.
A document was sent to the members of SMSC’s leading body, except for the member who brought the complaint, detailing the account and the action to be taken for the abuser. Within a day, all but one member of the leading body endorsed the document. The document was then sent to the general membership of ASC.
SMSC held a “struggle session” with three arbiters from ASC. The abuser was not involved. We originally decided to meet again in November to talk about patterns of racial oppression and, the class character of our organization, but that did not happen. Partly due to the intense emotional labor involved in this accountability process, but also because very important members to the organization decided to leave and pursue other revolutionary projects.
As a revolutionary organization it is difficult to reconcile that these events happened, but in naming the things we did to allow this situation to happen, we can learn from our failings and begin collective healing.
Four tools for maintaining gender oppression and avoiding accountability as referenced in the Incite! report are:
Denial
Minimizing
Victim Blaming
Counter-organizing
In the specific case of abuse within our organization these tools were used as a way to perpetuate the oppression of the member and enable the abuser to continue abusive behavior unchecked.
SMSC inadvertently used these tools by:
staying silent on the issue or addressing it ineffectually, avoiding accountability, and not prioritizing addressing the concerns of abusive acts and patterns observed,
viewing them as a private interpersonal matter rather than acts of gender oppression that required public collective action,
victim-blaming in mistakenly writing off the member as bourgeois and “white-feminist” and discounting their experience of abuse,
attempting to shift the narrative to other problems within the organization as a way to discount the abuse issue at hand,
counter-organizing in defense of the abuser and prioritizing the work and mental health of the abuser over the safety of the member.
Despite our Points of Unity, these acts and patterns of abuse were allowed to continue within the organization. Even in the time it took to finally write this statement, SMSC did not prioritize our own accountability in the situation. We acknowledge our failings and publicly apologize to the member who experienced this abuse. We are glad that the member is finding peace and self-determination despite the organization.
In the sequence of events toward resolution, SMSC took a course of action that was similar to the Principles of Accountability described in section 3 of the Incite! Report, excluding the last two principles. The two principles are:
Abuser accountability for oppressive, abusive, and violent attitude and behaviors
Transformation towards liberation
While these last two principles are very important ideas that need to be explored, SMSC prioritized the safety and self-determination of our member.
We expose ourselves in this manner in the tradition of leftist self-critique. We cannot just sweep things under the rug and expect to not repeat the same mistakes in the future. A paraphrase of something one of our arbiters said in our “struggle session” is the importance of emulating the social relationships we envision for a different system as best as we can under capitalism. To do this takes constant check-in on the internal dynamics of our organizational and interpersonal relationships.
A lot of discussion and conflict has arisen over the topic of creating bureaucratic policies and horizontal structures versus base-building and “doing the work”. Writing bullying and sexual harassment policies sounds like superfluous bureaucracy, but it should take precedence over how many actions a person needs to attend to become an official member of your organization. Take the time to discuss and create these processes of accountability that combat inequalities and make an effort to follow through with them. Making policies that facilitate this process is important, but if they are not being enforced/ implemented, they are useless.
In a system that rewards silence, it is necessary to be brave and speak out. Not only about the things we see wrong in the world, but also about manifestations of patriarchy within the proletarian hegemonic institutions we are building/attempting to build. The burden to be brave must not fall on one individual, our power comes from solidarity. Being brave is a collective responsibility that will lead us closer to liberation.
We are extremely grateful to the arbiters and the Steering Committee of ASC for facilitating our navigation through this process.
As SMSC is effectively defunct, folks looking to get involved in San Marcos can look to organizations such as El Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, Mano Amiga, Revolutionary Front San Marcos, and San Marcos Cinema Club. This page will not be deleted, but will not be replying to any further inquiries.
Thank you.
*http://www.incite-national.org/page/community-accountability-within-people-color-progressive-movements
