[TW: discussion of intimate violence].

Friends have asked me how my book on Forgiveness relates to Sarah Schulman’s book, ‘Conflict is not Abuse’. They don’t overlap much. We both characterise moralism as destructive; we’re both against genocide. We both criticise the dominant ways of thinking about harm, we do so from different perspectives.

In relation to personal suffering, the old liberal consensus held that: (1) harm is real, (2) it is caused by individuals rather than social structures, (3) conflicts should be resolved in ways likely to help the victim, (4) that victim needs to pardon their abuser, (5) the reason to do so this is to protect the victim’s own long-term mental wellbeing, (6) these principles apply to individual conflicts, not societies (save for South Africa or black people in the US, when suddenly they apply again).

Both Schulman and I reject point 2, but for neither of us is it the central problem. My book mainly challenges points 4, 5 and 6. Schulman focuses on point 1.

Her narrative centres on domestic violence within lesbian communities. It queers our assumption of the normal. When people encounter interpersonal violence in heterosexual relationships, and apply step 3 above, a way to understand what happened is to look for an abuser. It’s often a wise starting assumption to assume that it’s the man’s fault. Schulman shares the activist shorthand that you should “believe the woman”. Her next point is that, whatever insight that approach delivers when dealing with straight relationships, it is useless in resolving anything when the relationship of conflict involves two women.

At times, Schulman promises to criticise society when it underestimates the harm done by abuse, and to be no less hostile when people overstate the harm done by mere inter-personal conflict. But, almost all the examples she gives of shoddy thinking are instances of the second and not the first of these problems. Similarly, her subtitle (“Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair”) speaks only of the dangers of overstating harm, not of the risks of minimising it.

Life is conflict, Schulman writes (I agree). Two people flirting are two people in conflict (I agree there too). Allowing the state to adjudicate conflicts is destructive (for that one, I’ll give her all the yeses in the world).

Where conflict approaches harm, Schulman’s answers are that a person caught up in a destructive relationship needs, in seemingly every case, to remain in a relationship with the other. She is hostile to the idea that a person can ever thrive by ending a relationship (“Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange childish act of destruction from which nothing can be won”). To be fair to Schulman. following the passage I have just quoted, she goes on to suggest that repair might not mean exactly restoration. What is good for people could be them talking, not necessarily them continuing to live together. But, in the book as a whole, she is much more consistent in insisting that relationships should endure than she is in accepting that sometimes they need to be diminished or ended.

Complete abandonment, she says, is cruelty, “Shunning, an active form of harassment, is never useful in resolving problems”.

Schulman also shows a disturbing tendency to prove the injustice of departures by citing instances of her own life. This disempowers the reader, who wasn’t there when that particular friend abandoned Schulman and is expected to take the author on trust when she writes that the breakdown was unfair and unwarranted. I can’t have been the only reader wondering what complex story stood behind these bland assurances (“if we had spoken on the phone…”). What would the lyrices of West End Girl be, if the album had been written not by Lily Allen but by David Harbour?

Shunning, Schulman writes, is arbitrary. Shunning prevents the departee from learning necessary valuable lessons as to how their own behaviour caused the other person to do wrong. The better life is, in her book, a continuing relationship with the person the other wishes to leave. In this account, all departures are bad, both the trivial and the extremely-not – even the victim of sustained physical violence, “shunning” the domestic home under threat of death.

Schulman’s final chapter is called “The duty of repair”. Every relationship has around it a community of friends. Their job is to support both parties and help them repair whatever damage the two people have caused themselves.

It is this latter argument which I think has resonated, almost disengaged from the rest of the book, in activist communities. I’m told that there are even small leftist groups who based their policies for harm reduction on a reading of Schulman’s book. If so, I bet you anything that it’s this final section which landed with them.

People feel that it is the natural corollary of abolitionist politics. If we are going to ignore the cops in our heads, if we are going to accept the possibility that people will cause harm even in political spaces dedicated to social change, and if we are not going to drive people out of the movement prematurely – then shouldn’t we be helping all our people, even the ones who’ve done harm?

One response might be the following: we should listen carefully to people who report violence. We should reflect on what they tell us. We may also need to listen to people accused of wrong, although that is likely to be a more shallow listening than they would like. We may listen to them to make sure that this is not one of those rare cases where an allegation is wholly fictitious or made (as Schulman insists they often are) by a violent person to hide their own destructive behaviour. We should decide, quickly and accurately, what happened. With that knowledge, a community of friends or activists might say to a person accused of violence that we are happy to treat them as a full member of our community, so long as they admit what happened, apologise, and take steps to repair the harm tehyt’ve caused.

Lots of different activist communities adopt the approach I’ve just set out. It is here that Schulman’s duty of repair bites. She is saying that the community must get involved, must supervise the accused person, and guide them to self-change. I am not necessarily opposed to this part of her argument, but it is worth spelling out its costs, and here are just two:

Assuming that the violence occurred in a heterosexual setting – the duty would mean, in many cases, a much more intense project of looking after and healing the accused man than there ever was of listening to the woman. It takes time and emotional labour to get a perpetrator past the wounds of their youth. That’s often a much harder process than telling a victim that the person who hurt them has been working hard on their issue. Doesn’t this duty of repair reward people with rampant and destructive egos – they’re the ones who get the most attention afterwards?

And what do you do if the accused isn’t willing to see himself as a perpreator; what it he has underlying problems of a damaged family background or alcohol or dug addiction, which is unwilling to admit or change? Is the community of friends allowed (contra Schulman) to say that some people are too trouble to fix?

I am not posing these problems as unanswerable. Really, all I’m trying to do is explain why the large majority of reviews of Schulman’s book are positive and also why it is remembered unfondly in activist circles. They are just some of the reasons why, in my book, I base my critique of liberalism on different grounds to Schulman’s.

The SWP has gone public with its plans to remove four people from its central committee: Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber, Weyman Bennett and Mark Thomas. Each were in the SWP leadership in 2013, the year in which that organisation tried to cover up two complaints of rape and sexual harassment. Callinicos formulated the SWP leadership’s justification for their decision to keep Martin Smith (“Comrade Delta”) in post. He wrote the article, ‘Is Leninism Finished?’ which told SWP cadres how to resist the complaints – by saying that the real issue was not what the women had suffered (“a difficult disciplinary case”) but the willingness of SWP dissidents to vote against their own leadership (“Two factions were formed in the lead-up to the conference to fight for changes in the model of democratic centralism …that the SWP has developed”). Kimber was National Secretary of the SWP that year. Weyman Bennett hinted that the women complainants were in the pay of the secret state (“I’m not saying it is MI5, but it is suspicious that someone would come forward so late”).

In the same document, the organization acknowledges that the reason for removing the four was “the legacy of the 2013 crisis, when the SWP failed two women who raised complaints of sexual misconduct”. The party talks of that legacy as “something that will pose a challenge in the year ahead”. There are at least two ways in which the crisis is likely to have an impact over the next year: members of the SWP are likely to stand for elected posts in Your Party in February 2026. If the SWP nominates such of its members as Amy Leather – who spoke on behalf of the SWP at the recent Your Party conference – other socialists will remember what those veterans did during the SWP’s crisis year. In Leather’s case, she was another SWP CC member and supporter of the cover-up. She was also more importantly, on the Disputes Panel tasked with investigating the complaint, and asked one of the questions which became notorious in 2013 (In relation to allegations of plying women with drink as a prelude to pestering them for sex, she asked: “Don’t you think Martin is just generous? Whenever I go out for a coffee with Martin, he always buys me coffee.”)

Further, in July 2026, Ebb Books are going to be publishing the book on the left, which is based on the testimony of more than 50 people who suffered in 2013, have described how they were effected, and how deeply the problems went within the party. I hope that the book’s readership will include many people who joined the SWP after 2013. They are entitled to know what the people around them did when their party was in crisis mode.

Here, though, I’m going to focus on the book on the right, which will also come into print in summer 2026. While that wasn’t written with the SWP in mind, it is trying to formulate a general answer to such questions as “Should the left try to forgive? When has a wrong-doer changed enough so that it is good politics to forgive them?” And those are exactly the questions which people will be asking next year. The book’s argument, put as succinctly as I can, is that whether you’re talking about a person, a party, or a whole society the rules should be the same. The moment at which it is sensible to start talking about forgiving people is after a revolution. In the case of a large society, I’m hoping that’s easy to visualise. In the case of two people and a complaint of interpersonal violence, that transformation might mean:

-the perpetrator admitting they were wrong,

-them spelling out exactly how they were mistaken,

-them promising not do anything similar again, and

-them doing all they can to lower themselves and lift up the victim (“reparation”) so that they have reversed the original dynamics of power and powerlessness inside which they committed the original wrong.

(One further complication; the only person who can forgive an interpersonal wrong is its victim. For anyone else watching, the issue isn’t so much whether we should forgive but more like – when does the time come when it’s working asking the victim what she thinks? For most of the past decade, we haven’t been remotely close to it).

I didn’t draw up those tests for the sake of the SWP, who get no direct mention in my Forgiveness book, but for all the world’s wrong-doers. They would apply just as well to a repentant fascist, an apologetic cop, to a boss after the workers have taken power.

From that perspective, the SWP has published an apology. The party is sacking the worst of its former leaders. On the minus side, the apology was over a decade late, and one of the two women affected declined to accept it. And, while removing Kimber and Callinicos, the SWP proposes to keep in place as its branch secretaries and as members of its National Committee the generation of people who were the leadership’s first line of defence in 2013 – the hundreds of local Amy Leathers.

Still, overall, that is actually quite a lot of progress. In terms of the list I’ve set out, the crucial omission is the second of those four points. The reason a perpetrator needs to admit what they did wrong is that without this information an apology rings hollow, and they seem unconvincing when they say it won’t happen again. Without insight, its hard to believe the contrition or any subsequent act of reparation.

The SWP still refuses to say anywhere what mistakes the organisation made in 2013. Where did the faults start? What caused them? The SWP’s 2024 apology was written without consultation with the two women. Former oppositionists had to show it, ourselves, to one of them – the SWP having made no attempt to speak to either woman. The apology says, “We were wrong in how we responded to the two cases”, how were you wrong? “The process we had in place at that time was entirely inadequate”, how was it inadequate? The SWP is willing to admit to the vaguest and most weightless of things – error – but can’t say what people did, or who was affected by their actions, or why they were so destructive.

Of the hundreds of oppositionists who were humiliated, threatened with violence, spat on, lied about, or had to watch in horror as the SWP tried to drive them out of the labour movement – to which of them is the party willing to admit it did wrong?

The same SWP document urges its members to show “zero tolerance to defensiveness”. No-one’s arguing that they should defend anything. People are saying – it’s time to end the years of bureaucratic evasions. Now tell the truth – give us your best version of the story. Tell us honestly what you did wrong.