Where is Alex Grant?

Canada's most decorated professional Marxist has disappeared from sight.

Fightback, the largest organization on the Canadian left with no close second, has discarded its illustrious leader of multiple decades and founder of the section, Alex Grant. Grant has scrubbed the IMT from his social media, and the IMT has removed him, the erstwhile editor of their Canadian publication, from their paper. All of this is a little eye-watering for the scores of IMT members who left over the last year, in the wake of a sexual misconduct scandal that implicated Grant as a professional victim-blamer extraordinaire. Members in the US section were expelled for interfering with the “democratic processes” of the organization, i.e. commenting on Grant’s conduct internally while not being physically in Canada themselves or at an official meeting of the Canadian section. Perhaps most intriguing is that this has passed by the rest of the left without so much of a peep. This kind of upheaval in one of the quantitatively largest, self-describing Marxist organizations in North America should at least garner some trainspotting. Reflected by this is greater irrelevancies, but also the secret nature of Grant’s removal behind the backs of the membership, with “full-timers” reporting a script verbally to members. Since last year, IMT modus operandi is not to put any matters like this in text that can be “leaked.”

The composite picture emerging is that Grant departed the organization, possibly via expulsion, after being investigated for sexual misconduct, and is a persona non grata to his former colleagues. While numerous members describe being told the same basic structure of information, I will not delve into details in breaking this story. Further, anyone following this story on social media needs to refrain from behaving in a way insensitive to survivors. Words like “rape” are not a useful stick to make your points with. We do not know the nature of what happened, or what the women involved know their experience to be, without the input of their voice in this public conversation. The inside nature of a leader imbricated with a scandal involving cadres he promoted further muddy the water, adding a contour of backroom politics and shifting alliances. In the IMT, where nothing besides rubber-stamping is conducted in view of the membership, much less the public, every event is inherently opaque. But sexual misconduct is the most graphic image of the personal being political. Working class feminists have an obligation to speak with basic clinical literacy of matters that have visited real, living people.

What is minimally clear is that Alex Grant is associated now officially with sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is no laughing matter. But maybe this is, because what else can you do? The hookup and drinking culture in Toronto was legendary and viewed uncomfortably by IMT hierarchy in other sections with good reason. To Toronto’s credit, they have only aped the methods used in London, before a young woman substantively accused Alan Woods, Rob Sewell, and a British section Executive Committee member of institutional sexual harassment and leadership consciously made sure to separate their drinking from the ranks going forward.

When the IMT adopted late in its history an international Norms of Conduct to curtail this kind of exposure, they replaced the words “harassment and abuse” with “harassment and bullying.” I would know, since it was my branch who brought the need for such a document forward in the US Section. Contrariwise our hopes last decade, this cosmetic reform has not actually addressed the rampant patriarchy and rape culture endemic in IMT hierarchy, although it has given leadership a better cover of darkness.

Alex Grant’s name is forever in the public domain and, in the memory of untold numbers of former and current IMT members, associated with the practices of using the organization as a dating pool, “horizontal” recruitment, etc. Reports indicate that the displeasure of IMT leaders toward AG contains distaste for the fact that he was consciously non-monogamous, and not just practically non-monogamous for himself, unilaterally in his relationships, a tried and tested method employed by Alan Woods.

People’s private lives ought be just that. We have to pity the complexes of grandeur inoculated in IMT lifers like AG that have elevated every inch of their persona to the status of humanity’s savior, the singular voice of genuine Marxism, the only people doing anything worth anything politically-speaking, and the incarnation of an unbroken thread of a century and a half strong.

Despite the feelings of Fred Weston, a principled problem with Alex Grant is not whether or not his love life is unconventional, but the way he uses the offices of his organization — most egregiously, how he treats survivors who come forward reporting sexual violence in his organization. AG shouted down one such member in early 2022 over webcam, leading to their blog expose that accelerated the IMT’s hurtling down the tracks of lunacy, useful as a loyalty test in leadership’s eyes.

Two female branch leaders, originally friends of J, were enrolled to write a statement to membership as “social workers,” their major in university. Prominent IMT Twitter accounts like @droidliberator made quite a hurrah of this on social media: “Believe social worker comrades!” became a public refrain, an ugly appropriation of the more conventional notion to believe survivors.

“K received the first reports for both “Incident 2” and “Incident 3”. She is the individual referred to in J’s statement as “my friend” who attended the meeting with J and Alex Grant. It is her opinion that the discussion of abuse was handled appropriately. The meeting became heated only after politics were raised in the discussion by K and J and conflated with concrete instances of abuse. Although this part of the discussion was heated, Alex did not yell. While some of his points may have been phrased inelegantly, K strongly feels that Alex’s words have been completely distorted and mischaracterized.”

Several elements here bear teasing out. First, this is a letter written by K and E to membership, ostensibly. Never mind that they speak of themselves in the third person, that it was obviously at least co-produced with the hand of leadership, that they were flown on an airplane to convince Fightback members in other branches to trust leadership. Second, K refers to herself as making the mistake of “conflation” when raising “politics” in the discussion. Alex may have behaved inelegantly in light of this faux pas on the part of K and J, but he did not yell.

Actually, K spoke to J after the call, in tears, with a completely different tone and story. With social workers like these, who needs social problems?

In reality, K and E did not feel that the abuse was handled appropriately, which is why they sent a letter to leadership asking for basic measures to be adopted so that a policy would be in place for abuse that members knew about and could use. Leadership’s retort that such language is available in a handbook is plainly belied by branch leaders’ K and E patent ignorance of it. It is true the Canadian section long had language in place. I was around when the Canadian and US sections collaborated in producing policy. What stateside comrades were told, in fact, was that harassment is usually done by accident, in their experience more commonly by female members than male members! Later, putting pieces together, I was reminded by another ex-comrade present in these discussions that the Canadian section used to have a catchphrase: “Paws off, A—”, A— referring to a prominent member at the time and his proclivity for touching the shoulders and bodies of women comrades. Such were the days of innocence.

There is a reason why K felt at this time, in her words (sent in direct messages to J), that: “I'm so sorry that went so badly... I think it was a series of unfortunate miscommunications that led to some condescending moments that you reacted to accordingly.” “I am visibly seething.” “I really am going to catch a quick manslaughter charge at this rate.” “There's a chance I'm read[ing] completely uncharitably but my reading is 'shut up lol we're handling it.'"

In a more formal address to leadership, by K: “However, the allegations contained in the letter were meant to illustrate what I and several others believe to be serious problems with the formal procedures and processes themselves. Unfortunately those concerns have been, if anything, exacerbated by the experience that J-- and --- have been having after reporting their circumstances to the EC. I would very much appreciate a meeting to discuss the suggestions outlined in the letter and elaborate upon why I am convinced that action is necessary.”

And, K: "Alex was SHOOKETH on the phone." J: "God it sounds like the phone call went so differently." K: "It really did but I think that was at least 65% bc I was no longer hysterical."

For the record, raising your voice and speaking “inelegantly” to a survivor coming forward because of the political sin of an undefinable “identity politics” —  chastising them, while the young women in the meeting are reduced to tears or close to it — is enough alone to jeopardize the entire organization’s capacity to effectively handle allegations of abuse, when you are its leader and head honcho since the day you founded it, prestigious enough that even a member of the US Section Editorial Board and Central Committee could be expelled for “attacking our leadership” on a private phone call. But this is not all. The investigations of three offenders only went forward on the basis of a pressure campaign from female and non-binary cadre.  AG had continued to like and comment favorably on pictures of one rapist during his investigation. During his investigation, days before he was suspended, the rapist represented Fightback at one of its most prominent public-facing labor events. This same guy had a history of making off-color comments like threatening to kill an ex-partner’s new partner with a hammer, telling people he had somewhere on him a tattoo of a swastika, threatening to say the word “n#gger” as a joke (?), etc and was rather notorious for his foibles and striking personality.

This was the person Fightback sent as one of their main (white) faces in “indigenous solidarity” work. I am confident the reader now may question the contents of this entire write-up. But the unreality is really just this plain. We can rest assured that nobody in Fightback is a “Stalinist” or even “Stalinist-anarchist” because their airbrushing-out-of-photos skills are so novice we are forced to wonder if they learned their trade from Mr. Gob Bluth.

This rapist, whose face I redacted from the (original undoctored) photos because anonymity does matter, held branch meetings in his house until the investigation was complete. AG attended these meetings personally. He assured the organization later that the branch leadership was not unaware of this thorn of nuance, and he had done his due diligence. Now that it is public knowledge at least in the organization, we can inform the reader that this due diligence was probably imparted by AG in the formal channel of pillow talk.

As a supporter of #metoo, I am not bothered when survivors come forward to the public, especially after exhausting “formal channels” and being treated with ridicule. The IMT responded to J’s substack post in June 2022 by going on the offensive against J, declaring them a “political enemy of the organization,” and later making a required reading for new members in Canada the material written to discredit them. People were expelled (although most were only “suspended indefinitely”). I was told to resign and was not an exception for that. Every branch in the US section was instructed to vote unanimously on an Executive Committee circular containing nothing but lies about former leading US comrades who left the organization. The response was to circle the wagons and libel J, for example, as part as a “toxic small circle clique,” as relayed to me in DMs from a Canadian leading comrade when the story began to appear on Twitter.

Fightback published this statement to the public: 

“Once the facts are known, the only criticisms which remain are those which are explicitly political in nature, and which have absolutely no bearing on dealing appropriately with abuse. The aim of the open letter is clear: to cause maximum damage to our organization and cause confusion in the movement at large. We hope that this statement makes the picture clear for all to see.

… The political nature of these criticisms is obvious in the letter written by an ex-member, where the only individuals who are named are political leaders of the IMT: Alex Grant, Ted Grant and Alan Woods. Curiously, the names of the abusers are absent. People must ask themselves: why is this? If the purpose of the letter is to deal with abuse and protect people, wouldn’t the abusers themselves be named, and not the IMT’s political figures (one of whom is now deceased)?

This is clearly an attempt by postmodern identity politics partisans to destroy the largest Marxist organization in the country. With references to the ISO (who liquidated after covering up a sexual assault case) and the British SWP (who are a shadow of their former selves after protecting one of their leading members who was accused of rape) the open letter attempts to play on people’s emotions to attack our organization. But the facts stand out and people can see that these accusations don’t withstand the slightest scrutiny. Unlike these other organizations we dealt with abuse, and unlike them we have not capitulated to postmodern identity politics.

… We will not be deterred in the slightest. Our banner is clean and we will continue organizing and building the forces of Marxism in Canada. We will continue defending a serious approach to combating sexual assault. We will continue fighting the capitalist system and the oppression it promotes. The victory of socialism depends on it.”

Poor socialism! Poor Fightback too. This was actually around the eighth article the flustered cadre organization has published denying allegations of abuse in the last decade.

“Did abuse happen to comrades in the Canadian section? Absolutely—this is a fact that has never been in question. It is also a fact that the Canadian leadership acted resolutely to deal with these situations based on the information they had at hand. With the benefit of hindsight, could some of the steps taken by the Canadian EC and CC to investigate the facts and find a resolution have been done sooner, differently, or with a better bedside manner? By their own admission, yes. But does it flow from this that the IMT, and in particular its Canadian section, is a socially conservative cesspool of violence and abuse? Or that our rejection of identity politics in favor of class politics and class struggle is mere cover for grooming young people for predation by the leadership? Or that we are misogynists, racists, homophobes, and transphobes? Posing these questions so starkly is indeed over the top. And yet, these are the conclusions ex-comrade J’s letter draws and encourages others to adopt.”

These lines were penned by the leader of the US section to members. He told me he got in “big trouble” for this overly permissive admission.

I want to emphasize that Alex Grant has another side to him, for whatever interests, the reader may decide. Alex Grant, truly, was indeed “SHOOKETH” last year. He wanted to apologize and mend bridges, as reported from a guest at the Canadian CC meeting (also observed were jokes about neo-pronouns, why can’t everyone go by comrade/comrade and save the trouble?). It was London that ordered AG to shut up. Not to apologize. Not to show weakness. Not to budge one inch. To attack. And the apparatus obeyed.

Long before 2022, Alex Grant expended significant political credibility in the highest echelons of the organization to argue against the IMT’s zealous turn against “identity politics,” a bugbear they cannot define but purports to include feminists, “extreme trans rights activists,” critical race theory, and postmodernists, another category that they teach is literally beyond definition. (How scary for the Marxists.) He was the only leader to do so that I know of. On an important level, London’s displeasure with AG has lasted since.

A pestilent abscess is ensconced in the epicenter of where part of all financial contributions ultimately arrive — London. Alex Grant’s sexual intrigues were known to leadership for forever, as I can attest as ear-witness. To be forward as to my own biases, AG is a prissy, mercurial professional egotist who always seemed to dislike me and about two hundred other individual members on some level. I’m not disturbed by the news from Ontario. But I would defend him as not unrepresentative of IMT officialdom. More accused abusers sit on bodies like Central Committees and the International Executive Committee and receive members’ dues and are lionized in “journalism” that scarcely serves any other purpose.

AG’s disappearance is a watershed moment in a milieu in which leaders typically hold their station for life. Last year’s scandal rocked the organization in both North American sections in a way they have yet to recover from and are unlikely to ever. IMT members are led to believe that “sectarians” are obsessed with them and bite at every corner on the very perilous and dangerous terrain of social media. Their “clean banner” has been made a pariah, but not by us. And who is obsessed with who? The request of many members last year, that the organization take seriously the professional skills and practices required for investigating and adjudicating allegations of abuse, is so much postmodernist identity politics to these worthy gentlemen.

Their theories already possess the utmost political clarity on how to listen to survivors. Written August last year:

The influence of identity politics was the primary thread throughout the arguments of those entrenched in this latter camp, just as it is the logical thread running through the public letter and the social media outrage.

Identity politics is a method that places identity in the foreground as the lens through which a situation is supposed to be analyzed. The effect of this outlook is to assert an unquestionable moral code whereby every individual must participate in a discussion—or stay out of it—based on their identity status. In this case, rejecting the baseless slander and distortions from Jamie is called “victim blaming,” and the insistence on due process to establish the facts of any allegation is considered a failure to “center survivors.” Never mind that none of the instances of abuse were ever denied. [Note from me: Of the three men accused of sexual misconduct in 2022, two of them who had already been told by leadership to apologize for earlier patterns, one of them (one of the two already asked to apologize in earlier occurrences) was restored in reputation by the end of summer 2022 and kept on the Central Committee, and paraded in social media pictures celebrating his return with snarky captions. The other was suspended, with terms affixed to his return. The third was expelled, on his own advice to leadership during his admission of misconduct.]

The logic of this entire attack says that if you contradict or even simply question the “voice” of a victim, you’re contributing to their oppression. In other words, to stand with victims against abuse is equated with standing with Jamie in their slander campaign against the leadership—even though the leadership believed the victims about their abuse and acted on it decisively. When all the dishonest distortions are stripped away from Jamie’s account of events, what was their complaint about the procedure? They objected to due process—the need to interview the parties involved and establish facts before taking disciplinary measures—and they blamed the organization and its politics for the abuse they suffered.

This identity focus is not merely in the conclusion of the letter, where the case for identity politics is stated clearly and the IMT leadership and founders are smeared as homophobes and “intellectually dishonest social conservatives.” Nor is it merely at the beginning when our opposition to identity politics is disgustingly explained as “the men recruiting me asking for assurance that I would allow violence enacted against me or others to be swept under the rug.” Rather, this outlook runs throughout the entire letter, in every line that portrays the organization as a space of rampant transphobia and misogyny, where men use their positions of power to systematically foster abuse.

Identity politics replaces genuine discussion and objective analysis with a subjective fixation on individual “lived experience” and identity. The result of this is to bar and curtail discussion, to whip up a frenzy and silence opponents with labels. It ultimately dissolves class politics, based on a materialist view of the real power structure of class society, and replaces it with an elusive web of social power dynamics that every individual is implicated in and contributes to in one form or another.

When this view is brought into the organization, it serves the insidious purpose of setting up the impression of power dynamics between comrades of different identities. Instead of comrades working together for a revolutionary aim, we’re told there’s a pattern among the “men” in the organization, the “male” chair in branch, or that an EC member is incapable of resolving a conflict because he is a “white British man” attempting to enact a “misogynistic, victim-blaming nightmare.”

Meanwhile, “as an indigenous person” and furthermore a trans person and a survivor of trauma, a case is made to “center”—or rather, blindly believe —J’s account of the events, even if it completely contradicts the facts.”

We must be objective! We aren’t vulnerable, our banner is clean, clean we tell you.

Now that the guy who directly handled many of IMT Canada’s abuse allegations is, according to members across multiple branches and sections, albeit filtered to us by full-timer-speak echoed by rumor, declared internally as a veritable sex pest, will the IMT acknowledge that in 2022, they did have a fatal flaw in their (virtually untaught to members) abuse policy? That there may be issues beyond the elegance of bedside manner? That, maybe, “bedside manner” is a very unfortunate formulation in light of the last fifteen months? That there is indeed a greater cultural problem and that J was right to say so? What about the organization’s responsibility to report confirmed abusers of such stature to the rest of the movement? Shouldn’t they say names? That’s what they said last year in their statements. In fact, that’s what one “Student Work“ full-timer shouted at a York U female student in 2018 (incredibly, it later emerged he was reportedly the alleged actor himself, but at the time uploaded a video to Facebook of the shout-down for good measure).

Alex Grant was the face of Fightback all of its life. What happened to him? We know he wasn’t at Fightback’s May 2023 Congress and was removed from the publication’s editors after June. It appears, circumstantially, that the apparatus began systematically filtering the news to members after Congress, controlling the narrative from above during the downswing of summer months, when branches typically take a month’s rest. But the rest of us, many removed from the organization when we criticized AG’s “bedside manner” and with less grace and delicacy than shown AG, are made to wonder. Where is Alex Grant?