[The following articles are edited transcripts of a discussion held at the Marxist Symposium organized by International and Socialist Challenge in London, September 1978. An extended version of the arguments presented in Sheila Rowbotham's contribution may be found in Beyond the Fragments, by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, published by the Newcastle Socialist Centre and Islington Community Press. 1979]
Celia Pugh (IMG)
The attitude we take to the relationship between the party and the women's movement must flow from our strategic conception of how women's liberation will be achieved. In the short time I have I can only rehearse some of the basic outlines of this strategy.
Our starting point must be the reassertion of the essential basis of a Marxist approach: that the oppression of women is rooted in the material conditions of their existence — it does not spring from some accident of biology, from alleged natural divisions between men and women or differences in their psychological drives. Women's oppression results from social relations within class society as a whole. From this we conclude that a pre-condition for a lasting liberation of women is a challenge to these class relations and the means by which they are maintained. Today this means the destruction of capitalist [illegible].
Now, that is not to say that the oppression of women has existed only under capitalism. The oppression of women is a feature of all class societies. It is simply to assert that the liberation of women is impossible without a challenge to relations of power and domination in capitalist society, for these will always distort all forms of human life in the interests of the capitalist class. This relationship between an anti-capitalist and women's liberation struggle isn't only one way. The fight for women's liberation can achieve success only with the destruction of capitalism. But it works the other way as well. The challenge to capitalism cannot achieve success without a fundamental assault on the oppression of women. By definition, the revolutionary struggle involves the eradication of all the oppression and exploitation that festers in capitalist society. No revolutionary process deserves its name if it can't take up all aspects of oppression. Secondly, no fundamental challenge to capitalist domination will occur whilst there are mechanisms that make this domination acceptable and inevitable in the eyes of the oppressed and exploited. In class society, women are subordinate and the divisions between men and women are considered natural. As long as this remains unchallenged, the anti-capitalist struggle will be weakened. Women will continue to be scapegoats and will be expected to find personal solutions to crises and problems which are actually social. As long as the mass of women are isolated and as long as the privatized concerns of men and women in the family act as a barrier to collective struggle against capitalism, we cannot generate a united opposition to capitalist domination.
These barriers between the privatized family and the collective interests of the working class are often cynically used by the ruling class to whip up support for its particular reactionary positions and projects.
So, we can see that the fight against capitalism is inseparable from the fight for women's liberation. We must have a strategy that reflects this connection. This then raises the question of how we can combine the struggle for socialism and women's liberation. Here we must look at how the present conditions of oppression are maintained. Oppressive divisions between men and women are structured into all social relations in our society. This situation is regulated, controlled and supervised by the state in its governmental, legal, and repressive forms. For example, we have recognized how laws in our society operate to perpetuate the dependence of [illegible] see how the right to control our own fertility is denied us by the state. The repressive fist is also used to deny us the right to determine our own sexuality. The way laws and the state institutions operate to regulate sexuality is evident in the particularly harsh treatment of gays. So, like all aspects of oppression and exploitation, the oppression of women is most centralized and consolidated through the institution of the state. No strategy is adequate.
It is not enough to take up oppression as we experience it in our daily lives, by redefining our relationships with men and the other social, cultural, and economic relationships which grind us down every day. Whilst this is important, it is not sufficient. We cannot construct non-oppressive social, personal, and economic relations in a society where relations and structures of power and control deny these possibilities. A generalized reconstruction of our lives is not possible within the conditions of capitalist domination. To fully control our lives we must challenge the centralized way in which the capitalist state denies us this control. We must oppose capitalist state power and create forms of state organization capable of securing the right of all to control their lives free from exploitation and oppression. Only in this way can we create the political conditions for constructing new economic relationships, new personal relationships, and replacing present family forms.
Now, this is not to suggest, as Sheila has in some of her articles, that Leninists and Marxists ignore personal aspects of liberation. In fact, if you look at some of the things Lenin wrote against the Economists at the beginning of the century, we find him arguing for the need to tackle all aspects of oppression in society. He talked of industrial oppression, civic oppression, personal oppression, family, religious, scientific aspects of life. All these are features of society that revolutionaries need to change. I think that the women's liberation movement has reminded the left that these personal aspects of oppression are a necessary focus for struggle. It has also given us a deeper understanding of what this personal liberation will entail. But it is not enough to recognize this. We have to find adequate political means for fighting for this personal liberation. For this we must challenge the organized political power of the ruling class over our lives.
What are the implications of this strategic approach for the party and the women's movement? Let's look first at the women's movement itself. As revolutionary socialists, we understand the importance of the organized working class in challenging bourgeois domination. But it would be wrong to interpret this to mean we dismiss the organization of women against their specific oppression, as some socialists have done. We have seen historically, this activity of women does not always or necessarily occur at the point of production or involve proletarian women narrowly defined.
Why are these movements important? First, ideological notions of women's position in society permeate all layers of society, including the labour movement. It is therefore necessary for women to take the lead in challenging their oppression. Who would tell the Irish people fighting for self-determination, 'wait until the labour movement is prepared to take up your struggle before you take up the fight against British imperialism'? Who would tell those struggling against apartheid in South Africa, 'wait until the labour movement is prepared to take up your struggle before you do so'? The women's movement is acting as a spearhead in the fight against sexism in society.
A movement of women against oppression begins to establish the need to challenge all fundamental relations of oppression and domination in society. It reminds us that it is not sufficient to take up only economic exploitation at the point of production. The struggles of women against their oppression indicate the inadequacy of economistic and syndicalist outlooks on the struggle for liberation.
Movements of women also give all women confidence to challenge their oppression. Women are used to having their interests dismissed and characterized as irrelevant. Collective struggle and discussion of women allow them to challenge this isolation and pursue their specific needs in a forceful way. Also, women experience their oppression in very personal ways. Collective discussion and activity allow us to see that the problems we face are not ones of personal inadequacy, but of society. So, the women's movement gives women confidence to pursue their demands and struggles and to resist reactionary attempts to play on their isolation. Through the women's movement, we are beginning to redefine our images of ourselves and the role we play in society and struggle. We are more confidently asserting an independence free from sexist constraints.
Fundamental to this movement is its autonomy, or independence. This involves autonomy and independence from the state. It also involves an autonomy from men in struggle. This does not always mean women-only structures, but women must be able to govern and develop a lead in their own struggles. This allows them to free themselves from constraints imposed by men as agents of oppression.
Before explaining the important autonomy of the women's movement from the party, I want to indicate how the independence of the women's movement can go only so far. As I have already indicated, the struggles against capitalism and for liberation are indissolubly linked. These links must be made forcefully. Those who don't do this either offer an inadequate strategy, like revolutionary and radical feminists, or make the wrong sort of alliances in struggle, which derail and divert them. The position of bourgeois feminists who subordinated the struggle for the vote to defence of the imperialists in the First World War is the most obvious example — although we shouldn't use this to dismiss the impact and importance of the suffrage movement as a whole, many components of which fought against this perspective. Another example is the Italian Communist Party, which in order to cement alliances with bourgeois forces in parliament, held back the struggle for abortion rights. So in the perspectives and demands we outline it is necessary to draw the links between the liberation of women and the anti-capitalist struggle. This must be reflected in the sort of alliances we argue that the women's movement should make — these must be with the working class and other people fighting against oppression. The women's movement cannot isolate itself, or be independent from these other struggles and interests.
It is here that the revolutionary party becomes extremely important. We have to be able to derive a strategy which can draw these links between the fight for power and liberation. This strategy cannot flow from sectoral or immediate experiences. As I have indicated, capitalist domination is centralized, and so must be our counter-offensive. An adequate strategy will come from an understanding of all the class relationships, at every level of society — economic, political, social. We must draw on a recognition of the centralized domination of the state. This 'global consciousness' of all the integrated aspects of capitalist domination will not spring spontaneously from any one particular experience of oppression or a particular experience of struggle. These partial experiences need to be drawn together and synthesized, drawing on historical and international experience. The party is the instrument with which we can analyse society and synthesize the experience of struggles against oppression. The party aims to draw together a programme of action and demands capable of challenging capitalist power and laying the foundations for liberation. It fights for this programme to become a part of the partial struggles against economic, sexual, and social oppression. This will ensure that the underlying unity of interest among all the oppressed and exploited is recognized and that there is a conscious challenge to bourgeois domination and power.
It is necessary at this stage to clear away some caricatures of the role of the party, which have been sadly reflected in the positions expressed today. Firstly, this conception of the party does not involve it substituting itself for the independent activity of the masses themselves. It was with Stalinism that these distinctions between the party and the organizations of mass struggle became blurred. The independent struggle of the oppressed became subordinated to the direct concerns of the Communist Party leadership. Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, stressed the organizational independence of these mass movements. In discussing the trade-union movement, for instance, they both stressed that it had to be a truly mass and broad movement uniting all those prepared to fight against their oppression. However partially, the united action of this mass movement of workers weakens capitalist domination. Many will learn from the experience of struggle within this broad movement that a socialist perspective is essential for success. Acceptance of a socialist programme is not set up as a precondition for support of the mass trade-union movement. Our attitude to a mass women's movement should be no different.
Essential to this is an understanding that revolution and liberation will be won and developed by the masses themselves. The party cannot substitute for the mass struggle, be it of trade unionists, anti-imperialist fighters, or the women's movement. This is expressed in the independence of these organizations of mass struggle from the party itself. The party will fight for its own revolutionary positions within these movements, but the masses will be free to accept or reject them.
So, the party and the mass movement have distinct and complementary tasks in the struggle for liberation, a struggle which will be an ongoing one even after the seizure of state power. Even after capitalist domination has been overthrown, a women's movement will be needed to fight for real liberation. It will be organized through democratic mass institutions and not by the party itself.
The relationship between the party and the mass movements is not seen as a one-way process, with the party dictating programme to such a movement. Revolutionary demands and strategy are not concocted by some great thinker, a great Marxist intellectual just sitting and scribbling. No, strategy is drawn from real experience of struggle, from the historic backlog of debate and experience of the workers' movement and the movements fighting oppression, including the women's movement. There must be an interrelationship between a party and the mass of workers and fighters for liberation if an adequate programme for revolutionary change is to develop. Such a [illegible] is not fixed. It must constantly change and be strengthened in the light of new experience and understanding. We don't have all the answers now, and that is why revolutionary organizations must be able to learn from the developing and ever growing women's liberation movement.
Sheila Rowbotham
After I got Celia's letter asking me to speak here I had a dream that I did talk at this meeting and that it was absolutely terrible. And, after waking up, I realized that I had been far too concerned about protecting myself, that I was worried about whether I knew everything Lenin had said and all that sort of thing. I wasn't trying to think about what it was that related to other people rather than what would protect me. In the dream a stern voice told me that I would now re-sit history and Latin O levels and would have no time to revise. History was the O level I cared about most and Latin the one I was most frightened of. And I thought: what I must do is to try to tackle the sources of my fears, because I felt that they were also the fears of a lot of people in the socialist movement. I think there are many people both within and outside any political organization who are worried about the dominant assumptions on the left about how to organize.
The women's movement has tackled so many ideas; but there has been a point where we have stopped: the question of organization. Partly this is because the question is difficult, but some very real obstacles have been created by the way the question has been posed. So I tried to think back to what it was like in late 1968, at the very beginning of the women's movement. It was incredibly hard then to think in ways that differed from the ways the socialist movement said you had to conceive of something called the 'woman question', something that did not really relate to your feelings.
The first important thing was that we felt it was absolutely necessary for everyone to think. There was nobody who couldn't think. There were so few of us that everyone had to think to the utmost. Secondly, we were grappling with certain questions that were really unanswered. And thirdly, we had a kind of protection right from the start: no single woman was expected to produce a total theory like a rabbit out of a hat. No one expected that any individual could produce a complete alternative, because that is something that has to be created by groups of people in struggle. The ideas were really part of a process, and no one woman spoke for the movement. Nobody could actually take that responsibility or be inviolate. We were not cut off and removed from other people. Every person was speaking from the experience of her own existence and trying to speak with as much honesty as she could. You were not speaking on behalf of other people in order to raise them to some point of view. You were speaking from what actually happened to you. I know there are limitations in talking only about what happened to you. As time went on we realized this. On the other hand, these were important starting points.
I think that the first two conditions are now present in a quite different context. It is becoming possible to talk about the question of left organizations in significantly different ways. Issues raised by feminism and the gay movements, like the family and sexuality and the issue of autonomy, have made this need very obvious. Also there are openings in the discussion in the left about regroupment and ideas about how to organize. But I don't think we have the third. We do not have the protection. I think those of us who are concerned, whether we are in left groups or not, about really re-thinking how we organize, that we really need to create that kind of protective atmosphere which the emergence of the women's movement did manage to do. This is something we have to think about quite consciously.
I want to talk about the hold of certain assumptions on the left which really block this and which have to be tackled. For without it we cannot realize our own strength as people who are socialists; we don't really have much chance of creating a mass socialist movement. I don't see this as a sort of plot, but I think that the tendency of the way people hold ideas on the left means that the particular intuitive understandings of particular circumstances is constantly being viewed as against 'theory'. People's particular experiences are continually going against the grain. It is very easy to be daunted and awed by apparently cohesive concepts of organizing that are more prevalent.
I think that the women's movement has practically created ways of thinking and speaking and ways of organizing which can contribute a lot to socialism. I do not want to create a false idealization of the women's movement as some kind of idealized alternative. For example, how do we think about ourselves in relation to the past. Within the Trotskyist groups there is an implicit view of history as [a] kind of ascension towards 1917 and the Bolshevik moment. I think this is most marked amongst Trotskyists, because within the Communist Party, until very recently, the history of the socialist movement has been an embarrassment, and the CP has not really explored history; because of the grip of Stalinism the past is too gruesome. I think it is not very surprising, given the origins of Trotskyism, that it should be important to Trotskyism to patrol the entrances to the past. They were combatting the ways Stalinism really distorted that past. But I think there is a lack of self-consciousness among Trotskyists about the particular ways certain types of questions determine what kind of answers you get about the past. The question Trotskyists usually bring up about the past is, who was successful in taking power? You therefore come up with the answer: The Bolsheviks were successful in taking power.
I think that the socialist feminists are asking questions which begin to cut through this approach. It's not that socialist feminists don't think that taking power is important — many socialist feminists do — but there are many other issues that have to be dealt with along the way, like: what kind of sexual division of labour existed; how have socialist groups seen these divisions of labour. We need to inquire, what were socialists' attitudes to masculinity and femininity, which socialist groups have seen this as an important issue; what kind of socialist movements have involved large numbers of women and children and how did they do this.
It is not a question of coming up with complete models and alternatives. In fact, I think this is one of the problems of the anarchist and libertarian alternatives. In response to the Bolsheviks, they present another complete model — council communism or anarchism from Spain, Kronstadt, or whatever — and they are therefore preoccupied with how power is contaminated at certain moments. Socialist feminists are not just looking at the moments but are taking the moments as part of the long process in which everyday struggle is really crucial.
Bound up with this approach of left groups to history there is a kind of slide rule — particularly amongst Trotskyists — in which political education amounts to learning rules about how to organize. There are certain 'rules' and a particular language that you learn. The naming carries a kind of control, and then you don't have to think about them. If you have a name for somebody, you can dismiss them. This is usually notoriously connected to Stalinists in the 1930s, particularly their branding people as social fascists. But I think that Trotskyists have their own names. If somebody talks about the question of leadership, for instance, that immediately means anarchism, and you can't possibly learn from anarchists; so thought stops. Also, ideas are tarnished by association; if somebody has said something Bernstein used to say, well that means thought stops again, since Bernstein cannot possibly have said anything anybody can learn from.
The power in these names holds a fascination. All those kinds of words — centrism, voluntarism — you always have to look behind them, because they do not mean what they appear to mean. People who have come to the left have to learn that kind of jargon. It is not only extremely offputting. It distances and protects. It is never a language in which the person speaking is involved themselves.
There are not only arguments about how we think and speak but about how we act prevailing on the left. I do not have the time to go into these. I am just going to outline them. One is the idea that there are levels of activity, some of which are more important than others. I think that the women's movement has really attacked those kinds of levels as universal rules because the stress on the levels of economic and political exclude women.
Second, the idea that we need change now. I think there's a lot of confusion about this, because as soon as you say we need change now, it is customary for Marxists, and particularly for Leninists, to attack that, because people say you cannot have change now because the revolutionary organization is not in a position to carry an alternative. Well, I think the important distinction to be made is that we cannot carry the whole future. We do not know what the socialist future is going to be. But what we can carry is alternative ways in which it is possible for us to act now. The women's liberation movement insists on change now, partly because of the material situation of women.
Third, the idea that the revolutionary party knows better, which makes the issue of the party versus autonomous movements so stormy. Now I know that the official thing to say is that the revolutionary party always learns from outside, but secretly I do feel that most people in revolutionary [illegible] feel that they do know better because they would not be there if they did not know better. Even when you learn from outside you can end up active as if you have the leasehold on autonomous [illegible].
[illegible] Leninist left is the notion of training militants in the correct ideas who can [illegible] ideas in agitation. This reduces consciousness to knowledge. It follows that you train people to be a certain type of leader. I think that the women's movement has really challenged these views of consciousness and leadership. I am not setting up [a] personalization. I am not saying people do not lead at all, I do think people lead. But in the women's movement the way in which women lead is so dispersed. For example, it is inconceivable that the capacity to lead could be seen as somebody who says something coherent about the revolutionary party or even acts as a shop steward. The area of [illegible] in everyday life raised by feminist politics is so much wider. People who take action in their own lives with fantastic courage in contesting the personal power relations in the family are leading. The person who can speak or write like me putting these [illegible] may be momentarily 'leading' in one sense. I can do [illegible] because I have had that sort of experience over fifteen years and been forced to think in this way. But in another sense I should be seen as a particularly backward person. For after ten years of [illegible] I still cannot mend a fuse. When you extend your ideas of politics into everyday life, new areas of leadership and initiative are evident. You are talking about the courage, resolution, needed for transforming the situation in which you have been put. These are so varied and complex that they involve a quite different area of consciousness which is not included in the concept of training.
Finally, this is not my idea, but comes more from the situation of men. It is something somebody said who is in a men's group — You are not just talking about the personal [illegible] being political, but are [illegible] the existing areas of political activity are also personal, and that the relationships with the revolutionary organization are not removed from personal relations. I think that even organizations which claim that they have no personal vision as to what it is to be a socialist do have an implicit personal vision, which is a lonely militant without any domestic ties who is hard, erect, [illegible], controlled, and carries the burden of a higher [illegible]. You may say that is a caricature, but by the way you are laughing, you recognize something. This is a very limited and unattractive vision and has been challenged by the practice of the women's movement. I think we have to talk about the personal ways in which people are in fact making assumptions about what it is to be a socialist even while they deny these are important. In bringing these out into the open and beginning to [illegible] lives we can see how sexual politics raises more than sex-gender relationships but touches all aspects of power relationships in our [illegible] imagining how we might relate differently in a socialist world.
Beatrix Campbell (CP)
What I want to do is go through three things: One is to look at the impact of women's politics, in the form of the women's liberation movement (wlm). Secondly, to look at some of the typical approaches of the left; and thirdly, to analyse some of the discussion of the relationship between autonomous movements and the party.
I think the first important thing, which is self-evident but has to be re-said again and again, is that the wlm is based on the sexual contradiction that exists [illegible] private life and the public spheres of economics and politics. And what the wlm has done is to assert that there is a reciprocal relationship between patriarchal relations and capitalist relations of dominance, and that these systems are neither reducible to each other nor autonomous of each other. Now I would argue that socialist feminism is, in fact, the mainstream of the wlm. Despite all the vicissitudes of its internal movement, socialist feminism is actually the spine of women's liberation. It has unearthed the sexual contradiction and reasserted it into socialist politics, arguing that the sexual contradiction is structured by the capitalist formation and also structures it. Now, in that respect socialist feminism represents a drastic break with the antecedents of feminism. It is also a drastic break with radical feminism, which resorts to biological reductionism in its assertion of the absolute primacy of the sexual contradiction, and with socialism, which asserts that the sole determinant is class. (An example of this can be found in a whole host of socialist literature that reduces women's oppression and the family to class determination; which means that in the end sex oppression is inexplicable analytically.)
This socialist feminist mainstream has been concerned to [illegible] explore all the dimensions of the marriage — I suppose you might call it the historic compromise — between patriarchal and capitalist relations. Its innovation in contemporary politics has been to assert the autonomy of women as a political group; in practice, this assertion of autonomy has faced socialism with something new, since it has only had to cope with the autonomy of economic forms of struggle, which are subordinate to the political party and are always orchestrated by it. The form of autonomy upheld by the wlm is very different, and I will discuss it in a bit.
A classic tenet of Marxism is that the mode of production is a system involving the production of things and of social relations, ideas and culture that make up the capitalist social formation which continually recreates and reconstitutes itself. Now, that process involves not just economic appropriation but also the appropriation of the subjectivity of the masses, the denial of the historic potential of the masses. That potential is, of course, created by capitalism's very socialization of production. Now, women's liberation has taken that core of Marxism and insisted on a practice that gives it expression.
These things have introduced politics of a new type, not simply an increment in socialist politics, but politics of a radically new type. And these politics insist first of all that there is a contradiction within the working class; and secondly that political movements are not simply agents, but also subjects. [It] proposes forms of mass participation as opposed to a vanguard elite separated from the masses of the people, and it proposes autonomy in the form of separation from men, whereas in the past vanguard parties have always insisted that women follow men, and have denied the need for political programmes specific to women — which surely follows from [an] apprehension of a gender contradiction within the working class. [An] anecdotal example: the Communist League in which Marx and Engels were involved. On Saturday evenings the Communist League used to gather to talk about politics, and a book by Franz Mehring reveals: 'after that, the gathering became a social one, and women were present'. Meaning women were absent from the politics.
In a sense, socialist politics has changed in that women are now present, but it's an open question whether women's politics is present in socialist politics. Part of the process of autonomy is to achieve a necessary distance that enables the [illegible] consciousness, of otherness, in men and women and facilitates the organization of rebellion against ways of being in relation to the other. In the case of women, ways of being, the whole process of feminization, and our relation to men. It is thus anti-economistic because what it is criticizing is the assumption that the capitalist social formation somehow derives automatically and spontaneously from the labour process. What women's liberation, along with other sections of left politics today, is asserting is that in fact there is a complex system of producing and reconstituting capitalist social relations and that we have to intervene in those systems.
Now, one of the things implied by this is a massive expansion of the spectrum of politics. Not simply an increment, but a qualitative expansion, in other words a transformation of the nature and levels of intervention of socialist politics. Now, in the face of these innovations, what has been the response of socialism?
I think it could be said that whatever the differences between Trotskyism, Leninism, and Stalinism, there is a remarkable symmetry among these three tendencies of revolutionary politics as far as women are concerned. I'd like to go through some key areas where the women's movement differentiates itself from the left and criticizes the left, raising points that the left is going to have to come to terms with.
First is the issue of the family. Socialists tend to discuss the family either as institutionalized drudgery or simply as an institution that is functional for capital. Of course, this is largely derived from classical Marxism, which assumed that the entry (or re-entry) of women into social production would [illegible] women's inequality, and effect women's liberation. [illegible] that it is not as simple as that. The [illegible] about the family as institutionalized [illegible] without internal contradictions, [illegible] means that you cannot inquire into the social relationship between men and women. All sorts of glib assumptions have been made about what sort of social [illegible] are required in [illegible] family. It is [illegible] evidence, so-called socialist [illegible] that [illegible] labour may be relieved, but in relation to men it is not [illegible] resolved. The sexual contradiction remains, and moreover it can't be explained away by easy accusations of Stalinism. This approach also leaves no room for an analysis of the way the relationship between men and women in the family is mirrored throughout the social formation — in the economy, in politics, in culture. That form [of] analysis of the family also detaches the family from the structure of society in general and very often involves [illegible] women's oppression as rooted in the family in such a way that women are detached from the operational power structures of society, and often reduces it to a superstructural problem. Another consequence of this attitude is that it dissolves the autonomous function of the wlm and specific [illegible]; it encourages a denial of the specificity of struggles within the family itself and the effect of struggles within the family and the sexual division of labour. [illegible] this was an article in one issue of Socialist Challenge — [written] as it happens, [by] feminists within the CP — which [illegible], in my view, to absorb the family into class, which [illegible] particularities of [illegible] terms. [illegible] said [it would direct] [illegible] in one sense that is obviously correct. [illegible] struggles around the sexual division of labour within the family, culture, and the economy. It left the wlm with the supplementary [task] of [illegible] the labour movement to do the real work.
Now, as it stands the SWP goes even further in this, and I assume that [a] recent article in Socialist Review is symptomatic of their position. Presumably, you would not have something in Socialist Review [that] contravened the party position. In effect, this article specifically rejects struggles within those domains, because it argues that women's liberation ends up struggling amongst the weak and pathetic rather than those who are strong, who have got muscle, who have social effect, because they are in trade unions. Now, effectively what that does is to dismiss those domains of struggle that the wlm has insisted are critical to the social [illegible] of women. It drags [illegible] our wlm back into reductionism — economistic struggle within the sphere of wage labour.
What is important about these kind of positions is that they have no way of theorizing either women's relationship to class or the reciprocal relationship between patriarchal and capitalist contradictions and relations. The SWP's only strategy is to orientate the women's struggle to the labour movement, which expresses their variant [of] rank and filism as a strategy. Of course, it's not a strategy but simply a tactical approach and is based purely and simply on the kinds of tactics revolutionaries have historically adopted: to orchestrate the 'autonomous' trade unions, which are always subordinate to the party in reality.
One of the other things I would like to pick up on in the SWP article is that this form of analysis constantly reduces women to some kind of lesser version of men. The SWP article still referred to women as inferior. I'd like to know whether the SWP tells its black comrades that they are inferior. There is a difference between being oppressed and being inferior. One of the imperatives of the sort of political organization fostered by the wlm is that it dismisses that kind of association which still assumes that the model of militant humanity is male. In other words, the approach to the autonomous wlm [is] essentially moralistic and pragmatic. We can have our autonomous wlm to improve the calibre of women, to hold remedial classes for the backward; but what this [illegible] do is identify what the specific practical, ongoing, [illegible] and necessary autonomy of the wlm is. It still assumes that brawn is where it's [at], and that we need to direct [our] energy [to] capturing [that] brawn within the labour movement.
Now I want to briefly discuss the party and its [relationship] to autonomous movements. The first thing that should be said about the Communist Parties is that over the past twenty years they have had to confront their own history — to have a dialogue with their own history in a sense — which has involved a critical reassessment of the relationship between the party and popular movements, and, for example, more or [illegible] attempts to assimilate the effects of women's liberation.
The distinction between the CP and the Trotskyist movement today is that CPs are committed both to a mass party and mass politics. In that sense they are truly becoming non-Leninist, because they are rejecting a model of revolutionary practice that places revolutionary initiative within the care of a minority, who are agents of revolutionary innovation. The CPs have not got it right yet, but at least they are preoccupied with the problem of how to democratize the cause of revolutionary struggle and how, in a sense, to deprivilegize the CPs precisely by engaging en masse and [illegible]. This is important [in distinguishing] current communism [from] Trotskyism, because only [illegible] reclaiming that [illegible] of Marxism which conceives of the party as a minority elite vanguard. This derives from Lenin's formulations, when there were [mostly] authoritarian, non-representative states and when the working class was absent from politics. The situation now is very different. The working class is present in politics [on] a mass scale and that, in the end, is what all revolutionaries have to come to terms with; that really questions your relationship to the mass, because you are [illegible] to conceive of a relationship which is no longer about being in [a] leadership relation to the mass. It is here that the whole [question] about the relationship between autonomy and [the party] really becomes critical.
[What] the theory of autonomy proposes is that autonomous groups must determine their own subjective possibility. In other words, they must define and realize their historic promise, created by the existence of the capitalist formation. What the Leninist model proposes instead is a minority thrust that assumes the passivity of the masses. A feminist conception of autonomy actually envisages that particular social groups, through separation, define and determine their own historic role and begin to construct alliances with other special groups. Simple and obvious as that is, it nevertheless questions our assumptions about the status of a revolutionary party — the commando — which exists among slumbering, docile, [illegible] masses who will need the crucial intervention of the revolutionary party at the crucial moment because, of course, [illegible] the working class will not know [illegible] envisaging a mass party [illegible]. That is an [illegible].
[illegible] what to do because the working class is fickle and tends to retreat into private life, which for Mandel is not a sphere of struggle. In that sense, although I appreciate Celia's attempts to come to terms with the question of autonomy, she is wrong on one crucial point, when she says there are limits to autonomy. The function and range of autonomous movements is necessarily constrained by her model of the revolutionary party, which takes to itself the role of orchestrating what are regarded as subsidiary groups. There is no future for Marxist parties if they do not assimilate the implications of autonomy — there are no limits.
Joan Smith (SWP/Women's Voice)
Today the typical working woman in Britain is married and has [children]. This is more true in Britain than [in] any [other] European country and it is a new experience for the British working class. It is impossible to think, as many socialists once did, that women are oppressed as 'housewives' and men are [illegible]. [illegible] the heart of the argument on the relationship of women and the revolutionary party. As is the question of the nature of the revolutionary party itself.
The question of the relationship between the party and the [illegible] their tradition — developing their tradition and building a communist women's movement.
When I joined IS fifteen years ago I thought it was merely a [illegible] that the important work did not include specific campaigns on women's issues. I thought this would change as the student movement and the women's movement developed. But as time [illegible] issues of women — although no engineer had to raise the specific problems of engineering.
Some women in IS worked in the women's movement. Some in local groups, in various women's campaigns. Some produced the IS women's newsletter and some set up IS [women's groups] [illegible] was a remedial class for backward women. One of our women members was active in setting up the first 1970 women's liberation conference and many of us arrived under our own [illegible]. Eventually the newsletter turned into Women's Voice, [illegible] (NAC). We did factory gate meetings and street meetings and took the paper to our workplaces and used it to explain the issues. This made us realize how little we had used it before and what a vast potential there was for organizing women which was still untapped five years after the first Women's Liberation Conference. Why didn't we bump into other women from the movement when we were selling outside factories and workplaces and getting signatures for the NAC petition? What was different about our strategy for building a women's movement?
What happened then was that some WV groups were set up [each] to develop an organization which included both IS/SWP women and non-IS/SWP women around the politics of Women's Voice. As the organization of different groups developed, we had to look at the relationship between WV organization and the SWP. This obviously raised certain [political] questions — why didn't a revolutionary party automatically carry the women's question? Was a new organizational form [needed]?
Last June it was decided that WV should be independent of the SWP organizationally. But this in no way means that it is simply part of the 'autonomous' women's movement that Celia spoke of (and Beatrix and Sheila). Some of us would want to build a women's organization that is an independent socialist, working class, women's organization. Others still want to retain Women's Voice as the women's paper of the SWP. Others are for building a broader independent organization. The debate about the nature of Women's Voice is still going on amongst us but I amongst others would argue strongly for the building of a revolutionary feminist organization. This is a new form of organization — although it is in the tradition of Kollontai and Zetkin — and there are two major arguments which underlie it: (a) the relationship of exploitation and oppression, (b) the theory of the revolutionary party.
Firstly, I wouldn't disagree with anything Celia said about the centrality of the state to women's oppression and of the capitalist mode of production to women's exploitation. But what must also be stressed is that women's oppression and women's exploitation are totally interlocked. Women are not oppressed at home by the family and the state, and then exploited at work as workers. On the contrary, their pattern of [illegible] most women workers work not in manufacturing but in the public sector or in services; full time women workers earn two-thirds of the male wage.
Similarly, although all women do stand in a particular relationship to the state — abortion is the only medical operation which has a law attached to it — that doesn't mean that the oppression of a ruling-class woman is equal to the oppression of a working-class woman. The ruling-class woman does not have to have a back-street abortion, nor is she harassed by the welfare laws of the Social Security. Women are not outside the class system: ruling-class women participate in the exploitation of working-class women.
It is therefore impossible to separate women's oppression from women's exploitation in the way that Celia does with her argument that the revolutionary party combats the exploitation [of] the entire class and the women's movement combats the [illegible] which reflects the fact that women's oppression and exploitation cannot be separated nor reduced to each other. [illegible] to separate the oppression of women from any analysis of exploitation, does not hold. 'Patriarchy' cannot be separated from capitalism. Women's oppression is material — it has to be [located] in the real relationship of women to a capitalist family and a capitalist [state]. Bea argues for an 'autonomous' women's movement on the one hand, and a reformist working-class movement on the [other], but these two separated 'practices' could not solve the [problem] of patriarchy here and capitalism there.
[For] us (as for Marx) the family system is dominated by the capitalist mode of production. I would agree that the family is not an optional extra for capitalism. There is no possibility of a capitalism without some form of nucleated family — whether [in]dividuals grouped in private communes, [or] [illegible] free wage-labourers themselves. They are doubly [oppressed] by both their class and their role as women.
An 'autonomous' women's movement for all women ignores the class divisions amongst women and the necessity for building a socialist women's organization. It assumes that oppression can be dealt with over here (in the women's movement) and exploitation over there (in the broad mass movement, trade unions, communist party, etc). Similarly, the argument put by Celia that revolutionary women members of [a] revolutionary party should work within the [women's] movement, prove themselves as the best leaders and recruit other women to the party, also assumes that we can separate struggles against oppression and our struggles against oppression in real life. It assumes that one big women's movement can be built on women's oppression (i.e. that class divisions do not exist amongst that movement) and that it is merely the task of the revolutionary party to guide the strategy.
The question for us is whether the struggle against women's oppression can be won through working in the autonomous movement, or through working in the autonomous movement and in the revolutionary party. Or is there a third way — of building a socialist women's movement which is independent of men but not of revolutionary socialism — sister organisation of a revolutionary party. Here we come to the question of the revolutionary party.
I disagree with most of the statements that have been made here about Leninist theory of the party. Lenin's theory was not a 'big bang' theory: i.e. we need a party to make the insurrection. That was part of his theory but it derived from [a] much wider understanding of the tasks of a revolutionary party given the tasks of the proletarian revolution and the problems of creating a revolutionary class consciousness.
Lenin's argument on the tasks of the revolutionary party was twofold. On the one hand it had to mediate all the differences between sections of the working class — whether the difference between factory worker and artisan, male and female workers, black and white workers, advanced centres of struggle and backward areas etc. etc. On the other hand it also had to represent to the working class the tasks of the working class revolution which was the liberation of [all] the oppressed and all the exploited. That is why Lenin argued that a revolutionary had to be a Tribune of the people taking up every 'tiny' issue of oppression and exploitation. In particular in Russia the Russian proletariat must accept the rights of self determination by the national minorities and they must accept their hegemonic rule vis-a-vis the peasantry.
Gramsci accepted Lenin's theory and developed it. In working class 'commonsense' consciousness, he argued, there are many bits and pieces of ideas. There are bits of old proverbs, there are bits of racialist history, there are bits of the new future, etc. The task of the revolutionary party is to organise and develop a consistent revolutionary position — to eradicate all traces of racialism in consciousness for example, or all traces of anti-woman sentiment. In other words, it is an attempt in a sea of counter-vailing reactionary ideologies, to forge an organisational form in which revolutionary consciousness can develop and which can intervene in working-class struggles.
I accept all this theory. My problem is that it does not take account of oppression within the working class. Workers do not oppress black workers, or female workers. They might be racialist or sexist but they are not the source of oppression. But the relationship of blacks and women to the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist state is a different one as well as being the same one. Therefore we need blacks and women in the revolutionary party, but we also need independent socialist organization of blacks and women.
Just as Trotsky developed an understanding of the oppression of blacks in the USA and tried (unsuccessfully) to develop a consequent theory of black organization, so some of us tried to grasp the oppression of women and develop a consequent theory of communist women's organization. The way to transform a revolutionary party is not merely to have a women's caucus inside the party and then to operate within the women's movement outside and separately. The way to transform it is to lock into the revolutionary party another organizational form — independent organization of blacks, or independent organization of women — which overlaps with the party.
I would argue such organizations create the possibility of a genuine mediation of all sections of the working-class within the revolutionary party. The hegemonic task of any revolutionary party in Britain is not just support for national liberation struggles elsewhere but is also support for those sectors of the class whose entire pattern of exploitation is determined by their oppression, and whose oppression is also determined by the entire system of capitalism organization. Such struggles cannot be separated from the working-class party but they cannot be totally subsumed under it.
For the revolutionary party the existence of an independent 'sister' organization of revolutionary women is vital. Such an organization can intervene in the struggles of the oppressed on the basis of revolutionary politics. At the same time a large number of the members of these organizations will be members of the party — not 'token' women but women who are leading other women.
But equally, for an independent organization of women it [is] vital that a revolutionary party exists. It is only in a revolutionary party that you can demand that all men take [up] the National Abortion petition and get signatures in their factory. Bea has argued that the key difference is between [a] 'broad' mass movement (around the CP) and a tiny and narrow revolutionary party. That isn't the difference. The essential difference is between an unprincipled disunited party and a principled disciplined party. She is a member of [an] organization (CP) whose male members in my union speak against 'a woman's right to choose' and vote us down. We wouldn't allow that.
We support the women's movement, and the demands of the women's movement. We also support the black movement and the demands of the black movement. But that can't blind us to the fact that there are strategic divisions within those movements based on class divisions and the acceptance of ruling-class ideas. Look what happened to Huey Newton of the Black Panthers — how he was incorporated into the state. Look what happened to the women leaders in America who were incorporated into the capitalist system. There is always the possibility of the incorporation of 'movement' leaders. On the other hand, there are George Jacksons. We must build a consistent independent organization that is revolutionary feminist and that is a sister organization of a revolutionary party.
We now have WV groups that have women members who are not in the SWP. We want to set up WV groups up and down the country, using the magazine, which now has a circulation of about 8,000. If we start off building in and around hospitals, at the workplaces, in the streets and we manage to develop the nucleus of a women's organization with socialist politics then we will have achieved something. Celia has raised the question — how do you turn non-socialist women away? But the same question is true of any revolutionary organization. People come to you because they agree with what you write (we have Women's Voice) and they agree with what you do (we have the groups) and then you talk to each other. Nobody joins the SWP on a 'full programme' — we talk to people about immigration controls, workers power, etc. Similarly in Women's Voice we have some points on the back of the card. Even if women don't want to join WV they can still come to meetings and take part in those meetings.
The mass of women in this country are, of course, not revolutionaries. But we think we can actually create a new form of organization which can lock into the struggles of those women — which can generalize a dispute like the Trico Equal Pay dispute. The way forward in women's struggles is to avoid the split between the autonomous women's movement and the revolutionary party and find a third way — an organizationally independent organization of women which is sister to a revolutionary party. The only way to find out whether this is a genuine third way is to put it to the test, and to build such an organization.