Tony Cliff has recently entered the debate between Marxism and feminism, but does not, argues Valerie Coultas, take it forward. He conflates the many diverse strands of feminism, distorts the spirit of the women's movement and so fails to understand its political dynamic.
Tony Cliff only reads and listens to what he wants to read and hear. If his bold venture into the controversies surrounding Marxism and feminism is anything to go by he will end up with egg on his face. In a recent article he asserts that Marxism and feminism are irreconcilable. Using Clara Zetkin and the German Social Democratic Women's Movement as his model for orthodoxy, his central argument is that working women never have had and never will have a common struggle with their bourgeois sisters.
The force with which these arguments are made suggests that the article has a functional use within the Socialist Workers Party where the dissolution of Women's Voice groups is in dispute. Whatever his intentions are however, the article makes interesting if controversial reading. Cliff is quite right to point out that 'to be a Marxist one must be rooted in the tradition of the Marxist movement and that ignorance of our tradition on the woman question is very damaging'. But the disease is not only the SWP's. It infects many on the British left where discussion on this topic is long overdue.
One or two women's movements?
Cliff makes the following main points. Although women of all classes are alienated in the family this does not mean that they have a common struggle against that alienation: 'On the contrary, in the final analysis, the proletarian woman is spurred on by it to revolution, the bourgeois to reaction' (p. 29).
He comments on the glee with which bourgeois women, after the fall of the Paris Commune, demanded vengeance particularly against the female Communards. He goes on to assert that there have always been two women's movements: a bourgeois wing limiting itself to equal rights and a proletarian wing aiming at the destruction of women's social and economic oppression through the overthrow of capitalism.
Consequently Sylvia Pankhurst was wrong to collaborate with bourgeois feminists in Britain in the Women's Social and Political Union. This weakened the developing socialist women's movement and made her ignore women's involvement in strikes in the pre-war period. Clara Zetkin however was aware that the two movements were irreconcilable and waged a consistent struggle against any form of collaboration. 'It is not women's petty interests of the moment that we should put in the foreground; our task must be to enrol the modern proletarian woman in the class struggle.' (p.35)
Her understanding was shared by Lenin who applied the same approach in opposing the separatism of the Jewish Bund. Cliff also points out that today: 'This argument applies to black workers as much as women.' (p. 36) Implicitly the polemic is against those who defend the idea of an autonomous movement of women or blacks. This is apparently not the orthodox Marxist approach. Special agitation can be allowed but its aim should only be to win women to the 'class struggle' and of course the Party.
To avoid false polemics, it should be stressed that there are many areas that Cliff discusses that are common ground, Most crucially there is no disagreement with Cliff or Clara Zetkin that the overthrow of capitalism provides the basis for women's liberation. It is class society based on the defence of private property and the patriarchal family that perpetuates women's oppression, The overthrow of class society has to be the goal of any fight for liberation.
Feminism and the vote
Emerging from the youth radicalisation of the late sixties the spontaneity of modern feminism had a strongly anti-Marxist flavour. Cliff refers to the influence of 'third worldism' and 'soft Maoism' in the women's movement with its prejudiced attitude towards working class women. It seems also useful to recall the feminist heritage of the modern women's movement. Although the suffragette tradition lives on in the women's movement, no consensus exists about the suffrage movement and its different wings. Marxist women have tended to identify with the stand taken by Sylvia Pankhurst in setting up the East End Suffrage Federation to work for mass action by working class men and women to win the vote. It is true that Sylvia Pankhurst seemed reluctant to wage a struggle against her sister and mother earlier, within the WSPU, but perhaps she would have been helped in this if the emerging Labour Party had been more resolute in supporting women. Radical feminism suggests that both wings of the suffrage movement sold out by opposing or supporting the imperialist war since they took sides with men!
The polemics of Marxists at the turn of the century against the bourgeois feminists are useful in drawing out the condescending attitude adopted towards working women, some of which lives on in the women's movement today. Kollontai wrote:
'Women's meetings were especially numerous during 1905 and 1906. Working women attended them willingly; they listened attentively to the bourgeois feminists but did not respond with much enthusiasm, since the speakers gave no suggestion as to how the urgent problems of those enslaved by capital might be solved, ... Such needs were foreign to the bourgeois feminists, who came to the working women with their narrow concerns and exclusively "women's demands". The feminists could not understand the class character of this embryonic working women's movement,'
Later she points out that this did not mean that working or peasant women 'remained indifferent to or ignored their needs as women'.
Sexual equality and class unity
It could be argued that the small group of feminists who charged to the head of the massively successful anti-Corrie demonstration in October 1979 — demanding that they lead the march — similarly failed to understand the class character of the embryonic working women's movement today, coming to working women with 'exclusively women's demands'. Class unity and therefore identification with the labour movement has been a feature of the radicalisation of working women in Britain and a continual source of discord within the women's liberation movement, Although Tony Cliff refers to the strikes in the early seventies for equal pay he does not draw out the political significance of the Fords Equal Pay strike in 1969 in detonating a movement led by working women to get equal pay passed in Parliament. Sexual equality as well as class unity has been a feature in the radicalisation of working women — a fact that both Tony Cliff and some feminists seem to wish to deny.
But Cliff is right to point out that there is a strong tendency for some feminists to view working women simply as victims of oppression in the home, raped, battered, sexually harassed at the point of reproduction, rather than active people, fighting as women workers at the point of production where their collective power is so strong. The pressure of class polarisation in Britain is now finding its reflection in the debates in the women's movement. Those women who are prepared to put sex, as Kollontai puts it, 'above class' find no difficulty with calling for greater censorship against pornography or the death sentence for rapists.
The analytical roots of these political ideas lie in the debates over patriarchy. Many women active within the women's movement subscribe to a concept of 'male power' or 'patriarchy'. If men, or male power, is the main target, rather than class society, how can women look to the working class as a revolutionary class? Working class men cannot be logically anything but 'counter-revolutionaries' if you adopt a radical feminist analysis which flows from this concept.
So Cliff is right to point out that we have to look beyond the phrases of feminism, to understand their 'class struggle' stance. But it is also necessary to look beyond the phrases that Cliff quotes from Clara Zetkin, Eleanor Marx and Lenin to understand the Marxist 'class struggle' stance on this question. If we do this it is not possible to endorse Cliff's main conclusion: that co-operation with 'bourgeois feminists' was at all times wrong, that Zetkin never altered her attitude on this question, that today women workers should take their distance from feminism and not get caught up in one women's movement.
A central political question — the struggle for the vote
A closer examination of the revolutionary Marxist tradition on the woman question reveals a different story to the one Cliff tells. He underestimates the specific oppression of the female sex and cannot see this struggle against women's Oppression as part of the class struggle in its own right. Apart from denouncing Sylvia Pankhurst, he has little to say about the central political question that gave birth to the women's movement at the time — the struggle for the vote.
For Cliff this struggle was not a vital one for working women to be involved in. Yet Zetkin and Kollontai argued strongly at the world congress of the Second International held in 1907 that it was crucial for the class parties of the proletariat to campaign for the vote. 'Marxists know', argued Lenin, 'that democracy does not abolish class oppression ... But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of the struggle, socialism is impossible'. This was the spirit in which Marxists approached the suffrage struggle. To prove the point let us take a few examples from the German social democratic women's movement where we should remember that we are talking of a party that could under its own banner mobilise hundreds of thousands of members on the streets.
In a polemic with the women 'Rightsters', as Zetkin called them, who wanted to make juridicial rights under the existing social order the be-all and end all of the women's movement, the Marxist women were adamant. Women's freedom, particularly for working women, depended not simply on equal rights but the ending of their social oppression and economic exploitation through the abolition of class society. But this did not mean that Social Democracy should have no special demands for women. International Women's Day was inspired by the action organised by socialist women in support of women's suffrage in the United States. The first truly International Women's Day in 1911 was a huge success. Kollontai describes how: 'Germany, Austria ... were one seething trembling sea of women'. The theme of the demonstration was: 'The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism'.
It's true that the polemic with the women 'Rightsters' was a sharp one. But so too was the one going on inside the parties. Zetkin insisted on the 'woman question' being an essential part of the fight for socialism and not dismissed as exclusively female concerns. This battle certainly continues today and women in the SWP, shunted into Women's Voice groups in the mid-seventies, must have experienced the frustration of women's liberation issues being dismissed as not central to party concerns. It is also true that Zetkin was politically intransigent with the bourgeois feminists. She argued that the struggle of working class women was not that of bourgeois women — a struggle for the right to free competition with men — but a struggle to end bourgeois rule. While working class women may concur with the demands of bourgeois women, for instance on the vote, they do so only as a means to an end; to raise women's awareness of their oppression and to enter the working class movement equally with men.
But Zetkin's political opposition did not blind her to the similarities in the oppression of the female sex. She is sympathetic to the intellectual strivings of the bourgeois women's movement: 'It is precisely in these strata that we meet those tragic and psychologically interesting 'Neva' figures, where the wife is tired of living like a doll in a doll house, where she wants to take part in the broader development of modern culture; and on both the intellectual and moral sides the strivings of the bourgeois women's "Rightsters" are entirely justified.'
Women's consciousness
Nothing of this is evident in Cliff's article. His sectarianism towards feminism blinds him to the common features of women's oppression, their dependency on men within the family structure. All he can say about this is that: 'The household blurs class consciousness among women workers. It is on the valley and not on the heights of the capitalist terrain'. To suggest that working women's consciousness is only affected negatively by their oppression in the home is nonsense. Working women can accept their oppression but they can also reject it, When they fought for the vote and when they demonstrated in their thousands for 'A Woman's Right to Choose' against John Corrie's anti-abortion Bill they were challenging the view of women as childbearer first, human being second. Working women's consciousness is formed and changed according to the overall relations in society not simply by what happens at the point of production. Zetkin, Kollontai, and Eleanor Marx all understood this. Their polemics against the bourgeois feminists were fierce because they understood the appeal that these ideas had to working women. Tony Cliff fails to understand that appeal, not because he is a man, but because of his syndicalism. He is fixated with the factory and the trade unions. He cannot appreciate the significance of political campaigns waged by women against the state.
Zetkin's debate with bourgeois feminism
The massive growth of the German women's movement from the end of the nineteenth century up to the first world war can only be explained if you grasp this fact. The entry of women into the labour force provided the economic background for the radicalisation of working women. But the struggle against the Prussian state to win the right to join trade unions and political parties was not simply an economic struggle; it was a political struggle. It challenged the state head-on for women to be active politically. Despite repression the women's movement grew.
Cliff caricatures Zetkin's relations with the bourgeois feminists in Germany. 'Time after time the radical feminists called on the socialist women to join their demonstrations, but the invitations were always rejected by Zetkin'. (p. 40) He makes this rejection of alliances into an unassailable principle in his article. This was not Zetkin's approach. Take the example of the 1895 campaign for the abolition of the Law of Association that banned women from joining political parties. Cliff is particularly crafty here. He applauds Zetkin's warning to 'every class conscious member of the proletariat' not to sign the petition against this law which had been launched by the radical feminists. But he deliberately forgets to mention why Zetkin objected to this petition!
Zetkin had very good reasons for objecting to the petition namely that: no socialist woman had been consulted in drawing up the petition, she disliked its lackey-like tone, no mention was given to the position of working women in relation to the law and their right to organise, and above all else the petition conceded the principle of duality of the legislative structure in Germany by requesting the Reichstag to send a plea to the federated German governments rather than calling for the Reichstag to put foward a Bill. German Social Democracy had consistently fought against this legislative structure which was a left-over from absolutism. Zetkin quite clearly contemplated the possibility of collaboration over this law; 'If the bourgeois women wanted temporary collaboration with proletarian women for a common goal on behalf of the petition, then it is evident that the petition would be formulated in such a way that working women could sign it'.
But the most dishonest statement of all in Cliff's article comes when he tells us that Clara Zetkin only argued for special women's clubs and organisations to circumvent the Combination Laws. Even after 1908 when the Combination Law was repealed women received proportional representation on all the standing committees of the SPD, and the Central bureau for Women Comrades, led by two women with equal powers, remained in existence until 1917. The special agitation commissions set up in 1891 were not simply a legal expediency. They were seen as playing an educative role, awakening and reinforcing class consciousness.
Neither was Die Gleichheit, the Social Democratic women's magazine strictly under the control of the party leadership. It was not owned by the party and Zetkin's conception of it was one of educating the most advanced women to a class stance on women's liberation issues. Die Neue Zeit, the SPD theoretical paper, revealed the breadth of the debate on the woman question. Many articles emphasised the need for women to be conscious of their oppression, to have a theory of equal rights rather than to concentrate on day-to-day questions as the reformist wing of social democracy wanted to do in every sphere. It is clear that the Marxist wing of German Social Democracy was anxious to come to terms with the complex problems of female consciousness.
The debate among Marxists
What is missing from Tony Cliff's article is any sense of a debate among Marxists on the woman question. And yet before the rise of Stalinism and its stultifying effect on the international socialist movement, there was a great deal of debate on the question of women. The Communist Manifesto declared itself in favour of the abolition of the family and domestic slavery. Marx called in the First International for the setting up of special working women's branches in factories, industries and cities to ensure women were participating in the labour movement. The Marxists were for equal pay, the vote, the ending of female inferiority. Lassalle and Proudhon on the other hand opposed these ideas. The proletarian women held 'domestic sway' in the family and this was where she should remain, Lassalle opposed the vote for women and urged men to strike against female labour taking their jobs. Eventually it was accepted that women were inexorably being driven into the workforce, and were joining the trade unions and pushing forward their demands. By 1891 the German Party had adopted a full programme of demands for equality between the sexes. But as with other aspects of their programme the way they pursued those demands differed. Zetkin always argued for the vote to pursue the class struggle. The reformists began by the turn of the century to argue for it as a principle of bourgeois democracy. The Marxist programme in Germany remained unchanged but its content was lost to pragmatism.
The Russian revolutionaries continued to approach the woman question in Zetkin's framework, But they took things one step further, By seizing power they were able to implement the Marxist programme on women: easily available divorces, free unions, free abortions, decriminalisation of prostitution, the domestic servitude of women. These were profoundly radical reforms for a largely peasant-based economy that had recently been dominated by a Tsarist autocracy backed by the powerful Russian church. The Bolsheviks initially advocated a communist women's movement stressing, along with Zetkin, the different class interests of proletarian and bourgeois women, But, as with the debate on the united front in the Third International, they became aware that it was perhaps not possible, given the split among socialists in the First World War and the continuing support for reformist ideas in the working class, to refuse to unite in action to fight capitalist attacks.
Lenin, in two interviews with Clara Zetkin in 1920, suggests a bolder approach to exploiting the contradictions of the ruling class on the woman question. When Zetkin tells Lenin that she has been admonished for advocating special working groups in the German party, Lenin's reply puts Cliff to shame:
'Our demands are no more than practical conclusions, drawn by us from the crying needs and disgraceful humiliations that weak and underprivileged women must bear under the bourgeois system. We demonstrate thereby that we are aware of these needs and of the oppression of women, that we are conscious of the privileged position of the men, and that we hate — yes, hate — and want to remove whatever oppresses and harasses the working women, the wife of the worker, the peasant woman, the wife of the little man, and even in many respects the woman of the propertied classes.'
Clara Zetkin proposed an international conference to Lenin to promote 'ferment and radicalisation of women of all classes and sections of society. 'Lenin agreed saying that this would 'increase unrest in the camp of the bourgeoisie and its reformist friends'. Kollontai was at the same time organising conferences with non-party working women in Russia.
An autonomous women's movement
It is the latter approach that has informed the Fourth International's discussions today on women's liberation. the last World Congress expressed full support for the building of an 'autonomous women's liberation movement, proletarian in programme and social composition.' The resolution stressed the importance of building such a movement across the world to take up the different problems faced by women in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the semi-colonial world. By 'autonomous' it meant that the movement should be ted and controlled by women, not that it should be 'separatist', having nothing at all to do with men.
The women's movement it referred to was understood to be the broad movement for women's liberation — campaign coalitions, trade union and political party women's groups, lesbian groups, housewives groups, women's liberation groups, feminist collectives — all those women fighting for their liberation, The term 'proletarian in programme' referred to the need to draw out the anti-capitalist dynamic of the struggle — abortion on demand, free 24 hour nurseries, the ending of sexual harassment and degradation of women and their release from domestic slavery in the home. 'Proletarian in composition' stressed the importance of that movement reaching out to and basing itself on the experience of women workers, both as workers and housewives in order to reach its full potential.
Such a stand, which has always been the one taken by supporters of the Fourth International in Britain, has meant that we have often been the focus of criticism: on the left, for identifying with feminism; in the women's movement, for invading or threatening its autonomy, by arguing for alliances with the labour movement, But the highpoints of feminist activity over the last ten years — the demonstrations and strikes for equal pay and the massive movement against restrictive abortion legislation where women united in action with the labour movement, dull these criticisms somewhat.
Why is Cliff so rigid? Why does he try so hard to suggest that the truly revolutionary attitude is to enter into no alliances with bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois) feminists? Cliff has challenged other orthodoxies in the Marxist movement, So why the timid orthodoxy on women?
Cliff finds it convenient to hide behind the 'orthodox' skirts of Zetkin to give a 'scientific' basis to his hostility and suspicion of feminism. This is not to deny that he pinpoints non-Marxist aspects in some feminist analysis: its refusal to take a class struggle stance on some questions and to view the world through the prism of sex conflicts alone. But his fear of any autonomy (self-government as distinct from separatism) leads him to draw a false historical record, Tony Cliff's nightmare will only come to an end when he wakes up and starts to see the world through the eyes of women.
1. Tony Cliff, Clara Zetkin and the German Socialist Feminist Movement, International Socialism, Series 22, no 13
2. Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings, London, 1977
3. Lenin, On Soviet Socialist Democracy.
4. Lipow and Draper, Marxism versus Bourgeois Feminism, Socialist Register, 1976.
5. Clara Zetkin, Proletarian Women and Socialist Revolution
6. Lenin, On the Emancipation of Women