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An election is one of the few times when the majority of people seem to be able to actively involve themselves in all too brief a period, and many more people take an interest in political ideas.
Today attention is focused on elections as a political barometer to measure attitudes in the face of vicious attempts by the Labour Government to make the working class pay for the economic crisis, By-elections-like those in High Wycombe, Brixton and Garscadden -and the recent local council elections have had top press coverage. Even low turnouts (44% per cent in Brixton) expressed a political attitude; a demoralisation with all the major parties. Labour supporters voted with their feet against Labour's sell-out.
Mass abstention, or, at best, critical support for Labour offers a big opportunity for the left to enter the political arena created by the elections. The left is able to argue for a socialist alternative to a far wider audience than is usually possible.
The extreme right certainly understands this. In the local elections the NF fielded 602 candidates. It has used elections to terrorise the black communities, blame black people for poor housing, lack of jobs and so on. The NF isn't alone. SPUC, for instance, has been just as quick to use the opportunity to gain a platform for the anti-abortion campaign. It put abortion into the limelight in the Garscadden by-election. for instance.
To ignore electoral activity and reject it as parliamentarian would be a grave error. Instead, the left should be trying to pose an alternative to "parliamentarian"
politics by campaigning for mass action.
Passive voting won't defend living standards, confront racism or fight for women's rights in practice as well as in law!
Furthermore, elections can be a focus to promote and highlight local struggles. In Liverpool, for example, the campaign of women workers fighting the closure of the Fashion Design Centre won wide publicity and support during the election campaign. Many of the women from the factory attended their first political and elections meetings to win support for their campaign.
How can the issues of women's liberation be raised within the political forum created at election times? How do women relate to the elections? Do they regard elections as irrelevant and should we as feminists do the same? What should our attitude be to the different election campaigns?
Voting trends analysed by sex suggest that the female vote is substantially more conservative than the male vote. "In the 1974 election figures showed that either sex left to themselves would have produced a clear majority for one party or another" claimed The Guardian in an article on 5 May 1978. And women, it continued, would have voted for the Conservatives.
On most polls women are also more likely than men to be "Undecided'. But this view is coupled with the strong impression among political organisers that women are increasingly less likely to vote as their husbands direct!
Other studies of recent British elections have brought to light another appect of the rightward trend in women's voting patterns. Statistically, there are more women in the older age groups in the electorate, and more men in the younger. Part of the apparent bias of women as a sex could be explained by the greater conservatism of older voters, and not by the assumption that women are naturally more conservative.
Women do not vote or take political action in a vacuum. And this is the failing of most sociological voting studieswomen are abstracted from their position in society. It is the isolated and atomised situation of women in the home that can cause them to lean towards conservatism. Many women never experience the collective strength that is apparent in the factory situation, and they are outside the main stream of political activity. Anyone isolated from collective discussion and support is liable to want to hold on to the identity they have, and to reject that which appears to challenge it. And what do.
women have but homes, children, housekeeping. passivity, feminity, and sex appeal? Anything else we have to fight for!
On the other hand, women are playing a vital role in the fightback against the ideological and material attacks on the working class. They have often been more ready to take action and fight it out than men. Women's self organisation has played an exemplary role in strikes, pickets and demonstrations.
In Harlan County in the United States, during the recent coal miners' strikes, miners' wives organised themselves to help with picket duty, gave out leaflets, and fought the armed thugs the mine owners sent in.
One result of women's inability to become involved in labour movement structures is that they are more likely to escape the bureaucratic grip of social democracy. The trades union leadership, tied to Labour's anti-working class policies, has persistently sold their membership right down the river.
In these situations women fighting for equal pay, against factory closures, and for the democratic right to form unions are less prepared to accept the leadership's proposals for "compromises". The catch 22 is that women's interests are ignored by union leaderships in the first place.
The so-called apathy expressed by women in election times is thus not necessarily a reflection of their general response to important political questions especially those directly hitting them. Women are offered no real solutions to their problems by most parties, and it is no wonder that many women remain But with the present extent of the crisis, and the class polarisation accompanying it, we as feminists have an important task in taking the issues concerning us into the elections debates and activities. We can't allow SPUC or any other anti-women organisations to take the carpet from under our feet.
But we do also have to discuss how we as feminists should organise in elections. Should we support particular parties or would this exclude some of the women we are hoping to involve?
Should we in that case perhaps stand out our own candidates?
In France the pro-abortion group Choisir stood 100 candidates in the first round of the elections in March this year on a simply pro-abortion platform. Problems emerged from this. The first was that Choisir took no position on the important political issue facing the French working class and oppressed sections of society; the removal of Giscard and the right-wing government.
They addressed their demands to the
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right and the left, making no distinetion between them. Certainly the record of the Socialist and Communist parties is not much better than Giscard.. but the electoral victory of the PS and PCF would have fundamentally changed the French political situation, giving women's movement a much more favourable possibility of raising its demands.
The second problem devolving from this is that as feminists and socialists we are attempting to raise the issues of women's oppression in relation to the overall struggle for socialism. During elections where we can begin to pose a socialist alternative platform, we want out demands as women to be taken up as a central part of the wider programme for socialism, not isolated from it, as many of the traditional parties would like to see them.
If we do not stand candidates should we then call for a vote for or even vigorously campaign for particular candidates as organised groups from the WLM or simply as individuals? If we are attempting to build a mass movement of women around demands relating to their specific oppression it would cut across that for the WLM or any organised sections of it, NAC, socialist feminist groups, local women's groups and so on, to align themselves to any particular party, as this could split the movement.
This need not mean however, that individual women inside the WLM or in particular groups should not be involved in a campaign for a particular candidate as individuals and it would be important for them to have the strength of the autonomous movement behind them. In Leeds, Socialist women set up a specific action group to support Socialist Unity. They continued their involvement in SWAG-a socialist feminist women's eroup including a majority SE DOUBLE non-aligned women as welt as IMG, Big Falme, Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party and Labour Party-realising that it would be divisive to try to commit SWAG as a whole to support Socialist Unity. The group met separately from Socialist Unity to which it sent delegates. They saw their tasks as ensuring that the Socialist Unity election programme was genuinely feminist and later on in fighting for women candidates, leaflets on women" liberation, meetings around the specific issues etc. In Brixton Socialist Unity a women's caucus was set up with these tasks in mind and in order to ensure that women played a full role in the campaign itself-large numbers of socialist feminist militants participated in the campaign and the caucus was an important way of preserving autonomy within the This formula, however, leaves many questions unanswered. This is what we can do as individual socialist feminists but how should the women's movement participate as an organised force in the clections?
Is there a danger that the women's movement could fall into the trap of the French sisters and find itself isolated from the key political debates facing the working class as a whole by retusing to align itself to one party or the other?
As socialist feminists we are fighting inside the women's movement for it to make links in struggle with sections of the labour movement-in other words for the development of class positions within the women's movement. For some of us this would mean that we were in favour of a return of a Labour Government. For despite the attacks by the present Labour Government on women and on the whole labour movement through wage restraint, unemploy:
ment etc, we have to recognise that a victory for the Tories would mean the green light for further more blatant attacks by the ruling class, Le. that a Tory victory would represent a defeat for all those fighting the ruling class offensive. Only by arguing for a return of Labour can we place ourselves within the right camp to argue and fight for real socialist policies, as opposed to Labour's sell-outs. But does this mean that we would argue for women's groups and other organisations of the women's movement to adopt a formal position in favour of Labour?
At this stage such a position would in fact be no better than that of the radical feminists who are at present arguing that the women's movement should extend its demands to include a blueprint/strategy for the women's movement. Many socialist feminists have argued correctly against this on the grounds that it would be sectarian to do this because at this stage we have to win broader masses of women around specific demands that they can relate to and not ask them to agree to either a radical feminist or a socialist feminist strategy in order to do this. Asking the women's movement as an organisation to commit itself to Labour does imply a certain strategy - particularly in view of the fact that women are alienated and excluded from the working class organisations and do not have the same attitudes to politics as many working class men.
But whatever the answers to these questions socialist feminists should be arguing for a certain approach to work in elections-an approach which embodies united front tactics but enables the women's movement to raise its demands.
NAC and Elections NAC has been forced to get involved Picture from Hackney Flashers Collective
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in elections because SPUC launched themselves headlong into an unexpected spate of electoral activity, distributing thousands of leaflets with "Not the NAC, not the State, Foetuses must decide their fate!" holding extremely well attended public meetings and so on.
In many election campaigns, abortion has automatically become a key issuefor example, in the West of Scotland (e.g. Garscadden, Hamilton) with the high Labour Catholic vote, or in abortion black spots such as Birmingham. In other areas, the WLM and NAC will have to raise the issue themselves.
NAC activists explain how the abortion campaign will respond to election campaigns: "Our aim is to totally expose all the candidates positions on the issue, using all the information we can lay our hands on. such as voting records. Depending on the local situation, NAC will have the chance to explain different aspects of its aims. Racism in the Brixton by-election meant it was necessary to highlight our total opposition to forced abortion and sterilisation. In all NAC's activities there is a common emphasis on the right of women to choose.
NAC is not in favour of calling for a vote for, or aligning itself with, any particular candidate, organisation, or party. As a single issue campaign it can not take a position on all the other issues in candidates manifestos. To do so would cut across the aim of building NAC as a broadly based campaign. Potential supporters could be put off if NAC took a position on any electoral candidates. However, we are very much in favour of speaking at candidates meetings, from the platform if possible! We make it though in our speeches that we are not therefore supporting that or any candidate.
campaign Glasgow NAC leafletted and petitioned (for an out-patient clinic in the area in the constituency. We held a public meeting and invited all the candidates. Questions put to the latter particularly exposed the backpeddling of the Labour candidate Donald Dewar, "No one is going to whip me into line!" Dewar replied to a question on his refusal to be bound by Labour Party policy (for free abortion on request).
candidate ran contortionist circles around his contradictory policy of support for a woman's right to choose but against free abortion on demand.
A During the Garscadden by-election Sammy Barr the Communist Party tion.
book for all the family The Scottish Labour Party candidate Shoona Farrell, an anti-abortinist argued that she was a great supporter of women's rights, but abortion was not an issue for women' liberation. South West London NAC group in the Brixton by-election leafletted the constituency and held street meetings.
As a campaign around the fourth demand of the women's liberation movement, NAC is particularly interested in linking up with other WLM groups and campaigns in electoral work. One idea for the Brixton by-election was to find out if the local Women Against Racism and Fascism groups were going to hold a public meeting and ask for a speaker on their platform. We also try and involve labour and student movement groups in our activity."
NAC has been forced to confront the question of elections head on. Other activists in the women's movement have not yet done so. Whatever way we do this and whatever political basis it is crucial that the women's movement uses elections to further its campaigns and raise its demands. As socialist feminists we should be arguing strongly for this in the lead up to the general elecfor the first time in 15 the wite can I like
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