women's liberation were discussed in a feature article by Rebecca Fleming in Socialist Outlook No.14.
VALERIE COULTAS develops the discussion - which will also be open for additional contributions. I agreed with many of the points made in Rebecca Fleming's article on the SWP and women, but there were some points with which I cannot fully agree.
It's true that the history the SWP presents of marxism and feminism is a selective history - but Rebecca doesn't specify where it is selective. This is an important omission, because debates among marxists in the past can help us clarify issues today.
SWP leader Tony Cliff always places the stress on the attitude Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollantai took towards the bourgeois women's movement before the victory of the Russian revolution, where marxists advo cated building a communist women's movement. He refuses to
specific oppression any weight in their analysis and tactics to the specific oppression of all women, despite the fact that this oppression takes different forms among different classes. This helps Cliff to leave out of his analysis the more sophisticated tactics developed by the Third (Communist) International after the defeat of the
German revolution in 1919; he makes no reference to the debates on the united front and the women's movement, where Lenin and Zetkin discussed how marxists should try and work with suffrage organisations to pur sue the fight for women's rights.
This is where we disagree with Cliff -over how to use the united front to build the
women's movement- not on whether marxist demands of working class women within that movement (revolutionary women have always done this).
This point is important for today because women sympathetic to feminism (inside and outside the SWP!) are arguing for a cross class women's movement. This has never been our position. We have always argued for an autonomous women's movement, a movement governed or led by women, based on the needs of the working class as a whole.
Marxist women are not for autonomy in the abstract - that would be separatism: we advocate self-organisation to allow women to organise against their oppression. We argue that the best route to securing women's liberation is through an alliance with the workers' movement, because of the revolu-
tionary role of the working class. We argue that the self-activity of women on issues of abortion, sexuality and equal rights aids the working class and disorganises the ruling class. The alliance with the workers' movement must be based on a recognition of the specific oppression of women in all spheres of life. Now to touch on the issue of "material The Comintern recognised women's interests'. This debate is a
Cvery old one among marxists, revived in a new for among modern feminists. It has been debated in nearly all revolutionary organisations that have had an active engagement with feminism. Lise Vogel (Marxism and the Oppression of Women) argues that there has always been a theoretical confusion in the marxist movement over the exact nature of women's oppression. She suggests that a 'dual systems' analysis (i.e. based on systems of patriarchy as well as class society) and explanation of women's subordination has
often co-existed with an analysis more directly related to the social relations of production - for example in the accounts given by Engels and Bebel for the origins of women's SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
for the origins of women's op- pression. There has thus been an on- going debate about how far we can talk of a separate system of patriarchy or male power, operating autonmously from class relations. But those mar- xists who defend some kind of dual systems analysis, and therefore stress that working class men have a material in- terest in the oppression of women, have some pretty tricky questions to answer, as Rebecca's article showed us. If working class men have. a short-term material interest which differs from their long- term interest, which interest is dominant at any one time? What determines what is their dominant interest? In what is the term *material sense interest' being used? For mar- xists, material interest means Eda class interest. What purpose does it serve for marxists to structure their analysis around individual relations in this case, rather than placing in- dividual relations in the context of social relations, structures and power relations in class and capitalist society, as we do in every other case? While men do have more status and power in society and can oppress women in a myriad of ways surely the marxist answer to this is to urge women to organise collectively to confront that sexism? We also point out that structures, like the patriarchal family, reproduce these social relationships on a daily and generational basis, and working class men have every reason to support a total transformation in these relations. The power that working class men are allowed to exercise over women and children in the family does not in fact allow even men to lead full and free lives sexually, emotionally or materially. Working class men appear to benefit from exercising sexual domination over women but domination is not real power. As women have gained more freedom, they have begun to show - through the divorce statistics - that they can resist aspects of this domination. It is the capitalist class that benefits materially from male domination, not working class men or women, even though men are the agents of domination. Which class benefits from an analysis that focuses on the conflicts between working class men and women, as opposed to that which unites them? When we argue in trade unions that working class men must support women's abortion righis, and lesbian and gay rights because it is in their interests to do so. do we really mean it? Should we be saying SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
FEATURES Petitioning as women fight for their NHS "This resolution isn't in your short-term interests but...'?
We know that a lot of men will not change until social conditions, and particularly the family, are changed, but we argue that the battle for women's liberation must start now and that the most advanced workers will fight on behalf of the specially oppressed.
Traditionally, Lise Vogel points out, the reformist wing of the workers' movement leant towards the 'dual systems' analysis, and the revolutionaries defended the position that women's oppression was rooted in capitalism and class society. Far from the latter position meaning that you refuse to confront issues like rape, pornography, and female sexuality, it means that you confront those issues from a standpoint that analyses gender oppression in the context of class society - which means you support women organising but you refute racist, 'law-and-order', or "lifestylist' solutions.
Our experience in the class struggle tells us a lot about the relevance of these debates. When the mining communities went into battle with the Tory goverment, and men no longer had to go down the pits, the politically active miners' wives, backed up by the support groups, were able to challenge the backward attitudes of their husbands. Men did begin to perceive their class interest lay with women's liberation.
This was a very exciting experience because some of the miners began to see that what they had seen as their privileges - to spend their leisure time away from their wives and kids, to expect their wives to ser-
vice them because of shift work - were not as advantageous as shared political and domestic involvement turned out to be. However retreats on this front were inevitable as soon as the men went back to work.
Tony Cliff's history of the women's movement is very one-sided. He fails to project a clear record of the debates that took place between radical and socialist feminists over the last two decades in Britain and America. He ignores the positive features of feminism and the gains that women (including working class women) have made in society, the trade unions, political parties and the far left as a result of self-organisation. His rigorous critique of the women's movement is never applied to the SWP, whose record on women's rights has been inconsistent, opportunist and crude (busloads of SWP men shouting women down at Greenham!) as Rebecca explains.
In replying to Cliff it is correct to take the side of the downtrodden, particularly when the movements he attacks are under seige from the right. But socialist women should not fall into the trap he sets and allow anger at his doctrinaire version of marxism to cloud our understanding of the revolutionary potential of the working class, nor forget that socialist women have waged many a battle with radical feminists about the agenda for the women's movement. I hope