01.05.1997

Marxism and feminism - matchmakers not needed

Jack Conrad replies to comrade Ann Morgan

In her letter to the Weekly Worker Ann Morgan, women’s officer of the Scottish Socialist Alliance, asks Communist Party members to reconsider the “view that feminism is not relevant to working class women” (April 10 1997). Evidently what she means is that working class women need feminism. I beg to differ.

Comrade Morgan makes some very pertinent observations about the gross inequality between men and women. She also highlights the violence, tyranny an degradation suffered by women at the hands of men. Here we are on common ground. There is no substantive equality under capitalism, only formal equality. Moreover the natural and necessary intimacy of person to person is crippled by the impact of alienation, which prevents the full development of individuals as social beings.

However, comrade Morgan’s idea that feminism is the answer, that it is to be equated with women’s liberation, is in my view unfounded. So is her suggestion that Marxism and feminism are in some way compatible.

Marxism is the scientific theory of human Liberation. In contrast feminism is a spontaneous ideological response to oppression. Therefore attempts to marry the two result only in a hopeless muddle. The ‘Marxism’ of socialist feminism oscillates between bureaucratic reform and anarchistic utopianism: ie, whatever it may say about itself, it is not Marxism.

Let me outline my case against feminism.

Though she is “proud” to identify herself as a socialist feminist, comrade Morgan says she respects “both radical and liberal feminism”. Making this link is apposite and perfectly correct. Socialist, radical and liberal feminism are by definition varieties or strands of a distinct, albeit broad, ideology. In that respect what we have here is a phenomenon that can be likened - and not only for the purposes of analogy - with nationalism.

Nationalism is the natural ideology of the bourgeoisie. Despite that it is employed by all manner of social forces and movements to both shroud and advance their economic and political interests.

Fascism classically mobilises disorientated middle class and plebeian elements around a programme of national revival or salvation. Fascism gains sustenance from an often deep rooted sense of national insecurity or grievance. For example, Germany was reduced to second class status as a big power by the humiliating terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty - territories were annexed, armed forces subjected to severe limitations, huge reparations exacted. Hitler promised to make Germany great again.

Fascism takes nationalism to its most reactionary conclusions. It is counterrevolutionary and anti-working class to the core. Suffice to say, Marxists can give no support whatsoever to the nationalist demands of fascism.

The same applies nowadays - in the epoch of imperialism - to the nationalism of established bourgeois states. Whether it is governed by Blair, Major or Ashdown, there is nothing progressive about the nationalism of the United Kingdom state. Britain is an oppressor country and British nationalism is used to befuddle the masses - crucially the working class - and cohere them behind monopoly capital. That is why, be it in peace or war, communists refuse to defend the UK state. Our aim is to counterpose class against class. As a precondition we must pull workers away from the false consciousness of British nationalist ideology (most pernicious in its left reformist manifestations - Benn, Scargill, etc).

However at the opposite end of the spectrum is the revolutionary nationalism of Fidel Castro, Tupac Amaru and national liberation movements such as Sinn Fein. In terms of anti-imperialism, opposition to national oppression and hostility to capitalism there is a progressive content which communists support. That does not mean we paint revolutionary nationalism red. On the contrary working class independence must be established and the scientific world outlook propagated.

Marxism and nationalism - in whatever form - are in fact antithetical. The former is universal, the other sectional. One relies on myth and spontaneity; the other on consciousness and all that is enlightened in human thought. Attempts to marry nationalism and Marxism result not in an ‘improved’ or ‘deepened’ Marxism, but non-Marxism.

Hence, in spite of the socialist pretensions of the Jewish Bund and Pilsudski’s Polish Socialist Party in the early years of the 20th century, neither Lenin nor Luxemburg considered them Marxist. Quite right too. The Bund quickly discovered it had more in common with bourgeois and petty bourgeois Jews, Zionism included, than the proletarian internationalism of the Bolsheviks. The same was true of Pilsudski’s party. It put the unity of the Polish nation above the unity of workers throughout the tsarist empire against the tsarist empire.

Feminism too is a sectional ideology. It puts the unity of women above the revolutionary unity of the working class. According to Andrea Dworkin, “To be a feminist means recognising that one is associated with all women, not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact” (A Dworkin Rightwing women New York 1983, p221). In the last analysis that means betraying the interests of working class women to those of bourgeois women and thus bourgeois society. The same is true of abstract humanism, which childishly claims that ‘all men are brothers’, but refuses to countenance the class war necessary to make that ideal a reality. Women are not a sex-class of sisters. Nor can women’s oppression be directly equated with class exploitation. “The world of women,” declared Alexandra Kollontai, “is divided, just like the world of men” (A Kollontai Selected writings London 1977, p51). Both sexes are distributed across all classes roughly in the same proportion. Because the social relations between men and women also take place within the sphere of biological reproduction, sex-love and the household, women share the material circumstances of their families. Hence even in the absence of domestic bliss bourgeois women personify capital just like bourgeois men.

Comrade Morgan expresses her “respect” for liberal feminism. Yet liberal feminism openly pursues its aims within the existing system (which sustains and reproduces inequality). Liberal feminism originally drew into its ranks middle class ladies who resented their exclusion from parliamentary elections, higher education and the professions. Influenced by John Stewart Mill’s admirable 1869 essay, The subjection of women, they emphasised formal equality before the law.

Prior to World War I the social location of liberal feminism led it, in the form of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, to accept property qualifications for the vote and oppose universal adult suffrage.

The liberal feminists in the USA displayed the same hostility to the working class. In the name of one-step-at-a-time practicality they denounced as irresponsible the demand for universal suffrage intransigently championed by the US socialist movement - including those striking women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 foolishly cited by comrade Morgan in her defence of feminism.

Incidentally International Working Women’s Day was adopted in 1910 at the initiative of the Marxist and antifeminist, Clara Zetkin - socialist women in the US famously demonstrated against the liberal feminist movement on March 8 1908. Zetkin wanted to draw a sharp line of demarcation between working class and bourgeois women. Not surprisingly when it was first observed in Russia, both in 1913 and 1914, the strategic differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came to the surface. To accommodate feminism the Mensheviks insisted on women-only demonstrations. In contrast the Bolsheviks wanted not only working class women, but the entire working class to celebrate. Much to the consternation of the League of Equal Rights and other feminists, men joined the demonstrations and took part in mass meetings.

Writing in 1913 for the Bolshevik women’s paper, Rabotnitsa, Nadezhda Krupskaya made the difference between the workers and feminism crystal clear:

“Bourgeois women advocate their special ‘women’s rights’; they always oppose themselves to men and demand their rights from men. For them contemporary society is divided into two main categories: men and women. Men possess everything, hold all rights. The question is one of achieving equal rights ... That which unites the working women with working men is much stronger than that which divides them. They are united by the common lack of rights, their common need, their common conditions, which are the exploitation of their labour, their common struggle and their common goals. ‘All for one, one for all’. This ‘all’ means members of the working class - men and women alike” (AF Bossonova [ed] On the history of the publication of the journal ‘Rabotnitsa’ Moscow 1955, pp37- 9)

When its narrow class interests are endangered, liberal feminism collapses to the right and joins together with bourgeois men. Hence once the guns boomed in August 1914 Emmeline Pankhurst took an extreme pro-war position and jingoistically renamed her paper Britannia. The WSPU abandoned the tactics of terrorism and rallied behind British imperialism’s war effort. In Russia the feminists also “adopted a tone of elevated patriotism from the start” (LH Edmondson Feminism in Russia: 1909-1917 London 1984, p159).

Today the tradition of the WPSU limps on in the Equal Opportunities Commission, Clare Short and the bureaucrats who dominate the TUC women’s conference. Liberal feminism articulates the dissatisfaction of women who find their lives circumscribed by the burdens of motherhood, fear of violence and in the professions the notorious ‘glass ceiling’.

The underlying assumption of liberal feminism is the belief that British society is fundamentally healthy - its sexist defects can be corrected with judicious doses of reform. Liberal feminism therefore more or less limits its critique to male chauvinist prejudices, laws, practices and habits which mitigate against women. Men are the problem. Legislation and education the solution.

Consequently this strand of feminism is committed to a pro-state - ie, bourgeois - outlook. It protests against the “isolation and despair in real life”, but has no strategy linking women’s liberation with the overthrow of class society. Thus although agitational books like Betty Freidan’s ground-breaking The feminine mystique continue to be published - women’s studies in academia ensures that - liberal feminism is notable for its failure to challenge the capitalist system.

Radical feminism, in contradistinction, arose as part of the social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 70s. As the name suggests, this strand of feminism considered itself far more assertive and aggressive than the established movement. The radical feminists eschewed lobbying for activism.

They were the mainspring of grassroots campaigns around abortion rights, rape and childcare. The popular imagination was captured by bold stunts against the Albert Hall Miss World contest, demeaning advertising and bars on women in establishment clubs and institutions.

Radical feminism distinguished itself by encouraging the participation of the mass of ordinary women in their own liberation. One of its main forms of organisation were the so-called ‘consciousness-raising groups’. Here women were supposed to “translate their personal feelings into political awareness” (A Coote and B Campbell Sweet freedom London 1982, p 14). At its height thousands of women involved themselves in these groups, which were seen by radical feminism as a vital precondition for social change. Women would overcome their negative self-image and analyse male dominance. By collectivising the common experience of their lives women would create the unity needed to win the battle against the sexism of men and society as a whole.

Despite initial success the consciousness-raising movement collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. The stress on the personal, the ‘anti-hierarchical’ meetings became, in the words of Juliet Mitchell, “self-repeating, incestuous personal-problem” sessions (J Mitchell Women’s estate London 1971, p178). Hardly the way to mobilise an effective mass movement. The radical feminist movement declined into a loose network of small bookshops, women’s centres, academics and political lesbianism.

Nevertheless radical feminism has produced a number of influential theoreticians whose work is both original and penetrating. Unlike liberal feminism it assumes an all-sided system of women’s oppression. Radical feminists such as Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone argue that women’s oppression flows from harsh reality. Men and women are born different and not equally. Women throughout history - before modem birth control - were at the mercy of their biology: menstruation, constant pregnancies, care of infants, etc. That made them dependent on men, who only too readily enslaved them. This antagonism between men and women pre-dates class society and underlies all subsequent social formations and modes of production. Women, in this schema, therefore form an oppressed sex-class.

Radical feminism fights to overthrow not just its ahistorical system of patriarchy - defined as male domination - but nature; the “sex war”, says Firestone, “goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself” (S Firestone The dialectic of sex New York 1970, p2). The feminist revolution will therefore be an ecological-scientific revolution of test-tube babies and baby farms which liberates women from the shackles of biology.

This theory is both non-dialectical and non-historical. To say that women’s oppression was the first oppression is true. However, we must go beyond general truths and root women’s oppression in the laws and contradictions of specific modes of production. After all we could simplistically say that there has always been the weak and the strong. Suffice to say, that tells us nothing worthwhile about the concrete relations between slave-owner and slave, feudal lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian. In historical terms there have always been sexes, there have always been classes. But how they relate is coloured and shaped by definite historical and economic conditions. In the absence of such an analysis radical feminism is locked into an ineffective and self-defeating sex war with men. Not surprisingly it was easily assimilated by bourgeois society.

What of the socialist feminism which comrade Morgan identifies with? Socialist feminism emerged in the early 1970s as a left critique of radical feminism. Writers like Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham powerfully argued that a class analysis was essential for both understanding women’s oppression and creating a strategy for liberation. Against liberal and radical feminism they insisted that socialism was part of the answer and that men were not the enemy.

Nevertheless, while paying lip-service to Marxism, socialist feminists claim it suffers from economic determinism. Marxism, they say, pays insufficient attention to issues such as the family, personal relations, culture, etc. Marxism therefore must be developed or superseded by a new, more rounded theory.

Accordingly socialist feminism postulates a two-stage or dual revolution. The socialist revolution will overthrow capitalism, but that must be accompanied or followed by a distinctly feminist revolution which will eliminate patriarchy and the sexual division of labour. Comrade Morgan herself talks of the “socialist and feminist revolution”. Of course, the vehicle for this revolution is not primarily the working class. Rather it is a separate, cross-class women’s movement; whatever their social position, “women”, says comrade Morgan, are “joined” by the “reality of experience - experience of sexism, rape and violence”. Objectively all of this amounts to little more than a socialist repackaging of the radical feminist strategy.

Socialist feminism suffered a parallel fragmentation and decline to radical feminism. As a political force it now exists within ‘male-dominated’ social democracy, not in autonomous women’s organisations. Scottish Militant Labour and the Socialist Party have exclusive women’s sections, as does the Socialist Labour Party (the latter under the autocratic Carolyn Sikorski). There are also a number of Trotskyite entryists espousing socialist feminism in the Labour Party’s women’s sections (eg, Socialist Outlook and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty). The reformist environment of Labourism inevitably encourages their practical coming-together with liberal feminism around women-only short lists, demands for censorship and meaningless paper resolutions.

In academia there is also an important socialist feminist presence. Many women’s study courses are staffed by those who call themselves socialist feminists. These women have little or no direct political involvement. Trapped on the publish-or-perish treadmill, they churn out a never-ending stream of work, which is becoming increasingly banal and eclectic.

Let me now turn to the economic determinism comrade Morgan and socialist feminism rails against. She, like so many, seems to believe that Marx held the naive idea that the economy mechanically determines every aspect of development, not least women’s oppression. It is a straw Karl Marx comrade Morgan attacks. The accusation of mechanical economic determinism “cannot be taken seriously”, says István Mészáros (I Mészáros Marx’s theory of alienation London 1982, p 115) Marx’s dialectical conception of social development was never based on mere economic production.

The key concept is “human productive activity”, which, as Mészáros points out, is highly complex. Marxism shows that there are “manifold specific mediations” - ie, many determinates - in the various fields of human activity. They are not simply built upon an economic base, but also actively shape the economy “through the immensely intricate and relatively autonomous structure of their own” (ibid).

For Marxism economics is the ‘ultimate determinate’. But it is also a ‘determined determinate’. Ideology, religion, ethics, political organisation, the state and culture all have far-reaching effects on the productive relations and forces of society - they too are determinates.

Admittedly within what passes for Marxism there have been those who preach a rigid ‘economic determinism’ - Militant, aka Scottish Militant Labour and the Socialist Party, being a prime example. Issues like women’s oppression, gays, drugs and the constitution were dismissed by Ted Grant, Peter Taaffe and co as diversions. Nothing but a Labour government and ‘socialist’ nationalisation was deemed important. Needless to say, this arid programme flatly contradicts dialectical materialism and its complex of mediations. Not surprisingly, faced by such “vulgar economic determinism” in his day, Marx exacerbatedly said, “I am no Marxist”.

Comrade Morgan makes great play of her support of the right of “any group - black, working class, young people, older people, Irish and so on - to organise separately”. Well, as a democrat I too support the right of these groups to organise separately. I also support the right of reactionaries like the Pro-Life Alliance and the Muslim Parliament to organise as they think fit. But that is hardly the point.

Feminists, such as comrade Morgan, think there is something praiseworthy, something altogether positive, something to be emulated in separatist organisation. Communists ask the elementary and very reasonable question: separate from what and whom? Invariably separate organisation is a none-too-subtle code word for organisation separate from the working class, separate from the socialist movement, separate from the Communist Party.

We communists make no excuse about our wish to see all the working class freely and voluntarily organised under the leadership or hegemony of one democratic centralist party. The revolutionary unity of the workers is necessary if we are to overthrow the state and the capitalist system it defends. Hence the CPGB does not ignore or downplay the women’s question. On the contrary we fight for a mass working class women’s movement and fight for its leadership - the liberation of working class women will also be an act of self-liberation.

At the same time however communists are convinced that the women’s question is not just a question for women. Like every other manifestation of exploitation or oppression it is a question for the working class as a whole. That is why we consider it the duty of every communist and every worker to take up the battle for women’s liberation. As Trotsky eloquently said: “If we are to change the conditions of life, we [that is, the working class] must learn to see them through the eyes of women” (L Trotsky Problems of life Colombo 1962, p45).

This perspective is outlined in my Draft programme for the CPGB under ‘Immediate demands’: ie, demands communists fight for within the existing social system. It is worth reproducing in full:

“Women are oppressed because of the system of exploitation and the division of labour. Women’s oppression has existed since the dawn of class society. The abolition of exploitation will mark the beginning of the emancipation of women. Therefore the struggle for both is interconnected.

“Women’s emancipation is not just a question for women alone. Just as the abolition of class exploitation is of concern to female workers, so is the emancipation of women the concern of male workers. The struggle for socialism and the emancipation of women cannot be separated.

“Under capitalism women carry out domestic labour, such as housework, child rearing, etc, which is performed gratis. Given the technical possibilities to industrialise it, such work is enormously time wasting. It is also dull, demoralising and does not allow for any kind of cultural development.

“Advanced capitalism has created the material prerequisites for the liberation of women. However, women cannot be fully emancipated until the disappearance of the division of labour, without going beyond bourgeois right - that is, right based on work alone.

“In Britain women have won or been granted formal equality with men. The very existence of the capitalist system makes a mockery of that formal equality. At work, at home, in education, before the law, women are at all times faced with inequality, discrimination and oppression.

“Women have their own problems and demands. These demands however do not conflict with the demands of the working class, but rather they reinforce them. Communists demand:

1. Turning formal equality into genuine equality. Socially, economically, politically and culturally there must be equality of opportunity. Open 24-hour crèches and kindergartens to facilitate full participation in social life outside the home: ie, trade unions, political organisations, workers’ militia, cultural activities, etc.
2. Open high quality canteens with cheap prices. The establishment of laundry and housecleaning services to be undertaken by the state. This is to be the first step in the socialisation of housework.
3. Fully paid maternity leave three months before and six months after giving birth (the partner to be provided with six months paternity leave).
4. Free abortion and contraception on demand.
5. Provision for either parent to be allowed paid leave to look after sick children.
6. Maximum six-hour working day for all nursing mothers.
7. Decriminalisation of prostitution so as to remove it from criminal control. Prostitutes to be provided with special healthcare and other services to reduce the danger they confront. Measures to give prostitutes wider social opportunities.”

Because there “are no limits to masculine egotism in ordinary life” (Trotsky), we also demand substantive equality within the Party. The Draft programme states:

“There must be no discrimination between men and women in the Communist Party. Male communists must practise equality and female comrades must insist on it. However, given the male-dominated culture we operate in and the need to win women to follow the lead and join the ranks of the Communist Party, every effort should be made to promote women comrades in the Party. In this way, the Party develops its culture and extends its strength for the struggle” (Weekly Worker September 21 1995).

Comrade Morgan is absolutely right to fight for the SSA to campaign around “women’s issues”. She is absolutely right to fight to include male comrades in everything from combating domestic violence to discussions of the origins of women’s oppression. But her feminist notion that socialism and women’s liberation will be achieved in unity with the female personifications of capital - the women of the bourgeoisie, “gangsters’ molls”, “partners of the bosses” - because they too “experience oppression” - is profoundly mistaken.

When working class women - Hillingdon hospital workers, Women on the Waterfront, Women Against Pit Closures - enter the struggle, they gain support from their class brothers, not their bourgeois ‘sisters’.

However good the intentions of various well-meaning bourgeois women, class decides. Some individuals will commit class treachery and become partisans of socialism - that is excellent. But to rely on a cross-class movement to bring human freedom is pure utopianism. Of all the classes in capitalist society only the working class - men and women together - has radical chains.