06.10.2004

Women only and class

Women's liberation is not only a task for women, writes Elaine Harrison - and argues against women-only organisations

Louise Whittle raises important points on the fight for women’s liberation - points where it is essential that the workers’ and progressive movement have clarity (Letters, September 30). She takes the CPGB to task for our opposition to the idea that “decision-making and control” of campaigns on issues such as abortion rights should be exclusively in the hands of women. Specifically, the comrade was replying to Anne Mc Shane’s report of the September 16 London meeting on the need for an abortion campaign (Weekly Worker September 23), so Louise’s comments concern issues specific to that event as well as more general questions of principle.

However, the comrade’s confusion on this question is neatly illustrated in her sincere, but naive comments on this gathering. Exasperated, she asked us: “Why, oh why, do organisations like the CPGB and the Socialist Workers Party criticise women-only groups? … Is it because these organisations cannot control them?”

This is a little silly, as is her annoyance with the article’s tendency to “carve up the speakers according to which group they belong to”. In fact, this feature of the report was indispensable to an understanding of what was actually going on. From it, we learned that the meeting was convened as a result of a worthwhile initiative from two members of the International Socialist Group. (What this tells us about that organisation’s relationship with Respect, or with these two comrades’ attitude to their group’s abject role in the coalition is open to speculation, of course).

Furthermore, we learned that Candy Udwin - who defined herself as speaking “on behalf of the SWP” (my emphasis) - urged the audience not to launch a campaign, as there apparently is no serious threat to existing abortion rights. Thus, we get a measure of that group’s unprincipled accommodation to reactionary views on abortion in and around Respect, as well as a confirmation of their dangerously complacent attitude to existing democratic rights.

We also read that Socialist Action - which comrade Mc Shane correctly dubs Ken Livingstone’s “highly paid flunkies” and is engaged in establishing all manner of “tightly controlled little empires for aspiring bureaucrats and middle class careerists” - has attempted to colonise this embryonic campaign and the ISG comrades feebly allowed them the leeway to do so. (A subsequent CPGB request for an ISGer to address our meeting on abortion on Sunday October 10 was met with the rather bizarre response that all requests for speakers on that subject now had to be directed through the SA’s front organisation, Abortion Rights - when was that decision agreed, comrades?)

So clearly, these women acted to type not as women, but as members of particular political organisations. Thus, knowing what group they are aligned to gives the report real factual and political content.
This obvious truth also undermines Louise’s rather forlorn hope that women-only meetings imply that left sects “cannot control them”. Clearly, what we saw on show at the September 16 London event was a tussle between the different political programmes of various left groups. The CPGB lost, the ISG caved in, the SWP were keen to make sure the thing did not get airborne and - for the moment - the SA sect appears to be in control. This is the ‘story’ of the meeting. To paraphrase that doughty opponent of feminism and separatism, Alexandra Kollontai, clearly the world of lefty women - like that of lefty men - is divided into political groups.

Comrade Whittle goes on to criticise the CPGB for tending to see “everything as divided along class lines” and tells us that as a “socialist”, she believes that allowing “women to set the agenda” on these questions “will empower women”.

Using the September 16 meeting as an example, I would be intrigued to learn how the comrade believes that women - as a sex - have been empowered by the fact that the campaign is now in the hands of Socialist Action (unless we delegate to the likes of SA’s Sarah Colborne the right to speak on behalf of all women - a modest privilege that such political elements normally accord themselves, of course). However, the far bigger question revolves around the relationship of socialism to feminism and what type of socialism we are actually talking about.

Comrades Whittle is a regular reader of our paper and thus will be aware of the consistency with which we take the rest of the left to task for its economism. Our critique of economism relates to this particular debate in a number of ways.

First, there is the question of what we have dubbed the ‘narrower’ and ‘broader’ versions of this opportunist trend. Economism does not simply consist in a myopic concentration on trade union questions - issues such as wages and conditions. On the contrary, economists can follow and staff all manner of campaigns, causes and demands - for example, petty bourgeois greenism, feminism, black separatism, CND pacifism, Scottish nationalism and left Labourism. They do not, by any means, shun politics. Rather economism veers away from the Marxist conception of politics. Crucially it eschews the need for our class to take the lead on democratic questions and to unite all democratic demands into a single, working class-led assault on the existing state.

Take, for example, our insistence on the need to make women’s rights a key question for the working class to champion and gain political hegemony over. This is not an attempt to reduce the question to a dull defence of the rights of women as proletarian wage slaves in today’s society (with the abstract promise that socialism tomorrow will liberate them). We totally reject this anti-Marxist position propounded by the bulk of the left for much of the 20th century. Ours is a programmatic method designed to train our class in democracy in anticipation of its role as the ruling class under socialism - in keeping with Lenin’s much quoted, rarely understood definition of the archetype of a working class politician: “not a trade union secretary, but a tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects”.

But why the working class? For the same reason that Marx spoke of the modern proletariat as having “radical chains” - it is the universal class, in other words. By dint of its unique position in contemporary society, its organisational strength, its numbers and political programme, it has the potential through its struggle to free humanity as a whole. It is the only consistently democratic class. This is why we call ourselves working class partisans and attempt to organically link every democratic struggle without exception with this class.

Comrades who call themselves socialists but do not subscribe to this approach really ought to go back to the drawing board. In the case we are discussing, it is being suggested that women’s liberation is not a question for this class - an entity which is objectively economic but is subjectively constituted politically, not according to gender. I would therefore be intrigued to learn what comrade Whittle actually envisages men doing in the struggle for abortion rights and similar questions - it seems, at best it would be a passive supporting role. Hopefully, unlike others, she does not simply view them as the undifferentiated oppressors who must be compelled to concede.

Put another way, is the strategic question of women’s liberation that of unity as a sex against men? Or is it part of the fight of the revolutionary workers’ movement - composed of women and men - in the struggle for a new world shaped by the working class? This is hardly a new question in our ranks, as the debates in the Russian movement prior to 1917 vividly illustrate.

Finally, it is important to correct any imbalance that comrade Whittle or others may perceive in what has been written. Yes, we do have a class approach to the women’s question and, yes, we do reject the notion that “decision-making and control should be left in the hands of women”, as Louise puts it. In working class organisations, we want men to debate the issue and be won to politically advanced positions on the women’s question, for them to see that struggle as their own.

This does not mean that the CPGB is unaware of the particular problems involved in the development of women comrades in our movement, still less the need for different approaches to mobilising and politicising women in broader society.

In keeping with the best traditions of our revolutionary movement, we are in favour of women’s commissions in the party (which can be composed of men as well as women, of course), of special forms of work and types of meetings to draw in women; of positive discrimination in our ranks; of publications specifically addressing women’s issues, etc. And yes, women-only meetings can sometimes be a useful tactic to draw wider layers of women into the struggle, to facilitate them taking control of their destinies and educating themselves. (To sub-divide the category of women, for example, it is easy to see how such an approach might be useful in engaging women from particular ethnic or religious communities.)

And, to reassure comrade Whittle to a certain extent, it would be a pretty strange state of affairs in today’s Britain if the vast majority of the leaders and most prominent spokespeople of a campaign to defend abortion rights were not women. Given the culture that surrounds us, we would clearly be doing something very wrong.

This is not really the point, however. Our differences concern strategy, not tactics. Excluding men from any political input into the fight for women’s liberation is actually an expression of a non-socialist, non-working class approach to that struggle, including its manifestation in the campaign to defend (and extend) abortion rights. As Lenin’s partner and eminent Bolshevik comrade, Krupskaya, put it, it is a version of the political programme of “bourgeois women … [who] always oppose themselves to men and demand their rights from men. For them, contemporary society is divided into the main categories: men and women” (quoted in The Leninist March 1985 - our emphasis).

This is why the CPGB calls for a working class women’s movement. This does not mean women from other classes - as opposed to the politics of other classes - would not be welcome. Women’s oppression has existed since the dawn of class society: the fight for women’s liberation therefore has an indissoluble link to the revolution of the class whose role is to end that divided society.

Unless we recognise that and incorporate it into our political practice, we not only blunt the fight for socialism. We effectively cripple the struggle for women’s freedom too.