Letters

Female-led

The trouble with the Weekly Worker’s attempt in its last two issues to draw a line in the sand between Marxism and feminism is that the debate has produced more heat than light - not helped by the deliberately provocative and entirely crass headline, ‘Rape is not the problem’ (March 14).

I understand the need to defend the left against the charge of ‘rape denial’ raised by the hypocritical likes of the Daily Mail - an instrument of misogyny and chauvinism if ever there was one. Unfortunately, some thousands of words later I am none the wiser as to what Paul Demarty and Jack Conrad mean by the ‘feminism’ they so vehemently oppose.

I have always thought of feminism as simply the belief that the liberation of women from oppression is a priority, that that oppression seeps into all the pores of our society and finds expression in multitudinous ways, and that those at the sharp end of that oppression should play a leading role in combating it.

Sure, feminism is a highly fragmented political school. No doubt the majority of feminists do not make the link between women’s oppression and the class division of society. But rather than hurl abuse at a ‘feminism’ they do not deign to define and against which they offer no positive alternative, Weekly Worker writers would do better to engage with Camilla Power’s espousal of Marxist feminism (‘Is feminism a dirty word?’, March 14).

Here I think Jack Conrad and Paul B Smith (Letters, March 21) have misunderstood what Camilla is saying. They both leap with a degree of relieved alacrity on a single (possibly ill-judged) turn of phrase in the following paragraph: “Where Marxists assert that the working class becomes revolutionary through collective control of its own labour-power, feminists have fallen short of asserting that women become a revolutionary force to the extent that they exert collective control over their own sexuality…. an explicit linkage of the two ideas into a concept of women as a collective body, a class exerting class control over their collective power expressed in sexuality, has not yet emerged” (my emphasis).

Jack and Paul object to the characterisation of women as a class. I think they fail to read the paragraph in the context of the article as a whole. As Camilla’s very next sentence points out, it was Marx and Engels who saw the division of the human species into two different sexes and the very different biological roles men and women played in the reproduction of the species (as well as the disparity in average size and strength between the sexes) as prefiguring the division of society into oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited.

The Radical Anthropology Group, to which Camilla Power and Chris Knight belong, argues that it was collective action by women in alliance with their male kin and against those males who were philanders and rapists to enforce collective childcare and provisioning that launched the original human revolution - the embrace by our species of symbolic culture, maybe 200,000 years ago, that made us truly ‘human’.

It was the undermining of that female-led collectivity in the long series of crises that led up to the Neolithic revolution (Engels’ “world-historical defeat of the female sex”) that established patriarchy and the class division of society. Ten thousand years later it is scarcely possible that the Marxist project of once again establishing a cooperative, egalitarian, classless society can be accomplished without emancipating the whole of humanity, including the half that happens to be female.

And how is women’s liberation to be achieved? Certainly not without a process of radically democratising all the organisations of the working class (as the CPGB advocates) and, as part of that process, transforming the gender mix of those organisations and their leaderships. Nor without at least beginning the process of superseding the family with more collective modes of living and raising children.

I guess Paul has a point when he says that loving family relations can “hint at the egalitarian relations of the socialist future”. Only a very partial one, though. Housework and childcare are not directly productive of value (as Paul says), but the reproduction of the labour-power upon which capital is dependent for the production of value could hardly continue from day to day, let alone from generation to generation, without the labour that takes place within the family.

That labour continues to be predominantly performed by women. That won’t change until women’s isolation as women within the family - the solid material basis of women’s oppression in all class society - is overthrown.

And that particular revolution is not going to happen without a huge push from women acting in concert. The same goes for the transformations required in the organisations of the working class and the revolutionary left to banish to the pages of history male-dominated leaderships, all-male platforms at meetings and a tokenistic commitment to fighting the oppression of women.

In a sense the whole working class - men and women - must be remade as a female-led (not exclusively female) coalition in which demands for women’s liberation are central to working class politics. Female-led coalitions will play as prominent a role in the communist revolution of the future as in the communist revolution that created humanity.

Female-led
Female-led

21st century

Does the CPGB really want to attract dissident Socialist Workers Party members to its banner? Or even simply to recruit more women?

If so, why present what looks like your party line under the banner headline, ‘Rape is not the problem’? Why suggest that the SWP faces its current problems not because so many women members felt outraged and received backing from supportive men - but because “the SWP encouraged its members to become feminists”? (‘Meanwhile, in the real world ...’, March 21). Can we take it that this is official CPGB policy? Maybe Paul Demarty wasn’t responsible for the headline: I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Turning to the article itself, Paul correctly observes that the left has moved on from the time when Corin Redgrave could say of Gerry Healy’s leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party: “If this is the work of a rapist, let’s recruit more rapists.” But many on the left have more work to do. Ken Livingstone, for example, has still not retracted the sycophantic foreword he wrote for Healy’s biography in which he said: “It was a privilege to work with Gerry Healy.” It should be noted that this was written nine years after Healy’s abusive behaviour was exposed.

Of more relevance today, the SWP is clearly suffering from at least some of the problems which afflicted the former WRP. Mark Steel, Richard Seymour and other ex-members now openly accuse the party of becoming a cult. Andy Newman, on his Socialist Unity website, refers to his experiences in the party when he was 17, describing the SWP with hindsight as “a sexually and emotionally abusive cult” (March 14).

The disputes over comrade Delta’s behaviour have encouraged others to come out with allegations of bullying behaviour, sexual harassment and further allegations of rape. And the well-informed Soviet Goon Boy blog now tells us that “there are other disclosures still to come”. Of course, none of this shows that today’s SWP is remotely as abusive as the WRP of the 1980s. But clearly the left still has a problem.

I agree with Jack Conrad that in our revolutionary networks and organisations, we need to be democratic, open and accountable. Let’s also rid ourselves of all top-down hierarchical authority. But developing Marx’s insights requires even more than that, as I tried to show in my article. Unfortunately, some Weekly Worker readers seem determined to misinterpret my words as an argument for all women to unite as a class in order to then overthrow all men (Letters, March 21). That is clearly not what I wrote. Yes, back in the 1970s, there may well have been feminists who argued along such lines. But I specifically took issue with bourgeois feminism, relying almost entirely on quotes from Engels and Marx. Didn’t you read that bit?

Paul Demarty describes feminism as “wrong”, insisting “Marxists should be rigorously critical of it”. This is an excellent example of what I termed “dinosaur Marxism” in my article. These days, if you meet a class-conscious worker who describes herself as a feminist, you can bet she means something quite straightforward. Regardless of this or that strand of feminist thought, she’s clarifying that she’s aware of her specific oppression as a woman - and that her tolerance threshold is low. Isn’t it incumbent on all Marxists to support her in taking that stand?

In all proletarian revolutions, different sections of the proletariat take the lead at different times. No-one can predict how revolutions in the 21st century will unfold. Some of the time, in some workplaces, groups of predominantly male workers will take the lead. But if Marx is right to insist on workers’ self-emancipation, then it is only working class women who can lead the struggle against both thousands of years of patriarchy and hundreds of years of capitalism. It should go without saying that such a revolution can only win if working class men also emancipate themselves at the same time!

Jack Conrad says we need to make an either-or choice between Marxism and anarchism. Ditto with sexual politics versus class politics - we’re supposed to choose one or the other. To me, such wooden dichotomies are baggage from our movement’s splintered, tragic past. Communists may have been shooting anarchists in the past, but let’s not go down that road again. I know many anarchists whose intellectual inspiration is Marx. And wasn’t it Lenin who wrote State and revolution?

Comrades, this is the 21st century. I suggest we start learning from one another, pooling our resources to overthrow all antiquated survivals, such as the family, private property - and the state.

21st century
21st century

Past bullies

Feminism is a part of the democratic revolution which Marxists should seek to protect and extend by making the permanent revolution, as defined by Lenin and Trotsky - no socialism without the democratic gains (and beyond), no national revolution without completion by an international one.

Jack Conrad criticises Camilla Power for characterising women as a class - that is, “a collective body, a class exercising class control”, a stratum presumably separate from the working class, as others see the democratic revolution as separate from the social and the national from the international. This ‘woman-class’ approach is, I fear, implicit in the RAG hypothesis of the ‘sex strike’ and the idea that ‘primitive communism’ can be a guide to the international revolution.

RAG members have referred to their hypothesis as the human revolution, located far back in prehistory. This may well have occurred, but it is hard to see what evidence can be found for it. Even if it did happen, we can still be clear about how or whether it squares with the views of Marx and Engels on historical development.

Briefly, the thesis is that at some point in the last three million years, in a solidarity of grandmother, mother and daughter and with an almost modern knowledge of the link between menstruation and birth, women coordinated a rationing of sex for men. The men, ignorant of fertility, then succumbed to the need to stay by the possible sex partner and bearer of their children, so bonding all into a cooperative group different from a social organisation - dominant male and others - similar to the apes.

Now, whether or not this is the beginning of human society, it does also seem like the development of the first class structure with women as a conscious group organising men as a servant class. True, part of the hypothesis is that it was based on ‘primitive communism’, where property was communal, but, as we know from recent ‘official communist societies’, a lack of private property need not exclude a ruling group.

Presumably, this occurs around the time of what Engels (using the theory of Morgan) calls early human “group marriage” (The origin of the family, private property and the state). Engels, however, sees his female revolution as occurring when the growing density of population among early hunter-gatherers led to female members who “longed for the right to chastity, to temporary or permanent marriage”.

Engels further speculates that “a new form of family” could have arisen from the subsequent ‘pairing’ arrangement, but with the domestication of animals, agriculture and appearance of land ownership, reproduction was placed on another basis: patriarchy. Let us note in passing that Engels doesn’t isolate reproduction from production here, sex from subsistence, but doesn’t collapse them into each other either.

Of course, if one believes in a golden age of small hunting bands, the transition to farming and land ownership was a disaster and the subsequent development of capitalism even worse.

But is this the attitude of Marx and Engels? Take the Communist manifesto. This key document doesn’t begin by outlining the ideals of socialism, feminism or any other creed, but describes in almost celebratory fashion the effects of the capitalist mode of production. The manifesto leaves one in no doubt that the introduction of this economic procedure has transformed human existence. It has united the world in a single system, “stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe” and “created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all preceding generations”, including, one might add, women’s control of reproduction through contraception. This history has also created a large class, getting larger by the day, with a potential interest in banishing the ever more crisis-ridden system and replacing it with something else.

If we are to even attempt a new mode of production we must do more than bully others about how great the distant past was. We can indeed complain about the inadequacy of ‘progress’ so far, like Marx and Engels (after all, why a revolution if everything is fine?), but, like them, we must also recognise that historical development has given humanity the best chance to make a freer life for all.

Past bullies
Past bullies

Kollontai

Paul Demarty argues that women in the trade union movement are not so stupid or such “delicate flowers” as to be unable to expose misogynists as prats or to take on the likes of George Galloway. But neither stupidity nor sensitivity is the issue here. The point is that the oppression of women has a negative impact on their ability to challenge male chauvinism.

There is no Chinese wall between the left and the rest of society. Women do find it difficult to challenge overbearing arrogant men on the left - partly because of the lack of respect shown to them by such individuals, partly because of their own socialisation, and too often because of a lack of support from others in the organisation. It is crass to argue that just because you have met strong, outspoken women, there is no problem.

Demarty is right though on ‘no-platforming’. It is patronising nonsense to ban certain words or criminalise individuals who exhibit misogyny. But they must be challenged. We need to do more than defend the SWP against the Daily Mail witch-hunt. We need to critically examine why it is that women continue to experience sexism within the left. Women should not have to put up with sexism and harassment from their comrades. They are entitled to be respected and listened to.

Of course, making ‘should’ a reality is easier said than done. But we could at least think about what norms we would expect, rather than simply dismissing the proposals that have come forward from feminists and others on the left. And it is a question that men should be assiduous about too. I for one have often felt frustrated at the failure of male comrades to challenge chauvinism from other men.

We would do well to remember that leftwing women played a huge role in second-wave feminism. They cut their ties with the left on the basis of the complete inadequacy of that movement, especially the Communist Party, which was deeply traditional in its attitudes and practices. Today plenty of women who describe themselves as feminist would also believe themselves to be socialist. They want women’s liberation through socialism. Just because they call themselves feminist does not mean they have signed up to a radical, separatist agenda.

Jack Conrad quotes Alexandra Kollontai in her fight against feminism and for class struggle. It is indeed true that Kollontai was a thorn in the side of the ‘equal-righters’ in the early part of the 20th century. But she also faced major obstacles within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and later the Bolsheviks. She describes how in 1908 she “realised for the first time how little our party concerned itself with the fate of the women of the working class and how meagre was its interest in women’s liberation”. At an all-Russian conference of women in 1908, she and her comrades were mocked because of the well-known opposition to work among women that existed in the RSDLP. Lenin himself is quoted in an interview with Clara Zetkin in 1920 when he argues that you only have to “scratch the communist and a philistine appears. To be sure, you have to scratch the sensitive spots, such as their mentality regarding women”.

Today we hear little on the left about the history of that struggle within the Russian movement both before and after the revolution. The Zhenotdel, the women’s department set up in 1919 (and closed down by Stalin in 1930), is hardly known outside of academia. Leading members of this organisation played an invaluable role - often in opposition to the party leadership - in fighting to give real expression to formal equality under the Soviet constitution. The history of these individuals and their struggles illustrate well the battle both within and without the communist movement for women’s liberation. It is a history we need to reclaim.

Kollontai
Kollontai

Petty

I have to say that Jack Conrad’s apparent non-recognition of Camilla Power’s self-designation as an anarcho-Marxist, in defence of ‘pure’ Marxism, is rather petty, although I would have just as great disagreements with Camilla Power as he had.

I think perhaps Jack is mixing Marx up with Jesus or, perhaps more likely, the born-again cult followers in Life of Brian as to who has the one true and meaningful symbol of our saviour. Marx did not invent class struggle or class consciousness or communism; he was a student of these factors, alongside people like Bakunin, Proudhon and Kropotkin. What he did achieve though was to develop a scientific method of analysis and theoretical observation, which laid down a solid platform from which ideas could be tested and the class war understood and prosecuted. It is perfectly possible to use this method and draw different answers than Marx himself did, or apparent Marxists who followed him. Even during the time of his life, he observed that, since Hyndman regarded himself as a ‘Marxist’, he was glad he was not one.

If I had to choose a political designation, which is not something I am usually driven to do any more, I too would conclude I was an anarcho-Marxist - accepting the basic science and analysis of Marx, but coming to a slightly different variant of an answer than he did. The workers’ state that Marx was speculating on wasn’t the iron monolith that so-called ‘Soviet Russia’ became, nor the huge bureaucratic machine we understand from today’s capitalist models, but a very ephemeral executive body in the process of almost imminent decay at the moment of its birth. The bourgeois state in Marx’s day was a very fragile and loose body. When he talked of a ‘state’, he wasn’t envisaging the Pentagon or the International Monetary Fund. Marx was talking of the loose and temporal ‘workers’ state’ withering away within days, weeks at most, so the difference between other communist thinkers and himself was, on this issue anyway, slight.

I think the answer to the question, ‘Who rules and how?’ is a far bigger point of difference between people like myself and the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist/Stalinist party builders, rather than Marx’s conclusion that perhaps the workers may need to build some form of temporal ‘state’ or not. Marxists aren’t supposed to like states either, even workers’ states; we communist anarchists/anarcho-Marxists don’t like them, not simply in theory, but because history shows us they always end up being used to crush the working class.

Jack’s other throwaway references to “nationalist Marxists” and “black separatist Marxists” are also a little disingenuous. In the lofty realms of cross-legged attic class-struggle theory, it sounds fine and doubtless you go to the top of the Marxist theory class. However, in real struggles, which the class are really engaged in, Marxists can’t and don’t stand outside the struggle because it engages in less than theoretical class war with cloth-capped workers on one side and top-hatted, gold-chained capitalists on the other.

Marx’s instruction and explanation - “In short, the communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things” - if it means anything, means Marxists can’t stand aside from (for example) anti-imperialist struggles in Ireland, or Vietnam and demand that all nationalist elements be purged from the struggle and a pure, class-on-class war be fought instead. Connolly was an Irish republican Marxist; would you call him simply a ‘nationalist’? Would he be one of Jack’s “nationalist Marxists” which are “antithetical to Marxism”?

Likewise, the black struggle in America in the 1960s and 70s. We saw ‘black liberation’ as class war. We understood slogans of ‘black power’ to be workers’ power. Young, white, revolutionary coal miners saw in the Black Panther Party the expression of our own struggle. There were many debates within that movement. Some conclusions we favoured; some, such as returning to Africa, setting up a black state within America or, worse, black Islamic separatism, we did not. But, given that nobody had asked the Africans if they wanted to go to America in the first place, and the ruling class had murdered its way across centuries trying to ensure they didn’t have any say in America, we didn’t think it was down to us to tell them how best to engage in the struggle that had been thrust upon them. We expressed our solidarity with the Black Panthers and the black movement, and we called for self-determination for black people. Did that make us black-separatist Marxists?

I often get the impression from Jack that he draws quite different conclusions from Marx too, especially: “The communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement ...”. Now maybe we were the ones who had it wrong back in the 60s and 70s, and Jack never tires of telling us so, but we saw our role as communists to fight for a communist programme in the class-struggle organisations of the class and the progressive, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements which engaged and included the class.

Petty
Petty

Severed

Paul Demarty’s article dealing with the statement, ‘Women in the labour movement’, is very welcome. The motivation behind the statement, as Paul puts it so well, is clearly “the intensifying feminist offensive against the far left”.

While the statement is clearly an attack on the SWP, the right of the labour movement could easily use it as a tool to attack all of us on the far left. It is also, of course, an opportunity for many to be seen to be doing ‘something’ for women in the labour movement - when in reality the statement does no such thing.

If anything, Paul should have gone further in criticising the revolutionary socialists and Marxists who have also signed the statement. Whilst I am not surprised at the likes of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (any chance to attack the rest of the left), it was disappointing to see others - members of the Socialist Party, plenty of Socialist Resistance supporters (who really should know better) and lots of members of Industrial Workers of the World have signed this ill-conceived text.

I do wonder if the reluctance to deal adequately with the far left in the article was perhaps the fact that Paul was concerned about having to criticise the national secretary of Labour Party Marxists, Stan Keable, for also signing the statement. As readers of this publication are well aware, Labour Party Marxists argue a line in the Labour Party that is very similar to that of the CPGB. Now we have their national secretary lining up with a statement that is part of an offensive against the far left.

As the LPM website shows, no leaflet has been produced in the last four months and its last report was on a badly attended Campaign for Labour Party Democracy meeting where the LPM seemed to have nothing to say. It very much looks as if the LPM have severed their links with the CPGB and are moving to the right.

Severed
Severed

Proud

I learn with dismay that my friend and fellow socialist, Lee Rock, has been sacked, but I am not surprised (‘Campaign against victimisation takes off’, March 21). His activism as a socialist and trade unionist, fighting every day for the rights of his fellow Public and Commercial Services union members and all workers in the public sector, has made him a real thorn in the side of those who want to destroy the workers’ movement.

To sack a worker on the grounds that he has been sick too often is a despicable and inhuman act, but in this case it also represents the most disgusting cynicism. The managers responsible may think they have won a battle - but they are wrong, because Lee and those comrades loyal and close to him will never stop fighting for the rights of the working class. The managers who sacked Lee may well find themselves thrown on the scrap heap, as this government and any foreseeable successor government will persist in punishing workers in the public sector in an effort to save themselves and their capitalist friends from the collapse of their economic system.

Please let me know of any channels through which I can give Lee and his family some material help. To Lee himself - who needs no advice from us - I say only this: keep your chin up, comrade, and be very proud of what you have done for your class.

Proud
Proud

Same

I note that a member of Communist Students stood for a union post and the aim of this was not to win a union post on watered-down politics, but to win people to the politics of communism (‘Campaigning for communism’, March 21).

I have to say how positive I found this position. After all, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has long campaigned in elections upon the single issue of socialism and been subject to frequent criticism from the left for doing so, accused of being too ‘abstract’ and ‘theoretical’. I am therefore glad we are no longer alone.

Same
Same