05.12.2013

Safe Spaces: How not to fight for women’s equality

Harley Filben on the approach taken within Left Unity

Clause 4d in the constitution agreed at the founding conference reads: “As part of our overall commitment to gender equality, at least 50% of those elected to regional and national party bodies should be women.” The attempts by Leamington Spa to delete this clause and by Loughborough to lower the percentage to 40% were both heavily defeated.

The first thing to say about this is that the word “should” is ambiguous. While it was widely understood as laying down a requirement, it could be taken merely as an aspiration. However, leaving that point aside, it is clear that the drafters of this clause and all those who voted for it are motivated by a genuine desire to implement “gender equality”. But the problem is, such bureaucratic measures do not actually help achieve that aim and in fact are more often than not counterproductive. As critics on the left, including CPGB members, pointed out at the conference, it can lead to unwilling female comrades being pressed to stand to ‘make up the numbers’ and to the election of ‘token women’ - not necessarily those most capable or politically suited for the role.

That is not to say that things are fine as they are. As far as the position of women in the movement (indeed, in politics as a whole goes), we are faced with two distinct sets of problems.

The first is the material inequality between the sexes, expressed most clearly in the problem of the ‘double burden’: women are often required to present themselves as wage-slaves, while also rearing children and running a home. Politics is work, so in a sense all political activists suffer their own ‘double burden’. However, for more women than men that adds up to a ‘triple burden’ altogether. Less time to devote to politics means less time to swot up, to go to meetings and argue, etc; which in turn makes cadrisation more difficult.

The second problem is harder to locate exactly, but has to do with the internalisation of informal inequalities: (white, etc) men on average find it less intimidating to get up and speak in front of people, and so on; it is more likely, in fact, for it to occur to us white boys that politics is something we would like to do in the first place. The outcome is, again, the same - de facto male dominance in political organisations, particularly at leadership level (and, again, this is equally, if not more, obvious with the bourgeois parties than the left - the gender ratio in parliament is probably pretty close to that in LU and the CPGB, and worse than in the Socialist Workers Party ...)

Fighting against that, first of all, means fighting against extant political and material inequality between the sexes: for reproductive autonomy, better childcare, full political equality and so on, as necessary. It then also means expending every effort to develop people in the movement as cadre - a big part of that fight is democratic culture, but, more than that, special attention to education, overcoming as far as possible the division between ‘thinking comrades’ and do-as-you’re-told followers, etc. This is hardly just a matter for women, of course: if anything, it is more pressing a matter for youth. It is not easy to be 17 and wet behind the ears, and take on Hillel Ticktin in a polemic.

What we cannot do is offer an equivalent ‘solution’ to 50- 50 quotas - or, for that matter, ‘safe spaces’ policies and so on. This is because these are pseudo-solutions that come from incorrect conceptions of the problem, and are very often directly counterproductive. In the last analysis, the cravenness of Richard Seymour and co towards this stuff is an attempt to overcome gender imbalance through ‘opening up to feminism’ (theoretical eclecticism, which undermines any effective political fight for women’s liberation), and ‘being alongside people in struggle’ (usually a licence to engage in hyper-activism, which cuts against the need to develop comrades as ‘organic intellectuals’ or however you want to put it - it is the same with bureaucratic ‘safe spaces’ policies and so on).

We do not have an easy, off-the-shelf alternative to gender quotas. We develop our comrades as best as we can; something which requires serious attention to each individual’s needs. I have no doubt we could be better at this; a glance over at the SWP, however, and the left-liberal contingent in LU, should be enough to remind us that we could be doing worse.