First Published: Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Wherever there is capitalism, wherever there is private property in land and factories, wherever the power of capital is preserved, the men retain their privileges. (Lenin, “Tasks of the Working Women Movement in the Soviet Republic.” )
On International Working Women’s Day, we celebrate the struggle of oppressed women, particularly working class women, who have heroically taken up the fight against all forms of exploitation and oppression throughout the world. We celebrate IWWD in solidarity with the women of China and Albania in their struggle for socialist construction, with the oppressed women of all Third World countries who are fighting against imperialism, colonialism, hegemonism, and all reaction. We celebrate with the entire working class, all oppressed nationalities and oppressed women and men who are struggling to overthrow the system of monopoly capitalism in order to gain genuine equality for women.
Today the world is in great disorder. Marxist-Leninist Parties and organizations in various countries have developed and grown in strength in the fight against the bourgeoisie and modern revisionism. The Third World countries and peoples have won new victories & advanced in the struggle against imperialism, colonialism and hegemonism. The working class and oppressed nationalities and national minorities in the US and all capitalist countries have launched fresh offensives against their monopoly capitalists. On the other hand, the Helsinki Pact and the Angolan situation testify to the growing danger of a new world war and how Soviet Social- Imperialism is the most dangerous source of war.
The sharpening contention in the international sphere is directly reflected in the struggle for leadership in the international women’s movement. A clear example is last year’s International Women’s Conference. Last. summer, at the first U.N. World Conference of International Women’s Year in Mexico City, the delegates from Third World Countries and some national liberation organizations spearheaded a tit for tat struggle against the two super powers’ attempts to lead astray the international women’s movement. There were sharp debates and struggles on questions concerning the road to women’s emancipation and the correct line of action.
The U.S. delegation put forth the “non-political nature” of the women’s movement, that women are being discriminated against under all social systems, and attempted to restrict the discussion to formal and abstract women’s rights. Their two ’fundamental targets’ of International Women’s Year were to fight for equal rights with men and the participation of women on equal terms in the development of nations.
The Soviet delegates, under a ’peace’ banner pushed the trash about ’detente’ replacing ’cold war’ and disarmament being an essential condition for making the process of detente ’stable’ and ’irreversible’. “Only under the conditions of peace and reduction of military expenditure” can women “win their defined social rights.”
More and more, the two superpowers are becoming exposed. We cannot separate the women’s movement from the larger international situation. As a representative from the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.) correctly said: “Equality is out of the question for us unless our African continent is freed from colonial occupation, racial discrimination and apartheid in all its forms” and “provided that the people of other countries are still suffering from colonial enslavement and foreign economic plunder, we have no peace to speak of ”. With the unity of the awakening oppressed peoples and nations of the world, imperialist attempts to control this conference were soundly defeated in front of the whole world.
World war and revolution are two contending trends; either revolution will prevent world war or world war will lead to revolution. At home, US capitalism is in its deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. In its preparation for a new world war, the US ruling class is stepping up its attacks on the working class through unemployment, inflation, speedup and cuts in vital services as well as repressive measures such as Gun Control bills, the S.1 bill and police brutality, to tighten the control on the working class. It is clear that the hardest hit within the working class in this crisis are the oppressed nationalities, national minorities and working class women.
For working class and oppressed women here at home, we must take a stand with the oppressed peoples and nations against hegemonism, colonialism and imperialism. This struggle is inseparably linked to our own emancipation just as our struggle to overthrow monopoly capitalism here is inseparably linked with our struggle against women’s oppression. Our movement can’t be a separate ’non-political’ women’s movement for equal rights as the U.S. delegates tried to propagate. Ours must be a joint struggle alongside all oppressed men and women. What’s the proper outlook on fighting for our own emancipation? “Clearly, the primary task at the present in the struggle for women’s emancipation is to fight imperialism, colonialism and particularly hegemonism of the two super-powers. Only when this struggle is carried out successfully, while giving due attention to solving the special demands and problems of women, can the cause for women’s emancipation be pushed ahead steadily”. (From speech given by Li Su-wen, head of the Chinese Delegation)
In the United States, the struggle of working women against women’s oppression and male supremacy has always been an integral part of the working class movement and the movement of oppressed minorities against national oppression. The women garment and textile workers pioneered the struggle against the use of women and children as cheap labor and against the wretched working conditions imposed by the capitalists.
Working women’s struggles have also made great strides in the past year. The Farah workers, after a 22 month protracted and militant strike finally won their right to unionize. The Oneida Mills strike of North Carolina was another blow to the monopoly capitalists. Wildcat strikes erupt every day in the sweatshops concentrated in the Northeast of the country. In textile, electronic, garment, food processing, health care and other industries dominated by women, women workers are rising up spontaneously to fight for the “right to unionize, against slave wages, for decent living conditions,“ against the trade union bureaucracy for trade union democracy; and against male supremacist ideology.
Working women have also taken a leading role in community struggles, particularly oppressed national minority communities, for free and quality daycare, quality education, against police brutality, against pornography and degenerate culture. Across the country, working women are surging forward with rising consciousness to take up the task of liberating the entire working class from the yoke of wage slavery.
While there are significant gains that women workers have wrested from our exploiters, the monopoly capitalists, there are also setbacks. The bourgeoisie and its agents channeled the spontaneous struggles into legalism, reformism, feminism, social-feminism, and pacifism. Many of the struggles were sold out and the gains were not accumulated to build the communist leadership of the rank and file movement.
This points to the single greatest weakness of the women’s movement and the working class movement in general – the need for the genuine Communist Party to provide theoretical and practical leadership to the struggles of the multinational working class and to lead the working class to the final onslaught of monopoly capitalism. The party is the advanced and organized detachment of the working class. Only a party that is armed with the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought and made up of the finest sons and daughters of the working class will be able to lead the working class and the broad-masses of oppressed people through the twists and turns of events in the struggle for socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. As long as we do not have a genuine anti-revisionist ML party, the principal task of the communist movement must be party building: uniting with genuine Marxist-Leninists, winning over the advanced men and women who are rooted in the working class, applying the general truth of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought to the concrete conditions of the United States and developing a programme that is able to give direction to the different fronts of struggles of the working class.
On the women’s question, we must draw a clear line of demarcation with social-feminism, revisionism and opportunism in all of its various manifestations. In such an advanced capitalist society so deeply infested with bourgeois ideology there is no way that we can build a revolutionary working class movement led by genuine communists without constantly combatting and preventing these bourgeois women’s ideological influences within our own ranks.
The basic ML principle holds that there is no such thing as “women’s viewpoint”, or women above class. This is the fundamental line of demarcation between ML and bourgeois feminism. The bourgeois feminists and social-feminists peddle an ’autonomous’ movement which sees that men generally and not the monopoly capitalist class are the enemy of oppressed women. They raise demands such as the ’free expression of sexuality’. They also attempt to divert the oppressed women into struggles for legal ’equality’ such as the Equal Rights Amendment. (see ERA article). But even in the matter of formal equality, capitalism cannot be consistent. And one of the most glaring manifestations of this inconsistency is the inequality of women and men! (On International Working Women’s Day“, Lenin, Collected Works; Vol. 30, 1920) Our task is to expose these inconsistencies and point out the root of these inconsistencies – capitalism. “ ... under capitalism the right of divorce, as all other democratic rights without exception, is conditional, restricted, formal, narrow and extremely difficult of realisation.” (“A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism”, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.23, 1916)
The U.S. women’s suffrage movement was progressive in the 19th century when it was directly linked to the struggle to abolish slavery, but has long since turned into its opposite since the consolidation of imperialism at the turn of the century. In the U.S. where bourgeois democracy is relatively consummated and most reactionary, to restrict the aims and activities of the working class to winning reforms and to raise demands for legal ’equality’ is precisely to aid the bourgeoisie and to foster greater illusions about bourgeois democracy and the system of monopoly capitalism among the people.
The “Communist” Party of the, USA, although paying lip service to the role of working women and ’full equality between the sexes under socialism, has essentially a liberal reformist program. The revisionist “C”P totally liquidated, the class content of the women’s question. Their program is a revisionist program that asks for “real equality of women through electoral politics”, anti-sexist legislation, trade unionism, and affirmative action programs under capitalism to “extend“ bourgeois democracy for “advanced” democracy, to attempt to give a new lease to the parasitic, decaying and moribund bourgeois democracy. Their reformist and pacifist position on the women’s question is entirely consistent with their general programme that advocates peaceful transition to socialism, that abandons the dictatorship of the proletariat and that advocates detente as the grand strategy to socialism for the American working class.
Within the communist movement, the same reformist and liberal line on the women’s question is represented by the October League. “The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism.” (“Historical Destiny of Marxism,” Lenin) This is OL, the most dangerous revisionist trend within the communist movement. We cannot judge OL by the general truths of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought that they mouth. We must look at how they apply these general principles to concrete conditions of the US.
By supporting the bourgeoisie’s forced busing plan, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Shah of Iran, the OL shows its true colours as ML in words and die-hard reformist at heart. This liberal outlook similarly dictated their position on “compensative seniority”, pinning their hopes on the bourgeois court system and helping the bourgeoisie to split the working class, women against men, and white against oppressed nationalities and national minorities. In its latest article on the women’s movement (Call, 2/76), working class struggles and issues are liquidated except in one section, where they hail the “legal battle” on “compensative seniority” that is now in the courts. This is the world outlook of the dying desperate petty-bourgeois class longing for days of competitive capitalism when they were still on the rise – when there was still hope.
While the political manifestations of the “C”P, the bourgeois feminists, and the OL-revisionist trend in the communist movement are different, their ideological roots are the same – the illusion of bourgeois democracy, and demands for freedom and equality in the abstract before the law ... combined with their different social basis, they inevitably become the agent of the bourgeoisie and misleaders of the working class.
Social- feminism is a new brand of feminism. It says that all forms of oppression are interrelated and ’simultaneous’. This is a thoroughly bourgeois outlook under the political cloak of centrism: it is no accident that this centrist force also takes opportunist positions on the ERA, busing, community control and finally unites with the Trotskyites and the revisionists on the Angola issue.
It is inevitable since its ideology and world outlook is thoroughly tied to the petty bourgeoisie, it breeds and develops in the midst of marsh forces such as the Guardian and NAM-like organizations.
While right opportunism is the main danger in the communist movement, we must struggle on two fronts. We must also guard against the danger of left dogmatism, represented for example by the PRRWO – liquidation of the women’s question, not exposing revisionism and opportunism in front of the masses – which objectively unites with the right opportunists in liquidating the tasks of communists. By saying that the chief form of communist work is propaganda, in reality, they see it as the only task. They give up the need to win over the advanced and the masses in the course of class struggle against the monopoly capitalists by giving communist leadership.
Workers’ Viewpoint has also made serious right errors in our initial preparation for International Working Women’s Day this year, temporarily conciliating to bourgeois feminism. The basis is the liquidation of the women’s question. Without grasping firmly Marxism-Leninism- Mao Tse-Tung Thought as our guide, with some petty bourgeois social basis in the organization, with the condition of the women’s movement where marsh forces prevail, a bourgeois feminist line inevitably crept in and temporarily took over the women’s work in the organization.
The most urgent task of communists today is party building. Build the Party on the ideological plane, grasp the key link of political line! This means that we must apply the general truth of MLMttT to the concrete conditions of the U.S., imperialism in its dying age. We must seek out, identify and criticize the nationally specific character of revisionism in the U.S. in all its political, ideological and organizational manifestations. We must earnestly study Marxism and criticize revisionism, and combat and prevent degeneration. The women’s question is an area where the communist movement has lagged behind because of general theoretical weaknesses and the serious liquidationist tendencies on the women’s question.
“We must by all means set up a powerful international women’s movement on a clear cut theoretical basis. It is clear that without Marxist theory we cannot have proper practice. Here too, we communists need the greatest clarity of principle. We must draw a sharp line between us and all other parties.” (“My Recollections of Lenin”, Clara Zetkin, Appendix to The Emancipation of Women). The same task is confronting us today. All true fighters for the emancipation of women must take up the task. We must grasp tightly propaganda as the chief for~ of activity for Communists in this period. We must win over the advanced in the women’s movement, promote women leadership and fuse the women’s movement with the communist movement. And in the context of providing leadership to the day to day struggle of working women we must develop a fighting program on all the burning questions confronting working women. This will lay the basis for a mass revolutionary women’s movement that will march in arms with the entire working class, under the leadership of a genuine communist party, in fulfilling the historic mission of the proletariat of overthrowing monopoly capitalism and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.