First Published: Guardian October 22, 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Over the past several years, there has been a sporadic debate between the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) and class conscious activists within the Philadelphia women’s movement about its attitudes on women’s liberation. This debate is becoming somewhat more national as the effects of PWOC’s perspective have become more national.
John Trinkl’s criticism of PWOC's perspective on feminism (On the left, Aug. 20) and Sara Murphy’s response to it on behalf of PWOC (Opinion and Analysis Oct. 8) brought the debate to the pages of the Guardian. Several important points were brought out in that exchange which I feel should be more thoroughly discussed in order to be understood in the broader context of the relationship between class struggle and women’s liberation; and in the context of the relationship between contemporary Marxism-Leninism and contemporary feminism.
Before proceeding, I want to locate myself in this debate. I resigned from the PWOC after two and one-half years of membership early this year in refusal to stand trial for “feminism, extreme subjectivism and anti- leadership tendencies” and for supposed perjury in self-criticism. A few months later, I was expelled as “unable to play a constructive role in the progressive movement in general and the communist movement in particular.”
While there was no mention of feminism in the expulsion, the charges which I refused to stand trial for related to the role I had played in our internal struggle over Take Back the Night and on other issues related to women’s liberation.
The issues I think are the most important in the Trinkl/Murphy exchange are also those most commonly focussed on in the criticisms raised by women’s movement activists in Philadelphia. They are:
1. An overly negative assessment of all
tendencies within the feminist movement as
essentially bourgeois.
2. Sectarianism toward the women’s
movement in practical activity, an example
of which is the Take Back the Night
demonstration.
3. Economism in the political line which
PWOC takes as the basis for its strategy and
tactics.
4. Undialectical and anti-materialist approaches to understanding the history of the
women's liberation struggle in the U.S.
5. An unprincipled and imbalanced
approach to the deficiencies of the women’s
liberation movement in relationship to class
and race.
Due to space limitations, I will not deal with PWOC’s approach to history. Neither is there space to analyze the relationship between PWOC’s campaign against white chauvinism and anti-working class bias and its erroneous views on women’s liberation.
I will begin with the question of economism. PWOC bases its national unity with a number of other organizations and individuals on 18 principles of unity. Number 13 deals with women’s liberation. In principle 13, the only mention of the material basis of women’s oppression is “the super-exploitation of women is a pillar upon which capitalism stands and the struggle against it is inextricably bound up with the struggle for revolution waged by the working class.”
I have no argument with this formulation, but to leave the material basis for women’s oppression under capitalism there is inadequate. To say, in effect, that capitalist extraction of a higher than average rate of profit from female wage labor is the central touch point between class and sex oppression is, I think, economist.
As I understand it, we are more likely to find a useful understanding of how women's liberation relates to working class. liberation when we focus on the dialectical relationship between production and reproduction.
Engels states:
The determining factor in history, is, in the, final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a two-fold character; on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for production; and on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
Since the oppression of women is inextricably tied to our role as reproducer, and since that role as reproducer is tied closely to capitalist’s continuing ability to extract superprofits from female wage labor, we can’t even understand sex oppression in the economic realm if we are content with PWOC’s limited definition. The emphasis on, women's role in production set apart from the dialectic of production/reproduction leads to an inability to understand the relationship between women’s oppression and economic exploitation. It also assumes that the woman in the workplace is more a part of the working class than when she is not.
The economist perspective on women’s liberation leads its advocates to undervalue the contributions to contemporary revolutionary theory made by socialist feminists. In PWOC’s analysis, socialist feminists are unilaterally declared anti-working class. The following quote from Sheila Rowbotham’s most recent book should give the reader an idea of what the PWOC chooses to discount:
One aspect of ... a strategy would be a more worked-out understanding of what the feminist experience has taught us about how to organize and what aspects are relevant for the making of socialism. I think it would be to go down a blind alley if we simply pre-sent this in terms of a defensive idealization of the women’s movement as the ’alternative’, and a caricature of the 'authoritarian male' left .... Despite its creativity, feminism, by definition, expresses the experiences of one sex. It is necessarily partial.
Moreover, there are actual race and class biases as well. . . .
I don’t, think that the women's movement ... can provide some neat alternative out of a hat. The great historic force of Leninism is precisely that it has been created and used in revolutionary situations."
By ignoring such thinking inside the women’s movement, PWOC cuts itself off from and stands, “in principle”, against the very forces who have been taking up the real struggle for a working-class perspective and the real struggle against racism within the real women’s movement. Standing on the sidelines and caricaturing socialist feminists does nothing to advance our understanding of the successes and failures of their efforts.
What we get down to here is a simple equation of anti-Leninist being the same .as anti-working class. Those revolutionaries who insist on autonomy of the women’s movement, or the Black movement, for that matter, have been branded for their anti-Leninism – as if Leninism has rendered perfect results and should not be legitimately subjected to scrutiny. The protective assumption that all skepticism toward Leninism is vulgar anticommunism or bourgeois has kept cadre from many organizations in a cocoon of self-satisfaction and rigidity.
PWOC’s readiness to discount Rowbotham as reactionary is ideologically linked to its unwillingness to engage in self-criticism in regard to Take Back the Night. There is not space here to discuss Take Back the Night in depth ’ suffice it to say that while there were certainly problems with the slogan and the lack of strategic orientation to uniting the struggles against violence against women with those against violence against minorities, PWOC had hindsight rather than constructive suggestions to offer the women’s movement during the planning stages.
PWOC’s Murphy stated that the police were smiling and supportive at the Take Back the Night march. This is supposed to convince us that it was in unity with the police! The march route itself was well chosen – going from the offices of government to the pornography district to the subway stations where women have been raped and assaulted. It passed big corporate headquarters which represent bastions of sex discrimination. The speakers at the rally, dealt with racist and capitalist reasons for violence against women.
The inadequacies of the slogan as regards racism were apparent to some, but I doubt that the Philly police were among them. I interpreted the smiles on cops faces that night differently: It appeared to me that the cops thought 6000 “women's libbers” marching through the pornography district was the best joke they had seen in ages. Being laughed at by cops beats the hell out of getting shot, beaten or arrested, but my god, why try to stretch a political alliance between police terror and feminism out of it?
This equation of racist weaknesses within Take Back the Night with police support is exemplary of PWOC’s extreme and subjective response to both its internal dissidents and the women’s movement activists who planned the march.
The effort and time required to develop a balanced perspective, a knowledgeable perspective, were not taken. PWOC was not involved in the planning stages, more than attendance at one coalition meeting. It did not even know before writing the polemic against the slogan that the slogan was an international one. It had no straightforward program for the movement’s focus: the fight against sexual violence. Given that, this approach to changing the slogan was both 11th hour and set in a context of ignorance and insensitivity of the women’s movement rather than knowledge.
The historic isolation from and arrogance toward the women’s movement put the PWOC in a position of criticizing from without, rather than building antiracist consciousness from within. In my view, PWOC reflected only a superficial consciousness of racism and how it could be taken up.
A fuller understanding of the struggle within the women’s movement and relationship to racism and a deeper understanding of sexism as oppression would have allowed for the criticisms to be raised in the context of support for antiracist forces, within the women's movement. It could have been made in the context of a struggle for a deeper class perspective and the links between sexism and racism. But instead, it was considered righteously adequate to point out weaknesses.
The struggle for revolutionary theory to guide a people’s movement will not emerge from launching broadside attacks on our allies.