- Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation: 1640 to the Present Day by Tony Cliff, Bookmarks: 1984.
Women have played an active role in the great revolutionary struggles of the past 350 years. This role has been by and large ‘hidden from history’. Feminist writers over the last fifteen years have striven hard to uncover this history. Yet they have built into their accounts not only a false patriarchal conspiracy theory, but have also hidden from their histories the glaring class differences and antagonisms within ‘the women’s movement’.
Tony Cliff sets out to remedy both these errors. The ambitious title Cliff gives his book indicates the enormity of the task. Those specific approach to working class women. In the Introduction he writes: ‘The history of efforts to organise working class women into socialist organisations like the general history of the working class movement, is a long story of ebbs and flows, of great achievement and heart-rending disappointments. Yet the struggles go on, even though time and time again they have to start afresh from the beginning’.(p.11).
Cliff’s habitual spontaneism which here he applies to women is capable of short bursts of wild optimism and enthusiasm, which fall back into a bleak pessimism. There is an alternative method to Cliff’s. It is one that understands clearly that it is the task of an organisation of revolutionaries, and specifically of women communists, to intervene in each major upheaval, to test out other leaderships, to draw larger numbers to their programme, even after a defeat. It is a tradition that not only built parties and movements of working class women, but also tested, corrected and developed its programme.
For example, the experience of the Russian women’s movement from 1905–7, combined with that of Zetkin in the German women’s organisation, enabled Kollontai and the Bolsheviks to reach a better understanding of how and around what to organise working class women by 1917. Cliff constantly neglects that aspect of these historical examples.
You would imagine from Cliff’s account that there were no problems with the woman question in the German and Russian movements. In fact, the Bolsheviks were slow and inadequate in their work on women right up to 1917, due to a reticence to recognise the special needs of women workers. It was leading women like Kollontai and Zetkin who combined a Marxist rejection of bourgeois feminism with a revolutionary strategy and tactics, designed to mobilise women for their own emancipation and working class power.
This programme, which became the Bolshevik position during the 1917 revolution, included raising specific demands relating to women’s oppression and the need for special forms of agitation, propaganda and organisation to draw women into struggle. This remains the case today.
The major blind spot in Cliff’s analysis is that he continues to see women simply as backward workers who must be drawn into the general class struggle. He rejects any notion of special interests and argues: ‘As workers too, the needs of men and women are identical. Because of these things any separatism between men and women workers will damage both, and will damage women more than men’.(p.102)
Cliff maintains that whilst women’s oppression is a result of their position within the family, it is only as workers that they become able to struggle against capitalism: ‘The workplace, and the fight by working women to improve their circumstances there, is the key to changing ideas, raising consciousness’ (p.235); and again: ‘the starting point for a struggle against women’s oppression is not that of oppression itself, but the point where working class women are strong, where, with the men of their own class, they can fight to change society’ (p235).
Cliff here confuses two points. Of course, women can only politically act to change society through their struggle alongside men, based in the workplace. But it is totally false to limit the issues for launching a mass movement of working class women to the problems they face as workers. The movement of miners’ wives in the 1984 strike shows that the problems working class women face as home managers can be an enormous spur to militant struggle. Cliff has nothing to offer these women except trade unionism or joining his party. In this he falls decisively below the level of Kollontai and Zetkin who wanted to build a mass working class women’s movement under communist leadership.
Cliff’s book, whilst a very good introduction to the history and militancy of working class women, fails the reader because he ends up with an economistic critique of feminism which suggests that the heart of a revolutionary programme for women consists in overcoming the barriers that prevent a backward section of our class from fighting alongside their brothers. On finishing the book the reader would do well to turn to the writings of Kollontai and Zetkin for the full picture.
