The Comintern Theses on Women adopted at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International in 1921 both codified the Marxist position on the women question and summarised the experience of over 25 years of Marxist agitation amongst working women. The Communist Manifesto declared it the intention of communists to ’emancipate women from their position as mere instruments of production’. Bebel, Engels and Clara Zetkin developed a communist analysis of the women question showing the road to this emancipation to be inextricably bound to the proletarian revolution.
Engels demonstrated that the material basis for the oppression of women lay with the development of private property — the domestication of animals and pastoralism and the development of slavery increased the wealth, the form of which belonged to the male line. With their greatly increased status the tribal chiefs were able to overthrow the existing system of ‘mother right’ that recognised descent solely through the female line, thus precluding the passing on of such wealth to the male’s children. Thus the social driving force of developing private property led to a new form of patriarchal family — where descent was determined exclusively through the male line, the woman was degraded and regarded as the exclusive property of the man, a mere instrument for breeding children.
Thus women’s oppression existed in all class societies — antiquity, feudalism, capitalism — and only the ending of class society would provide the pre-conditions for the full emancipation of women. The pre-conditions because the dictatorship of the proletariat (which places political and economic power in the hands of the working class, which has no material interest in the oppression of women) will immediately begin to cut the roots of women’s oppression.
The exploitation of both women and men will end with the suppression of capitalist property relations and their replacement by socialist planned production. Women will be drawn into all spheres of social production on an equal basis with men. The transformation of privatised domestic labour by the socialisation of childcare and housework will supercede the family as a unit for the reproduction of labour power. These socio-economic roots of women’s oppression must be cut if women’s liberation is not to remain a utopia. This task necessitates the united efforts of the vanguard of the proletariat (its party) and an organised mass movement of working class women.
Like the class struggle itself it necessitates, before and after the proletarian revolution, a relentless campaign against both the class enemy and its agents and also every element of backwardness in the working class itself. Moreover, Marxists recognise that the oppression of women will not end on the morrow of the revolution. Aspects of sexual inequality and oppression will continue for a period, as will other aspects of social oppression because of the cultural level inherited from bourgeois society. The population cannot be totally re-educated, nor can a psychological pattern instilled in men and women from infancy be fully eliminated and reversed at a stroke. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary transition to socialism involving a ruthless drive against all the ideological and social remnants of capitalism.
The fundamental difference between this struggle before and after the seizure of power is that in the latter case communists will be cutting with the grain of social development, will have in their hands the means of administration, public education and coercion. Thus the Comintern Theses set down a series of tasks for the communists in countries where Soviet power was already achieved, aiming to ‘transform the slave of the family and home into a free co-worker in the great social renaissance — a fellow creator of new forms of life’.
Throughout the 1890s up to 1914 Clara Zetkin led and developed German social democracy’s work amongst proletarian women in the spheres of education and agitation, at the same time clarifying and extending theoretically a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression under capitalism. Capitalism destroyed the old household economy where social production and household work took place. But at the same time as separating off privatised domestic toil from the sphere of social production it forced women into production to earn a livelihood: creating the modern women question.
Here their inferior social position, stemming from their position in the family, seriously handicapped them in their fight against exploitation as members of the working class and provided the capitalists with a super-exploited additional workforce. Within the family women perform the essential economic role of maintenance and replenishment of the commodity of labour power — this takes place outside the sphere of public production; in the privatised tasks of child-rearing, cooking, cleaning etc. Women, isolated in the sphere of petty production and dependent for economic support on their working husbands are easy prey to the ideology which glorifies the women’s position in the home as rearer of the family, and which condemns all those movements which threaten the stability of the society and the family.
The family is both a prison and a haven for the working class woman. In order to defend themselves in the sphere of production women not only had to overcome these ideas, the result of centuries of social isolation and enslavement within the family, but had to fight against the same ideology and prejudices in male workers. All this and at the same time carry the double burden of having two jobs — one at the factory and one in the home.
The capitalist has every interest in maintaining this inferior status for women. It renders unionisation and collective struggle by both men and women workers difficult. The woman’s domestic responsibilities mean she is able to take full time work only when capital provides the necessary child care facilities — providing the ideal reserve army of labour to be driven back to the home in periods of recession.
It was the recognition of these special problems facing women which made it necessary to find special methods of work amongst women and develop women’s sections or committees to carry out such work primarily amongst working women, i.e. those already involved in collective activity and struggle, but also amongst housewives and home workers. To reject such work was to abandon large sections of the working class to the influence of the bourgeoisie and open to reaction in times of social crisis.
While capitalism produces the modern women’s question, Marxists recognise that it takes different forms within different classes. The Comintern Theses, in declaring as a ‘basic proposition of revolutionary Marxism’ that there is no specific women’s question and no ‘specific women’s movement’, summarises the position adopted by the Marxist women’s movement towards the bourgeois women’s movement — their ‘enemy sisters’.
For middle class women — the petit and middle bourgeois women and those of the bourgeois intelligentsia also drawn into social production with the expansion of capitalism — the women’s question manifested itself firstly in their position of economic inequality as regards the men of their class in the employment field. The demand for the suffrage — for equal political rights with men — was seen as the battering ram for the other demands of the movement, for equality in occupational education, for sex equality in carrying on an occupation.
The ‘women’s rightsters’ were fighting in the economic sphere for free trade and free competition with the men of the liberal professions already threatened by the overproduction of ‘proletarian brain workers’. For proletarian women capitalism’s increasing search for the cheapest labour power broke down any such barriers erected to limit free competition — machine production meant she became completely equal to the man as labour power, and for the capitalist her advantages — stemming from her social position as an undercutting competitor — encouraged them to extend the use of women labour to the highest degree.
Unlike her bourgeois counterpart she did not have to fight against barriers erected to prevent her competition — against the men of her own class — such opposition and barriers had been turned down for her by capitalists need for exploitation. She was faced with a common struggle of both working women and men to overthrow the system of exploitation which enslaved them both.
Marxist women recognised the justice of the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement — they fought alongside them in their fight for political equality — but at the same time recognised that were all the demands of the women’s rightsters conceded it would leave them as exploited as ever and that those who saw only a ‘women question’, who recognised no class struggle — only a struggle of the sexes — the bourgeois feminists — would go into the camp of the bourgeoisie, would demand their rights alongside the males in their class to exploit their proletarian ‘sisters’. Thus even while fighting for the rights of women the bourgeois feminists were bitterly hostile to the demand for special protection for women workers.
A demand growing out of the fact that working women did not see the end goal as free competition with men, the freedom to be exploited to an equal amount and more as the men of her class, but as the ending of their joint exploitation. Rather it was a question of erecting new barriers to the exploitation of women — and men — a demand which drew a class line in the ‘women’s movement’. Thus the socialist women’s movement argued clearly that Communism and the complete emancipation of women would not be achieved by united efforts of all women of different classes but by ‘the united struggle of all the exploited’.
The modern women’s movement
The triumph of fascism and Stalinism and the long recession of the thirties, was a period of dark reaction for women. After World War Two, however, the unprecedented expansion of capitalism led to the drawing into the workforce of large numbers of women. These conditions, amounting to an emergence of women into the sphere of public life hitherto not witnessed under capitalism, gave women of both the intelligentsia and the working class a potentiality for struggle which encouraged the rebirth of a large, if amorphous, women’s movement in the late sixties and early seventies.
This movement emerged into a situation very different from the last great period of women’s organisation and struggle, the period lasting from the 1880s to the 1930s. Stalinism had obliterated the communist position on the family (in order to cover its retention, indeed glorification, in the Soviet Union). It had espoused a ferocious bourgeois puritan ethic utterly repugnant to Marxism — persecuting homosexuality as an ‘unnatural vice’, driving from the ranks of its parties not only ‘sexual radicals’ like Willhelm Reich, but even anathematising orthodox psycho-analysis in favour of a crude and reactionary behaviouralism. This sexual counter-revolution and the renunciation by the world’s CPs of the building of mass communist working women’s movements had almost wiped out the memory of the movements of Zetkin and Kollontai.
Although modern feminists have rediscovered the profoundly revolutionary analysis of the family to be found in the works of Engels, they have all too often recoiled in horror from Marxism, identifying it with Stalinism — or with the indifference or hostility to women’s liberation which the ‘Trotskyists’ have too often demonstrated. They have identified these groups as hostile to women’s liberation.
Thus, despite recognising working class women as ‘the most oppressed’, socialism as the necessary ‘material basis’ for the full liberation of women, feminists remain anchored to the notion of a ‘women’s movement’, refusing to specify its class allegiance (and, thereby giving it not, as they imagine a non-class character, but a petit-bourgeois character.) This refusal to draw the necessary conclusions from the above ‘recognitions’ leads to a refusal to orient towards working class women in general, and to organised working class women in particular. It leads, above all, to an opposition to the Marxist strategy of building a working class women’s movement under communist leadership.
Such a movement should not be seen as a component of a broad ‘women’s movement’ independent or autonomous from the vanguard of the working class (its revolutionary communist party) but as a component of the class forces of the proletariat specifically organising women and independent of all bourgeois or petit-bourgeois forces.
To the economists and sectarians within the working class movement, such as the SWP (IS), who see no need for a working women’s movement, who would limit it to trade union demands, or who insist that it can be no more than a department of the party, we point to the specific nature — the dual nature — of working class women’s oppression and exploitation, rooted in the domestic slavery of the family, and from there extending to all spheres of social life including the work place.
To rouse women from the passive acceptance of this, a particular programme and a specific form of organisation is needed. A programme which addresses itself to the question of working women’s slavery in the home and the family. Which, therefore, takes up the right of women to control their own fertility, the demands which make concrete the struggle for the socialisation of child rearing and housework. One which takes up all the questions of women’s rights to equal treatment as independent human beings in terms of jobs, housing, social and welfare benefits etc. A fighting strategy which takes up not only equal pay and conditions, vital as these are, but includes certain forms of positive discrimination (in areas like admission to apprenticeships, training programmes and to skilled jobs) providing this is under the control of organised working women.
It must also, necessarily, include special provisions: rights to caucus separately, meetings in working hours, crèche provisions etc., which enable women to play a full and equal role in the struggle of their class for its emancipation and that of women.
A communist current, rallied around such a programme, will undoubtedly find mortal foes in the bureaucracies of the labour movement (TU and political) not primarily because these are male preserves, though they are of course largely so, but because these bureaucracies are inextricably bound up with the existence and preservation of capitalism — and all this entails for women.
Such a communist current will, therefore, have to strive to organise women independently of these bureaucrats. This does not mean standing in sectarian isolation aside from the mass organisations of the class. It necessitates, centrally, work in the unions to build a mass movement by winning individuals to the communist programme; it allows for the placing of demands on the bureaucrats, including the demand for the formation of a ‘mass working women’s movement’ autonomous from any bureaucratic veto, i.e. with its own democratically-elected leadership at all levels, and the freedom of political tendency within it. In such a movement communists would fight openly for the leadership and the adoption of their programme.
Thus, two interlinked tasks face us in the coming period. The rallying of a communist women’s tendency around the type of programme outlined above, and propaganda for a mass working women’s movement. The former must aim, via polemic and debate, to rally the best elements of the present women’s movement to its ranks. The latter task means close involvement in the day to day struggles of working women, focussing centrally in the trade unions.
At the centre of this dual perspective today lie the extremely limited forces of the Working Women’s Charter Campaign.
The Working Women’s Charter
The strategy of the Labour government to solve British capitalism’s crisis at the expense of the working class means a violent attack on all the gains working class women have made since the war. This can be seen dramatically in both the fields of social services and of employment.
Cuts in social expenditure are hitting women hard. Women form the majority of the workforce in the public sector services. Seventy six percent of NHS employees and 67% of education workers are women. Cuts in these sectors will mean high unemployment amongst women and throw the burden of caring for the sick, the elderly and the young squarely on to their shoulders. Family Planning Clinics are being reduced and the new bill to restrict women’s right to abortion is being raised in parliament. In Buckinghamshire the Tory council intends to close all five existing nursery schools. The occupation of the EGA hospital has highlighted the enormous number of hospitals threatened with closure throughout the country. While in Stockport teachers are operating a no-cover policy because their classes are too large, students teachers occupied their colleges last year in protest at the lack of jobs.
During periods of boom the state may increase nursery facilities to enable women to work. This soon changes during a recession. There are less nursery places now than there were in 1900! In times of crisis women can be dropped from the labour force by cutting nursery places.
Unemployment too takes its toll of women. Women find it hard to organise with trade unions because of their family commitments and often through lack of permanent employment. Male trade unionists are often antagonistic to women workers, reluctant to take account of their special needs by providing crèche facilities during union meetings or to locate them on union committees. Women have remained to a large extent unorganised and exploited by employers.
Women workers are concentrated in unskilled jobs, in schools, hospitals, nurseries or in part-time jobs. Cuts in social expenditure, lack of union organisation, serve to make women particularly vulnerable to redundancy and women are becoming unemployed twice as fast as men.
The government has attempted to defuse the militancy of women against these attacks through myths such as ‘a woman’s place is in the home’, looking after your neighbours, community spirit and the like and also through the introduction of the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act. The effect of the legislation has been to highlight the inequality of women and to increase their expectancy. The acts themselves have been shown to be inadequate even in terms of reformist legislation and have in fact heightened the militancy of women.
The Trico equal pay strike was undoubtedly the most important strike last year and proved that the only way to achieve equal pay is through militant action for most working class women. The EPA and SDA were not designed for working class women and this became apparent when most cases taken to tribunals by working class women were lost. There will be moves made to tighten up the more obvious loopholes in the act and although this should be supported we must also recognise the inability of the acts to bring equal pay or equality for women.
Women have shown their increasing determination to fight back against cuts and unemployment and have not been fooled into believing that the EPA or the SDA will bring equality or even equal pay. The victory of the women workers at Trico after 21 weeks of struggle, the victory of the bingo hall workers in Coventry, the occupation of the EGA have shown that during a time when the working class as a whole has shown a reluctance to engage in struggle, women have a heightened expectancy and will to fight.
If the WWCC is to make a serious contribution to the two linked tasks outlined above, and prove itself equal to the period of struggle facing working women, it must overcome a number of serious weaknesses, weaknesses which threaten its very existence. These can be summed up under the headings: programme; tactics; and organisation.
In each of these areas we believe the dominant tendency in the charter — the IMG — has a chronically wrong perspective. We shall, therefore, concentrate, in assessing the charter’s weaknesses on the IMG’s wrong solutions and the positions argued for by Workers Power.
In order to build the foundations of a working women’s movement the spontaneous struggles of working class women must be taken up by an action programme of linked demands to address their immediate needs around certain key issues and at the same time show the necessity for uniting the working class in order to overthrow capitalism.
The programme we raise for women during the present crisis must contain within it opposition to cuts, unemployment, the cuts in real wages caused by incomes policy and inflation, and fight for crucial demands such as a woman’s right to work, sliding scale of wages and hours and equal pay.
The WWCC should be able to take up the spontaneous struggles and convince working class women and their organisations of the need to organise around a series of inter-linked demands which will address their immediate needs and, at the same time show that, in order to secure real equality, a united working class struggle for the overthrow of capitalism is essential.
The existing charter is totally inadequate to these needs. It limits itself almost exclusively to equal rights (pay, entry to jobs) and to a series of weak demands for reform. Such demands as ‘free abortion to be readily available’ rather than ‘free abortion on demand’ and for ‘improved provision’ of nurseries deliberately hold back from what can be ‘reasonably expected’ from capitalism. Demands ought to fearlessly express what women need now, expressing as this does the bankruptcy of capitalism, its reformist defenders and the need to overthrow them and it.
It should hardly surprise us that the original charter is a very limited reformist document — coming as it does from the London Trades Council under Communist Party inspiration. But revolutionaries should not simply throw up their hands in sectarian horror and put as much distance between it and themselves as possible. The document, with all its weaknesses, attracted around it certain working class forces. Its adoption by various unions, branches, trades councils etc. indicated a definite rousing of activity in the unions following the struggles of the early seventies. Revolutionaries should relate to this current. This means, however, the attempt to win working women to correct (i.e. successful) tactics in struggle and to a programme for the working class-led struggle for women’s liberation. It does not mean adapting or limiting ourselves to the horizons of already existing (reformist or Stalinist) leaders of the working class. This issue lies at the heart of the differences Workers Power has with the IMG’s approach to the charter campaign.
The IMG refer to the existing charter as ‘the property of the Labour movement’ and have now decided to oppose its amendment. (Actually, if it belongs to anyone it belongs to the bureaucrats!) The IMG have never understood the role of the trade union and Labour bureaucracy, either in their ultra-left or their present ‘rightist’ periods. Though the bureaucrats have shown scant interest in their property doubtless they could defend it themselves, without the IMG acting as securicor for them. The IMG know quite well that the charter is inadequate, they agreed to the amendments at last year’s conference, then fought against their adoption: ‘the Labour movement had been won to them’. Not only that, they also know that by and large only the revolutionary groups and their sympathisers have fought for its adoption or organised any ongoing campaign around it. Yet they wish to keep it intact, as a sort of talisman, to lure back the CP and the trade union bureaucrats and, through them, the masses.
What is involved here is a mixture of muddle-headedness, realpolitik and cynicism. The IMG know that, initially, it is largely the revolutionary groups and their sympathisers who will organise grass roots campaign work. Therefore, there has to be an ‘adequate’ policy for them. But the masses can only be reached (so the IMG believe) via the existing official leaders who won’t swallow the amended charter, instead they are offered a ‘left’ reformist one — to coax them into becoming the Women’s Section of the Class Struggle Tendency. This strategy rules out entirely the clear, unambiguous presentation of a revolutionary programme standing foursquare with working women in struggle against these bureaucrats who are their most dangerous ‘friends’. In essence the IMG’s strategy is like that of the Comintern in 1925-6.
The existing amendments, passed at last year’s conference, still leave the charter far from perfect. Workers Power will propose further amendments. But we believe that to fail to amend the charter this year will demoralise and disorient the campaign still further — running the risk of destroying it altogether.
The future of the charter
The charter’s weaknesses in the field of tactics and organisation flow from its lack of direction in the political field (the absence of programme and perspectives). The IMG are completely incapable of providing these. Their reliance on a ‘broad Labour movement’ / Women’s Movement rally — their eagerness to give the charter campaign a low profile in this — is of a piece with their opposition to definitively amending the charter itself. Whilst chasing the will of the wisp of the women’s class struggle tendency, they are prepared to see the campaign and the small forces it has rallied frittered away.
What does the charter campaign need to become? This question must be asked and squarely faced at the conference on 22nd May if the campaign is to survive, let alone go forward.
Firstly the charter campaign needs a set of fighting perspectives and a leadership pledged to carry them out. In outline we believe these should include: a reorganised and more regular paper which includes, centrally, articles of political analysis as well as reportage — a newspaper that can act as the scaffolding linking local charter groups and caucuses in the unions together so that they can build according to a common plan. The paper should organise and educate. It does neither effectively at the moment. The paper should explain in depth the key demands of the charter.
The local charter groups need to be won to a united national perspective, a real will and determination to reach out to working class women in struggle, centrally in the unions and factories but also, importantly, in the nursery campaigns, the general campaigns around the cuts or on specific issues like the closure of the Elizabeth Garret Anderson Hospital. The orientation of the campaign should move away from the emphasis on affiliations and adoptions. These are important in gaining support among the rank and file and must be fought for, but they should flow from the continual agitational/propaganda work being done at the base.
Using key demands in the charter to campaign around in the workplace it will be possible to build women’s caucuses in the unions. The emphasis should shift away from geographically based charter groups towards caucuses in the unions. The geographically based groups should provide the links between the workplaces, the localities and the national structure of the campaign. The national campaign should raise issues crucial to particular unions and industries. For example, in NUPE and COHSE, heavily affected by the cuts, it will be important to take up and campaign against the cuts. As the demonstration on November 17th showed, the public sector unions are becoming increasingly militant. NALGO, SCS and CPSA will also be feeling the effects of the cuts and the campaign can make gains amongst the rank and file of the unions. Positive discrimination on trade union committees, women’s special needs in attending meetings etc., should be raised in national unions as well as the localities.
In making this orientation we have to make doubly sure that we do not develop the chronic trade union cretinism of the SWP (IS) in Women’s Voice. It is a great mistake to believe that only ‘economic’ demands, equal pay etc., are relevant to women at work. Indeed unless we take up family-related issues — abortion and contraception, nursery facilities i.e. the oppression of women — then we will not win a working class women militants to the charter campaign and will not hold any that are attracted to it.
Nor can the charter ignore the central political issues facing the class as a whole. In most places women feel the effects of class policies more sharply than men whilst being, because of relative isolation in the home and lack of militant trade union organisation, more open to ruling class propaganda.
The years of crisis and stagnation that face British and international capitalism face the working class as a whole with the choice of fighting back or losing piecemeal the gains made over twenty five years of struggle. Likewise it faces women — from the ‘middle class’ as well as working class — with the loss of the ‘social reforms’ that women never had, or hoped to gain. Women are a potentially greater organised force today than at any previous time in history. In all previous revolutionary periods women have played a key role. They must do so again.
Excerpt:
From the Marxist analysis of the family to the strategic failures of the IMG’s approach to the Working Women’s Charter Campaign, this 1977 Workers Power article by Stuart King sets out both the theoretical foundations and the practical demands of a communist women’s movement — and argues that only a working class-led, politically independent movement can deliver women’s liberation.
