Emancipation & Liberation

As we celebrate 98 years of International Women’s Day, Catriona Grant, the SSP Women and Equality Policy Coordinator, explains what feminism is and how it fits into socialist practice and ideology

The suffragette movement was a bourgeois movement

I’m a Marxist not a feminist, I stand for the liberation of all workers

The socialist movement played no significant role in the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s, which proves the Marxists really do not care about women

Historically, Marxism hasn’t recognised the oppression of women as a sex. It is only concerned with the oppression of women as workers.

I’m a socialist, I believe in equality for all workers. Positive discrimination is just discrimination against men

What is feminism?

Many of the above statements have been made in discussions and debates around socialism, feminism and Marxism. The SSP has been a microcosm of many of these discussions since its conception. There has been a battle regarding ideology around feminism, women’s liberation and oppression but at times the debate appears to lack praxis, the praxis of theory into practice.

No doubt women are changing. We need an appropriate word which will register this fact. The term feminism has been foisted upon us. It will do as well as any other word….It mean’s women’s struggle for freedom.

(New Review, 1914, paper of American Socialist Party)

What do we mean when we call someone a feminist or refer to feminism? Why does it have so many different meanings? And why can it be seen as a positive expression of liberation politics or a term of abuse? And more importantly what is socialism’s relationship to feminism?

Feminism, means many things to many people but perhaps the best way to explain feminism is to see it not as a theory, a practice or ideology but almost as part of anthropology regarding women’s position in society. Feminism is the naming of women’s oppression, women’s rights, the women’s question etc. This was first posed by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1790 in her book The Vindication On the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft named the problem, she described women’s relationship to men and to society as oppression, that women are infantilised, sexualised and ignored, they are denied their full human potential by lack of economic power, the vote or say in their own or anyone’s else’s lives. Many of Wollstonecraft’s ideas and questions were taken up and raised in the French Revolution and many women and men discussed her ideas. Indeed Wollstonecraft moved to Paris during the revolution.She was hailed by many liberals and revolutionaries as a true visionary.

Wollstonecraft brought the vindication of women’s rights into the liberal and utopian socialist movement and since then women’s rights have been discussed and debated as a moral, political, ideological, scientific and social problem.

Feminism is best explained (crudely) as a spectrum between radical and reformist. Feminists of all kinds oscillate on the spectrum between radical and reformist.

Feminists who describe themselves as radical feminists are the feminists who wish to change the system, have a radical approach to the world. However radical feminists rarely agree with one another. They are often diametrically opposed to one another. The two main spectrums are materialist feminists (usually Marxist but may be anarchistic) and the political feminists, who see patriarchy (men) as the problem.

Radical feminists share an understanding that society and even the class system need to be overthrown, however they may differ (greatly) on how to solve the problem. Political feminists are often wrongly described as bourgeois feminists (e.g. Andrea Dworkin etc). Materialist feminists want to defeat the class system with the working class; political feminists want to defeat the domination of men or the patriarchy by feminist action and may see little role for men.

Reformist feminists want to reform society to make it better for women, They can be liberal feminist (sometimes known as bourgeois feminists) who want to compete with men and have what men have within class society. On the other side, are economist feminists (socialist feminists fit into this categorically when calling for reforms), who want economic and legislative reforms to address women’s oppression.

The problem is that rarely does any feminist fit into any one category all of the time but the key issue is how we are influenced by the ideas and solutions in addressing women’s oppression.

A materialist feminist may be involved in an economistic demand for equal pay or a woman managing director (liberal feminist) in supporting a campaign against men’s violence against women (political feminism).

Many comrades dismiss feminism on the basis of coming across feminist ideas and/or practice they disagree with. Instead, the methodology should be – if you have identified that women are oppressed and something has to change that is identifying with feminism. The real dilemma is how do we address this oppression and bring about women’s liberation? Some people, usually men feel more comfortable describing themselves as pro-feminist.

Marxism & Feminism

However to understand politically the ideas of feminism i.e. the acknowledgement of women’s oppression and the need for women’s liberation, we must first understand it historically and materially. Revolutionary Marxists in the past (though not always consistently) have waged an unremitting struggle within the broad working-class movement in order to struggle for women’s liberation. Marxists were not only involved in raising the consciousness of women to recognise their oppression and to demand their liberation but to educate the advanced working class to an understanding of the significance of the struggles by women for full equality, emancipation and for the liberation from the centuries-old degradation of domestic slavery. Throughout the past 160 years the struggle has been more intense than at other times.

At the time of Marx, debates were held about women’s liberation and oppression. In Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848 he stated:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family based? On capital, on private gain……The bourgeois sees in his wife, a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

Marx identified that women’s oppression was based on her relationship to production but also her relationship to men and to the family. There were many debates with the utopian socialists about this subject before the Communist Manifesto. Fourier and Owen were fervent champions of the emancipation of women but they saw it as a moral question rather than a materialist question. Marx explained that the oppression of women lay in its relationship to their role in the family and the system of production, based on private property and a society divided between a class that owned the wealth and a class that produced it. Marx (and Engels later in The Family, Private Property and the State) identified the role of the family in perpetuating the oppression of women.

Marx and Engels explained how the abolition of private property would provide a material basis from transferring to society, as a whole, all those social responsibilities borne by the individual family – the care of the old and sick, feeding, clothing and educating the young. Relieved of these burdens, Marx pointed out, the masses of women would be able to break the bonds of domestic servitude, and they would exercise their full human potential as creative and productive – not just reproductive – members of society.

Marx gave a solution. Just like Dorothy’s red shoes, the solution was there all the time, the solution being the working class, created by the capitalist system, which could become the force to overcome class society. However the wish wasn’t just for a better society but to begin to organise how to bring it about. In bringing about a communist transformation of society, women would be liberated. However women would only be liberated if they were organised and involved in their own liberation, as part of the liberation of the class.

In the First International there was a debate whether women should be allowed to join. Marx himself presented a motion in 1864 to the General Council that special women’s branches be organised in factories, industries and cities where there were a large concentration of women workers. He made it clear that this should not cut across building mixed branches as well.

However the next year a massive row broke out in the German section of the First International between the Marxists and the non-Marxists. In 1865, and for twenty years following, the German SDP was divided between the followers of Lassalle (the reformists) on one side and the Marxists under Bebel and Liebknecht on the other. There were sharp differences on organisation and ideology but one of the major debates was on women. The Lassalleans were opposed to demanding equal rights for women. Their demand was women should not be forced to work for a wage, that their rightful role was in the home with the family and that a man should have a family wage to support his wife and children. Liebknecht and Bebel argued ferociously that women had the right to be economically independent from men and to be liberated from the family. The SDP’s original demand was for full political rights for adults which left the demand open as to whether women were indeed considered adults or not.

The decisive arguments that won the victory for the demands were published in 1883 in Bebel’s Woman and Socialism and Engels’ The Family, Private Property and State published 1884. In 1891 the SDP demanded political rights for all, regardless of sex, and the abolition of every law which discriminates against women in any way.

The SDP in 1896 organised women into autonomous groups in order women could be educated and organised to concentrate on specific campaigns particularly political equality, insurance for childbirth, protective legislation for women workers, education and security for children. Until 1908 women were banned from joining political organisations in Germany but women could join societies. Women within the SDP had proportional representation from their societies and committees to the National Committee of the SDP.

Whilst the German SDP were debating whether women were adults or not or had the right to be independent both economically and sexually – the debate echoed around the world, particularly in the demand for the vote, the right for women’s franchise. (This article cannot properly address the suffragette movement)

The year before women won the vote (well those with property and over 30) in Britain in 1918, women in Russia went on strike under the demands of Bread for our children, bring home our husbands and sons from the trenches. Indeed it was International Women’s Day of 1917 that was the first day of the Russian Revolution. Women had organised themselves as women, despite being workers and Bolsheviks. Before the revolution, demands such as contraception, the right to abortion and to divorce were not common demands, however by 1918 they had become part of Soviet legislation.

Alexandra Kollontai, the only women on the Bolshevik Central Committee toured throughout the Soviet Union with her comrades Inessa Armand, Emma Goldman, Clara Zetkin and many others, in arguing women were central to the revolution and their own emancipation. Previously in 1913, Kollontai had organised a day long lecture in St Petersburg on the Women’s Question and all the organisers and speakers were arrested for immorality. In Britain, the British Communist Party organised a Kollontai lecture where working class women queued up in their hundreds to hear of the reforms of the Russian Revolution, though many believed they would be told how to practice birth control and be given Russian contraceptives.

In 1921 the Communist International made it obligatory for membership, that communist parties throughout the world had set up women’s bureaus and there had to be at least one full time member of staff to co-ordinate the work. There was an International Women’s Secretariat to oversee the work with six monthly conferences with representation from all sections to discuss the work with women and demands to put forward to support women’s liberation. Unfortunately the rise of Stalinism put an end to the progressive nature of this communist tradition and women were not to organise themselves so radically for another 50 years.

Conclusion

This article is in response to the confusion of whether, as socialists or Marxists, we can identify with feminism. To suggest that we do not is ahistorical. It does not fit the praxis of our theories about class society and human liberation.

Surely it cannot be argued that women, currently, are fully equal to men and even if they were, are they so liberated they can reach their full human potential? No sane socialist or Marxist would suggest such a thing. The debate to reject feminism in the socialist and Marxist movement is a false one, denying uncomfortable truths and realities. Many male socialists do not enjoy the accusation that they may wittingly or unwittingly benefit from women’s oppression and many female socialists do not want special treatment or to be victimised because of their gender, all of which can be addressed in a vibrant socialist organisation with debate, discussion and trying very hard to solve problems when they arise. The debate now needs to be about how do we address the specific issues of women’s oppression and exploitation and more importantly how does a party like the Scottish Socialist Party deal with feminist action and identification as part of the working class movement to change the world.

Column written by Mumia Abu-Jamal

The images of voracious famine leaking out of the steamy deserts of the Northwest African nation of Niger, cuts to the soul’s quick.

Babies barely able to grasp a breath.

Mothers with breasts as flat, and milkless as boys.

Men and women, dizzy with hunger, laid low in the barren dust, awaiting whatever release that either death or food may bring.

Fathers weeping because there is a relentless drought, and there is nothing — nothing — to feed one’s wife, one’s children, one’s aged mother.

This is Niger, 2005, and according to broadcast reports, it will take about 4 weeks, or perhaps more, for any food relief to reach the nation.

It is a telling reflection of the lives we live that here, in the heart of the Empire, there are millions of people who have so much to eat, that the fastest growing health threat is morbid obesity, and it’s equally serious cousin, diabetes. Billions of dollars are spent annually on the latest fad diet, carbo diets, Atkins diets, grapefruit diets, and, if I’m not mistaken, a donut diet (OK — I’m joking about the last one).

But just barely.

What’s wrong with this picture?

How the world is organized, and how the world’s economic business is done, is what’s wrong.

Clearly, some people have too much; others have nothing.

One also couldn’t look face-on at these pictures, without thinking, almost immediately, of the recent worldwide music concerts which were designed to raise consciousness — not money! — about the starving millions in Africa.

As I looked at these famished people, babies so weak and drawn by hunger that they could no longer eat, as one girl’s tender mouth was a nest of parasites eating her tiny body alive, and wondered about the concerts that were designed to raise consciousness about the plight of the starving.

It reminded me that we live in an age when TV becomes, not merely an image, but a fact.

Millionaire musicians stage concerts around the globe, pulling in billions to the international media conglomerates, showing how nice and progressive and caring these stations are, while perhaps 600,000 people, in one country, will starve to death by week’s end.

Madness. Media madness. Corporate madness. Capitalist madness.

With perhaps one-hundredth of one percent of the monies used to stage the broadcast blockbuster event, virtually all of these people could’ve been fed, and saved, to live, at least through the rainy season. No doubt, those heart-rending pictures of human suffering will yet raise billions for organizations, NGOs, and charity agencies, and will continue to do so, long after these specific men, women and children, will have ceased living on this earth. Briefly consider the state of the world’s wealth and poverty:

• 1. 1.3 billion people lack access to clean water; 1.2 billion live on less than a dollar a day; 840 million are malnourished.
• 2. More than 20,000 people die each day from hunger-related diseases.
• 3. The richest three people in the world have assets greater than the combined output of the 48 poorest countries.

[Excerpts from: Seabrook, Jeremy, The No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste, & Hierarchies (Oxford/London: New Internationalist/Verso, 2002), p. 11.]

We live in a world where madness passes for normalcy, where the raging logic of the marketplace leaves tens, and hundreds of millions of people, in dire peril.

And the gap between the rich and poor grows exponentially, daily.

Yet, like little Neros, we play musical accompaniments to massacres of hunger, which can be prevented with virtual ease.

But, this is Africa; Niger, poor people, agricultural people. These are expendable people. These are but flickering images on a screen.

Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mary Ward reviews Women’s Liberation and Socialism by Gill Hubbard and Angela McCormick published by the Socialist Workers’ Platform, part of the Scottish Socialist Party. £1.50

I started reading the above pamphlet with some trepidation. It was produced in the midst of a heated, divisive and misleading debate on whether or not to adopt a mechanism for the party list section of the Scottish parliament elections, which would ensure that women and men were equally represented on the lists. It was therefore, I suppose, inevitable, that a pamphlet written at this time by two women in favour of the proposal should seek to find theoretical, historical and Marxist backing for their position. My concern was that in order to substantiate their position, these comrades would set out to bend the stick. Unfortunately, this pamphlet lived up to my fears.

It starts out with a dishonest description of the nature of the debate itself:

Debate is taking place within the Scottish Socialist Party about whether to have equal numbers of men and women on parliamentary candidate lists

This was not the debate. The SSP has always supported the position of complete gender equality. How this is achieved was the issue. The disagreement was over whether or not the SSP puts in place a mechanism, which determines the gender of the comrade most likely to be elected to the Scottish parliament, at the top of the list in each region.

(The RCN opposed the tokenistic proposal for a mechanism and fully backed the amendment from Dundee West and Kilmarnock branches that looked at ways of involving women in all levels of party work. The amendment rooted the cause of women’s double oppression under capitalism and sought to change the male dominance of the
SSP.)

The pamphlet goes on to claim that it, seeks to address these arguments, and explain why fighting sexism and ending women’s oppression are central to the struggle for socialism. It succeeds in achieving none of these aims.

As an opponent of the proposed change, I did expect the pamphlet to deal with the main arguments being aired up and down the country over the question of how gender equality can be achieved under capitalism. I had the right to expect that the many genuine questions raised by comrades in opposition would be answered: How do we attract more women to the ideas of socialism? How do we bring them into the structures of the SSP? How do we change the SSP to allow this to happen? How do we relieve women of their double oppression so they can fully participate? Does such a mechanism leave democracy in tatters? Does it not simply benefit a few ambitious women while doing nothing to change women’s position in society? And how will this mechanism help in fighting sexism, and ending women’s oppression?

Gesture politics

Instead of serious polemic, these questions are swept aside in the best tradition of gesture politics,

But these arguments do not take into consideration the long standing oppression of women which means that many women do not always put themselves forward to play a leading role. Many working class women lack confidence in their own abilities and don’t see themselves as political leaders in the workplace, community or within socialist organisations.

Tell us something we didn’t know like how this mechanism will change any of the above! Furthermore, reassure us that this imposed schema can be justified in terms of the questions posed by the opposition. There is little further direct reference to the debate but there is a strong suggestion that the proposal is the direct political manifestation of Marxism as applied by every great thinker of our Marxist tradition. Sylvia Pankhurst, Rosa Luxemberg and John MacLean are used in manner that suggests they would have had no possible quibble with this proposal!

As a history of the struggle for women’s liberation, it is a complete mish mash. It fails to develop any particular strand of the struggle to any depth nor does it make the reader feel identification with the women cited. It falls into the traditionally male trap of presenting political argument devoid of emotion. Consequently, the struggles of the suffragettes and the fight for legal safe abortions are depicted in a clinical matter of fact way that fails to move or inspire. And for any women who live outwith Glasgow, their struggles are completely invisible. Glasgow-centric-ism (I know that is not the right word but you know what I mean) debilitates the SSP in many spheres of its work but you always hope that new writers would recognise and try to deal with it. A mention of the women who have fought and sacrificed in factories, mills, fishing villages and on the land all throughout Scotland would at least have acknowledged that heroic battles have taken place outside the auspices of the Red Clydeside.

More than just a mechanism

No socialist could fail to agree with the main premise of each chapter:

• Fighting sexism and women’s oppression is central to the struggle for socialism
• Women are doubly oppressed under capitalism
• Women have led tremendous struggles for the liberation of themselves and others
• The Women’s Liberation Movement failed because of a lack of class politics
• Capitalism is the enemy not men
• Marxists fight for the liberation of all of humanity
• The struggle for women’s liberation goes on today

But we need more than such bald statements in order to take us forward. We need the combination of Marxist theory and practice. We need to develop fresh ways of thinking and acting towards each other. All of this means more than just passing a motion to put in place a mechanism.

The proposal for 50-50, had the backing of the SSP executive, SSP Women’s Nework and the Socialist Worker Platform. Given such prestigious backing, winning this mechanism should have been a walkover for the party leadership. Instead, it resulted in a massive split within the party, a split within the leadership ISM platform and a group of comrades walking out of the conference when their amendments were not voted on. The Executive/Women’s Network won, but the victory was pyrrhic. The conference debate was marred by the destructive nature of the arguments used by the movers. Telling comrades they should find another party if they disagreed with the motion, that their arguments were cretinous, and the attempts to bully a woman into not speaking against the motion left a very nasty taste in the mouth, and swayed votes, not to the proposers but, against them.

A couple of weeks after the conference I walked up to join my comrades setting up a Saturday stall, the only woman amongst a fairly macho looking bunch. I could not help wondering when the 50-50 proposal would make a difference to me as a woman in the SSP, or to the hundreds of working class women walking past us.

This pamphlet was, I think, quite a brave attempt to add some theory into a debate, which at times verged on the farcical. Sadly, the haste with which it was produced, and its failure to address the central elements of the argument mean that it reflects the state of gender politics in the SSP. Like the conference resolution itself, this pamphlet lacks the vision to provide real solutions.

As communists and progressives around the world celebrate International Working Women’s Day, Linda Gibson argues that, under capitalism, gender roles lead to an artificial division in emotional development.

As International Women’s Day comes around articles will again be written about how women are still not achieving parity with men. And of course that’s true but I want to look at things from a slightly different angle. I don’t want to be equal with men if that means having the right [and being expected] to work full time; if that means developing a male emotional psyche – or even if it means fighting to have a female emotional psyche validated in the workplace. The fight to be equally exploited and dehumanised by the needs of modern capitalist society is the wrong fight. [And, increasingly, we are facing a capitalism that has to squeeze more and more out of us to maintain itself.] Of course we, as communists, should be fighting to abolish all wage slavery; but even within the present system we can and should challenge the notion that what women need is to be equal with men, as men currently are. Because men aren’t brought up to be fully human – neither are women. We are socialised into our respective gender roles, each of which prepares us to operate in our given sphere. Of course this is a massive simplification and generalisation; people are much more complex than that. I also acknowledge the complications and contradictions of the class versus gender debate. However there is still enough of a socialised and internalised division between men and women to be able to use that as a starting point to look at what kind of change we really want to fight for.

Emotional development reflects the needs of capitalism

It might be argued that throughout time men and women have always been allocated different tasks and roles and have had different and differing status based on this. [For example, I quite liked the notion that in the beginning women were revered as goddesses and worshipped because they produced live mini-humans! Then men figured out that they had something to do with it and things haven’t been the same since!!] However, in the last couple of hundred years task or work related divisions have been intricately linked to the emotional. The emotional development of men and of women was to reflect the needs of capitalism. Women were to be at home with the children, being caring and nurturing and men were to be out in the world of work, being strong and rational. Even when contradictions became obvious, such as the need for working class women to ‘work’so that middle class women could be leisured, the middle class bourgeois ideal was upheld as something to aspire to.

Man for the field and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head and woman with the heart; Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion.

Extract from The Princess by Alfred Lord Tennyson [1847] and 100 years later:

There is no doubt in the minds of the General Council that home is one of the most important spheres for a woman worker and it would be doing a grave injury to the life of the nation if women were persuaded or forced to neglect their domestic duties in order to enter industry, particularly where there are young children to cater for.

Trades Union Council [1947] These two extracts highlight the conditioning of women into separate spheres, even in the working class movement.

More recently bourgeois liberals have been challenging some of these divisions. We’ve seen the rise of the new man more in touch with his emotions and more involved in bringing up his children. Women have the right to a full-time job or career. However, for most women in this position the result has been even more exploitation in the form of double-work. This means being home maker as well as career woman, struggling with the guilt of neglecting their nurturing responsibilities at home and of allowing home life to intrude upon the world of work. Of course a lot of these bourgeois developments don’t touch our class. Many working class women have been doubleworking all along, their income essential to the family’s survival. And millions of working class men have lived with long term unemployment and the devastating effects that has had on a male psyche that has identity and purpose so tied up with work, job or career.

So men and women need to join together to fight for the right not to have to work full time and to fight for the right to develop and express the full range of our emotional being. Just as we work to challenge and change the relations of production, we must challenge the divisions and separations that stunt our emotional development. That isn’t to demand that men are more in touch with their feminine side – we must challenge the separation of certain emotions into masculine and feminine constructs. The left in particular needs to look at emotional development and how much that hinders our class. Of the many obstacles we need to overcome in order to overthrow capitalism the most unacknowledged are our psychological and emotional barriers. Our emotional development is where we internalise our own oppression and yet it’s accepted by many on the left that the emotional isn’t important – that it’s not real politics. For example for women to be real proper politicos they have to subsume the emotional to the rational and purely political [if there ever can be such a thing]. But this is to internalise middle class capitalistic values. For the rise of capitalism it became necessary to suppress and devalue the emotional. In order to exploit and compete in huge scale capitalism owners of production and wealth had to overcome and suppress their capacity to feel for others, to empathise. Hence the rise of the notion of the angel in the house, home as a haven from the harsh outside world of business, commerce and public office. The caring, nurturing, emotional side of humanity was deposited in women – men were to be the aggressive, competitive, unemotional ones. This was necessary for the maintenance and development of the mass exploitation of the working class [even paternalistic landowners were allowed to care about their workers and were seen to have obligations towards them].

Meaningful way of contributing to society’s needs

However, I’m also challenging the notion of what work is and why women are demanding the same as men in this sense – we should be arguing alongside men for a more meaningful way of contributing to what our community and society needs and wants. Even under the present system we can demand that parttime well-paid work becomes the norm for men and for women. This would allow for a more equitable distribution of the pleasures and responsibilities of life. Then the construction of genderroles with its artificial divisions in emotional development would become unnecessary. Men and women have an equal right to experience and express the full range of human emotions – and to express them openly.

Thus I would argue that to challenge capitalism, and within that to fight for gender equality, we need to look at our own emotional conditioning. The women’s movement talked of the personal being political, I’m arguing that the emotional is political, and that to challenge our internalised views of the importance of the emotional is a truly revolutionary thing to do. Emotionally, equality isn’t about men being seen to be crying on the football pitch, or about young women becoming laddettes. It’s about what’s usually dubbed the emotional being given equal consideration with the rational. We need both.