Emancipation & Liberation

Allegiance

In this year of Jubilee and celebration of monarchy, a lot will be said about allegiance – allegiance to Queen and country. It slips off the tongue quite readily but carries a heavy message. Allegiance is a powerful emotional attachment to a cause or person or place and experiencing and expressing this deeply felt emotional bond seems to be a very human need. It feels good at the level of the individual and even better when with others who share the same allegiance. For socialists and communists simply to mock and berate people for having those feelings is a misguided approach which alienates our own class from left politics. We need to have a more sophisticated approach based on an understanding and acknowledgement of human emotional development and needs. We need to start from where people are. This isn’t to advocate reformism or liberalism or to support nationalism. It’s to stand alongside folk, acknowledge the powerful feelings that they have and then debate with them as to how best to use this allegiance.

We’re up against state, corporate and right wing political machinery that does appeal to folk’s emotional make-up. They study and use the emotional and psychological against us: to ensure a steady supply of cannon-fodder for the armed forces; to persuade us to buy the latest whatever; to whip up support for the BNP. Our feelings are constantly subverted and manipulated by the elite and the powerful to meet their own ends, to maintain their own power. Thus, we on the left need to look at the emotional and our emotional development as a legitimate site of class struggle – without diluting our revolutionary socialist convictions. As socialists we need to highlight and to emphasise that capitalists take the emotional seriously. In fact it’s necessary for them to manipulate us emotionally so that we will accept our economic exploitation. Allegiance is a powerful emotional weapon that’s used against us. Within our class our aim as socialists is to bring about a realignment of that allegiance so that it becomes a positive force. We need to feel it and use it consciously for our own good, for our own class.

Linda Gibson

Midlothian

Liberate Humanity

I was very pleased to be able to obtain your latest publication at Word Power. However, I was surprised that you decided to change the title. Communism is the only system that can hope to liberate humanity and republics are a vital stage on the road to emancipation. I preferred the previous title.

I can sympathise with your attitude regarding past difficulties involving Stalin, Pol Pot etc, but I still consider it necessary to promote greater objectivity. It must be remembered that right opportunism, ultra-left utopianism and Trotskyist syndicalism could not have been established in the circumstances. This paved the way for the Stalin line, which dominated revolutionary ideology, even beyond Hungry ’56. International revolution failed all over Europe between 1918 – 1938 and no one could have foreseen a Maoist victory even as late as 1945!

Stalin’s state controlled apparatus, establishing as it did a party bureaucracy, was bound to succeed despite Trotsky’s correct view that it would inevitably become counter-revolutionary. As for Pol Pot, he cannot be understood without reference to the fascist puppet Lon Nol and the saturation bombing of the whole region.

I am also concerned to promote organically viable production, which sees an end to capitalist methods in farming and transport. If the car is to survive it must be collectivised after massive reduction. It must be a state controlled vehicle serving isolated workers, nurses, doctors, etc. It must never, ever again fall into private hands.

As regards, farming we have to save Polish (etc.) methods from annihilation by the EEC and learn how to farm organically all over again. We must develop holistic medicine to a level now seen in China as regards acupuncture and herbs. This will mean applying homoeopathy on a scale never seen before. Their patentised vaccines, minerals and plants can replace the toxic poisons pedalled for profit by capitalist controlled phoney science.

An Avid Reader

Edinburgh

Little Scotlanders?

Do I detect a Little Scotland trend in the Scottish Socialist Voice’s coverage? I submitted this short article on an important victory in the struggle against casualisation. It wasn’t printed. Although won in England, this victory is important for all UK workers, particularly in the building industry. More recently, despite the good coverage given to the Glasgow Housing Anti-Privatisation campaign, there was nothing about the campaign in Birmingham. Certainly the Glasgow vote against was very impressive considering the odds we were up against. However, the Birmingham tenants won! Surely our internationalism can extend to England, especially when we can take heart from their successes.

Allan Armstrong

Edinburgh

A Victory Against Casualisation

At a time when increasing numbers have been forced into temporary contract work over the last decade, it is a real boost to hear of a significant victory against casual labour. Even better this victory has been won in the building industry, which has long suffered under this iniquitous system. The construction employers’ neglect of pensions, sickness and holiday pay is more than matched by callous acceptance of the industrial slaughter on their unsafe sites. Between April 2000 and March 2001 alone there were 128 building worker deaths.

On January 15th, four carpenters from Northampton finally won holiday pay they were entitled to under the European Working Time Directive. They had fought for 22 months in the face of employer intimidation and the threat of the blacklist.

Byrnes Brothers, a shuttering contractor, went to great lengths to resist the men’s claims. Behind such small sub-contractors lie many large construction companies who resort to cowboy and also gangster operators, the better to avoid any real responsibility on the sites. Therefore it was not surprising that when Byrnes Brothers lost at the Industrial Tribunal last January, they should put in an appeal. They only backed down from this last September, but held up payment until further negotiations last week.

However, almost as many obstacles were put in place by the UCATT full time officials. They managed to whittle down the original 24 claimants to four. Significantly, these four Irish and Scottish carpenters were from the Northampton UCATT branch, where the rank and file Building Workers Group have been campaigning for years. The branch was not going to be fobbed off easily. The men also had the backing of the lay London and South Eastern Regional UCATT Council.

This is a significant victory. It means that European Employment Law is now enshrined in British law. Hundreds of thousands of self employed building workers are now legally entitled to holiday pay. However, this won’t be given automatically, but will have to be fought for. The key message of the victory already gained is for members not to depend on full-timer officials but rely on their own self organisation.

The way is now open for a campaign to end the massive casualisation in the building industry. The Building Worker Group also intend to move on to direct action to stop the killings on the sites.

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.