File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9708, message 73


Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 19:27:00 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Socialist Shelters? (was Queer Kids....)


Carrol wrote:
>	Notice that we have "Marxists" in the United States, and
>"Socialists," but we do not have a *socialist movement* at this
>time, and it is a movement, not individuals or even collections of
>individuals who build *institutions* of any kind, including homes
>for homeless kids. And if fact, under the conditions of the last
>30 years or so, those individual activists who have tried to
>build one or another kind of "service" institution have usually
>used that activity as a road away from politics, not as an
>embodiment of their politics.
>
>	So in addition to saying that there are no "socialist
>shelters" now in the U.S., I would go further and say there
>ought not to be under present conditions.

I agree that without a movement, individuals who aim to serve a given need
by building an institution are likely to become simple service providers
and to become depoliticized. But this still leaves questions of *how to
build (or rebuild) a socialist movement* and of what is the relationship
between *movement-building* and workers' mutual aid activities (among which
we may count a shelter for homeless kids).

I am finally reading Mark Naison's _Communists in Harlem during the
Depression_, and the book contains passages that relate to what we are
discussing here. (BTW, I highly recommend the book to those who haven't
read it yet.) I would like to quote one of them from the chapter entitled
"They Shall Not Die: The Impact of the Scottsboro Case on the Harlem Party":

"With Scottsboro setting the tone, other aspects of Party organizing in
Harlem, most notably its work among the unemployed, displayed greater
dynamism and flexibility. During the summer and fall of 1931, the Harlem
Unemployment Council began to develop new strategies which tried to
incorporate the cooperative traditions of Harlem's population into its
program of militant protest. This represented a substantial change for the
Harlem Council. During the first year of its existence, Harlem Council
leaders, in an effort to distinguish their organization from Harlem's soup
kitchens and private charities, had bluntly told the unemployed that the
council could not take responsibility for providing them with meals. When
rank-and-file council members had tried to collect food, money, or clothing
for starving neighbors, or cook communal meals for the unemployed, council
leaders had criticized them for 'avoiding militant struggle' and failing to
shift the responsibility for care of the unemployed to the government. But
by the summer of 1931, Harlem Party organizers had come to recognize that
such doctrinaire opposition to self-help measures had limited their
movement's appearl. 'Fear of the self-activity of the masses,' they
concluded, had isolated the Harlem Council from many 'sincere workers' who
saw no contradiction between taking a collection for their neighbors and
resisting an eviction or marching to City Hall.

	The council's new strategy involved three major components: taking
up collections on particular blocks to help families who were close to
starvation, taking delegation of unemployed people to charitable agencies
and sitting in until they received relief, and participating in protest
actions at City Hall and the state legislature to demand cash relief for
the jobless. The Party's call for a National Hunger March to Washington in
December, 1931, gave added focus to these activities. Organizing for the
march took the form of public hearings on conditions in Harlem and marches
on public and private relief agencies. In several of these actions, the
Harlem Council succeeded in getting immediate cash relief for unemployed
individuals." (66-67)

The above passage from _Communists in Harlem..._ says, to me, the following:

1) Workers' mutual aid activities can be used for a movement-building
purpose, when they are organically linked to other class-based direct
actions, class-consciousness-raising, and so on.

2) Related to (1), workers' mutual aid activities shouldn't be made a
substitute for class-based organizing for reforms and social revolution.

3) The people that marxists would like to appeal to and recluit to the
socialist movement are likely to have their own cooperative traditions and
institutions. Ignoring them totally would be a poor idea.

Since this is a marxist-feminist list, I think that (3) should be
especially of concern to us. Feminists (and even non-feminist women) have
placed much emphasis on mutual-aid activities. Creating and sustaining
women's health clinics, providing underground abortion-provider networks
when abortion was still illegal, establishing women's presses and
bookstores when books by, for, and about women were scarce, setting up
rape-crisis hotlines and counceling services, organizing self-defense
classes, taking care of one another's children (formally or informally),
and other activities have been the means that not only allowed women to
work to meet other's women's urgent and immediate needs; They can be also
the media through which women learn organizing skills and gain the ability
to exercize leadership and initiative. I think marxists should think about
ways to relate to these women's self-activities, in order to build a
socialist movement.

Yoshie

   

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