From: "Rebecca Peoples" <wellsfargo-AT-tinet.ie>
Subject: M-TH: Women
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 21:07:31 -0000


Hi folks,

Below is a doctored version of material from the Trotskyist Manifesto. I
have been studying the section dealing women. I found much of what is
contained in it useful. I would like you to offer your comments on it. In
that way I can perhaps develop my position on the woman question:

THE FIGHT AGAINST SOCIAL OPPRESSION

All exploited classes face oppression.  The systematic denial overall
political and economic equality and personal freedoms is both an expression
and a reinforcer of the exploitative relationship between the ruling class
and the direct producers. Systematic economic, social, legal and political
inequalities which specifically affect women, youth, different racial and
national groups, lesbians and gay men are the various different forms by
which class oppression takes place.
The working class is the only class with the decisive interest and capacity
to overthrow the system which maintains all forms of class oppression.
However, the existing workers' organisations fail to take up the real battle
against social oppression.  Indeed, it is frequently the case that the
reformist bureaucrats who dominate the labour movement actively encourage
attitudes of hostility to the needs and plight of specific sections of the
socially oppressed.  The socially oppressed are subject to sexism, racism
and heterosexuality in such a way as to block their fuller participation in
trade union and political life.  The task of the revolutionary vanguard lies
in combating these prejudices and putting the mass organisations of the
working class in the forefront of the struggle against oppression.
The socially oppressed themselves are not necessarily in the vanguard of
struggles simply as a result of being the most down-trodden sections of
society.  Capitalist exploitation and oppression produce not only
revolutionary fighters, but also backward and submissive layers.  Many may
embrace reactionary ideas or retreat into private life.  The most class
conscious elements of the oppressed will be in the vanguard of the struggle
for their own liberation.  This vanguard's participation within the overall
class struggle can ensure that their interests are actively taken up by the
wording class.
Special methods of agitation, propaganda and forms of work need to be used
to win the socially oppressed to the communist programme, and as a result
special forms of organisation may be necessary both to mobilise them to
fight their own oppression, and to enable them to enter the ranks of the
organised workers' movement on an equal basis with all other workers.
Within the working class movement revolutionaries must defend the right of
the oppressed to organise and caucus in order to press for their demands to
be taken up by the whole of the class.  In certain conditions, working class
movements of the oppressed have also proved necessary to achieve these
goals.  Such special methods and organisational forms have nothing in common
with separatism.  They are a means of facilitating revolutionary unity
inside the working class and ensuring that the workers' movement as a whole
champions the struggles of the oppressed.
In the first place the revolutionary party has a duty to ensure that in its
daily work and in its internal organisation it is responsive to the needs of
the socially oppressed.  Where mass revolutionary parties exist party
sections, or party-led movements can be formed.  These sections will
organise the oppressed for communist struggle as party members and take the
struggle against oppression into the heart of the workers' movement.
However, revolutionary communists are as yet a tiny minority inside the
workers' movement, so the building of mass sections of the party organised
to carry out special forms of work has to be approached by other forms of
the united front.  In many countries, the common experience of the oppressed
has led to the development of movements and campaigns amongst women,
lesbians and gays, youth and the racially oppressed.  The party cannot leave
the leadership of these movements to the petit bourgeois utopians, the
Social Democrats or the Stalinists.
We support the building of fighting united fronts against oppression, and
argue that we must struggle to base them on the proletariat utilising class
struggle methods.  In certain cases these united fronts may take the form of
fully fledged movements, with branches, congresses and executive committees.
But in each case the organisational form must be related to the concrete
circumstances.  The length of time that such organisation may be needed
depends upon the degree to which we are successful in winning the labour
movement as a whole to our programme.
We counterpose this tactic to all forms of autonomous or collaborationist
movements of the oppressed.  Where bourgeois forces arc involved in
movements of the oppressed the revolutionary vanguard seeks to break the
working class and other oppressed classes away from any alliance with them.
Indeed, by building proletarian movements of the oppressed and by fighting
relentlessly for communist leadership within them, we are combating the
tendencies to separatism and popular frontism that arise amongst the
oppressed.  Our aim is to build communist movements of the oppressed,
although not all participants in such movements will be members of, and
therefore under the discipline of, the revolutionary communist party.

The fight against discrimination
Other sections of society, who are not socially oppressed, face
discrirnination  under capitalism.  The elderly, the disabled and the sick,
who do not fulfil the requirements of capitalism for wage labour, arc
discarded and treated as a burden on society.  Important sections of the
poor arc stigmatised and criminalised for actions they take in order to
survive.  Others are defined as mentally ill and excluded from society.
Bourgeois society utilises the marginalisation of these groups in order to
impose its concepts of "normality" and its moral code upon the whole working
class and to pursue its strategy of divide and rule.
For instance the enforced isolation of the elderly makes them prey to
conservatism, the restrictions imposed on people with disabilities allow
them to be used as non-union cheap labour.  Revolutionaries must support the
struggles of the elderly, the sick and people with disabilities against the
discrimination they face.  This will facilitate their integration into the
working class and thereby strengthen the fight against the common enemy.
They should fight to ensure that the workers' movement allows the fullest
possible access for all members of the working class to its organisations,
meetings and social life.  The revolutionary party should ensure that it
sets an example to the rest of the workers' movement.
Revolutionaries seek to win the militant fighters from within the ranks of
those who suffer discrimination.  While supporting all struggles for reforms
and improvements under capitalism, communists explain that the profit motive
makes it impossible for capitalism to meet the needs of those it puts on the
scrap heap.  Furthermore, its rapacious nature creates sickness and
disability Only socialised and planned production can release the necessary
resources to fully integrate these groups into society and lay the basis for
liberation.


Women

The epoch of imperialism condemns millions of women all over the world to
suffer the misery of raising children and running homes in conditions of
enormous deprivation.  Oppressed women bear the full brunt of inadequate
housing, insufficient food and the struggle to stave of or cope with the
effects of disease.  Super-exploitation in the factory and on the capitalist
or small peasant farm are likewise the norm for the majority of women in the
world.
Women of all classes arc denied economic, social, legal and political
equality with men.  The universal nature of women's subordination makes it
appear as a natural result of their role in child-bearing.  But the
systematic social oppression of women only began with the birth of class
society and the creation of the patriarchal family as the basic unit within
which reproduction, child-care and day to day survival occur.  Throughout
the different forms of class society the particular features of women's
oppression have changed.  But they all contain at their kernel, privatised
domestic labour, a sphere of life which is the prime or exclusive
responsibility of women.
Capitalism has proved unable and unwilling to systematically socialise the
labour done in the home and thereby is incapable of ending the oppression of
women.  The provision of socialised laundries, child-care and canteens has
proved to be too much of a drain on surplus value for the bosses to provide
them, other than partially in the exceptional situation of war.
For non-working class women oppression takes on a very different form.  Even
amongst some ruling classes women are denied full rights over property and
inheritance and are kept as decorative assets and producers of heirs by
their husbands.  Their continued oppression, whilst a million miles away
from the drudgery and misery of the working women of the world, is also due
to their role in the family.  The production of heirs requires the strictest
adherence to monogamy by the wives.  However, ruling class women can offset
many of the worst aspects of their oppression through the employment of
working class women to perform their domestic labour and raise their
children.  Moreover they can be never be real allies of working class women
since their stake in bourgeois society means they are completely wedded to
the very society that is the material basis for womans oppression.
In the imperialist countries the numbers of women employed in wage labour
has massively increased since the Second World War.  In many countries the
majority of married women now have paid employment.  Whilst this development
has tendencies towards undermining the economic and social dependence of
women, the circumstances under which it has happened have proved a mixed
blessing for women.  Now most women have to combine their hours worked in
the factory or office with their hours of domestic labour in the home.
There has been little increase in the amount of household work done by men,
so women now have even longer hours to work to balance against the gain of
receiving a wage.  But since women still receive substantially lower wages
than men, their economic independence is largely fictional. Legal
restrictions reinforce continuing dependence of women on their husbands or
fathers in most imperialist countries.
In addition to its role in the reproduction of labour power, the family also
plays an important role in maintaining the social order of capitalist
society.  The family acts to reinforce the dominant ideas of the ruling
class, maintaining the respective roles of men, women and children,
inculcating obedience and servility.  Even when the nuclear family has
ceased to be the most numerically common form of the household, as is now
the case in many imperialist countries, the strength of it as the 'ideal" is
such that it continues to influence every aspect of womens' lives.  From the
type of education girls receive, through the jobs women do, to the
relationships they seek-all these are shaped by this bourgeois family
"norm".  This family is based on monogamy and heterosexuality, with intense
pressure being exerted upon women and girls to conform.  The roles of men
and women in the family restrict the development of both sexes, but have a
particularly repressive effect on women.
The present form of the family leads to a division within the working class
which is maintained by the ideology of sexism.  In the labour movement this
is not just a question of backward ideas about women's role.  It involves
condoning or participating in the exclusion of women from many unions, Such
sexism leads to a failure to fight for equal pay and refusal to support
women in struggle.  Whilst women's oppression is not caused by the attitudes
of male workers, their sexism continually reinforces it.  Often, through
domestic violence and abuse, this happens in the most brutal way.
Male workers do enjoy real material benefits as a result of the oppression
of women.  They have a higher status within the household and social life.
They secure better jobs and wages and have a lighter burden of domestic
chores.  These privileges help to reinforce sexist ideas and behaviour
within the working class.  However, working class men will receive far more
important gains from the final liberation of women the collective
responsibility for welfare, freedom in relationships, sexual liberation and
the economic gains of socialism.  All this means that viewed historically,
working class men do not benefit decisively from the oppression of women,
but are hindered in the realisation of their fundamental class interests.
It is the capitalist class, who benefit from the division created between
male and female workers.

The struggle against women's oppression in the semi-colonies
Proletarian women are, from earliest childhood, forced to work for pitiful
wages and, after the extremely long working day, have to do the housework or
take on extra work to ensure subsistence for the family.  Things are no
better for the women who often, on top of the housework, must also work the
land because their men have to work in the cities.  Poverty, miserable
working conditions and unemployment force many women into prostitution.
Although imperialism undermines the economic basis for traditional
patriarchal systems in these countries, nonetheless, old forms of womens
oppression, such as dowries, bride price, clitorodectomy and polygamy, are
retained.  Widow burning in India is a brutal example of this.  Among the
women in the semi-colonies illiteracy is even higher than among the men.
Despite medical advances the mass of women in the semi-colonies have no
control over their fertility and in Africa and Asia half a million babies
die at birth each year.  Only a very thin upper layer of society benefits
from the advantages that capitalism brings, for example, in education and
health services.
Under these conditions of oppression it is no wonder that thousands of women
have taken part in the anti-imperialist struggles in Vietnam, Nicaragua,
Palestine, the Philippines and paid a heavy price with their lives.  But
their interests have always been betrayed.  The petit bourgeois and
Stalinist movements have proven themselves completely incapable of carrying
through the liberation of women.  The PDPA in Afghanistan, for example, was
prepared to halt the literacy campaign amongst women to win a compromise
with the Islamic tribal leaders.
Against such betrayals we pose the struggle for the liberation of women as
an inseparable component of any proletarian revolutionary strategy.  Working
class and and peasant women must be organised around economic demands and
for protective measures against rape, forced sterilisation, trade in women,
and enforced confinement for sex tourism.
Even when semi-colonial women escape these miseries millions of immigrant
and migrant women are drawn into the workforce within the imperialist
heartland. There they perform the most menial tasks for very low pay, in
appalling working conditions.
Immigration controls and restrictions on visas or work permits constantly
menace migrant women.  In particular they are denied access to many jobs and
so are forced into working conditions that isolate them from other workers,
the trade unions and labour movement.  They are often employed in domestic
service to rich families, where they remain unorganised and highly
exploited.  They frequently have no right to unemployment benefits or
protection from arbitrary dismissal.  In addition they are denied political
rights and social welfare provisions.  In all countries we demand the right
of domestic and home workers to be unionised, for an eight hour day, a
minimum living wage and the right to social welfare.  We demand of the trade
union and labour movement special measures to organise this section of
workers.

For a working class women's movement
To end the oppression of women the fundamental separation of domestic labour
from the totality of social production must be abolished.  Only with women
drawn fully and equally into production, with domestic work being organised
collectively in a planned socialist economy, can women be free from
oppression.  The socialist programme alone can guarantee the socialisation
of housework and child care.  But even under capitalism we can march towards
this goal by struggling for womens rights to waged labour.  Where the bosses
say that there is no work available for women we argue for the sliding scale
of hours, to share all available work with no loss of pay.  Part time jobs
for women have been used by the bosses to increase the exploitation of women
workers through low pay and no employment protection, while providing a
flexible workforce.  We demand full employment protection for part time work
combined with the fight for reductions in the hours of all workers, with no
loss of pay.  We demand the provision of socialised care for children and
other dependants to allow women to participate in social production equally
with men.
Even where women have been drawn into waged labour on a large scale they
have not become economically independent.  Women must be granted equal pay
for work of equal value to guard against the superexploitation  they
currently suffer.  This is in the interests of the whole working class.  The
low wages of women, far from protecting male wage rates as many reformist
union leaders have maintained, have a tendency to undermine male wage rates
and therefore the living standards of the whole class.  For an equal minimum
wage for men and women at a level to be decided by the working class.
Women's earnings must be protected by the sliding scale of wages, where
rising prices are matched by rising wages.  Working class women will be
essential participants in committees that determine price rises and set wage
claims.  For women in the semicolonies there is an additional urgent need
for equal rights to land holding and ownership.
The inequalities that women and girls experience in education and training
make them unable to gain the same employment as men.  Women must be given
equal opportunities through education and re-training, paid for by the
bosses and under the control of the unions, women workers and apprentices.
Girls must have equal access to education.  Literacy programmes must be
instituted for women in countries where there are high levels of female
illiteracy.
Since women still have primary responsibility for the raising of children,
to have an equal ability to take up paid work there must be free childcare
for all, under the control of women workers and the unions, with full pay
for maternity leave.  Paternity leave should be made available for fathers.
For women who are unable to get paid employment as a result of the inability
of capitalism to provide social support for dependent children or other
relatives, we demand that the state provides full unemployment benefits, at
a level to be decided by the labour movement in each country.  This demand
must be combined with a struggle of the working class for precisely the
social provision which would enable women with children or sick or disabled
relatives to be able to work.  We are for the collective provision of
laundries and restaurants, subsidised by the state, under working class
control.
A woman's reproductive role also means that there are certain types of work
which may be dangerous to her health or that of her children.  Protective
legislation must be enacted to prevent the harm which may be done by certain
types of work.  Where this has already been enacted by the bones' state it
has been due to a combination of working class pressure and the reaction by
some actions of the ruling class that unbridled exploitation in pursuit of
short term gains threatened the reproduction of the working class in the
long term, and therefore the very basis of the profit system itself.  In
addition big capitalists also realised that such legislation would help to
drive the smaller capitalists out of business.  However, the working class m
ust oversee the implementation of protective legislation, as the bosses will
cheat and always find ways to avoid the law so that they can maximise their
exploitation of women.  The labour aristocracy and trade union leaders have
used the notion of protective legislation to exclude women from certain
skilled trades in order to protect their sectional craft interests.  Women
must not be excluded from any trade or industry.  Committees of women
workers, not union bureaucrats, must decide what tasks, if any, within a
trade may be harmful to women's health.
Women are systematically denied control of their own bodies and are forced
into having unwanted children, or prevented from having children they do
want.  Women are also forced into arranged marriages and obstructed from
getting divorced.  In short, women are denied control over their own
fertility.  Child-bearing must be a choice-- for women if they are to
participate equally with men in production, social and political life.  The
provision of free contraception and abortion on demand for all women is
essential.  In many parts of the semi-colonial world women suffer oppression
stemming from previous modes of production and the attendant religious
ideologies.  We are against the forcible circumcision of women, which is
part of that oppression.  The semi-colonies also suffer from the pressure of
imperialism to solve their so-called "population problem" at the expense of
womens rights.  No woman should be forcibly sterilised.  Women are
restrained from participating in social life by legal, social and religious
codes and frequently face psychological and physical abuse.  Enforced
marriage and the sale and trade of women must be legally outlawed and these
laws enforced by the working class.  Full legal rights and benefits must be
available to all women regardless of their age or marital status.  Down with
the compulsory veiling of women or their exclusion from any aspect of public
life.
Women cannot be liberated unless these demands for the immediate interests
of women form part of a programme for working class power.  But the fight
for immediate and transitional demands can draw working class and peasant
women into the united fight of the workers for that goal.  Unless women are
won to such a united working class struggle they can remain a passive or
even backward section of the class, subject as they are to the impact of
bourgeois propaganda, particularly religion.  But won to such action women
can break working class men from the sexist ideology that splits and weakens
the labour movement, as well as secure real gains for themselves as they
advance towards the goals of socialist revolution and women's liberation.
Women must be recruited to the unions, and organised to press their demands
on the union leaders.  Where women work alongside men in industry we oppose
the call for separate women's unions, even where- the sexism of the union
bureaucrats makes participation of women very difficult.  The struggle must
be waged to unite male and female workers, whilst defending the right of
women to caucus and organise within the unions and at all levels of the
labour movement.  We must demand that the union leaders fund and support
campaigns for the recruitment of women, including part time workers who
should be given full rights and reduced rates of dues.
We recognise that the legacy of womens role under capitalism as the prime
carers and child rearers will mean that many women will be drawn into
struggle around the organisation of welfare in times of heightened class
struggle and revolutionary crises.  However, the revolutionary party must
agitate for special measures to ensure that women play a full role in all
aspects of the class struggle, and are not held back from any form of
political activity due to their welfare role.
A proletarian women's movement, led by revolutionaries armed with a
programme for the dictatorship of the proletariat, is essential if women are
to play a positive and vital role in the revolutionary struggle.  A movement
which draws in wide layers of working class women is an essential way of
organising those women who are excluded from production, i.e. housewives,
unemployed and disabled women.  Such a movement, based on women organised in
the factories, offices, on the farms, in the communities and in the unions
can, at one and the same time, fight for the interests of women, against the
prejudices of male workers, and for the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism.  In key battles of the working class, women frequently organise
their own committees and groups.  Whatever form these initial organisations
of women take, revolutionaries must argue for their transformation into a
proletarian movement which draws in all layers of women workers, poor
peasants and oppressed sections of the petit bourgeoisie.
In the present period, where revolutionaries are not in the leadership of
the mass of working class women, the tasks of organising such a movement
still exist.  We demand of the Social Democratic and Stalinist leaders of
the working class that they provide resources and support for the building
of such a movement.  In this way we can enter in to a united front with the
most militant sections of working class women and, through joint actions and
communist propaganda, seek to win them  from their misleaders.
Women of other classes, most importantly peasant women but also urban petit
bourgeois women, especially in the imperialised countries, will be drawn
into this struggle, behind the leadership of proletarian women.  To follow
the feminist line of an all-class women's movement would be to surrender the
interests of working class women.  The possibility exists of a temporary
alliance with parts of the bourgeois women's movement in some semi-colonial
countries.  But such movements must fight and mobilise for at least
bourgeois democratic demands (for instance the fight of the Congress Party
in India against the burning of widows).  United action also depends on
freedom of propaganda and organisation for all tendencies that are prepared
to fight.  There must be no restrictions on Trotskyists in their
revolutionary work.
We oppose the idea of an 'autonomous" movement because it excludes the
possibility of the women's movement being won to the revolutionary
programme, and seeks to prevent communist women from intervening as
disciplined members of their organisation.  Communist women seek to win the
majority of a proletarian women's movement to supporting the revolutionary
programme and electing communists to its leadership.
The slogan of "autonomy" also involves the exclusion of men from the
organisations, and often meetings, of women.  Working class women cannot
destroy capitalism and end their own oppression without uniting in struggle
with the rest of their class, namely, working class men.  The exclusion of
men from the activities of a women's movement places an unnecessary barrier
in the path of the fight against sexism.  This fight must involve the
education of male workers in the process of common struggle with women.








     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---